Shadowed Clues, Smart Search for the Traitor, Breaking the Maze
The sea breeze, carrying the salty, bitter moisture, drilled into the collar of Bo Yu's shirt as he rubbed the burning crescent-shaped birthmark on Tang Yao's neck.
The morning dew that fell from her trembling eyelashes mixed with the frost that had formed on her lashes last night in the cold storage, overlapping into a strange mirror image.
"It's about to storm." The old fisherman, who was organizing the fishing nets on the breakwater, suddenly spoke up. As his grayish-blue wrist turned, the plastic buoys in the net cast off fragmented blue light.
Bo Yu's pupils suddenly constricted—he realized that the spacing of those buoys matched the exact direction where the blood-red signal flare had risen last night.
He jerked his head up. Under the brim of the fisherman's hat, half of a scaly face flashed. The silver pomfret struggling in the net suddenly turned over, revealing their pale bellies.
Tang Yao, in his arms, suddenly convulsed violently. Her nails scraped three bloody marks across Bo Yu's chest.
Bo Yu pressed one hand on her twitching shoulder, while his other hand reached for the tactical knife at his waist. By the time he looked back, all that remained on the breakwater was a fishing net fluttering in the wind, with half of a glowing blue scale caught in the netting.
"Zheng Yufu went out to sea three days ago." As Bo Yu kicked open the wooden door of a seaside shop, the freckled shopkeeper was stuffing pickled seaweed into glass jars. "If the person you're talking about has green sleeves, they've probably eaten some 'sea lingzhi' from the new dock construction site—oh, you shouldn't touch that stuff!"
The radio on the counter suddenly emitted a sharp static sound. Amidst the noise, Bo Yu caught a Morse code message from Feng Hacker.
He grabbed a pack of sea salt lemon candy from the shelf and stuffed it into his pocket. As he turned, he glanced at the seaweed in the jar, which had oddly twisted into the shape of "watch your eyes."
The only internet café in the town was hidden on the second floor of the seafood market, and the rotting fish smell perfectly masked the burnt odor emitting from the computers.
Bo Yu settled Tang Yao in a lounge filled with instant noodle buckets and began typing at a speed faster than the neon lights flashing on the internet café's sign.
In the surveillance footage, Qian Duobao's lifeless body lay in the corner of the cold storage, where a blurry metallic reflection flickered in sync with the flash of the blood-red signal flare.
"The logo projection of Xu's hospital requires three laser positioning devices," Feng Hacker's message suddenly popped up. "But the system shows one of them was stolen last week—Bo Yu, behind you!"
In the reflection of the LCD screen, the crimson blade of Shen Killer hovered near Tang Yao's neck.
Bo Yu grabbed the hot computer and smashed it behind him. The blade barely nicked the edge of Tang Yao's hair, and her dazed pupils reflected the startled pigeons flying outside the window. Their flapping wings left web-like cracks on the glass.
The cramped hallway turned into a blood-soaked chessboard as Bo Yu maneuvered, carrying Tang Yao, along the rusted fire escape.
The footsteps of Shen Killer echoed simultaneously from six different directions. Bo Yu suddenly recalled the six refrigerated trucks that arrived at the seafood market every midnight—the sound of their wheels grinding through the standing water perfectly matched the rhythm of the tactical boots hitting the metal ladder.
"How much of it do you think is real this time?" Bo Yu suddenly laughed into the void. As he kicked open the rooftop's iron door, five infrared laser points simultaneously locked onto his forehead.
The five Shen Killers that appeared in the morning mist all raised modified crossbows, the poisoned arrow tips shimmering with peacock-blue light in the sunlight.
Tang Yao's body temperature was rapidly dropping. Bo Yu felt her crescent-shaped birthmark on the back of her neck begin to crystallize with ice.
When the first crossbow bolt shot toward him, he deliberately used his left shoulder to meet it, rolling to the back of the water tank the moment the excruciating pain hit him.
As the blood soaked through his shirt, the five killers surrounded him from different angles. Their steps, tapping through the water on the rooftop, synced perfectly with the ticking sound of the cooling agent leaking in the cold storage from last night.
"Didn't Boss Xu teach you?" Bo Yu suddenly ripped open his blood-soaked collar, the silver fur on the back of his neck shimmering in the midday sunlight. "A werewolf's transformation doesn't always have to wait for a full moon."
As the water tank exploded with a roar, a mist clouded the air. Bo Yu's fangs grazed Shen Killer's throat.
He deliberately let the wolf instincts invade his reason, allowing the brutal roar to mask the soft whisper of his tactical knife being unsheathed.
When the third killer fell, clutching his bleeding neck, the remaining pursuers finally realized that the "fatal wounds" were just shallow scratches.
"He's collecting our blood samples!" One killer suddenly screamed as he retreated, but Bo Yu's claws had already scraped off the skin from his neck.
In the smell of blood mixed with the sea breeze, Bo Yu found a thread of clarity hidden deep within his maddened wolf eyes—these killers all had the same cyan veins behind their ears, just like the "disappeared Zheng Yufu" on the breakwater.
When the last killer fell from the rooftop, Bo Yu staggered and grabbed the daughter wall for support.
The cost of forcibly activating his bloodline was worse than expected. The remnants of his wolf vision flashed before his eyes—three hundred meters away on the seafood market's roof, a figure with a pair of binoculars was ripping off a bionic mask, revealing Wu's signature hooked nose under the peeling fake skin.
Tang Yao's breathing suddenly became rapid, and the fingers gripping Bo Yu's collar glowed with ice-blue light.
Bo Yu fished out the sea salt lemon candy, noticing that the candy wrapper was marked with Feng Hacker's warning in transparent ink: Beware of all glowing objects.
As Bo Yu smashed through the iron door of the emergency passage, Feng Hacker was setting up three holographic projectors on a rusted drainage pipe.
On the damp cement floor, floating data streams in dark blue swirled around. If you looked closely, the flickering lights formed miniature 3D models of the cold storage.
"Your shoulder's bleeding." Feng Hacker didn't look up from his virtual keyboard. The projection of Qian Duobao's corpse suddenly spun 360 degrees. "But more than that, I'm concerned about Miss Tang's hypothermia—her eyelash ice crystals have increased by 2.17 millimeters since three hours ago."
The holographic image of the cold storage froze suddenly, and a metal reflection was magnified layer by layer.
Bo Yu stared at the increasingly clear device number in the projection, suddenly remembering the gold-trimmed medical equipment in the corridors of Xu's hospital.
Tang Yao curled up unconsciously in his arms, and the ice-blue mist from her birthmark began seeping out. As the mist touched the holographic projection, it triggered tiny electric arcs.
Feng Hacker suddenly removed his smart glasses, the lens still marked by the burning traces of data streams. "The last signal sent from the locator was from a pharmaceutical company in the south of the city, but it was acquired by Xu's group three months ago." He turned around and knocked over a box of instant noodles. The seasoning packets spilled into the standing water, releasing strange oil patches.
Bo Yu used his tactical knife to pry open the ice crystals on Tang Yao's collar. As the crystals shattered, they made a wind chime-like tinkling sound.
When he placed the sea salt lemon candy between her pale lips, the glowing warning on the candy wrapper suddenly spelled out Feng Hacker's profile in the dark—this discovery made his hand holding the knife pause, the scratch he made on the wall three centimeters deeper than usual.
The glass curtain wall of the pharmaceutical company looked like a moldy crystal in the rain. As Bo Yu climbed up the exterior drainage pipe to the third floor, he smelled the disinfectant mixed with the scent of tequila from the ventilation shaft.
He intentionally left claw marks on the tempered glass, the cracks in the glass creating the Xu's Group emblem in the flash of lightning.
Inside the laboratory's low-temperature chamber, several bodies with cyan scales growing behind their ears floated in the bubbling green liquid.
Bo Yu's pupils turned into vertical slits as he saw the blue particles settled at the bottom of the culture tank, with the same biological fluorescence as the scales on the fishing net on the breakwater.
When his wolf claw touched the operating table, the hidden alarm suddenly began to play the birthday song.
Seven killers, wearing gas masks, fell from the ceiling. Their tactical vests had miniature refrigeration devices that constantly sprayed the cold storage's signature pale purple mist.
As Bo Yu dodged the poisoned darts, he intentionally knocked over the experiment rack, and transparent tentacles suddenly extended from the fallen culture dishes—those mutated seaweed's suckers were all stuck with Xu's hospital's drug labels.
"Did your boss forget?" Bo Yu wrapped his wolf tail around a killer's ankle and slammed him into the genetic map display screen. "Werewolves' sense of smell on a rainy night can distinguish three hundred types of fear hormones."
As he spoke, his fangs pierced through his oral mucosa, and the saliva mixed with blood dripped onto the killer's gas mask's breathing valve.
The culture tanks suddenly exploded, and the green liquid gathered on the ground into glowing streams.
Bo Yu stepped on the floating bodies and leaped toward the ventilation duct, but was caught mid-air by an electric net.
When he ripped apart the electric net with his wolf claws, he saw a barcode on the back of one killer's neck that appeared in the damp environment—the first six digits of that number perfectly matched the mercenary ID that Feng Hacker had had canceled last month.
Tang Yao's ice crystal pendant suddenly heated against his chest, and Bo Yu used the burning sensation to maintain the last thread of clarity in his mind.
He deliberately exposed a flaw, allowing a killer to stab him under the rib, and in the instant the killer got close, Bo Yu used his canine teeth to crush the earpiece.
Radio static crackled with Wu's characteristic cough, but the distant sound of seagulls pointed to an abandoned shipyard twenty kilometers away.
When Bo Yu finally broke through and rushed into the control room, he found that all the computers were looping surveillance footage of Feng Hacker adjusting the holographic projections.
As he smashed the host computer case, a red-glowing chip automatically popped into the ventilation shaft. The shark pattern engraved on its surface with nano-engraving technology was the same graffiti that Qian Duobao had drawn under Bo Yu's gun three years ago.
The rain washed over the bloodstains on the glass curtain wall. Bo Yu leaned against the emergency power box, wrapping his wound. The enhanced hearing of the werewolf suddenly caught the electronic sound of the convenience store door three hundred meters away, followed by the faint sound of Feng Hacker's favorite mint cigarette being lit.
He crushed the mutated seaweed in his palm, watching the glowing cells form half of Xu's Group's emblem in the rain. The other half of the pattern strangely twisted into Tang Yao's profile.