Chapter Five: Infection

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

With cotton balls stuffed in his nose, Luo Zhengxin slid into the backseat of the Mercedes S-Class, closed the door, and leaned against the window in silence.

“Hey, Xin Xin, what’s wrong with your nose? Is it bleeding?” Luo’s mother, dressed in a mink coat, looked at her beloved son with a face full of concern as she gently touched his cheek.

Luo Zhengxin pushed her hand away, reluctant to answer the question, and muttered hoarsely, “Got it playing basketball.”

“Playing basketball and ending up like this? The skin on your nose is scraped raw; it’ll leave a scar. Tell me who hit you—I’ll report it to the school board! This is unacceptable…”

Luo’s mother, never one to lose out in business, couldn’t bear to see her precious son bullied. She immediately took 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 the scenes on the basketball court.

How did I fail to catch such a slow ball?

How did I not catch it?

Meanwhile, Li Sheng, the one constantly on his mind, was happily riding his bike, entering an alley, and stopping in front of Zhao’s Dessert Shop to start his part-time job.

A few hours later, after a normal shift, Uncle Zhao asked Li Sheng to deal with the leftover ingredients from the day.

Cakes, desserts, and bread spoil quickly and have a short shelf life. If unsold, they have to be thrown away.

Previously, Uncle Zhao couldn’t bear the waste and chose to give the leftovers away, but the consequences weren’t exactly pleasant.

Li Sheng, carrying large bags of cakes, stopped suddenly in the back alley.

The hunger he felt that morning surged again like waves, each stronger than the last.

“...”

After hesitating for a moment, Li Sheng looked up at the high part of the alley. Seeing no surveillance cameras, he opened the cake box and devoured it greedily.

His stomach seemed bottomless, never feeling full. Even after consuming a massive amount of sugary treats that could spike his blood sugar, it still wasn’t enough. He said goodbye to his boss, rode to the night market, and bought several boxes of fried pork chops and fried chicken cutlets.

“This hunger definitely isn’t normal. Several servings of breakfast satisfied me in the morning, but now at night, I need tons of sickly sweet desserts plus pork chops. If this keeps increasing, even gorging on compressed biscuits won’t satisfy me.”

His mind heavy, he calculated how much longer his hard-earned savings could last.

Back home, Aunt Li Zhao was in the kitchen, her face grave as she spoke on the phone, discussing with colleagues the arrival of a new company leader in a few days.

Uncle Xue Jingming lay on the sofa watching a basketball game on TV, while cousin Xue Lingyu and cousin Xue Luomeng studied TOEFL problems in the study room, preparing for possible overseas study.

“I’m back,” Li Sheng called casually after changing slippers. Only his uncle responded.

Well, he was used to it by now. Li Sheng returned to his bedroom and plugged in the USB drive given to him by Yuan Zhixia.

As expected of a genius, Yuan Zhixia’s program featured a clean interface and practical functions.

After some thought, Li Sheng deleted nearly all software on his computer, including input methods, covered the webcam with sticky notes, muffled the speakers with soundproof cotton, then connected to a VPN and logged onto the foreign internet, starting with a search on Prometheus Corporation.

Prometheus Laboratories was founded ten years ago. Initially, it was an obscure auto parts company located in Maine, USA.

Five years ago, under the leadership of a vigorous new CEO, they unveiled an invention called Daedalus—an industrial robot.

This eight-axis robot was sold at a low price and came with mature intelligent programming, capable of welding, assembling, painting, handling, gluing, and inspection work.

It could reduce the workforce needed on industrial assembly lines by 20% to 70%.

More importantly, given enough raw materials, Daedalus could replicate itself.

Thanks to this robot, Prometheus Laboratories leapfrogged ahead, quickly surpassing the four giants in the field: FANUC Corporation, ABB (a merger of Sweden’s ASEA and Switzerland’s Brown Boveri), Germany’s KUKA, and Yaskawa Electric.

A year later, they acquired Yaskawa Electric and officially entered Japan.

From then on, Prometheus surged forward, repeatedly acquiring and expanding across various sectors.

Automobile manufacturing, electronics, aircraft production, food and beverage processing, mining, energy, house construction, infrastructure, aerospace, brain-computer interfaces...

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

Outside the U.S., in war-torn regions, they directly trained armies to protect local branches.

If Samsung Group was a monopolistic entity rooted in South Korea, where ordinary people could live their entire lives within the conglomerate,

then Prometheus was like a colossal octopus, its influence spreading to every corner and field globally, maintaining its technological and industrial dominance through astronomical annual research investments.

“No wonder that man called August, the one in the suit, can legally carry a firearm in the city.”

Li Sheng rubbed his chin and searched for Perez. He found that Perez was not a senior executive at the Yin City branch but a mid-level security department supervisor, with a security manager above him.

“Let’s try searching for the Special Affairs Bureau.”

This time, the search yielded little. Whether Li Sheng entered the term in Chinese or English, the abbreviation or full name, details were scarce.

Instead, when he searched for “Shadow Realm,” “Divine Scourge,” and “Lord of the Bugs,” he unexpectedly found several chat screenshots on a niche anonymous urban legend forum abroad.

Original poster HaccKer: Look what I caught—a Mothman!

Attached was a blurry photo taken at dusk, showing a hunched figure with large wings on its back.

HaccKer: Last night, my father and I were driving back to our farm when we caught this thing on camera. It flew off into the woods, clutching a deer, as soon as our headlights shone on it.

CaLvo: The photo’s so blurry, did you take it with your door lock?

BarKLe: This blurry photo reminds me of 9/11. I was standing under the Twin Towers then, taking pictures of the victims. My uncle was among them.

CaLvo: Bro, my condolences. May your uncle rest in peace.

BarKLe: Thanks, he was the best pilot in the Middle East.

CaLvo: ???

HaccKer: ???

HaccKer: Anyway, I’ll continue. I swear this photo is 100% real. There really are Mothmen near my farm. A lot of dead insects mysteriously appear in the fields, a sheep vanished without a trace, and just today, a cow had bite marks resembling those of a vampire.

CaLvo: Sounds like a decent story. Too bad it’s not fifty years ago; this photo would’ve been a hit on TV back then.

DaVid: ...OP, if I were you, I’d hide in the basement immediately. It’s nighttime where you are, right?

HaccKer: Yeah, why?

DaVid: Outside Earth, there’s something called the Lord of the Bugs. You can think of it as a decaying god from another world—the Divine Scourge. Half of its body shattered into countless pieces that fell through cracks into our world. Any creature infected by fragments of the Lord of the Bugs enters a state called Genetic Hunger, requiring them to absorb different species’ genes periodically and consume large amounts of food to digest the genes. Then they absorb new genes and eat again, repeating the cycle.

DaVid: Any attempt to delay, stop, or break this cycle causes significant mutations, turning the victim into a mindless monster that hunts other victims to spread the infection.

DaVid: The Mothman you saw was probably originally an animal like a wolf or black bear. It got infected by the Lord of the Bugs and began mutating, starting by absorbing genes from small insects, then rodents, then sheep, deer, even cows—finally, humans.

DaVid: You said you live on a farm with few neighbors nearby, and now it’s night. The Federal Investigation Bureau’s Special Incidents Division definitely can’t get to you in time. Hide now.

DaVid: It’s coming for you.