Chapter 3
A few years ago, Su Lin probably would have stuck to his usual slacker ways and simply waited to die right where he was. But things were different now.
He had told Airena he would go find her.
He had saved up money and planned to buy a small house in the Central Star Sector.
That clumsy, naive girl was still waiting for him far away!
He couldn't die!
That was the one overwhelming thought in Su Lin's mind.
By the time he came to his senses, he realized he had used his access card to clear every checkpoint and sprinted all the way to his workplace for the day.
It was a storage room for alien life-forms that no one had paid any attention to for many years.
Alien life-forms = Zerg
Simply put, this was where the Zerg corpses humans had obtained were preserved by various methods.
Su Lin's previous job had been to record the parameters of these Zerg corpse specimens.
The work was truly boring. It really was.
But among these utterly meaningless specimens was one that had once been the Galactic Alliance's most important test subject many years ago. One could even say that the research institute Su Lin was in had been established to study it.
It was a Zerg that had yet to fully hatch.
After being immersed in a special medicinal solution for decades, parts of the larva's limbs had turned a translucent, deathly pale. Its body was curled up, with no eyes or fully formed appendages. It looked more like some kind of enlarged human embryo than the rumored "Zerg."
The first time Su Lin saw it, it took him a long time to connect it with the "Zerg Queen" in the records.
Yes, this was no ordinary Zerg.
It was a... Zerg Queen.
["Zerg Queens are very weak."]
On the Human Alliance's inhabited planets, the teacher of every human class would teach their students in a calm voice.
["In terms of combat strength, they are the weakest individuals among the Zerg. They have no elytra and no armor. Strictly speaking, they have almost no ability to protect themselves, so from the moment they are born, the imperial Zerg and the many other families seal Zerg Queens away in the most hidden and impregnable fortresses... But from another perspective, Zerg Queens are also humanity's greatest enemy, because once one matures, it will breed countless high-level individuals for the Zerg day and night. We only need to remember one thing: without Zerg Queens, there can be no high-level Zerg, the ones we call lords... Yes, that's right. The familiar Lord of Scarlet, Pale Calamity, and Blood Wing have all been confirmed as lords. And during the war, these three lords alone accounted for over eighty percent of the Galactic Fleet's losses."]
["Most importantly, without a Zerg Queen's mental soothing, lord-level high Zerg will soon self-destruct from energy overload, and the seven great families that form the foundation of Zerg society will begin fighting among themselves without the mental links imposed by a Zerg Queen. After all, devouring and fighting one another is the Zerg's nature. No matter how they develop, they are ultimately nothing more than a lowly, brutal life-form at their core. The only reason the Zerg have made it this far is the suppression exerted on them by a Zerg Queen's pheromones..."]
["To utterly defeat these disgusting invaders, all we need to do is find their Zerg Queen... Of course, this will be a long and difficult campaign, but the Galactic Fleet has never stopped trying..."]
Su Lin could almost hear his teacher's words from that classroom many years ago. Back then, sitting below the lectern, he had never imagined that one day he would take a job at a research institute on a remote planet.
Nor had he imagined that such a shocking experimental specimen lay deep within such a dilapidated research institute.
Decades ago, the human military had secretly obtained a Zerg Queen's egg by some unknown means.
The war between humans and the Zerg had been raging at the time, and human scientists had established a heavily guarded research institute on a distant, remote planet specifically to study the Zerg Queen's egg.
Everything had gone smoothly in the early stages of the experiments. There had been signs of life inside the egg, and all the data had indicated that it was indeed a Zerg Queen that had yet to fully hatch.
However, after the humans exhausted every method to forcibly bring forth the Zerg Queen embryo, the Zerg Queen showed no response.
Year after year, the scientists tried everything, but the Zerg Queen remained nothing more than a mass of incomplete dead flesh floating in nutrient solution.
In the end, the researchers, who had initially been full of ambition and high hopes for it, had been forced to admit in despair that their attempts had failed utterly-the only reason they had been able to obtain this Zerg Queen was that it had been defective from the very beginning.
It could never have hatched successfully, nor could it have become a true Zerg Queen.
Otherwise, those terrifying male Zerg, who could go mad for a Zerg Queen, would never have allowed humans to obtain it.
It was a failed specimen utterly abandoned by the Zerg.
As the war between the Zerg and humanity entered an extraordinarily prolonged stalemate, the research institute and this failed specimen alike were consigned to the dust of history.
Until this very moment.
Su Lin didn't know why the Zerg, after lying dormant for so long, had suddenly invaded this remote backwater planet.
Nor did he know what he needed to do to stay alive.
He had no time to think about any of that. When he looked up at the conspicuous special storage vessel in the very center of the room, what drifted through his mind were a few words a colleague had once said in casual conversation.
["Ah, you have no idea how much importance the higher-ups placed on this thing back then. Seriously, just look at what this storage vessel is made of! This isn't some ordinary composite material. It's type K-22 alloy. In the whole Galactic Alliance, probably only the First Fleet commander's mech can afford to use this stuff, right?! With this thing, even if a miniature nuclear bomb went off, that lump of rotten flesh inside would come out unscathed!"]