Breaking the Deadlock, Love Rekindled in a Desperate Struggle

Bo Yu crouched beside the rusted anchor chain of a fishing boat, his fingers tracing the blood-stained metal foil.

The morning mist, thick with the briny sea air, struck his face, and the glow of the encrypted number on Tang Yao's collarbone seemed to burn into his retina as if still alive.

Three days had passed, and the wound coated in the antidote's sweet, metallic scent should have scabbed by now — if she were still alive.

"Bo Xiao Ge!" Zheng Yufu, wrapped in a shiny oilskin raincoat, dashed in from the alley. The yellow croaker fish in the plastic bucket flopped about before all suddenly turning belly-up. "The CCTV at the pier's been moved again, just like the rising tide."

Bo Yu crushed a fiddler crab that scuttled across his boot with a deliberate step, its cobalt-blue shell reminding him of the trembling fingertips of Qian Duobao when he handed over that cigarette.

The same mint cigarette laced with neurotoxin had given off this eerie blue mist when it burned.

He pulled out the frequency jammer that Feng Hacker had modified and saw that the red dot on the display was closing in on the breakwater.

"Same routine," he said, tossing the last half-pack of spicy sauce to Zheng Yufu and turning, deliberately letting his trench coat sweep across the damp brick wall.

Fluorescent green wolf claw marks immediately appeared on the moss — the marks Tang Yao had painted for him with glow-in-the-dark paint during the last full moon. Now they were acting as beacons to lure the pursuers.

The smell of the seafood market mixed with the scent of diesel, assaulting his senses.

Bo Yu reached into the ice block pile at a stall and found the hard drive Feng Hacker had hidden. Just as his fingertips brushed against the warm metallic surface, a gloved hand suddenly reached from an angle.

The old woman selling oysters grinned widely, her toothless mouth revealing the scales on her apron, vibrating ever so slightly in some frequency.

"Boss Xu wanted it fresh," she said, her withered fingers suddenly flicking out sharp claws. The cold light flashed just as Bo Yu overturned a foam box.

Among the bouncing octopus tentacles, a silver wave formed by nano-robots flowed toward him along the drainage pipe.

At the moment Bo Yu slammed open the warehouse iron door, moonlight streamed in through the roof cracks, casting a halo around the needle mark on the back of his neck.

The wolf venom serum from Shen Killer's injector was heating up in his veins, allowing him to tear apart the mechanical hounds that lunged at him with his bare hands, but also making the old injury on his collarbone sprout silver fur.

"Are you crazy?" Feng Hacker peeked from behind the server racks, his glasses flickering with thirty-seven different monitoring screens. "Uncle Zheng said you were at the pier... Wait, why are you shedding fur?"

"Special effects makeup," Bo Yu said, tossing the sparking mechanical leg into the scrap pile and suddenly staring at the leftover instant noodle cup on the hacker's desk. Inside the red oil swirl, tiny nano-robots were forming the logo of Xu's Group.

He grabbed Feng Hacker's wrist. "Who have you met today?"

Amid the hum of the refrigeration unit, the faint click of a gun being loaded suddenly mixed in.

As Bo Yu yanked the hacker into the bulletproof glass compartment, he saw Zheng Yufu's fishing rod hanging down from the ventilation duct, with a sonar jammer counting down on the fishing line.

"Miss Tang's life-saving charm," the old fisherman's voice echoed through the seagull cries. "She said if you start to mutate, just soak in the seawater to clear your head."

Bo Yu stared at the suddenly blacked-out monitoring screens, a low laugh escaping his throat.

The heat from the mutation was burning his rationality, but he clearly remembered the stormy night three days ago when Tang Yao arranged the sonar controller parts into the Big Dipper and how her fingertip had brushed his palm.

Now, those parts were lying in Feng Hacker's toolbox, arranged into a completely different formation.

"Help me hack into the Port Authority's tide monitoring system," Bo Yu said, ripping off the bandage and exposing his bleeding wound to the cold air. "Boss Xu loves to ship goods on a new moon night because..." His bloodstained fingertip pointed at a blinking red dot on the satellite map. "The rising tide hides the yacht's waterline."

Feng Hacker suddenly began coughing violently, tearing open a new packet of seasoning from the noodles and swallowing it.

Bo Yu squinted — the trail of chili powder was following the rhythm of a Morse code, the rescue signal they had agreed on last month.

"Looks like our bait is working," Bo Yu said, turning the tracker he had dug out from the mechanical hound's body and pressing it into the noodle soup.

One of the surveillance screens immediately flickered with static, revealing a shadowy figure in the distance on the breakwater.

The cigarette between the person's fingers was giving off that familiar cobalt-blue smoke.

The waves grew more violent as dusk descended. Bo Yu stood atop the abandoned lighthouse on the pier, letting the last rays of sunlight stretch his shadow into the raging tide.

The metallic foil Tang Yao had left behind grew hot in his palm, its encrypted number flashing in rhythm like a heartbeat.

He deliberately hung his trench coat on the rusted beacon, exposing the silver-gray skin on the back of his neck.

When the first drop of rain shattered on the telescope lens, Bo Yu grinned at the churning sea.

The Xu's Group logo on the Shen Killer's chip fragments was buzzing in his pocket.

The salty sea breeze, swirling with the smell of rust, circled the pier as Bo Yu leaned against the shadow of a shipping container, his fingertips tapping lightly on the rusted steel plate.

The wolf fur he had deliberately left in the seafood market fifteen minutes ago was now drifting in the drainage pipe, and he could imagine the twisted expression of Xu's men as they tracked the signal.

"Six heat sources, three o'clock direction, crane," Feng Hacker's voice crackled through his Bluetooth earbud, accompanied by the sharp click of a keyboard. "Wait... they're carrying the sonar emitters!"

Bo Yu licked his fangs, and as the moonlight pierced through the clouds, he deliberately let the silver fur behind his ear show.

As the first black-clad figure leaped down from the shipping container, he was already using his military knife to pry open an oyster — the splattering juice perfectly coated the man's goggles, and the knife blade cut through the power line of the sonar emitter.

"Didn't your boss teach you?" Bo Yu spun to dodge an electric baton, his boot heel crushing into the man's knee. "Only fresh catch at the seafood market." The knocked-off goggles slammed into the crane control panel, activating the rusty hook, and a 30-ton container collapsed like a line of dominoes.

The waves suddenly crashed violently against the breakwater, and Bo Yu caught a faint jasmine scent in the spreading dust.

He pretended not to notice the woman in white who stumbled into the battlefield, but when he sidestepped a steel cable, he deliberately let her pearl earrings catch on his cuff.

"Help, help!" The woman grabbed his collar, her tear mole glowing faintly blue in the moonlight.

Bo Yu felt the sharp pain at the back of his neck — her nails hid a neurotoxin.

He smoothly pulled her waist into his embrace, teasingly blowing a strand of hair away from her forehead. "A beautiful lady like you, here to catch the sea breeze?" His hidden hand quietly twisted the electromagnetic pulse generator he had stolen from the black-clad man.

As the woman tried to smear the anesthetic on his throat, the sudden burst of blue light from the pulse generator froze her in place.

"Even the beauty trap is not high class enough for your boss?" Bo Yu used his military knife to lift the bionic skin on her collarbone, revealing the tracking chip glowing red beneath. "The last bionic person you sent lasted at least three minutes."

The terror in her eyes suddenly shifted into a cunning smile. Her red lips parted, and she bit down on her fake teeth. A wave of sea-anemone-scented smoke instantly erupted.

Bo Yu held his breath and leapt back, watching her melt into a puddle of liquid metal, slipping through the cracks in the ground, leaving behind only an empty white dress floating in the oil slick.

"The tide is turning!" Zheng Yufu's voice mixed with the sound of the ferry horn.

Bo Yu flipped over onto the gantry crane, seeing twelve black SUVs crushing through the breakwater's railing.

He pulled out the last of the spicy sauce Tang Yao had left, smearing the final bit of red oil on the steel cable — nano-robots formed into a tracking swarm and immediately redirected toward the convoy.

As the explosive fireball lit up the night sky, Bo Yu huddled in the corner of the cold storage, pouring iodine on his wound.

His deliberately torn protective suit revealed blood-soaked bandages, and the silver fur on his collarbone had spread to his chest.

He counted the footsteps coming from the ventilation ducts, grunting in pain as the third echo reached his ears.

"Bo Ge? Is that you?" Qian Duobao's trembling voice broke through, tinged with a cry. "They've taken my wife... I was forced..."

The familiar scent of mint smoke mixed with bitter almond came from the edge of his vision, and Bo Yu smelled it before he saw the fishscale-covered shoes appearing in the shadows.

With the thunderous crash of steel shelves collapsing, Bo Yu appeared like a ghost behind him.

He pressed the unlit poison cigarette to the betrayer's carotid artery, "Remember that time in sophomore year, when you stole my student ID for an online loan?" The cold tip of the cigarette pressed against the man's sweaty temple, "I said back then, if you ever do it again, I'd make sure to leave you a permanent mark you won't forget."

The warehouse lights suddenly flickered on, and the swarm of drones controlled by Feng Hacker projected the images onto the misted glass windows.

Thirty-seven monitoring perspectives all played footage of Qian Duobao collecting gold bars for Xu's Group, with the snowy frames even clearly showing the scratches on his hand from his mistress.

"These... these can explain everything..." Qian Duobao collapsed to the frosted ground, suddenly pulling out a ceramic gun from his waistband.

But Bo Yu had already wrapped the frozen octopus tentacles around the trigger, and when the man's finger pulled, the recoiling tentacle whipped him in the nose.

The crowd watching gasped, and Bo Yu stepped through the shattered ice, walking into the moonlight. He held up the metal key he had found in Qian Duobao's pocket.

"Do you know why Xu's boss insists on shipping goods on a new moon night?" He tossed the key toward the reporters rushing in. "Because the secret of the angle of the moonlight refraction is hidden in the prism of this key."

The sharp sound of something cutting through the air suddenly came from the sea wind, and Bo Yu tilted his head to avoid the crossbow bolt that whizzed by his ear.

But he saw Zheng Yufu's fishing rod suddenly go taut.

Fifty meters away, on top of the lighthouse, a killer in a sharkskin wetsuit was loading a second arrow, and the veins in his neck bulged, faint silver lights swimming beneath.

"They're genetically

modified deep divers!" Feng Hacker's warning was drowned out by the explosion.

Bo Yu rolled into a fishing boat filled with foam boxes, and as his hand landed on the sonar device hidden under the wheel, he suddenly remembered what Tang Yao had said when she taught him to read star maps: "When the hunting dog's reflection appears before the body, it means the sea has turned into a mirror."

He cranked the sonar frequency to the max and bared his fangs toward the lighthouse.

The sea suddenly boiled under the moonlight, hundreds of gun squids stunned by the infrasound floating to the surface, tearing apart the killer's reflection.

When the modified human lost balance and fell, Bo Yu hurled the rusted anchor into the darkness — in the light of the metallic collision, Xu's yacht outline began to emerge.

"I found you," Bo Yu wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth, and the wolf pupils in the night glowed with a ghostly blue flame.

He deliberately let the last bit of rationality be swallowed by the beast, because the wound Tang Yao had bitten into his shoulder before she disappeared now resonated painfully as the yacht drew closer.