Skinwalker Belle – Chapter 412 – Want a Taste?

That sentence was spoken so low that it was drowned out in the noise of the battlefield cleanup.

No one heard it except Lin Fan.

Lin Fan, who had been about to turn around, froze mid-motion. A rare hint of blush crept across her jade-white cheeks.

This self-produced, self-sold energy potion of hers—one that could trigger human evolution.

And yet, a mere Level 2 guy had seen through its essence with a single glance.

There was something undeniably embarrassing about having her secrets laid bare like that.

But Lin Fan was Lin Fan. After everything she’d been through, her capacity for mischief had reached a level of transcendental excellence.

Far from retreating, she stepped forward instead.

She closed the distance until she was right in front of Chu Chen, their breaths nearly intertwining. Her exhale, carrying a strange, exotic fragrance, brushed against his ear.

“Sharp eyes you’ve got there. What, tempted to have a taste?”

Lin Fan’s smile was utterly wicked, her tone dripping with teasing.

“If you really want some, just say the word. Other people have to pay good money, line up for limited editions, and get rationed bottles. But for you? I’ll give you all you want—no watering down, guaranteed.”

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Chu Chen’s chewing on the soft candy came to an obvious halt.

He looked at the flawless face so close to his own—so perfect it defied any criticism—then glanced at the playful glint deep in Lin Fan’s eyes.

His hyper-accelerated brain stalled for only a fraction of a second before reverting to its usual lazy, dead-fish-eyed state.

“No thanks.” Chu Chen shoved his hands back into his pockets and took a half-step back to create distance. “Psychoactive substances would interfere with my neural transmission. I worked hard to unlock the limiters in my brain—I’d rather not have your biological hormones forcibly slowing down my thinking.”

He paused, then added seriously.

“If I ever live long enough to get tired of using my brain to crunch all those annoying numbers, I’ll consider asking you for a cup to see what it actually tastes like.”

With that, Chu Chen let out a jaw-cracking yawn.

“I need to go sleep. My brain just got unlocked and immediately ran at full capacity—now it’s severely oxygen-deprived. Leave the rest of the physical work to Lu Yuan.”

He turned around and trudged off toward the underground shelter with heavy, dragging steps.

Lin Fan crossed her arms and watched Chu Chen’s swaying figure retreat, the corner of her mouth quirking slightly.

This calculation freak really wasn’t easy to fool.

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Setting the thought aside, Lin Fan turned and swept her gaze across the wrecked training ground, finally locking onto Lu Yuan in the distance with pinpoint precision.

Every hair on Lu Yuan’s body stood on end in an instant. It was the instinctive terror of prey being locked onto by an apex predator.

That familiar look—the one that said he was nothing but small fry.

Last time he’d been on the receiving end of that look, he’d ended up with a sock stuffed in his mouth and ground into the dirt under her heel. Could this female demon possibly think she hadn’t had enough fun earlier and was about to drag him into some kind of hellish training session?

“B-Boss!” Lu Yuan snapped his legs together, standing ramrod straight. “What do you need!”

“Pathetic.” Lin Fan walked over to a broken concrete slab, her skirt swaying slightly as she sat down with elegant grace. She crossed her long, fair legs and propped her chin on one hand. “Don’t be so tense. I was too busy cleaning up the trash earlier to ask. Tell me—what the hell are those Federation bigwigs up to now? And those freakishly deformed things—which dog kennel did they crawl out of?”

Lu Yuan let out a relieved breath and yanked Chen Mo, who was bandaging his arm nearby, over.

“Old Chen knows all about this! Old Chen, give the boss a full report!”

Chen Mo ignored the wound on his arm, stepped forward, and gave an extremely standard military salute.

“Reporting to Lei Jie! The bald-headed Lin Qiang who was just killed is the top enforcer under Wang Shan, the leader of the Federal Compromise faction. As for those genetically modified mutants, they belong to the augmented human troops of Chen Dingjun, the leader of the Resistance faction. Now the two factions have completely burned their bridges and have directly descended into civil war.”

“Wang Shan?” Lin Fan twirled a strand of white hair that fell across her chest with her slender fingers, her tone languid. “I do have some recollection of him. A while back, I paid a visit to the Kunlun Mountains—there’s an underground base built into the mountain there. I happened to take over that base along the way. I didn’t expect this old bastard to have such long reach, with his men managing affairs all the way out here in western Sichuan.”

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At these words, Lu Yuan and Chen Mo exchanged glances, both seeing extreme shock reflected in the other’s eyes.

That base in the Kunlun Mountains—classified as top secret by the Federation and heavily fortified—had been taken down by Lei Jie alone?

If such an outrageous feat of combat prowess were to make its way back to the Federation, it would be enough to keep the old-timers in the Resistance faction’s upper echelons awake at night from sheer terror.

“And who exactly is Chen Dingjun?” Lin Fan paid no attention to their astonishment and continued her questioning. “Those augmented humans who looked like walking patchwork—he’s the one who cobbled them together?”

“Chen Dingjun is an old-school general of the Federation,” Chen Mo said with a grave expression, speaking rapidly. “He’s over sixty now. He’s an extreme, absolute human-supremacist. To counter the threat of the Dragon Spirit Continent, his research teams have been specially studying the Mutated Beasts that emerge from the Rifts, even sending people across the Rifts to secretly collect genetic material from various races. Then they forcibly stitch those non-human genes onto human soldiers.”

“The process is extremely cruel—the mortality rate of the live-subject experiments is over ninety percent.”

“Sounds like they’ve got plenty of drive,” Lin Fan raised an eyebrow. “With all those lives thrown into the grinder, what’s the strongest defective product they can manage to produce?”

“According to the intelligence we’ve gathered, the highest recorded result reaches Level Six,” Chen Mo answered truthfully. “But this kind of forced fusion can’t resolve the fundamental problem of genetic rejection—most of them don’t even survive two years. However, that intelligence is a year old now. Who knows how far their research has progressed by this point.”

Lin Fan curled her lip in disdain. Augmented humans created through such crude, barbaric stitching methods.

Even if they reached Level Seven, in her eyes they were nothing more than unsightly garbage.

“And what about this Wang Shan? What exactly is this Compromise faction planning to compromise on?” Lin Fan shifted her posture and continued asking.

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“Wang Shan is fifty years old, and he’s a very troublesome psychic-type Evolved being,” Lu Yuan cut in eagerly. “His greatest specialty is Mind Control. He can forcibly brainwash others, turning them into puppets who obey his every word. Just like how he controlled Old Chen and the others earlier.”

“As for the Compromise faction’s platform…” Chen Mo gritted his teeth, fury burning in his eyes. “They’ve already reached a secret agreement with the Dragon Clan from the other world. They plan to sell the survivors of Blue Star into slavery to the Dragon Clan, in exchange for absolute power and comfortable lives for their small circle of elites in the Post-apocalypse. The tens of thousands of people in the Eastern Defense Zone are the offering they intend to hand over as their pledge of loyalty.”

Lin Fan burst out laughing at that. Yet within that laughter was an unmistakable note of mockery and the pity one might show a fool.

He had witnessed Wang Shan’s mental control firsthand at the Kunlun base.

Compared to his own “Faith Feedback” — a technique that bound directly to the depths of one’s soul, preserving the target’s full intelligence while allowing him to grow stronger with each absorption — Wang Shan’s crude and clumsy control method was nothing short of a joke.

What was even more laughable was Wang Shan’s little trading scheme.

Those bloated federal bigwigs had no idea what a grand game the otherworldly Dragon Clan’s patriarch, Long Hao, was playing.

From the very beginning, he had treated all of Blue Star as nothing more than a livestock pen. Once the Crystal Bones matured within every human on the planet, Long Hao intended to swallow all of humanity — skin, bones, and all — to ascend to the tenth-rank divine throne.

Wang Shan and his ilk thought they were selling out humanity for their own gain, but the Dragon Clan was planning to devour even the sellers as appetizers along with the main course.

A bunch of frogs at the bottom of a well.

“Just two slightly plumper lambs waiting for the slaughter, that’s all.”