20 Minutes to Crack the Serum

Black Widow used her shock bracelets to paralyze a smaller mutant on her left flank, but the larger ones showed insufficient reaction to the discharge.

Hawkeye was on the roof of an apartment building, using his arrows and steel cables to trip the mutants—but the creatures could snap the cables with a single burst of strength.

They were hampered by the need to avoid collateral damage.

These monsters were innocent civilians.

The heroes could not use lethal force.

A helicopter landed in a clearing three hundred meters behind the blockade.

As Lynn jumped out of the helicopter, the frontline commander approached him—a white man in his forties, wearing a S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform with the rank of colonel on his chest.

His initial reaction to seeing Lynn was exactly as Lynn had anticipated.

"The expert Director Fury mentioned is—you?"

"I am the doctor here." Lynn adjusted his glasses. "Give me a workspace within fifty meters of the front line. I need first-hand samples."

"Fifty meters?" The commander's face was practically screaming that Lynn was insane. "Fifty meters from the front line is already within the mutants' activity range—"

"Then sixty meters."

The commander started to protest.

A tactical vehicle from an assault team pulled up from the side and stopped.

The door opened, and Hawkeye, Clint Barton, jumped out.

There was a triangular laceration on his left shoulder—a claw mark from a mutant, with the flesh turned outward and blood still seeping through.

Barton glanced at Lynn.

"Fury said you were coming." He swept a look at the medical kit in Lynn's hand. "What do you need?"

"A blood sample from a mutant. Preferably one that mutated less than an hour ago. Also, any tissue samples shed by the mutants—skin or scales will do."

"Your shoulder—"

"Business first." Barton turned and ran back toward the front line.

Lynn watched his retreating back.

All-Things Diagnosis provided an assessment of Hawkeye's shoulder injury in the background—a laceration 1.2 centimeters deep, missing the tendon, with moderate blood loss.

It wasn't fatal, but if left untreated, it would affect the precision of his archery.

Five minutes later.

Barton returned.

He was fast.

In his other hand, he held two things: a tactical syringe filled with deep purple blood, and a gray scale the size of a thumb.

"The blood is from a guy who finished mutating less than forty minutes ago. The scale fell off another one." He handed the items to Lynn. "Is this enough?"

"It's enough."

The commander assigned an armored communication vehicle to serve as Lynn's temporary workstation.

Inside the vehicle were folding tables and power outlets. Lynn unfolded the Stark Portable Biochemical Analyzer and completed the warm-up and calibration in two minutes.

He started with the scale sample.

All-Things Analysis cut straight to the core.

In his field of vision, the microstructure of the gray scale unfolded instantly: a keratin base, but the arrangement had been completely rewritten.

Normal keratin had an alpha-helix structure, but this keratin had been reprogrammed into beta-pleated sheets, with a density twelve times higher than normal.

This was not a natural mutation path.

This had been designed by someone.

He loaded the blood sample into the analyzer.

The data began to run.

Simultaneously, All-Things Analysis performed a parallel analysis of the viral vector in the serum.

The core component was locked.

A modified retrovirus.

It targeted a non-coding sequence in the human genome known as the "Potential X-Gene," forcing activation through a variant of the CRISPR-Cas9 system.

The activation instructions were random, which explained why everyone's mutation path was different.

But the virus had a fatal flaw in its design.

There was no "kill switch" set in the activation process.

Once the gene was activated, it could not be stopped; the mutation would continue to progress until the host's genome completely collapsed.

At the same time, the virus incidentally damaged the neural pathways of the Limbic System while editing the genes—which was why the mutants lost their sanity.

"Hydra's handiwork," Lynn whispered.

Crude, violent, and indifferent to the consequences.

Like a gun without a safety: it could fire, but where the bullet landed was entirely up to luck.

The frontline's voice came through the communication channel.

Captain America: "How is the analysis going in the rear? We have two large mutants pushing toward the blockade, and standard weapons are ineffective against them."

Lynn picked up a spare communication headset.

"Give me twenty minutes," he said.

"Twenty minutes?" Another voice popped into the channel—not Captain America's, but one lighter and faster. "These blocks might not exist in twenty minutes."

"Then let them exist for twenty minutes." Lynn cut the connection.

He needed to focus.

The gene-editing sequence of the retrovirus was dismantled piece by piece by All-Things Analysis.

The recognition site of the Cas9 protein, the targeting sequence of the guide RNA, the regulatory elements of the activation promoter—each layer of the structure unfolded in his mind, as clear as an engineering blueprint.

There was only one thing he was looking for—where the "lock" for that promoter was.

Every genetic switch had a way to be turned off.

The problem was that Hydra's designers hadn't left a shutdown interface, but that didn't mean one didn't exist. Natural genetic regulatory systems always had redundant mechanisms.

All-Things Analysis operated at full capacity.

The countdown began.

Twelve minutes passed.

The situation in the communication channel grew increasingly tense.

A mutant over two meters tall, covered in scales, broke through the first layer of barricades on the left flank.

An armored vehicle was flipped over. Three soldiers were injured and were being dragged to the rear.

Captain America's shield slammed into the mutant's chest and bounced off.

The mutant swayed but didn't fall.

Its regeneration speed was high; the dent from the shield flattened within seconds.

"Rear!" Captain America's voice sounded again.

"Eight minutes left." Lynn's voice returned to the channel, unnervingly flat.

Black Widow said in a side channel: "If he says eight minutes, it's eight minutes. Stop rushing him."

The front line stopped pushing.

Lynn's brain was processing information at a speed far beyond human comprehension.

All-Things Analysis was not mere calculation—it possessed an instinctual "intuitive understanding" of biological molecules.

An ordinary bioinformatician would need a computer to simulate protein folding, but he could "see" the folded conformation directly.

The fourteenth minute.

He found it.

Upstream of the promoter sequence was a "silencer" region—a regulatory element responsible for suppressing promoter activity under normal conditions.

While Hydra's virus forced the activation of the promoter, it had incidentally destroyed this silencer.

But the core binding site of the silencer was still there.

If he could synthesize a molecule that precisely matched this binding site, he could "re-lock" the activated gene.

The mutation process would be terminated, and the genetic changes that had already occurred would slowly regress under the suppression of the silencer.

He began to design the structure of this molecule in his mind.