Chapter 5: Infection

The school bell rang, and students filed out of the campus one by one.

Luo Zhengxin, with cotton balls stuffed in his nose, slipped into the back seat of a Mercedes S-Class, closed the door, and leaned against the window in silence.

“Oh my, Xinxin, what happened to your nose? Did you bleed?”

Luo’s mother, dressed in mink, frowned with concern as she stroked her precious son’s face.

Luo Zhengxin pulled away from his mother’s hand, unwilling to answer, and muttered gruffly, “From playing basketball.”

“Can playing basketball really leave you like this? Your nose skin is scraped raw—you’ll scar! Tell Mom who bumped into you; I’ll complain to the school board! This is outrageous!”

Luo’s mother, who never took a loss in business, couldn’t bear seeing her beloved son bullied; she immediately pulled out her phone and called the homeroom teacher to find out what happened.

Luo Zhengxin was already used to this family atmosphere; he leaned against the car window, eyes vacant, his mind replaying every moment from the basketball court.

Why couldn’t I catch such a slow ball?

Why couldn’t I catch it?

Meanwhile, Li Cheng, the very person constantly on everyone’s mind, was riding his bike happily into an alley, stopping in front of Zhao’s Dessert Shop, beginning his part-time job.

A few hours later, when his shift ended normally, Uncle Zhao told Li Cheng to dispose of the remaining ingredients from today.

Cakes, desserts, bread—all perishable, with very short shelf lives; if unsold, they had to be thrown away.

In the past, Uncle Zhao couldn’t bear to waste them and gave the leftovers to others—but the consequences weren’t pleasant.

Li Cheng carried a bundle of cakes to the back alley and suddenly stopped.

That same hunger from earlier returned, like a tide, each wave stronger than the last.

“.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Li Cheng looked up at the top of the alley; seeing no surveillance cameras, he opened the cake box and devoured it greedily.

His stomach seemed insatiable, showing no sign of fullness. After eating enough sweets to spike his blood sugar to dangerous levels, he still wasn’t satisfied; he bid his boss farewell, rode to the night market, and bought several boxes of fried pork cutlets and fried chicken cutlets.

“This hunger is definitely abnormal. This morning, a few people’s breakfasts satisfied me; now I need mountains of cloying sweets and pork cutlets. If this keeps growing, even gorging on compressed biscuits won’t be enough.”

His thoughts grew heavy as he calculated how long his hard-earned savings would last.

Back home, his aunt Li Zhao stood in the kitchen, face grim, on the phone with colleagues discussing the company’s upcoming top-down leadership change.

Her husband, Xue Jingming, lay on the sofa watching a sports game on TV; their cousin Xue Lingyu and cousin Xue Luomeng were studying TOEFL exercises in the study, preparing for possible overseas study.

“I’m back,” Li Cheng called out casually as he changed his slippers; only his uncle replied.

Fine, he was used to it. Li Cheng returned to his bedroom and plugged the USB drive given to him by Yuan Zhixia into his computer.

Yuan Zhixia truly lived up to her genius reputation; her program was defined by minimalist design and practical functionality.

After a moment’s thought, Li Cheng completely deleted nearly all software on the computer, including the input method, then covered the webcam with sticky notes and lined the speakers with sound-dampening foam.

Only then did he climb the ladder, log onto the foreign web, and begin his search with Prometheus Laboratory Company.

Prometheus Laboratory Company, founded ten years ago, was originally an obscure auto parts firm in Maine, USA.

Five years ago, a new, vigorous CEO took over and suddenly unveiled an industrial robot invention called Daedalus.

This eight-axis industrial robot was inexpensive, equipped with mature intelligent programming, and capable of handling all tasks—including welding, assembly, painting, transporting, gluing, and inspection.

It could reduce the number of workers needed on an assembly line by 20% to 70%.

More crucially, given sufficient raw materials, Daedalus could replicate itself!

With this robot, Prometheus Laboratory Company overtook its competitors, swiftly surpassing the four industry giants—Fanuc Corporation, ABB (formed by Sweden’s Asea and Switzerland’s Brown Boveri), Germany’s KUKA, and Yaskawa Electric Corporation.

A year later, it acquired Yaskawa Electric, officially entering Japan.

Since then, Prometheus continued its rapid expansion, repeatedly acquiring, growing, and acquiring again, broadening its reach into ever more fields.

Automotive manufacturing, electronics manufacturing, aircraft manufacturing, food and beverage processing, mining, energy, housing construction, infrastructure development, aerospace, brain-machine interfaces.

Not only that, Prometheus maintained its own police force and prisons—through contracts with the U.S. government, it deployed armed personnel into cities like Birmingham, New Orleans, Memphis, Baltimore, and Detroit to combat crime and maintain order. A real-life version of RoboCop.

In war-torn regions outside the U.S., it directly trained armies to protect its local branches.

If Samsung Group was a monopolistic entity entrenched in South Korea, where ordinary people could live their entire lives within its system,

then Prometheus was a colossal octopus, its tentacles reaching every corner and domain across the globe, sustaining its technological and industrial dominance through astronomical annual investments in research.

“No wonder that suited man called August could carry a gun in the city.”

Li Cheng rubbed his chin and searched for Perez; he found Perez was not a senior executive at the Yin City branch, but a mid-level head of security, with a security manager above him.

“Try searching for the Special Affairs Bureau?”

This search yielded far less; whether Li Cheng entered Chinese or English, the abbreviation or full name “Special Affairs Administration,” he found no detailed information.

But when he searched for 【Shadow Realm】, 【Godspawn】, and 【Lord of Insects】, he unexpectedly found several chat screenshots on a niche, anonymous foreign forum specializing in urban legends.

OP hacker: Look what I captured—Mothman!

The attached image showed a blurry, hunched silhouette taken at dusk, with massive wings on its back.

hacker: Last night, my father and I were driving home to our farm when we captured this thing. When it saw our headlights, it dropped the deer and fled into the woods.

calvo: This photo is so blurry—did you take it with your front door lock?

barkle: This blur reminds me of 9/11. I was standing right under the World Trade Center, filming people losing their lives; my uncle was among them.

calvo: Brother, I’m sorry for your loss. May your uncle rest in peace.

barkle: Thank you. He was once the best pilot in the Middle East.

calvo: ???

hacker: ???

hacker: Forget it, I’ll keep going. I swear this photo is 100% real. Mothman really does appear near our farm. Dead insects keep appearing mysteriously in the fields, a sheep vanished without a trace, and today, a cow’s back had wounds like those left by a vampire’s bite.

calvo: You’re making this up pretty convincingly. Too bad it’s not fifty years ago—this photo might’ve gone viral on TV then.

david: . OP, if I were you, I’d hide in the basement right now. It’s nighttime there, right?

hacker: Yeah, so what?

david: Beyond Earth, there exists something called 【Lord of Insects】. Imagine it as a decaying god from another world—a 【Godspawn】. Half its body shattered into countless fragments, falling through rifts into our world. Any organism infected by a 【Lord of Insects】 fragment enters a state of 【Genetic Hunger】: it must periodically absorb biological genes from different species, consume massive amounts of food to digest them, then absorb new genes and eat again, repeating the cycle endlessly.

david: Any attempt to delay, block, or break this cycle causes the victim’s body to mutate drastically, becoming a mindless monster that seeks other victims to spread the infection.

david: The so-called Mothman you photographed was likely originally a wolf or black bear. Infected by the 【Lord of Insects】, its body mutated continuously, first absorbing genes from small insects, then rodents, then sheep and deer, then cattle—and finally, humans.

david: You said you live on a farm with few neighbors nearby, and it’s nighttime now. The FBI’s Special Incidents Division won’t arrive in time. Hide.

david: It’s coming for you.

(End of Chapter)