Poison

Ji Ming wiped the tissue from the instruments of torture... Then, taking the wet towel his assistant handed him, he walked out of the interrogation room.

The moment his subordinates saw him emerge, they immediately came over to await orders. "Director?"

Ji Ming waved a hand behind him. "Bury it."

His subordinate glanced at the interrogation room they had just left, immediately acknowledged the order, and withdrew. He did not dare delay or slack off in the slightest when it came to this superior's commands.

Ji Ming walked toward a long table covered in medicines of every kind. Beside it stood the captain and vice-captain of the Operations Department's First Squad.

"Director, these are the prohibited drugs seized from the Black Alliance hideout. We've taken inventory—there are fifty-seven types in total, with different functions and effects."

"And these are the transaction records and custom order details."

Ji Ming accepted them and flipped through them with an icy expression. At last, he said, "Investigate every one of them."

"Yes!"

"Divide all drug samples into two batches. Send one to the capital for retesting and keep the other on file."

"Understood."

Outside the interrogation room, silence fell once more.

Mo Sheng, Ji Ming's assistant, set a cup of hot tea by his hand and comforted him. "If we can confirm that the two cases share the same origin, then the metamorphic mutation incident wasn't a premeditated infectious mutation incident. It was merely a side effect of a large quantity of prohibited drugs. If that's the case, you and Jinping won't be pushed into the eye of the storm."

Mo Sheng was a thirty-five-year-old married mother. Her rank was average, and her appearance utterly ordinary.

There was only one reason she had become Ji Ming's assistant: she made excellent tea.

"It's too early to draw conclusions." Ji Ming covered the teacup with the hand that had just held the torture instruments, yet made no move to drink. "If I wanted to use prohibited drugs as the medium to plan a mutation incident capable of covering a region of considerable scale, what would be the first thing I needed to do?"

The question leapt too far ahead and clearly caught Mo Sheng off guard.

She could only follow her young superior's train of thought and try to reason it out. "Selecting a specific population, stabilizing the supply, ensuring a sufficient quantity of drugs, sample evaluation... experiments?"

Realization dawned in her eyes. "You mean they may still be in the experimental stage?"

"Fifty-seven samples, involving nomadic peoples and rural and urban populations. If it's already like this during the testing stage, then the eventual scale of infection should extend beyond a single city. Its severity will likewise far exceed the current data."

After calmly saying this, Ji Ming lifted the strong tea beneath his palm and drained it in one gulp.

Mo Sheng was secretly alarmed. She carefully stepped aside and said nothing more.

She had never doubted that her superior would make the most correct judgment. Every crisis in the past had proven no exception.

The layout of the ordinary two-bedroom apartment was bizarre.

Two stood, two lay down, and one clung to the ceiling.

Jiang Qian watched the humanoid giant bee dive at him like a headless fly. He sidestepped, narrowly passing it by.

The giant bee landed not far from the middle-aged man. Using its still-not-fully-transformed human feet and bee legs, it pushed its body forward, buzzing incessantly at the man's face.

Xiao Xuebai covered her mouth and stared at the scene in shock.

She was intensely uncomfortable with the sight of the giant bee aiming its writhing mouthparts at a human face. Her stomach churned even harder, yet she could not stop looking.

The giant bee seemed to be at the end of its strength. After diving from the ceiling, even its movements became slow, limp, and feeble.

Jiang Qian crouched behind it.

He reached out, dipped his fingers into some yellow mucus that had dripped onto the floor, and held it beneath his nose for a sniff. After pondering for a moment, he rose and walked in front of the giant bee sprawled on the ground.

The unconscious middle-aged man lay between him and the giant bee.

Though unconscious, the middle-aged man's expression was twisted, and his skin had turned a bluish purple—a clear sign of poisoning.

After a moment of silence.

Under Xiao Xuebai's baffled gaze, Jiang Qian said to the giant bee:

"He's still alive."

The giant bee's high-frequency trembling abruptly stalled. Its densely packed compound eyes turned toward Jiang Qian. Mutation had rendered his face completely unrecognizable as human.

"But you may not live much longer," Jiang Qian continued.

The giant bee continued staring blankly at Jiang Qian, as though it did not understand what he was saying.

Yellow mucus still clung to its mouthparts, not yet fallen. Its buzzing was muddled and indistinct, yet Jiang Qian seemed able to communicate with it without any difficulty.

"Even after what they did to you, you don't hate them?"

As the giant bee listened to Jiang Qian's words, its response gradually weakened. Its head, covered in compound eyes, slowly drooped. Its writhing mouthparts could tear open the middle-aged man's throat at any moment.

Yet it merely lay silently beside the middle-aged man.

Jiang Qian reached out and touched the giant bee's mouthparts, testing the sharpness of those massive mandibles.

The sight sent Xiao Xuebai's blood pressure soaring. She nearly died on the spot...

Later, when the Special Affairs Center Operations Department patrol team arrived, the mutated giant bee had already stopped moving.

After Jiang Qian and Xiao Xuebai thoroughly handed over the scene, they were permitted to return to the company.

Before leaving the house, Jiang Qian looked back at the family portrait hanging in the center of the living room. Of the family of three, the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old younger son wore a Lakers jersey, his arms tightly around his parents as he smiled with sunny fearlessness.

Only after getting back into the car did Xiao Xuebai seem to finally return to reality after the night's string of shocking events.

She looked at Jiang Qian's profile in the passenger seat and softly asked, "How could you understand what a metamorphic Mutant was saying?"

According to relevant authoritative materials, metamorphic Mutants did not possess the basic ability to communicate through speech.

She thought that if Jiang Qian could read minds, it would be far too incredible.

"I guessed." Jiang Qian gave a reluctant smile.

"You guessed? But you didn't seem to..."

"People communicate through more than language. There are also body movements, expressions, microexpressions, breathing, and condition. I couldn't understand what he was saying, but I could roughly infer his emotions and intentions at the time."

Jiang Qian calmly concluded, "Emotions give rise to actions, and actions lead to cause and effect."

Xiao Xuebai was utterly confused by those profound words. Though she did not understand them, they still sounded incredibly impressive.

She looked at Jiang Qian with something close to worship in her eyes.

She could not tell whether he was a fledgling, a beast, or a sage.

But Jiang Qian had left half of what he meant unsaid.

His ability to read expressions and "understand" emotions, thereby inferring the cause and course of events, came only from having previously learned from a vast number of "samples." He could flexibly apply every emotional pattern, even if he could not truly empathize with them.

"So what do you think actually happened today?" Xiao Xuebai pressed.

Jiang Qian was also recalling the entire sequence of events, as well as the series of reactions from the husband and wife of that family.

The wife's gaze had wandered, her heart full of guilt. She had accidentally triggered the alarm. She was a timid toad.

The husband had controlled today's deadly setup. He was an extremely reputation-conscious platypus who did not want anyone to discover that he was hiding a Mutant in his home.

After a long silence, Jiang Qian asked, "If a Mutant appears in an employee's family, will it greatly affect that employee's reputation at the company?"

Xiao Xuebai blinked. "Of course. Mutants are outcasts among the super-species population! Their identities are comparable to fallen people, psychiatric patients, criminals in modern human society... How should I put it? There are very few cases of upright, decent License Holders becoming Mutants out of nowhere. Once they fall, the reason is usually anything but innocent. What do you think?"

"An outcast..." Jiang Qian smiled.

That label was hardly unfamiliar to him.

"Why ask that?" Xiao Xuebai asked, puzzled.

"The Mutant was this family's son. For now, we have no way of knowing how he mutated, but as you said, it was undoubtedly something disgraceful."

"I can't be certain what exactly happened, but I detected poison in the Mutant's secretions."

Jiang Qian calmly gazed out the car window.

"That clearly wasn't venom he secreted himself. I suspect he was fed poison after mutating."

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