Chapter Four: The Escape

Gao Lin stood at attention and said, “Understood! Keeping secrets is a basic quality for us at the Social Security Bureau!”

“The Social Security Bureau… Who on earth came up with that name? It’s embarrassing just to say it out loud.”

“Haha, what’s there to be embarrassed about? Is there anyone bold enough to gossip about us to our faces? We’d just haul them in and give them three days of special treatment.”

After Gao Lin left, Yuan Liming slumped wearily into a corner.

His longtime colleague, Li Qinghai, patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t put too much pressure on yourself, Old Yuan. They may have given us three days to crack the case, but everyone knows there’s too much trickery here. No one will really hold it against you.”

Yuan Liming shook his head. “No, it’s not that. I’m almost at retirement age anyway, so losing the job wouldn’t matter. But this case is just too bizarre, too unsettling. I can’t rest easy unless it’s solved.”

Li Qinghai fell silent as well.

Blood covered the ground, scattered with chunks of flesh and broken bone, clothing ripped to tatters like torn sacks, smeared traces of desperate struggle, and a string of bloody footprints fading off into the distance…

Even an old officer like him felt rattled by such a gruesome murder. He found himself uneasy just looking toward the north of the city, where the bloody footprints vanished. If he admitted that, though, he’d really be embarrassed.

Yuan Liming counted off on his fingers. “Look, six delinquent youths killed at once, yet only the mayor’s son is missing. Then their bones are chewed apart, their blood licked clean. And finally, a trail of bloody footprints leading north. Just thinking about it sends chills down my spine. I have an ominous feeling this is only the beginning…”

He hadn’t finished speaking when a young officer came running over again, flustered but excited by the magnitude of the case. “Another one’s dead, over in the north part of the city!”

Halfway through, the young officer picked up a call, stumbling over his words. “Th-three more people are dead!”

As Li Qinghai stared in shock, Yuan Liming bowed his head and sighed. “The storm is about to break.”

Adonsa hid in the shadow of a row of garbage bins, occasionally rummaging through bags of rotten kitchen scraps and stuffing them into his mouth.

A housewife with her child passed by. The child looked on with curiosity, while the mother dodged away in disgust.

“See? If you don’t study hard, you’ll end up picking through trash for food,” she half-scolded, half-warned her child.

In just three days, Adonsa’s host body had become almost unrecognizable. The dried black blood caked on his skin was the least of it; the boy, who at fourteen ought to be at his most youthful, now bore a face etched with deep lines, an unnatural maturity that suggested not the budding vigor of youth but the peak of a life burning at full blaze.

This was because Adonsa had forced the body’s metabolism into overdrive using growth factors secreted from his true form, shaving at least thirty years off every cell’s life.

It wasn’t meant to be so much, but Adonsa’s manipulation was too crude, and a great deal of vitality was wasted. Many bodily systems were now gravely out of sync due to the forced maturation.

Long, disheveled hair, thick and sharp fingernails, callused and leathery skin—these were all byproducts of rampant metabolism. The bones hadn’t grown larger but had instead sealed off their growth plates, becoming rigid and fully ossified. Muscle density had increased at a staggering rate, granting him a sudden surge in strength.

His entire locomotive system had been enhanced, and so had his digestive system. Under Adonsa’s stimulation, the stem cells in his gums proliferated wildly; the once blunt, rounded teeth had all fallen out from gnawing through bone, and a third set of teeth had erupted from his jaw—so sharp and savage they could only be called fangs.

His digestive capacity, aided by the primordial essence, was now hundreds of times more powerful than a snake’s. A pile of ribs could be reduced to chyme in less than half an hour, and in another half hour digested completely, leaving barely any waste.

The body, once somewhat frail, had been forcibly matured through Adonsa’s neurochemical tweaks, and could now arm-wrestle some bodybuilding coaches with ease.

In a real fight, those muscle-bound showmen would be dead ten times out of ten.

But Adonsa’s inexperience left many parts of the body uncoordinated. The swollen muscles had torn red striations across the skin, like stretch marks; the face was twisted and slack, drool sometimes trickling from the mouth. Joints had become badly deformed by the rapid changes in muscle and tendon.

Adonsa worked hard to manipulate his facial muscles, trying to look normal, tightening his expression into a mask of cold indifference—a look that would draw little attention.

The ultimate goal, of course, was to blend unnoticed into the crowd.

He would slowly adjust the body’s imbalances over time.

Yet as Adonsa remade the body, the body in turn affected Adonsa.

Pain meant nothing to him—just signals reporting the body’s status. But hunger was another matter.

His monstrous digestive power gave him a terrifying capacity for rapid evolution, but it also made him like a mad bull with firecrackers tied to its tail, unable to rest for even a moment.

Even after consuming more than a ton of food since his birth, Adonsa’s hunger remained insatiable.

Meanwhile, he was learning—gathering knowledge from the brains he’d devoured, observing, and accumulating experience.

The food, liquefied by corrosive gastric juices, was split in purpose: half replenished the energy lost to the body’s furious metabolism, half fed the true form hidden in his skull.

Both were bottomless pits, but the true form’s evolutionary progress had finally advanced again, making further enhancements possible.

His animal instincts warned Adonsa that danger was looming. The pedestrians around him exuded a scent of excited tension.

What Adonsa didn’t know was that this was a cold, indifferent society; even if a dozen people had been slaughtered just down the street, it would only be fodder for idle gossip.

They would only truly panic when the fangs closed on their own throats.

Hunger drove Adonsa to move once more.

Just then, an old scavenger with an iron hook came near, striking Adonsa lightly as he leaned by the heap of garbage. “Motherless wretch, get out of the way! Don’t mess with my work!”

Adonsa showed no emotion, simply stood up and struck the old man behind the ear.

The blow landed on a cluster of nerves, and the old man collapsed instantly. Adonsa caught him gently, looking for all the world like a model citizen helping a fallen elder, and before two patrolling officers arrived, dragged him into an abandoned pump room nearby.

The officers wandered off, none the wiser.

The old man’s mind was clear, but his body was paralyzed. His angry glare turned to terror as he stared into the stinking darkness, sensing a rotten, deadly presence. He thrashed like a fish out of water.

Adonsa’s thick arms closed around him like iron bands, and so began another savage feast.

His hunting skills were growing sharper; with a bit more practice, he would be able to vanish completely from the investigative net.

But before that, could Adonsa slip past the violence machine that had now mobilized in full?