Desperate people, accept the seed of my soul!

It turns out that Shen Hanzhou began preparing for his evacuation on the very day he was transferred from the laboratory.

He used his warehouse manager privileges to transfer the necessary raw materials and equipment for the experiment in batches.

When the members of the Five Mountains Society kicked open his apartment door, there were only a few old clothes and a formatted computer left in the room.

After that, Shen Hanzhou disappeared completely.

His status was marked as "fleeing, pending investigation" in the internal bulletin of the Five Mountains Society, but no one was able to find him.

Heo So-won spent two days.

She checked all short-term rental registration information in the suburbs and three towns under the jurisdiction of Guangyang City, but to no avail.

Just when she was about to give up, by chance, in Baishi Town, the outermost part of Guangyang City, she found the bungalow that Shen Hanzhou had registered with a fake ID.

Shen Hanzhou only goes out once a day when it's almost dark.

He went to the general store at the edge of town, bought a case of mineral water and a few packets of noodles, paid, and immediately came back to lock the door.

From Xu Suyuan's perspective, Shen Hanzhou was about thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old, thin, wore metal-framed glasses, and walked with a slight hunchback.

The light in the bungalow was only on in the kitchen at the very back. The windows were covered with newspaper, but a faint smell of chemical reagents wafted out from the crack in the door—the smell of ethyl acetate mixed with another organic solvent she couldn't name, with a slightly sweet and pungent odor.

Xu Suyuan realized that this person was not simply trying to escape.

He continued conducting experiments while fleeing for his life.

Xu Suyuan did not have any contact with him at the time.

She didn't know anything about this person—whether his attitude towards the Five Mountains Society was simply fear or suppressed hatred, and how much external pressure he could withstand—these questions remained unanswered.

She simply wrote down the address and observation notes in her notebook, preparing before taking action.

Tonight, as she watched the smell of Shen Qinghou applying medicine, she suddenly remembered the bungalow with its windows covered in newspapers and the chemical smell emanating from the cracks in the door.

Two people are doing the same thing in different desperate situations.

She closed the notebook and put it back in her inner pocket.

It's not the right time to contact Shen Hanzhou yet—the Fire Seed organization has just finished a tough battle, Shen Qinghou's injuries need treatment, Su Wan needs to be settled, and the next move of the General Headquarters needs to be observed.

But she remembered this person.

Xu Suyuan's intuition told her that Shen Hanzhou was likely the key figure in dealing with the Five Mountains Society.

------

In the cellar beneath the bungalows of Baishi Town.

Shen Hanzhou stood in front of the lab bench, the pipette in his hand hovering steadily above the test tube.

The cellar windows were sealed shut from the inside with newspapers, four layers thick, so that not a single ray of light could get in from the outside.

Only the rechargeable LED light on the lab bench emitted a pale halo, illuminating the row of glassware in front of him.

As he weighed the raw materials, he went through the synthesis route in his mind.

The conditions for each reaction step and the amount of each catalyst were crystal clear in his mind.

This was an instinct he had developed during his six years working at the Five Mountains Society.

Even now, in the basement of this remote bungalow in Baishi Town, surrounded only by moldy walls and cold sewage pipes, his hands remained as steady as if he were in the temperature- and humidity-controlled first-class laboratory of the Five Mountains Society.

The project that the Five Mountains Alliance had asked him to participate in a month ago was to synthesize a drug that could overdraw one's physical potential.

The project began with Chen Guohua's corpse.

The information about the body of the person who burned his life to complete his revenge in the Heavenly Palace on the Cloud Top was obtained by the Five Mountains Alliance after his death.

Shen Hanzhou had read the autopsy report.

The report shows that Chen Guohua's cells underwent some kind of unnatural metabolic burst before his death, releasing energy beyond the limits of the human body in a very short period of time.

The energy fluctuations defied existing biological common sense, but the data was there and could not be questioned.

After reviewing the report, the research team within the Five Mountains Society proposed a hypothesis: if this metabolic burst could be artificially induced, ordinary people could temporarily gain extraordinary combat power.

The cost is equally clear.

The user's life force will be irreversibly depleted, and the body will burn out in a very short time.

This is a disposable consumable, treating people like batteries.

Shen Hanzhou's senior, Shen Yanhui, is the person in charge of the synthesis for this project, and Shen Hanzhou is her assistant.

A month ago, Shen Yanhui completed the verification of the synthesis route for the first batch of drugs.

On the night the verification was successful, the Five Mountains Society's internal security team broke into her apartment.

Shen Yanhui was injected with a drug she had synthesized herself; the Five Mountains Society wanted to use her as their first live experimental subject.

Shen Hanzhou received a notification the next morning: his senior sister had died unexpectedly due to a mistake in her operation in the laboratory.

He had worked for the Five Mountains Society for six years and this wasn't the first time he'd seen something like this.

Shen Yanhui and his synthesis skills are only considered above average within the Five Mountains Alliance; they are not irreplaceable top talents.

The drug synthesis route has been verified, and subsequent process optimization can be advanced by simply changing two researchers.

Keeping the two of them around would mean two more insiders on the project, and the Five Mountains Society has never liked having too many unnecessary people know too much.

The Lieyang Province branch of the Five Mountains Alliance is undergoing a reshuffle, with some trying to take this opportunity to eliminate those who do not belong to their faction.

Shen Yanhui is dead, he's next.

Shen Hanzhou stood in front of the surveillance camera for thirty seconds, then turned and walked out of the laboratory to complete the day's chromatographic analysis as usual.

He is not a good person. He worked for the Five Mountains Society for six years and was involved in the synthesis of at least four kinds of prohibited drugs.

He didn't care what the drugs were used for; he just enjoyed the thrill of disassembling and reassembling the molecular formulas in his mind.

But my senior sister is different.

Shen Yanhui was the one who got him out of the underground black market drug workshop.

She gave him a legal identity, a stable salary, and a fume hood where he could conduct experiments in peace.

The Five Sacred Mountains Society would treat her as a tool to be used and then destroyed.

Shen Hanzhou didn't want to die; he wanted to do something for his senior sister.

On the very day he was transferred from the laboratory to manage the chemical warehouse, he began making preparations.

He used his warehouse manager privileges to transfer the necessary raw materials and equipment for the experiment in batches, and kept meticulous records.

When the members of the Five Mountains Society kicked open his apartment door, there were only a few old clothes and a formatted computer left in the room.

He fled to this bungalow in Baishi Town, where the windows were covered with newspapers. He only went out once a day in the evening to buy a case of mineral water and a few packets of noodles at the general store at the town entrance.

After paying, they immediately return to lock the door and never linger.

At this moment, he is replicating the batch of potions left behind by his senior sister.

This time it wasn't for the Five Sacred Mountains Gathering to be recreated, it was for himself.

He wanted the higher-ups who killed his senior sister to taste the potion for themselves.