In the seventeenth year after the nuclear blast, humanity had retreated into underground ark bases. The bases divided radiation zones into four levels, ranked warriors in ten tiers, and catalogued mutant species. Everything was orderly, except for the things that made no sense: species from medium-radiation zones appearing in low-radiation zones, mismatched file numbers, and the leadership changing its story every time an SSS-rank warrior died.
Lin Zhan was a researcher at the institute, spending her days with sequencers and sample boxes. She remembered a snowy night when she brought home a mute little boy, hid him in a storage room in a derelict building, and fed him dry rations for three months. When he left, he gave her a purple crystal pendant. She kept it and never told anyone.
Later, she met a red-haired warrior at the base. Everyone called him Lord Qi Shuo. He was SSS-rank, and on his second day after transferring in, he tore apart the previous strongest warrior. The way he looked at her was as if he knew her, yet didn't know her at all.
Qi Shuo didn't remember the snowy night. He had only fragments: a girl, a storage room, a stone. His fusion rate was 98.7 percent. He was the only person in the entire base who needed no anchor, and no one could explain it, including him.
In the anchoring chamber at the other end of the base, Lin Wei had worked for ten years. She stabilized the gene chains of warriors ranked B+ and above. She was the best at her job and the least talkative. Everyone thought she was the most obedient pawn, until the new recruit Lu Chengyu barged in.
Behind the base lurked the
