What kind of person was Earl Vale?
Only Old Tang truly knew. He had been by Earl Vale's side for years and had witnessed how the black market was built under his leadership.
That Earl Vale could start his own operation in the gray realm and grow the black market from nothing showed that he was a genius.
Indeed, Earl Vale was a genius, and the name he chose for himself revealed his pride.
But at the same time, Earl Vale was deeply insecure.
The more perfect a person is, the less they can tolerate their flaws. When Earl Vale was young, he lost his hands and feet to a disease. This disability, impossible to hide, made him feel inferior.
To restore his limbs, Earl Vale tried countless methods.
Perhaps driven by increasing knowledge and desperation, when technology failed him, Earl Vale began to pursue metaphysics.
Over time, the stranger the subject, the deeper his obsession grew, even developing into an unhealthy fixation on metaphysics.
To make matters worse, the appearance of the white mermaid seemed to change Earl Vale's entire worldview. While everyone else found the woman in the white dress strange, Earl Vale accepted her without hesitation.
This mixture of inferiority and arrogance made him extremely sensitive. Because of this, Old Tang always followed Earl Vale's wishes carefully. He dared not disobey him.
Yet, ironically, this obedience was about to cause great harm to Earl Vale.
Old Tang led the team to Earl Vale's apartment. Though they had not entered yet, Old Tang was trembling with anger.
He had a gut feeling Earl Vale was dead.
Standing at the door, Wen Yu looked around the apartment and noticed it was clean and tidy, almost no sign that anyone had been there.
He turned to Old Tang and asked,
"Where is the bathroom?"
Murlocs preferred to build nests in small, damp places. The bathroom, being the smallest and most humid room, was the perfect spot for them.
Old Tang snapped back to attention, drew his gun from his waist, and stepped inside first, heading straight to the bathroom on the first floor.
Wen Yu and the soldiers followed closely. When passing a glass wall, Wen Yu paused. He looked inside carefully and realized it was actually a water tank that stretched to the ceiling. White scales still clung to the bottom, uncleaned.
Old Tang moved ahead and, before the soldiers reached him, opened the bathroom door.
Immediately, a sharp mix of damp rust and white steam rushed out.
A red liquid flowed at Old Tang's feet.
He looked into the bathroom, which looked like a scene from hell.
Blood splattered the ceiling, and nearby lay Earl Vale's prosthetic arm, soaked in blood.
All of this proved the arrogant blond man had foolishly sacrificed his body for the "goddess" he believed in.
In the upper right corner of the ceiling hung a flesh-colored cocoon. It moved rhythmically, indicating the murloc inside had not yet hatched.
Suddenly, with a tearing sound, a piece of skin fell from the intact cocoon, revealing a circular hole.
Old Tang stared at the hole, and a red beast pupil appeared within, locking eyes with him.
He was horrified. The muscular man, barely two meters away, began trembling the moment their gazes met.
Mucus oozed from the hole, corroding the edges as the murloc prepared to emerge.
This was the curse of the murlocs. Due to genetic defects, they could not build proper nests, yet their instincts forced them to relive the moments before nesting endlessly.
"Destroy it," Wen Yu said suddenly. He looked at Old Tang and said, "Leave now."
The murloc must have smelled Wen Yu's breath and mistaken him for some kind of tonic. It hurried to emerge early, eager to attack.
Wen Yu's calm command snapped Old Tang out of his deathly fear. He looked sadly at Earl Vale's prosthetic arm in the blood, roared, and instinctively raised his gun.
He aimed at the cocoon and fired.
Bang, bang, bang, bang.
Old Tang emptied his gun with a series of shots.
The huge cocoon stopped wriggling, but its entrance was still being corroded.
After a moment, a woman with black wet hair fell out of the opening. Blue blood leaked from the wound, and she looked dead.
Old Tang wiped sweat from his face and prepared to reload, but suddenly, the woman's head snapped up.
She screamed.
Old Tang, standing in front, took the full force.
An invisible, powerful impact threw him to the ground. His ears and eyes rang painfully. His mind went blank.
He had no idea how much time passed.
When Old Tang recovered slightly, he was lying on the floor, his entire body aching, his thoughts scrambled, and a steady stream of warm liquid flowing from his mouth and nose.
The "woman," the one Earl Vale had called "Jasmine" over and over, was now crawling painfully out of the flesh-colored cocoon.
She was the polar opposite of the delicate figure in the white dress.
Now, she was a massive monster.
Her two-meter-long tail was still stuck halfway in the cocoon, making it hard to imagine how such a huge body had fit inside.
Old Tang struggled to open his blurry eyes and looked at the creature.
His internal injuries were so severe he could barely think.
Beside him lay a few soldiers. They did not move. He did not know if they were dead.
The murloc had used a sound wave attack, wiping out over half the team.
Still, Old Tang's bullets had caused serious damage.
There were bullet holes all over the creature's body, blue blood leaking freely.
Though the wounds had not killed it, they slowed it down considerably. It had to rest and move slowly to heal.
Oh God, what the hell was this?
Old Tang fought to open his eyes wider, endured the pain, and fixed his gaze on the murloc.
His instincts screamed that if the creature fully emerged, they were all doomed.
Driven by a desperate desire to avenge his comrades, Old Tang took a deep breath and tried to move.
He struggled to get up and fire at the murloc again.
Sadly, his severe internal bleeding left his body unresponsive. After a long fight, he barely managed to twitch a finger.
Just then, Old Tang noticed Wen Yu walk past him toward the murloc.
Wen Yu... how was he still standing?
Old Tang's mind raced.
However what happened next shocked him even more.
Wen Yu stood less than a meter away from the murloc, seemingly speaking to it quietly.
Yet the murloc—the same creature that had terrified Old Tang to the point of losing color in his face with its single glaring eye—now made a frightened expression that could only be described as a grimace.
There was indeed a conversation between Wen Yu and the murloc, but Old Tang could not understand what was said.
The previous sonic attack left Old Tang's ears ringing with white noise. He felt as if his eardrums might have ruptured, and blood was slowly leaking from them. Old Tang guessed the other soldiers nearby who survived were likely in a similar state.
After Wen Yu's exchange, the murloc grew restless. It fixed its blood-red eyes on Wen Yu, then opened its mouth wide again.
This time, instead of a sonic attack, it let out a high-pitched scream—more of a warning.
It screamed while retreating, digging its claws into the floor and tearing small holes.
Wen Yu shrugged as if accepting responsibility. He sighed, quickly raised his gun, and fired.
The murloc was still looking up at Wen Yu, so the bullet passed clean through the center of its forehead and exited the back of its head, spraying blue blood mist.
This was no mere wound but an execution.
Old Tang watched the scene in stunned silence, pondering the situation.
Even for a creature like a murloc, known for its incredible self-healing, the chance of surviving a bullet through the head was practically zero.
To ensure the murloc was truly dead, Wen Yu fired nine more shots directly into its head.
After the ninth shot, the murloc's skull was utterly destroyed, leaving only a sticky mass of flesh and blood.
Wen Yu lowered his gun, standing amid a cluster of indistinct murloc corpses. He tilted his head, as if unconcerned.
Then he walked to the bathtub and turned off the faucet that had been running.
Before Wen Yu looked back at him, Old Tang quickly closed his eyes, pretending to still be dazed from the earlier sonic blast.
He thought to himself that murlocs were actually not the scariest thing here—the calm and composed Wen Yu seemed far more terrifying.
…
Half an hour later, Dr. Mu Rin arrived with a team.
He squatted beside the murloc's body, examining it for some time, and could not help but complain:
"This is brutal. Its face is smashed to pieces."
"I'm afraid it might still be alive."
Mu Rin looked at him without expression.
The researchers thoroughly inspected the small bathroom and the living room outside, collecting all relevant evidence.
All the injured were evacuated. Except for two with severe internal bleeding, the others survived.
This casualty count was lighter than Dr. Mu Rin had expected.
It might be because Old Tang had not spoken at first, and the shots Old Tang fired seriously injured the murloc, preventing it from launching a full attack.
This also confirmed that murlocs were failed evolutionary creatures, far less successful than the merfolk who had evolved properly.
"I believe the fight happened mostly in the bathroom," Dr. Mu Rin said.
He stood and gestured for an assistant to remove the murloc's body. Then he asked curiously:
"The glass curtain wall outside, or rather the large transparent glass box—how did that break? What kind of struggle occurred?"
When Dr. Mu Rin and his team entered the apartment, the broken glass in the living room was the first thing that caught their attention.
From the shards and their base, he guessed that the broken glass came from a large glass box, but it was clearly broken deliberately.
Why would someone damage it?
Were they searching for something? Or was there a fight?
Yet there were no obvious signs of a struggle in the living room.
"It could be thermal expansion and contraction," Wen Yu said after thinking for a moment.
"The glass quality wasn't good. I broke it myself."
Dr. Mu Rin was speechless.