Green Tide

Pale golden arcs of electricity shot from Meng Chao's fingertips.

Several Harvesting Blades wound around the cables, spinning as they scraped off samples of the coating.

He placed the coating samples, the pale green fluid extracted from inside the malformed monster, and the strange green lichen beneath a crystal microscope for examination.

Sure enough, all of them contained an extremely active substance that lay somewhere between animal cells, plant cells, and fungal cells.

Meng Chao called Long Feijun and the others over to observe it.

He himself fell into thought.

"I have an idea—or rather, a question."

After everyone had examined it, Meng Chao said, "Have you ever considered where monsters actually come from? I mean, a creature like the Seven Star Tarantula, which combines the traits of arthropods and mammals, or a 'griffin,' which combines Lion-Tiger Type Monsters with falcon-type monsters, could not possibly have evolved naturally. There must have been some kind of... 'modulator,' right?"

Long Feijun exchanged glances with the exploration team members, and they all nodded. "That's right."

"And this kind of modulation—combining the most ferocious traits of various animals in an attempt to create the strongest Carbon-Based Lifeform weapon—must have an extremely high failure rate. The organs and locomotor functions of most animals simply cannot coexist. One careless mistake, and you get something like this small Sabertooth with wings growing from its ribs, where different organs contradict one another. Forget fighting—it would struggle even to survive."

Meng Chao continued, "Therefore, the modulator must have conducted a massive number of experiments, merging parts of countless monsters together. No, 'merging' is not quite the word yet—it should be 'stitching' them together. Then, from among them, it selected breeds with greater combat strength and longer lifespans, discarding those patchwork failures.

"This process is somewhat like how humans optimize