Skinwalker Belle – Chapter 438 – It shouldn’t be like this——-

The eighty-meter-long golden dragon lowered its head in midair, both foreclaws clutching desperately at its skull.

Pain.

There were no wounds on its body.

Something had been dug out from the depths of its consciousness, splitting the self it had just constructed clean in two.

One half was Long Yi’s genetic instinct.

A searing, brutal urge to fight—every cell screaming.

I am the Five-Clawed Golden Dragon! Tear them apart!

The other half was utterly different.

It was a woman’s voice.

Faint, trembling, carrying a fear and confusion only humans possessed.

My name is Zhu Yan.

I am human.

Two streams of consciousness collided in the Mental Sea, churning into chaos.

The golden dragon’s body lost all control. The colossal creature, over eighty meters long, plummeted from the sky and crashed into the lawn before the Black Palace with the force of a landslide.

The foundation cracked.

Debris flew everywhere.

Half the lawn was gouged into a crater over a dozen meters deep.

Long Kui froze for an instant.

The next second, he snapped into action.

“Now!”

Five dragons dove simultaneously.

Long Kui’s violet dragon led the charge.

Wings folded tight, his sixty-meter-long body spiraled downward, violet Dragon Breath twisted by the high-speed rotation into a corkscrewing pillar of light that slammed head-on into the prone golden dragon.

The other four dragons flanked from four directions.

Dragon horns. Dragon wings. Dragon tail. Dragon claws.

Five full-power strikes at seventh rank, every blow aimed at vital points, leaving no room for mercy.

Zero didn’t dodge.

Her Mental Sea had spiraled completely out of control.

Long Yi’s genetic instinct was frantically issuing combat commands.

Fight back! Tear open that violet dragon’s throat with your claws!

Zhu Yan’s memories pulled back with equal desperation.

I’m not a monster—I’m human!

The two consciousnesses fought for control of the body, every nerve stretched taut in a tug-of-war.

The golden dragon’s movements fell into complete chaos.

Its left foreclaw rose to strike, then withdrew halfway through the motion.

Its tail swept through half an arc, then froze rigid.

Its jaws opened to unleash Dragon Breath, but the energy surging in its throat was forcibly suppressed halfway.

Just standing there, dazed, exposing itself entirely to the barrage of five dragons.

Long Kui’s spiraling Dragon Breath struck first.

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The lawn before the Black Palace was plowed into a scorched trench over a hundred meters long.

Clods of mud and rubble, mixed with steel rebar from underground pipelines, were hurled into the air.

The scale armor across the golden dragon’s chest and belly was burned straight through.

Dark-red muscle tissue was exposed, emitting reeking white smoke.

The other four dragons followed up immediately.

Dragon horns pierced the hind leg.

The azure dragon’s horn tip punched through from the base of the thigh, spraying a mist of dark-golden blood.

Dragon wings sliced open the flank.

A wound half a meter deep ran from the ribs all the way to the rear haunch, the outline of internal organs visible within.

A dragon tail lashed across the neck.

The cervical vertebrae gave a dull crack, and the dragon’s head was knocked to one side.

Dragon claws pinned the skull.

Five talons sank into the gaps between the scales atop its head, pressing the golden dragon’s face firmly into the dirt.

The golden dragon was nailed to the ground.

Its massive body still struggled.

Its tail swept deep furrows across the earth, its foreclaws clawed at the soil, reaching forward—every motion kicking up great sheets of rubble and dust.

But its movements grew slower and slower.

Dark-golden dragon blood poured from a dozen wounds, seeping down through the gaps between scales, pooling into thin rivulets among the shattered bricks and debris.

“Seize her together! Take her back to the Dragon Emperor Hall for study!”

Long Kui reverted to human form, standing twenty meters away with his greatsword in hand.

He didn’t approach.

A win was a win.

But Long Kui knew all too well how ugly this victory was.

One against five.

He had held off five Pureblood Dragon Clan seventh-rank experts for over twenty minutes, and had managed to injure all five of them.

What if she knew Dragon Clan combat techniques?

What if she had decades of combat experience behind her?

Long Kui gripped the hilt of his greatsword, not daring to think further.

The first gray dragon to step forward bared its teeth, revealing a mouthful of dragon fangs stained with dark-gold blood. It lowered its head, opened its jaws, and aimed directly at the base of the dragon horns, ready to bite down.

The instant before the fangs closed.

The golden dragon’s eyes lit up.

Not the dark-gold dragon pupils.

But black.

The black pupils of a human.

Clear, burning with fury.

Zhu Yan’s.

The scene shifted.

Bulletin board of the Capital Defense Forces.

A notice stamped with a red official seal was posted in the most prominent spot.

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The edges of the paper had curled from the wind, but the words were still clear.

“The Chief is recruiting volunteers for an experiment to alter one’s bloodline. Upon success, one’s talent and evolution rank can be elevated by several tiers.”

Zhu Yan stood at the outermost edge of the crowd, reading the notice from beginning to end three times.

The people around her murmured among themselves.

“Don’t go. There’s definitely something fishy about it.”

“What if it’s real? Don’t you want to get stronger?”

“You have to stay alive to enjoy being strong…”

Zhu Yan didn’t join the discussion.

She had clawed her way to rank five through reckless, relentless training.

The entire Capital Military District knew her name.

That lunatic who ran laps every morning at four o’clock.

That workaholic who always charged first into every mission.

That monster who had ground her way up from rank two to rank five through sheer grit.

But she knew better than anyone.

Rank five was the ceiling.

Every step beyond required a transformation at the genetic level.

It required a higher-order bloodline awakening, a qualitative breakthrough in special abilities.

These weren’t things you could run laps to achieve, or lift weights to achieve. Even throwing your life at them wouldn’t fill the gap.

This ceiling of talent—she couldn’t climb over it.

But this experiment could give her talent.

Zhu Yan tore down the notice, folded it neatly, tucked it into her pocket, and headed to the registration office.

There weren’t many people in line.

Most smart people didn’t dare come.

She wasn’t smart.

But she wasn’t afraid to die.

At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Ten thousand meters deep.

The laboratory was blindingly white.

The air conditioning was cranked up high, the temperature held at a constant sixteen degrees—chilly, bone-piercing cold.

Day one.

Injection of the xeno-gene.

The needle pierced her vein, and the icy liquid spread through her bloodstream, reaching every corner of her body.

Burning.

Burning from deep within her bones, radiating outward.

Zhu Yan bit down on the rubber block in her mouth and didn’t make a sound.

The male soldier in the bed next to hers howled in agony all night, until his voice went hoarse and cracked.

Day three.

The bed next to hers went quiet.

Then the convulsions started.

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Genetic rejection reaction.

His muscles spasmed uncontrollably, foam bubbled from the corners of his mouth, and his eyeballs rolled up into his skull.

A researcher walked over, bent down, scribbled a few notes on a clipboard, and once the convulsions stopped, waved toward the door.

Two people in protective suits wheeled in a stretcher, pulled a white sheet over him, and wheeled him out.

As the door closed, Zhu Yan saw six more stretchers lined up in the hallway.

That night, seven were wheeled out.

Day seven.

“Where did those people who were wheeled out go?” Zhu Yan asked the researcher who came to change her IV.

The researcher didn’t even look up, just swapped out the needle on the syringe in hand.

“Disposed of.”

Three words.

Spoken with the same flat tone as asking, “Have you eaten?”

Zhu Yan didn’t ask again.

She stared at the fluorescent light on the ceiling. One section of the tube had a loose connection, flickering every few seconds.

Flash. Then dim.

From that day on, she started counting the days.

Day ten.

Chen Dingjun arrived.

White lab coat, graying hair, followed by four or five assistants, each clutching thick folders of data.

Chen Dingjun stood before the experimental table, sweeping his gaze over the volunteers lying on it, their bodies riddled with tubes.

His eyes moved from left to right, no different from inspecting parts on a production line.

Then, without turning his head, he said something to the assistant behind him.

“The survival rate of this batch is 0.3 percentage points higher than the last. Continue optimizing the protocol.”

Materials.

Zhu Yan lay on that cold metal surface.

Her back was covered in red marks left by the tube connectors.

When she heard that word, she felt no anger.

To be precise, she was stunned for a long time.

Materials.

Suddenly, she remembered something.

The civilians in the resettlement camps near the military district.

Every so often, a group of them would disappear.

Sometimes dozens, sometimes over a hundred.

The official explanation was that Mutated Beasts had attacked, or that they’d been relocated to other bases.

She used to believe it.

There was no reason not to.

She was a soldier. Soldiers trusted the organization.

And now?

Zhu Yan turned her head.

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The person on the neighboring bed was new again.

A young girl, looked under twenty, with an IV catheter still in her arm from the experiment.

The girl was asleep, brows furrowed tightly, fingers unconsciously clutching the corner of the thin blanket in her dreams.

Zhu Yan looked away.

She couldn’t believe anymore.

Final frame.

She’d lost track of which day of the experiment it was.

When the pain lasts too long, your sense of time is the first thing to go.

She only remembered the needle.

Extremely thin, piercing through the gap between the cervical vertebrae at the back of her neck.

Then a thin sliver of metal.

The moment it touched her spine, she heard a faint “click.”

“Chip implantation complete.”

The researcher’s voice came down from above.

“Designation: Zero.”

From that second on, her consciousness was pressed down, layer by layer.

Layer one. She couldn’t feel her arms anymore.

Layer two. Her legs were gone too.

After layer three, her hearing began to blur, surrounding sounds turning into muffled buzzing through water.

Further down, her field of vision shrank, the fluorescent lights on the ceiling becoming a single point of light.

Then darkness.

In this laboratory ten thousand meters deep, amid this pile of cold instruments and data, her name, her past, every lap she’d ever run, every wound she’d ever taken, every drop of blood she’d ever shed—

All of it was crushed beneath a chip the size of a thumbnail.

“It shouldn’t have been like this…”

That was her last thought before consciousness sank into darkness.

She remembered the training ground at four in the morning.

Remembered the three hundredth lap she’d run with her heels rubbed raw.

Remembered herself charging first on the battlefield.

Remembered the two years she’d gritted her teeth climbing from Level Two to Level Five.

She had tried so hard.

Harder than anyone.

For what?

To become a number on this experimental table?

To become a material?

To become a mindless weapon, killing for the old man who treated her like a spare part?

Everything she’d once fought to protect—a soldier’s honor, faith in the organization, the obsession with growing stronger…

What did any of it mean?

“It shouldn’t have been like this… It shouldn’t…”