"Didn't the cat-looking kid come today?"

Morris poked his head out of the cave.

The dark-skinned little boy was lying bare on the outer wall of the wormhole like a gecko, nodding at him.

The children spend most of their days climbing on the outer walls of the slums.

This unique structure of the slum is called a wormhole, and from a distance it looks like a glowing ordinary giant mound.

Named for its insect-like den-like appearance, a mixture of rough gravel, sand, and a small amount of industrial waste makes up the vast majority of the hive. The erratically curved internal corridors of the wormholes are interconnected, and the wider cave-like space can be used as a cave for the poor who cannot afford to buy a house.

The Morris family lived in such caves close to the outside.

The sunlight shines on the outer walls of the mound, and the small amount of crystals mixed in the building materials reflects the dazzling light, so that the simple building gets the necessary little light.

The boy who climbed on the outer wall was called the stone.

Children in the slums are born without the meaningful names given by their parents, after all, early childhood death is a rare occurrence here. For those who live to be about ten years old, their parents often either give them a random name that their ancestors used, or give them a less decent name according to their usual hobbies and habits, such as stone.

This child is known to many residents because he likes to climb the outer wall of the steep and dangerous wormhole since he was a child.

With olive-colored skin, long curly black hair, and two dark black eyes born in the dark, the boy has a body as strong as a stone.

The lack of a nutritious diet in the slums affected the growth of his muscles, which were more slender and strong than his peers due to his long-term sports and rock climbing, although Stone did not like to talk, but he often volunteered to help the surrounding residents do some physical work in exchange for a small amount of food, and was very popular with everyone.

About a year or two ago, the rocks, who had been crawling around alone, suddenly had a few friends, perhaps from the surrounding slums.

In addition to Stone's younger brother, there was a freckled red-haired girl, a strange child who had no hair because of the radioactive elements or contamination that remained, and a very handsome green-eyed boy who was always dressed in sportswear and was very impressed by Morris.

The green-eyed child is the least frequent, short and not very talkative.

Maurice's sister in the lair sighed in disappointment when she heard her brother's question, and the anticipation on her face and the flush on her cheeks faded - Maurice touched her sister's head, crawled to the opening of the cave and sat down, breathing in the fresh air, looking at the blue sky and the white clouds floating in the sky.

Their caves are quite far from the ground.

Due to the dramatic increase in the population of the slums, the wormholes have increased several times over the years.

The cave to which the new inhabitants were assigned took a long time to climb up from the inner tunnel, and when you looked down from the opening of the cave, the people below were really not much bigger than the insects and ants—and to everyone's surprise, the stones and the children often climbed up and down at such heights without falling down.

At the same time, not far from the slums, in a certain institute on the outskirts of the city.

In a large glass petri dish, long hairs like seaweed float in a culture that resembles amniotic fluid.

The creature wrapped in long hair curled up into a baby's form, its jaws slowly rising and falling with breathing.

The nameplate welded on the metal base underneath the petri dish of the creature is engraved with the creature's code name and name - mermaid.

Nine stared at the image of the subject's brain waves reading from the frequency screen, and it was clear that the subject had entered a deep sleep cycle of REM (rapid eye movement).

The new product developed by Company N, a long-term partner of the laboratory, can rewrite the memory of the test subject, so as to adjust and correct the parameters of the acquired personality class. In order to prevent accidents, he and his team took turns to monitor the subjects' brain waves twenty-four hours a day during the month after the new data was imported.

…… If this experiment is successful, it may be possible to create a Chimera that is stronger than Duke Poison.

During the few minutes of Nine's vision of the future, the subject's double eyelids covering the eyeballs opened very slowly, revealing extremely bright two-color pupils.

These eyes look like human eyes, the outermost layer is the whites of the eyes, followed by very highly saturated, a little bright peacock blue and a peacock green closer to the pupil - the deep pupils shrink like cats when they receive light signals from the outside world, forming a square cone-shaped slit.

Before Nine came to his senses, his eyes were closed, as if nothing had happened, and the observation instrument did not report such a short period of anomalous fluctuations - after all, there were still observation errors.

"It's a shift change!" Behind him came the cheerful voice of a partner.

Relieved, Nine turned to leave with the bag he had prepared.

Researcher Sixteen was a very young girl, a graduate of a prestigious university, who received her Ph.D. from one of the top professors in the industry, and was introduced to the institute without any problems—a mediocre-looking girl with a great enthusiasm for her work, a short haircut that matched her age, a plain face, and no particular interest in anything other than research.

After proofreading and setting the parameters, Sixteen opened a packet of potato chips and placed it on the table, connected to the remote machine, and prepared to start checking the monitoring of the room that was supposed to be in charge of her roommate, Shizuko.

"Help," Shizuko's expression of clasping hands to herself appeared in front of her, "Anyway, there is usually nothing abnormal, so please help me take a look~ My boyfriend is finally on vacation today, and I want to accompany him well." ”

Although Shizuko has troubled her to help with the night shift remotely every time - but if this girl is also interested in scientific research and love, maybe she will have a competitor for her year-end award, No. 16 sighed.

Shizuko is different from her, probably because of her cultural background, this girl is very enthusiastic about dressing up and falling in love. She held a curling iron in the mirror, and the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about the opposite sex was far more vibrant than the backwater in her eyes when she worked.

After the machine was started, the glasses-free VR screen in front of me gradually became clearer.

Ever since the seniors wrote programs to monitor anomalies, Sixteen's job has become a bit boring.

It's not the same fantasy she had about the institute when she just graduated – it's not every day that there are explosive new discoveries, and it's not all colleagues who are passionate about their careers.

In this environment of boiling frogs in warm water, she, a girl who was once enthusiastic and wanted to dedicate herself to scientific research, although not hopeless, gradually became a little lazy.

Today, however, the on-screen situation in the testing room intrigued her, and Sixteen curled up in a huge chair and picked up potato chips while watching them like a TV show.

At the same time, the test chamber.

Since some of the human experiments studied by the institute were not so popular with humanitarian organizations, and there were few volunteers among the public willing to participate, in order to avoid unnecessary troubles and ensure that there were enough test subjects, the leadership had long signed mutually beneficial contracts with the metallurgical security officials in each city.

Some prisoners with serious cases or even death row prisoners can participate in experiments to reduce their sentences or regain their freedom, while those with less serious cases, such as brawls and vandalism of public facilities, can choose to "assist in research" in areas such as testing rooms.

The helpfulness of the study sounded more like labor reform and the provision of free labor — things that researchers were less willing to do, such as running errands and cleaning, were counted as points on the prisoner's record based on their difficulty. This type of cleaning and chores, which do not require too much risk, have lower scores and need to be done longer to offset their sentences, but because they do not have to worry about missing arms and legs, there are still quite a few prisoners who choose this type of work. By analogy, the higher the score, the more difficult and dangerous the work, and the higher the risk of risking one's life to become a test subject.

Becoming an assistant in the "practice room" is a relatively generous point for non-human modification work.

The so-called practice room is a room where new test subjects are tested for physical fitness.

Perhaps it should be called the Colosseum or the Colosseum...... Number 16 thought as he ate potato chips.

The walls are soundproofed and shock-absorbed, and no one knows what's going on inside, except for the robots that carry out the commands, the researchers who observe through the bulletproof glass, and the technicians who perform video backup and data collection and analysis such as Shizuron.

In the practice room, the one who caught the eye of No. 16 was a small boy with shackles and handcuffs, wearing ordinary sportswear sweatpants in the corner, and the jacket zipper was pulled to the tallest.

Sixteen inexplicably felt that face was familiar.

A porcelain doll-like delicate face, unfluctuating eyes, and short dark blonde hair that is slightly curly to the chin...... If it weren't for the fact that the boy was so petite, she would have almost recognized him as the strongest test subject she had ever seen in the newspapers, "Duke Poison".

Duke Poison, whose real name is unknown, and his origin is also a mystery.

According to internal rumors, Duke Poison himself did not enter the research institute as a prisoner and become an experimental subject like the garbage in front of him, but was born in the army, and his own background was voluntarily reformed by the top soldiers in the past. However, there are several internal rumors, the most amazing is that he is actually a pure artificial human made after genetic engineering optimization, and there are many spare clones of him somewhere.

As one of the most successful Chimeras at present, the dream lover of countless girls, this handsome Chimera can be regarded as the reason why Sixteen was determined to enter the research institute when he was a girl.

Although there is no guarantee that Chimera's genetic modification will be "inherited", because his modification is extremely successful, his offspring will become a very important case study and object of protection.

However, unlike other more timely-fun-loving Chimeras, the "Duke of Poison" has a rather low-key private life. There have been no scandal rumors for many years, so that many enthusiastic women are very excited to create a lot of fandom and novels based on him and publish them on major websites......

But those were things that Sixteen didn't look at very well.

As a fan sister of Duke Poison who has been loyal to him for more than ten years, she is willing to believe that Duke Poison is a straight man, and she also fantasizes that she can meet him by chance at the scientific research institute one day, and then have some unexpected romantic encounter......

Her mind was drawn back to the scene in front of her.

For the sake of humanity, each time a new pre-test subject chooses a test subject, he or she can see the reason for the other person's imprisonment.

The pre-test subject appears to have been imprisoned for armed robbery, and is quite tall and athletic.

Luke, the prep test subject, entered the room, and almost immediately made his choice.

Murderers, arsonists, sex offenders, drug dealers...... The last short thief apparently looked the least combative. The sign in front of the beautiful boy reads "Theft", and among the criminals lined up, he is the smallest and the most delicate.

"I choose him." Luke pointed to the beautiful boy and said to the experimenter who was invisible behind the single-sided glass.

"Okay, we'll start in five minutes." The man's unheaving voice came from the microphone.

The beautiful boy didn't seem to understand the situation, scratched his head, and looked left and right to make sure that he had been chosen. The cat-like round eyes blinked, and suddenly became a little excited from a daze.

He sighed as he looked at the man in front of him, who was a head taller than him.

"The sin of stealing doesn't need to be locked up for long......"

Sixteen looked at this slender beautiful boy through the screen and muttered, as if he had watched this teenager who was somewhat similar to her male god being beaten to an inhuman shape.

The handcuffs and shackles of the beautiful boy "snapped-" and loosened.

As several unselected criminals streamed out under the escort of the robots, the door to the practice room was firmly closed.

The beautiful boy unhurriedly pulled down the zipper and took off his coat.

Seventeen's eyes were glued to the screen without blinking, for fear of missing the slightest detail.

The heartbeat of "puff puff" is getting faster and faster, and it is especially loud in the quiet room with only the experimental equipment.

However, when the beautiful boy took off his coat, she found out that the beautiful boy was ...... It's a girl.

However, it does not match her slender appearance, except for her chest tightly wrapped in bandages to facilitate movement, the exposed figure, from the arms to the waist and abdomen, can see quite obvious muscles - this muscle is not the kind of girl who is too thin, but you can see the slightly raised lumpy muscles on her back and the faint chocolate abdominal muscles on her waist and abdomen at a slight angle in the light.

Although No. 16 knew that it was a girl over there, he still looked at the muscles and the face, and swallowed slightly.

"Let's go." The man's voice came from the microphone again.

Before Luke could react, the thief raised his leg and kicked him in the abdomen.

Bending down in pain, Luke cursed a swear word, and was about to fight back, when his head was "buzzing", and then his throat was stuck by Xiao **'s thin elbow, and the whole person suddenly lost his center of gravity and was slammed against the wall.

Sixteen was stunned, and forgot to eat the potato chips in his hand.

The thief moves very quickly and in one go.

Apparently unlike a prep test subject who was large but didn't have any formal training, this was a guy who was trained in martial arts.

Next, the thief stepped back slightly, did not directly lock his throat to make the other party faint from lack of oxygen, and seemed to realize that although he had the first opportunity, he was still too far behind the other party.

Before Luke could catch his breath, the boy's fist slammed into Luke's ribs like a rain of lightning - if it weren't for the camera pulling in to see the details, Sixteen would have barely been able to see the thief's movements.

Luke works for a gang of bandits and has always been accustomed to using firearms.

Although his arm strength, physical fitness, muscle strength, etc. are very good, in real hand-to-hand combat and fighting, he can only be unilaterally beaten by this thief who is much shorter than him.

And this woman, the speed of the blow is not only fast, the strength is quite large among women, but also specializes in hitting the weak parts of the human body.

No matter how tall a person is, the weakness of his body is still the same.

It didn't last more than a few minutes before Luke endured the pain and yelled "towel" at the guy behind the glass.

"Then the test is over." The researchers announced through the glass.

Sixteen began to read the data recorded on the wall and began to analyze the footage of the battle that had just been taken.

Before the robots dispatched by the researchers arrived, the thief continued to hit his opponent who was already begging for mercy, as if he hadn't heard it. Before catching a glimpse of the robot next to him coming over to pull the two apart, the thief came down to Luke's stall on his knee before pretending to stop as if nothing had happened.

After Luke was taken away for treatment, the researcher spoke again on the other side of the glass.

"L, your points have reached the standard for getting out of prison, you can go."

The thief who called L picked up his coat from the ground, patted the dust, put it on with his head down, pulled the zipper up again, turned and left.

As if she had suddenly woken up from a dream, her blood rushed to her head, she pushed the table aside and stood up, unaware of the potato chips falling to the ground, turned around and pushed the door and began to run out.