Skinwalker Belle – Chapter 436 – I am not Number Zero, nor am I Long Yi

Chen Dingjun pulled a black controller from the inner pocket of his white lab coat.

It was palm-sized, with a plastic casing and a single red button on it.

It looked crude, but this thing was connected to the self-destruct program of the chip embedded in the back of Zero’s neck.

The chip had two modes.

The regular command mode was what was active now—whatever he said, Zero did.

The other mode was called Complete Release.

In plain terms, it burned out the chip and let everything suppressed in her genes burst free.

The upside was that Zero’s combat power would skyrocket.

The downside was that from the moment the button was pressed, Zero would no longer be his weapon.

Chen Dingjun glanced up at the blood-soaked blonde woman hovering in midair.

She was still fighting.

Her left shoulder had been run through, and the wound on her right leg was so deep the bone was visible, with dark golden blood streaming down her calf.

But her movements showed no hesitation—she executed whatever command she received without a second thought, no different from a machine.

The problem was that a machine running a preset program couldn’t beat five Pureblood Dragon Clan members of the same tier.

Every time Long Kui brought down that purple greatsword, another layer of Zero’s protective Dragon Qi was shaved away.

The other four Dragon Clan members coordinated flawlessly—a spear sealing off the left flank, a curved blade cutting the right, attacking from above and below in relentless rotation.

Zero’s reaction speed was fast enough, and her strength was sufficient, but she couldn’t adapt.

The chip’s directives to her were “protect Chen Dingjun” and “eliminate the enemy,” so she could only switch back and forth between those two commands.

Long Kui had clearly figured this out too, deliberately drawing his attacks toward Chen Dingjun to force Zero to divert her attention and defend.

Every time she turned to defend, she gained another wound.

At this rate, within ten minutes, Zero would be dismantled into spare parts.

Chen Dingjun looked down at the controller in his hand.

His thumb rested on the red button.

He was hesitating.

Not out of fear of death.

He’d spent his whole life in genetic research, his mind packed with data and formulas—he’d long gone numb to life and death.

What he hesitated over was Zero.

She was the crowning achievement of his life’s work.

Over a thousand failures, hundreds of scrapped experimental subjects, and only then did he get this one perfect product.

Peak seventh-tier combat power, pure Dragon Clan gene expression, every metric maxed out.

Press this button, and Zero would no longer belong to him.

But if he didn’t, Zero would be dismantled and taken back by these Dragon Clan members.

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That old dog Wang Shan was still watching the show from a distance, muttering something under his breath, wearing that smug look of someone waiting to see a joke play out.

“You forced my hand.”

Chen Dingjun gritted his teeth.

His thumb pressed down hard.

Beep—

A sharp, prolonged electronic tone rang out from the back of Zero’s neck.

A wisp of white smoke rose from that spot, and the acrid stench of burnt circuit boards filled the air.

The four Dragon Clan members surrounding her all froze for a moment.

Zero stopped.

She hung in midair—no longer fighting, no longer defending.

A curved blade was still lodged in her collarbone, dark golden blood dripping down the edge, and she didn’t even raise an eyelid.

“Sir, she’s not moving!” the Dragon Clan member with the curved blade shouted back.

Long Kui frowned and took two steps forward, greatsword in hand.

Wang Shan was laughing hysterically in the distance: “That thing broke down, didn’t it? Chen Dingjun, did your remote get water in it or something!”

Chen Dingjun ignored him.

He stood on the aircraft, which had already descended to the ground, craning his neck up, staring fixedly at the motionless figure in midair.

Zero’s eyes were closed.

Inside her mind, a violent upheaval was underway.

The instant the chip burned out, every neuron that had been suppressed by electronic signals for who knows how long exploded open.

Like a dam suddenly collapsing, a flood of information surged into what had been an empty sea of consciousness.

Images. Sounds. Emotions.

All foreign.

And yet, somehow, not foreign at all.

She saw endless slaughter.

Golden dragonflame scorched half the sky as a golden Eastern dragon rampaged through a swarm of Western dragons, its scales drenched in the blood of its enemies.

She saw a towering great hall.

Upon the throne sat a figure radiating a terrifying oppressive aura.

That dragon knelt before the hall, covered in wounds, watching his subordinates die one by one to cover his escape—his eyes burning with unwillingness.

She saw a young man.

Standing at the edge of a cliff, wind whipping through his hair, a stubborn smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

“In this life, I, Long Yi, will never bow to anyone.”

Those words detonated within her sea of consciousness.

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Zero’s body convulsed violently.

“Who am I?”

The moment that thought surfaced, even she was stunned.

From the moment she was created until now, she had never once asked that question.

The chip told her she was Zero.

Carry out orders. No thinking required.

But now the chip was gone.

Those fragments of memory were still pouring in relentlessly.

“I am… Long Yi?”

No.

Long Yi was male.

She was female.

“I am Zero.”

That wasn’t right either.

Zero was just a number—a designation, a codename, the name of a tool.

More memories flooded in.

The pride of the Five-Clawed Golden Dragon. The humiliation of once being Collateral Dragonkin. The bone-deep hatred for the Pureblood Dragon Clan.

These things weren’t hers.

But they were carved into every single one of her cells.

Chen Dingjun had used that person’s genes to create her body.

What those genes carried wasn’t just power—it was fragments of memory, imprints of emotion.

When the chip was intact, all of it stayed suppressed.

Now it was all unleashed.

“I am not Long Yi. And I am not Zero.”

Zero’s eyes snapped open.

The cold mechanical red glow in her pupils shattered completely, replaced by a blazing golden light—like twin suns embedded in her eye sockets.

Crack!

The curved blade lodged in her collarbone was shattered into fragments by a force erupting from within her body.

Metal shards sprayed outward, striking the nearby dragonkin in the face and carving bloody gashes across his skin.

That dragonkin stumbled back a dozen paces, his face a mask of utter disbelief.

“This power is wrong! Completely different from before!”

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Zero turned her head.

Her gaze swept past the four dragonkin and landed directly on Long Kui.

That look had changed.

No longer the hollow, mechanical stare of one awaiting orders.

There was something in it now.

Pride. Contempt. And a hatred seeping up from the very marrow of her bones.

Long Kui’s grip on his greatsword tightened.

He had fought wars for years—seen every kind of look a man could give.

But this look sent a chill down his spine.

This wasn’t the look of someone facing an enemy.

This was the look of a predator eyeing its prey.

“Pureblood Dragon Clan… DIE!!”

Zero spoke.

Her voice was hoarse, rough with the rawness of newly awakened consciousness, but every word was bitten off with weight.

The entire hall fell silent for a single breath.

“She’s conscious!” Long Biao shrieked, clutching his severed arm, his voice cracking.

Standing atop the aircraft, Chen Dingjun threw his head back and laughed—the sound echoing through the skies above the Black Palace, dripping with a near-maniacal triumph.

“See that! This is perfect genetic fusion! Consciousness awakening! This is Zero’s true form!”

“Playing tricks.” Long Kui said in a deep voice.

He refused to believe it.

So what if an artificially created being awakened?

He was a Pureblood Dragon Clan member, at the peak of the seventh level, a leading figure among the younger generation.

He raised his heavy sword high, purple energy converging on the blade into a crescent-shaped arc of light.

He brought the sword down in a single strike.

Zero didn’t dodge.

She spread her arms wide, facing the Sword Qi that could split mountains, and tilted her head up.

Something was swelling in her chest.

It was an instinct sealed too long in the depths of her genes.

She opened her mouth.

ROAR—!

That wasn’t the sound of a human, nor the howl of a beast.

That was a dragon’s roar.

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A pure dragon’s roar, untainted by any impurity.

Golden sound waves erupted from her mouth, exploding into a massive ring-shaped shockwave above the Black Palace.

The Sword Qi Long Kui had sent down was shattered by the sound waves, fragments of purple energy scattering through the air.

All the remaining glass windows of the Black Palace burst apart.

Rubble on the lawn was hurled into the air.

Wang Shan and Long Biao were slammed flat to the ground by the dragon’s roar.

Wang Shan clamped his hands tightly over his ears, mouth open but unable to make a sound, two streams of blood trickling from his nostrils.

Long Biao fared worse—the wound at his severed arm was torn open again by the shockwave, and he curled into a ball on the ground in agony.

Before the dragon’s roar had even faded, Zero’s body began to change.

Dark golden scales emerged across her fair skin, spreading from her neck down her arms, from her waist and abdomen across her legs.

Every scale radiated a searing luster, like gold soaked in molten magma.

Her bones crackled audibly within her body.

Her spine elongated.

Her shoulder blades expanded outward on both sides.

The tattered clothes on her body were shredded into fragments by her rapidly swelling frame, scattering in the wind.

Her legs merged together, fused, bones restructuring.

Her tailbone extended wildly, and a massive tail covered in Scale armor unfurled behind her.

The entire process took no more than five seconds.

The golden-haired woman in midair vanished.

Above the Black Palace circled a dark golden Eastern dragon over eighty meters long.

Its serpentine body coiled, layers of Scale armor stacked upon each other, each scale gleaming with a cold metallic sheen.

Its head held high, two golden dragon eyes looked down upon everything on the ground.

Five claws.

The breath of every Dragon Clan member present stopped.

Long Kui looked up at the colossal dragon that blotted out the sky, his pupils trembling violently.

Perhaps the Collateral Dragonkin didn’t know, but Long Kui did.

The Five-Clawed Golden Dragon was recorded in ancient texts.

That was the mark of the royal bloodline.

Back then, that rebel had been hunted down and killed precisely because he carried this bloodline yet was born into a collateral branch.

“This can’t be…” His voice trembled.

“Royal Golden Dragon Bloodline? This is the bloodline of that rebel from back then? How could it appear in a place like this?”