Cracking the Serum (Please Keep Reading)

Peter hurriedly took the notebook when he heard Ben's words.

The densely packed formulas made Ben's head spin.

Actually, if Little Broken Watch could not turn Ben into Grey Matter, he probably would not have understood its contents even with another ten years. But Peter had never doubted this. In his eyes, Ben was capable of anything!

"Then I..."

"You go find Connors." Ben got moving as well.

Without a lab or equipment, even if he could crack the formulas, he would not be able to make the serum.

"Is Osborn Tower empty today?"

Peter shook his head. "There isn't a single person there."

He found it a little strange too. Even if something had happened to Connors, why was the entire Osborn Enterprise completely empty? Not to mention that Connors's identity had not even been exposed yet.

Ben thought of a few more things.

Thinking of the trouble Norman Osborn had run into recently, it no longer seemed so strange.

"In that case, I'll borrow the equipment inside Osborn Tower." After parting ways with Peter, he headed for Osborn.

Just as Peter had said, Osborn Tower seemed to be completely deserted.

The usually bustling Osborn Tower was now nearly empty.

But Ben did not go in immediately. Even if there was no one inside Osborn Tower, the instruments and equipment were still running, especially the surveillance cameras. Ben did not want his secrets recorded and exposed.

He first went to a nearby mall and bought a top-of-the-line laptop, then headed to the rooftop of the adjacent building and opened it.

The watch core popped out and locked onto Grey Matter.

"First, let me crack Osborn Tower's network system."

Directly connecting to Osborn's internal network, then either shutting down the surveillance feeds or fabricating fake footage, was the best approach. And for Grey Matter, it was easy.

"Osborn's software system isn't that hard to hack."

Ben, already transformed into Grey Matter, crouched in front of the laptop. His frog-like horizontal pupils watched a long stream of code scroll past his eyes. The rapidly flashing characters appeared as clear as still images to him.

His eyelids closed from both sides.

Galvans had two ways of blinking. One was the normal way, with the upper and lower eyelids closing together, but sometimes their left and right eyelids closed instead.

"I didn't expect the firewall of a company as big as Osborn to be this weak," he said in surprise.

But he had overlooked Earth's technological level.

It was not that Osborn's firewall was too weak; his technology was simply too advanced!

"This computer is a lot better than that old junker at home." He reached out and tapped the laptop, nodding in satisfaction.

The two computers he and Peter had been using had both been scavenged by Uncle Ben from someone else's discarded secondhand goods. Even in this era, they were long outdated. Every time they were turned on, their cases roared like sports car engines.

At that moment, rows of notification windows flashed rapidly across the computer screen.

The system had already been hacked, but Grey Matter's transformation time still had about twenty-seven minutes left.

In other words, hacking into Osborn Enterprise had taken him less than three minutes, and that was while being limited by the laptop's performance.

If he had used a more advanced computer, it probably would have taken only a few seconds.

But for now, he did not plan to enter Osborn Tower immediately.

Moving around in Grey Matter's body was somewhat inconvenient, so he planned to wait for the transformation to end before heading over.

"I need to hurry up and crack Little Broken Watch to get authorization. Otherwise, waiting this long every time is a hassle." He turned and glanced behind him. Even with his broad field of vision, he could only see a small part of the watch face on his back.

With plenty of time left, Ben simply took out Peter's father's notebook and began working through it.

"No wonder Peter and Connors's experiment failed."

He spotted the reason for Connors's mutation at a glance.

Peter's parents had researched the Spider Gene and created the Mutated Super Spider, but they had not actually achieved complete cross-species genetic inheritance.

To make the serum stable, genetic compatibility had to be prepared in advance.

But Peter and Connors had overlooked this point. Or rather, the notebook had never mentioned it at all. Ben could see this flaw with his current intelligence, but Peter and Connors could not.

And the more important problem was that even with genetic compatibility prepared in advance, complete stability could not be guaranteed.

It could be said that the formula Richard Parker had left behind had been flawed from the start, and Richard himself clearly knew it. That was why, even though he had adapted Peter's genes inside the Mutant Spider long ago, he had not immediately tested the experiment on him.

In other words, Peter now faced the same risk as Connors: mutating into a Spider Monster.

It was just that the Spider Gene in Peter's body was more stable. Unless something unexpected happened, there was no need to worry for the time being.

But as Peter's spider abilities continued to grow stronger, that balance would be broken sooner or later.

"You should be glad you have such a good cousin."

Ben pinched his chin and began recalculating the formula.

Making an antidote for the Lizard Serum was easy enough. He only needed to reverse-engineer the formula. Stabilizing the genes in Peter's body would take a little more time.

Of course, only a little...

More than ten minutes later, Ben stretched lazily.

Before him, the notebook had been filled with formulas he had written.

He had derived not only a drug that could stabilize Peter's genes, but even a perfect Lizard Serum.

Of course, he had removed the Superpowers granted by the Lizard Serum and retained only its medical applications. He did not want the world to be filled with superhumans.

Although the serum itself had not been experimentally verified yet, Ben was quite confident.

Primus's medical project is complete now, Ben thought happily. But this medicine is too perfect. If it's put on the market right away, it'll cause even more trouble.

A single dose could regenerate severed limbs. Ben did not even dare imagine how many medical companies would hate him to the bone if this thing truly hit the market.

He planned to weaken its effects many times over before releasing it.

With a little time left, Ben did not idle around. Instead, he used Grey Matter's brain to study.

Ten minutes later, Ben had transformed back from Grey Matter. He put away the notebook and looked toward Osborn Tower.

Perfect timing. The sky had darkened as well.

"Time to move."

He had written all the steps for preparing the serum in the notebook.

Ben closed the notebook and, under the cover of night, leaped from the rooftop.

At the same time, inside Osborn Enterprise, a gaunt, white-haired old man with a gloomy expression was teasing his little parrot.

"Lizard Serum, what a magnificent invention!"

He picked up a small vial of serum, looked at its crystal-clear appearance, and praised it loudly!