A Mysterious Invitation, The Werewolf’s Shadow Unveils the Truth

Bo Yu's nails dug deep into his palm as he watched Professor Lin on the rooftop of the office building across from him, lifting the syringe under the moonlight. The purple liquid inside the glass vial shimmered with a strange ripple.

Tang Yao suddenly grabbed his wrist, her fingertips as cold as ice. "Don't move, he's using sonic resonance for targeting."

The shattered glass door of the convenience store exploded in a loud crash.

Bo Yu pulled Tang Yao against his side and leapt into the air, crashing his back into the cold storage unit. Moonlight brushed past his ear, and three purple syringes embedded themselves into the tiles, corroding holes the size of a bowl.

The girl in his arms suddenly let out a muffled grunt. He looked down to see a bloodstain spreading from the wound on Tang Yao's shoulder.

"Southeast corner, ventilation duct," she gasped, ripping off the store's poster to reveal a rusted iron grate behind it.

As Bo Yu's werewolf claws shredded the iron grate, he heard Professor Lin's laughter cutting through the entire street: "Your blood excites me even more than Miss Tang's..."

Two hours into their frantic run through the sewers, Bo Yu's old phone suddenly lit up.

Encrypted messages projected onto the damp wall, and the holographic map's endpoint was marked at an abandoned chemical factory on the outskirts of the city.

Tang Yao fixed her gaze on the flickering wolf-head symbol on the map, her eyelashes casting shadows across her pale face. "King Zhao loves to soak his experimental subjects in wine."

"But this place holds the answers you're looking for," Bo Yu turned off the phone, the taste of Tang Yao's blood—sweet and metallic—still lingering on his tongue. Three minutes ago, the girl had bitten her fingertip and smeared the blood on his wound, where the syringe had grazed.

As the searchlight of the chemical factory dome cast Bo Yu's shadow on the ground, he could smell the scent of conspiracy.

Behind the bulletproof glass curtain wall, King Zhao was playing with a bone-handled surgical knife, the blade reflecting the mechanical eye in his right socket.

"I've heard you can tear an armored vehicle apart with your bare hands?" Bodyguard Sun's metal knuckles drummed on the titanium table, the electromagnetic cuffs casting an eerie blue glow on the surface.

Secretary Liu's red nails brushed across the holographic screen, and Bo Yu's werewolf data suddenly turned blood red. "You're still showing up during the waning moon phase... quite confident, aren't you?" She fell silent as she noticed Bo Yu's pupils had become amber vertical slits.

When Researcher Liu's syringe came at him, it emitted a high-pitched beep.

Bo Yu deliberately let the needle sink into his elbow vein, the cold liquid exploding like a thorny net through his bloodstream.

He staggered and knocked over the experimental table, hearing the metallic fatigue screech of his bones—these idiots were trying to suppress his abilities with wolf venom.

"This is the latest gene lock," King Zhao shoved the surgical knife into the table, and the skull-shaped handle released a nerve-toxic mist. "Just hand over Miss Tang, and..." His words were cut off as Bo Yu suddenly ripped the heart rate monitor's wires out.

Amid the crackling electric sparks, he roared at the ventilation duct, and the sound waves shattered the sprinkler heads on the ceiling.

As Bodyguard Sun's mechanical arm swiped through thin air, Bo Yu used the water curtain to leap onto a beam.

The wolf venom made his claws tingle, but it was enough to tear through the duct's filter mesh.

When Secretary Liu activated the infrared tracker, Bo Yu deliberately snagged the corner of his blood-stained clothes in the exhaust fan.

"You idiots!" King Zhao's roar was drowned out by the alarm.

Bo Yu smirked from within the ventilation duct, watching the laboratory below fill with black smoke due to the overload—these delicate instruments were most vulnerable to water vapor conducting electricity, and the coolant that Bodyguard Sun had knocked over was now forming a river across the floor.

When Bo Yu kicked open the exit grate, moonlight just pierced through the clouds.

He raised his middle finger to the three people on the top floor of the chemical factory. His voice, now tinged with werewolf resonance, made the glass curtain wall hum violently. "Tell Professor Lin, next time, use a tungsten alloy needle!"

As the night wind, carrying Tang Yao's familiar jasmine scent, brushed past his nose, Bo Yu froze.

He reached for his inner pocket, expecting to find his small phone, but instead, it had turned into a bionic chip, smoking with toxic fumes.

Cold sweat slid down his spine, and at the base of a nearby phoenix tree, he saw a leaf flashing with the red light of a miniature tracker.

Bo Yu's fingers scraped against the outside wall of the convenience store, the concrete dust falling in small clumps.

He stared at the bionic chip in his palm, the burn marks from the toxic smoke forming the abbreviation of Tang Yao's name.

The phone's location tracking showed the last signal had disappeared near the southern city's waste disposal station, but when he slammed open the rusted iron gate, all he found was Secretary Liu's high heels crushing three empty syringes.

"Miss Tang is voluntarily cooperating with the gene sampling." Secretary Liu's lipstick gleamed metallic under the moonlight as she kicked aside glass containers at her feet. Purple liquid began to spill over Bo Yu's shoes. "But you... don't you want to know how Professor Lin managed to locate that convenience store?"

A dull thud from the sewer interrupted Bo Yu's thoughts, and his pupils immediately contracted into slits.

When he grabbed Secretary Liu's throat and crashed through the metal cabinet, what he saw instead was Xiao Zhou thrashing in the sewage.

The small informant was holding Tang Yao's silver hairpin, trembling. The edge of the hairpin had dark blue-black blood clotted on it.

"They're in Qinglong Mountain..." Xiao Zhou's words were cut off by the sudden wail of police sirens.

As five black SUVs blocked the alleyway, Bo Yu's wolf claws had already torn through the drainage grate.

Secretary Liu's laughter mixed with the sound of tear gas exploding behind them: "Don't forget, Miss Tang's blood neutralizes the wolf venom!"

When Bo Yu stopped at the gas station by the national highway, the hairpin left four bloody marks on his palm.

The gas pump's screen suddenly flickered, and Tang Yao's virtual image was distorted into an eerie silhouette by electromagnetic interference.

He swung his fist at the display, just as he smelled the jasmine scent buried deep within the code—this was the secret signal they had agreed upon.

"Twenty kilometers away, there's a forest ranger station." The mechanic, his face smeared with grease, suddenly spoke, his wrench still covered in fresh blood.

Bo Yu narrowed his eyes, noticing the second button of the mechanic's work uniform gleaming with the same red glow as Secretary Liu's earring.

As the mountain road collapsed in the heavy rain, Bo Yu floored the accelerator.

In the moment the jeep took to the air, he saw Bodyguard Sun's mechanical arm reach out from the car window. The electromagnetic net skimmed across the car roof and vanished into the cliff.

The windshield wipers suddenly pointed toward a right-hand turn. The crooked road sign there had a claw-like wolf pattern scratched into it.

Old He's cabin was hidden behind three lightning-struck trees. The door handle was wrapped in rope soaked in black dog's blood.

When Bo Yu slammed the door open, the ashes in the fireplace were still warm, and Tang Yao's jacket fragments hung on a deer-antler trophy, the fabric cuts as clean as if made by a laser scalpel.

"This is what the girl left." Old He pulled out a bronze compass from beneath the shrine. The needle spun wildly as the werewolf approached. "She said if someone in a black suit arrived first, to throw the compass into the fire." The old man's frostbitten fingers pressed down on Bo Yu's wrist. "The third plank in the attic floor."

The bloodstained experiment logbook was wedged between the floorboards. Bo Yu's nails scraped sparks as he tried to pry it out.

When he saw the contents inside under a flash of lightning, his rear molars almost cracked—next to Tang Yao's blood sample data, there was a bold stamp of Professor Lin's biotech company logo.

The sound of an owl's shrill cry echoed through the mountain forest. As Bo Yu rolled down the stairs, three tranquilizer darts embedded themselves in the spot where he had just stood.

Bodyguard Sun's mechanical eye lit up with infrared beams outside the window, and Secretary Liu's mocking laugh echoed through the downpour: "Little Miss Tang should be in the experiment chamber by now, don't you think?"

Bo Yu crashed through the back window into the pine forest. The scent of pine resin mixed with a faint trace of jasmine.

He stopped abruptly at the cliff's edge, the disordered blood handprints on the rock still carrying Tang Yao's warmth.

As his wolf claws dug into the rock crevices, he heard the sound of metal instruments sliding along the tracks above, like some heavy-duty restraint system being deployed.

The moment thunder rolled through the valley, Bo Yu saw the curtains on the second floor of the cabin fluttering.

At the tear in the fabric, a silver button with tooth marks hung in the wind—this was the shirt button Tang Yao had stolen from him three days ago, using it as wine money when they had eaten kandou together.

The mountain mist thickened suddenly, and Bo Yu's wolf ears caught the sound of gears grinding to his ten o'clock.

He held his breath as the scent of decaying earth filled his nostrils.

In the humid air, Tang Yao's blood scent, like a thread, drilled into his temple, and at the other end of the thread, something metallic in the cabin was heating up.

When the first raindrop pierced the clouds and hit the rusted animal trap, Bo Yu's muscles tensed instantly.

He heard the sound of his heart striking his ribs, merging with the vibration of the hydraulic pump coming from below the cabin.

Bodyguard Sun's mechanical body's distinctive current sound reached three hundred meters away, and at the same time, a lullaby melody that Tang Yao had once hummed filled the forest.

Bo Yu crouched low, his claws sinking into the resin oozing from the pine tree.

The door hinge of the cabin creaked under years of disuse, and the light spilling from the second-floor window turned a strange ghostly green.

He counted his heartbeat as he reached behind the porch pillar, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck rise with the high-frequency sound waves—a frequency that matched the sonic locator Professor Lin had used at the convenience store.

Moonlight was suddenly swallowed by the clouds.

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