The Hive's Pain

"Someone fed it???"

Ye Zheng couldn't follow Feng Ling's train of thought, because she didn't know that when Feng Ling had absorbed the Hive, its Card name had been a string of garbled characters.

So when Feng Ling learned that the lizard's name also appeared as gibberish, she almost instinctively connected it to the Hive.

Her intuition told her that the lizard had most likely come from the Hive's Abyss Labyrinth.

—The Hive was dead, but the Administrator had not gone offline, the Labyrinth had not closed, and the creatures inside were still alive. Labyrinth creatures were not supposed to have Cards.

To highlight the special nature of the Labyrinth Master, all Labyrinth creatures could only grow within the parameters set by the system. Their genetic code was fixed, and absorbing a Card would alter that "fixed" state. Therefore, the origin of this lizard's Card was highly suspicious.

Ye Zheng asked, "Why do you think someone fed it the Card? Why couldn't it have killed a creature carrying a Card? A Contaminant, for example, or a Hunter? A Xenomorph?"

"Just intuition." Feng Ling reached out, grabbed the Card, and placed it into the Squirrel card slot. "The name Siamese Crocodile doesn't sound native."

Ye Zheng froze at that.

The Monsters created by the game had regional characteristics, so the Cards seized by people from different countries possessed distinct local styles. For instance, He Yue Ning and He Xing Luo had Black and White Impermanence, while Duan Fei had Di Tu He and Cong Cong. These Cards were all connected to local myths and legends. Cong Cong, for example, came from the Classic of Mountains and Seas.

Of course, there were exceptions. The Seraph Ye Zheng possessed, for instance, had been seized from the body of a foreign Xenomorph.

"Siamese Crocodile...