Lin Sinan nodded repeatedly. “Yes, yes. Our Special Operations Department has excellent benefits. Not only do we provide social insurance and housing funds, but you also get an apartment as soon as you join.”

Lu Yan: “I have one. A 240-square-meter flat in the city center. Market value: 13 million.”

The flat was compensation given by the relevant authorities after they took his father away. Back then, housing prices weren’t as outrageous as they were now, but it was still worth several million.

“And family members enjoy high subsidies and special benefits.”

Lu Yan: “My parents are both deceased. I am an only child.”

“Children can be given priority arrangements for key elementary and middle schools.”

“I am a gay man. I cannot have offspring. Opposing surrogacy is everyone’s responsibility.”

Lin Sinan: “…”

The serious way Lu Yan answered made him look exactly like a contrarian arguing at a construction site.

Lu Yan coughed lightly and drank another glass of water. “What is the monthly salary?”

It might have been the first time in all his time working that Lin Sinan had encountered someone who asked about the monthly salary. For a moment, he was a bit bewildered. After all, for people like them, money was the least important thing.

Lin Sinan: “100,000? …Base salary plus commission.”

Lu Yan calculated it in his heart. It was quite good; it was much higher than his salary when he was a doctor. But since the patients had become much more vicious, this compensation seemed reasonable.

Lu Yan took the document and flipped through it. The document Lin Sinan brought was a formal contract, but perhaps out of consideration for his non-military background, the restrictive conditions were few. There were only two points: reporting to headquarters periodically and executing at least one mission every three months.

As long as he joined the Prevention and Control Center, Lu Yan could receive fixed monthly supplies of special medicine, get free access to pollution disease intelligence, participate in headquarters training, and receive organizational assistance when encountering difficulties.

Overall, in order to attract more people to choose this profession of living on the edge, the conditions offered by headquarters were quite generous.

[The Pollution Disease Prevention and Control Center and the Research Institute are not the same institution. If you want to, joining is actually a good choice.]

Lu Yan finished reading the employment contract and signed his name in the bottom left corner.

At Lu Yan’s strong request, Lin Sinan sent two staff members to escort him home.

Only one night had passed, but the streets looked like they had been hit by a terrorist attack. There was broken glass and toppled streetlights everywhere, and occasionally one could see traces of blood and remains—some human, some from pollutants. The pollutants in K City could still be eliminated by physical attacks, so there were still many people in military uniforms busy on the road.

Lu Yan rolled down half of the car window to observe the outside. He had been staying at home the whole time and had never gone out during the day. Seeing it on the news and seeing it with his own eyes were completely different feelings.

Because his five senses were heightened, Lu Yan could even see the tear tracks on the face of the officer who was collecting his teammates’ corpses. Tears mixed with blood and dust flowed down, sorrowful and silent.

[There are dozens of ‘Awakened’ in K City, plus over 30,000 soldiers assisting, but how can they save 3 million people unscathed? Clearly, because of the earlier riots, some humans hiding at home were dragged out by angry pollutants and eaten—chomping sounds.]

The system’s detached tone made Lu Yan frown.

[Demanding that the system show empathy like a human is indeed a bit too much to ask.]

Lu Yan rolled up the window and pressed his right hand against the palm of his left hand, closing his eyes uncomfortably. Something was bulging there, like a bamboo shoot after rain, ready to break through the surface at any moment.

When Lu Yan got home, he turned on his computer, which he hadn’t used for a long time. Lin Sinan’s contact information was still on his phone, and the other party had sent him a URL, telling him it was an internal forum.

Perhaps because of some settings the Prevention and Control Center had adjusted, Lu Yan’s IP was no longer trapped behind the firewall. He saw the outside world’s discussions about the K City lockdown.

“Pollution disease,” “Monstrous transformation,” “Aberrant humans”… these messages had actually dominated the trending searches for several weeks. But those who hadn’t experienced it could hardly understand what kind of terror this was.

[The speed of global evolution is getting faster and faster, and the country has chosen to give up on information blockades. They hope that through popularization, more ordinary people can survive when encountering difficulties.]

[Besides, this makes it more convenient to summon Awakened.]

The internal forum was called “Apocalypse.” It was invitation-only, and all Awakened worldwide who had any connection to official organizations had accounts there. The administrators were selected by the Pollution Disease Prevention and Control Centers of various countries. To cater to people from different regions, the forum thoughtfully came with its own translation system.

This forum required a fixed user ID, but generally, it did not record real information, and one could choose to post anonymously. Not even the administrators had viewing permissions. It was said that a foreign official organization once tried to hack into the forum; not only did they get no information, but the person in charge died unexpectedly the next day. No one dared to cause trouble after that.

Lu Yan hesitated for a long time over his username. He originally wanted to take the name “Doctor,” but that ID was already registered. Lin Sinan had told him that some of the combat records of the Awakened executing missions might be published on the forum, and at that time, the forum name would replace the real name, so he had to be cautious.

“There’s an Awakened from Sichuan who took the ID ‘Is there a 1?’ As a result, when doing missions later, he was either avoided by straight male teammates like the plague or pestered by strange people. In short, you must think clearly; the forum doesn’t sell name-change cards.” In the end, as if recalling something, Lin Sinan added, “He’s ranked quite high on the forum. If you’re a 1, cough cough, you can try posting a selfie to team up with him…”

Lu Yan was not interested in teaming up. After thinking for a while, he entered two characters: Di Ting (谛听).

Di Ting: A legendary divine beast that knows all things in the world and can distinguish truth from falsehood. It was very fitting.

This time, Lu Yan registered successfully.

The Apocalypse Forum looked like a chat forum from the beginning of the internet in the early last century. The UI was ugly and rustic, like a freshman computer science student’s final project. It was divided into three main sections: “Technical Exchange,” “Bounty Missions,” and “Water-Cooling/Off-topic Area.”

Lu Yan clicked on the sub-section under Technical Exchange: “Pollution Disease Case Studies.” He read through all the information from S-level to F-level. Information was a very important thing; at least in the future, when encountering a source of pollution, he wouldn’t have to catch a case to dissect it just to know its characteristics.

The lower the rank of the pollution source, the more detailed the information. The S-level pollution disease data only had a few lines of text, but the C-level pollution source “Parasitic Fish” had seven or eight pages of documentation.

[Cough cough. This is normal. Although everyone talks about a ‘community of shared future,’ Awakened still have nationalities… You can apply for the internal data of the Prevention and Control Center; it will be much more detailed. To be honest, the First District is already very merciful; 40% of the data on the Apocalypse Forum is provided by Awakened from the First District.]

After all, in the current situation, “community of shared future” was not a joke. The whole world had fallen, and the First District alone could not last too long.

Lu Yan had always been a fast reader, but it still took him two full days to finish reading so many cases. Some cases were like mental pollution just by looking at the pictures, making people feel nauseated. He saw Lin Sinan’s pollution source, the C-level pollutant “Parasite.” In the image data, the remains of many deceased were covered in fat, white, long worms. The plump, soft worms crawled out from nasal cavities, earlobes, and mouths, making one wish they could drag the photographer who didn’t use a blur filter out of the computer and beat them up.

In the data section, there was also an “Awakened Ranking.” This was an annual selection evaluated by officials, mainly looking at spiritual power thresholds, contributions from the past year, and other political games not known to outsiders.

Over 60,000 people were registered on the Awakened Forum, but the list only revealed the top 100. Lu Yan scrolled to the bottom and found that the 100th place was that “Is there a 1.”

Personal introduction: Appearance-focused, ugly 1s stay away.

Bai Qiushi, codenamed “Hanchan” (Cold Cicada), was ranked 37th.

There were also some names on the list that clearly looked foreign, such as “Indra,” “Michael,” “Odin,” “Miyamoto Musashi,” and so on.

Lu Yan scrolled up until he saw the first place.

ID: Tyrant.

He clicked on it to take a look. The personal page only had the name hanging there solitarily. It belonged to the First District, but the number of visits was astonishing.

Lu Yan was speechless: “Too ‘chunibyo’ (middle-school syndrome)… to think someone would actually name themselves Tyrant…”

He also noticed one thing: the Tyrant ID was registered 84 years ago. That meant that even if they had registered the forum the moment they were born, Tyrant should be 84 years old now. Lu Yan’s own registration date was February 26th of this year. He flipped through others, and the time varied from the last century to this century. It seemed that it wasn’t a system glitch.

“So, pollution disease and Awakened have existed since the last century.”

It was probably because it couldn’t be hidden anymore recently that these eerie changes had entered the field of vision of ordinary people.

Like an elderly person who had just learned to surf the 3G web, Lu Yan spent a few days excitedly browsing the forum. He only lurked and didn’t post. He learned a lot of useful knowledge. For example, when encountering a pollution source, the more fear one felt, the faster the mutation rate rose; the further one was from the pollution source, the slower the mutation degree… and pollutants were also divided into two types: biochemical pollutants and spiritual pollutants. The pollutants in K City belonged to the former. But powerful pollutants often possessed both.

Besides this, Lu Yan also saw a few posts in the off-topic section asking for “Healing-type items for a high price.” Nowadays, with global evolution, in addition to healing-type Awakened, there were many special items that could reduce biological mutation degrees. And healing-type powers were the rarest of the dozen or so ability branches. Only three had been discovered so far.

No wonder the Prevention Center was so nervous. If it weren’t for Lu Yan’s explicit unwillingness, they might have even wanted to send him to headquarters and treat him like a national treasure.

On the fourth day of returning home, the symptoms of discomfort on Lu Yan’s body finally began to subside. Previously, his arm had hurt as if it were about to be torn apart, and his hand wasn’t very steady when flipping the spatula while cooking. At night, the pain made him break out in a cold sweat. Now, the sharp pain had eased, and his body had shown a little new change.

Lu Yan lowered his head and looked at the palm of his left hand.

As he stared, the interior of his palm gradually split open, revealing fresh red flesh inside. The edges of the crack were covered with sharp fangs, triangular shark teeth. Although it looked a bit strange, this was indeed a mouth.

Lu Yan probed his right finger inside. The tactile sensation was very strange. It didn’t hurt much, but it definitely wasn’t very comfortable. His right hand felt like a little puppy was happily licking him.

He sneaked out again in the middle of the night and cut off a segment of an Alga-man’s tentacle and brought it back. The mouth on his left hand ate very happily, much more convenient than the way those white thin lines fed.

Lu Yan asked: “Is my left hand still my hand? In the end, will my body belong to my soul?”

The system smiled and answered: [It is still a baby fish and relies on you very much. But if you keep staying in your current state, when it discovers that its master is so easy to control, the bad little fish might also bite back at its master.]

On the seventh day of Lu Yan returning home, the news anchor announced in an inspiring tone: “After a month of unremitting efforts, we have worked together with one heart and one mind, and finally brought the pollution under control! The Prevention and Control Center states that after observing for three more days, the K City lockdown can be partially lifted!”

“This pollution disease event has been designated as a B-level emergency. The source was the C-level pollutant ‘Parasitic Fish.’ This catastrophe caused 46,321 deaths in K City and the sacrifice of 456 rescue workers…”

As he read, the anchor’s eyes turned red. Behind every cold, dead number was a family, a life, and many years of joys and sorrows.

After Lu Yan turned off the TV, he was silent for a long time. His social relationships had always been thin, but thinking of Dr. Li who died, the rich second generation, and Shen Qingyang whose whereabouts were unknown, he couldn’t help but feel a bit of compassion and sadness.

Fortunately, Lin Sinan’s phone call interrupted his emotions.

“Dr. Lu, it’s me. Lin Sinan.” On the other end of the line was Lin Sinan’s hearty laughter.

“Team Leader Lin.”

Lin Sinan: “The call is actually because there is something to discuss with you. The promotion of Awakened also requires pollution sources. Now that your data has been sent back to headquarters, there are currently two attitudes above. One is that they hope to let you train while ensuring your safety—the world is changing too fast, and personal strength is really very important; the other part hopes you go to headquarters to promote by taking medicine like the ‘Pope’…”

When mentioning “taking medicine,” Lin Sinan’s expression was slightly unnatural.

System: [Whether it is taking medicine or eating people, the editor would also like to know. I have to say, among the thirteen research institutes in the country, the First Research Institute is really perverted.]

[A group of inhumane madmen doing experiments that even gods fear. Sooner or later, they will be bitten back.]

On the phone, Lin Sinan continued: “If you choose the former, the headquarters has already determined a location. It’s in W City, adjacent to K City. There is a mountain village that has mutated. The case codename is ‘Living Dead,’ the pollution source rank is E, and according to testing, the maximum pollution value is 1100. In addition to me, there is another Awakened with a spiritual threshold of 3000 accompanying you. If you choose the latter, I will also be the one to send you to the First Research Institute. The benefit is that it is relatively safe and controllable.”

“I am currently downstairs from your place. Whenever you have decided, you can come down and tell me your choice.”