Desperate people, accept the seed of my soul!

The white owl frantically fled through the forest.

Behind him were his last two trusted men. All three of them had their combat uniforms torn to shreds by tree branches, and their faces and hands were covered in cuts and bruises.

"President! The Sharp Blade Squad has gone mad! They don't want prisoners! They'll kill anyone they catch!"

A trusted aide's voice trembled.

"Shut up! Run!"

The white owl roared, not daring to stop.

His mind went blank.

One thousand two hundred people.

All the manpower of the Jeolla Province branch, plus the mercenaries borrowed from neighboring provinces, were thrown into this canyon.

None of the four hundred enhanced soldiers injected with the drug were withdrawn—the backlash after the drug's effects wore off had already begun. Through his binoculars, he witnessed the soldiers fall one after another, suffering from muscle dissolution, internal organ failure, and bleeding from all seven orifices, dying a more gruesome death than being shot.

But Bai Xiao didn't care.

All he cared about was whether he could escape alive.

As for those brothers who were tricked into injecting the drug, they're dead, so be it.

Anyway, it wasn't him who died.

He walked through a thicket of bushes that had been blown apart by machine gun fire, when suddenly his foot slipped and he tumbled into a dry drainage ditch.

When he got up, he was surrounded by the sound of soldiers with sharp blades, footsteps, and gunshots.

He huddled in the drainage ditch, trembling all over, covering his mouth with his hand, afraid to make a sound.

The gunfire in the dense forest lasted for a full forty minutes.

The Jeolla Province branch of the Five Mountains Alliance was completely expelled that night.

1,200 armed personnel killed more than 900 people and captured more than 200.

All the captured prisoners showed symptoms of severe organ failure, and more than half of them died during transport. Of the remaining prisoners, only eleven survived after being sent to the hospital.

The Dark Web commando team withdrew immediately after the Fireseed organization appeared, leaving behind a rearguard.

The entire rearguard was killed in action, while the main force suffered only minor casualties and successfully withdrew from the battlefield.

After reading the battle report in the command vehicle, Black Snake remained silent for a long time before finally saying something.

"Bai Xiao is finished. From today onwards, we call the shots in Jeolla Province's underworld."

But there was no excitement in his tone.

There was only a kind of exhaustion from surviving a catastrophe.

He knew that if the Fire Seed organization hadn't suddenly appeared and kidnapped Song Chao, the Sharp Blade Brigade's anger would now be directed at the Dark Web.

------

On the other side, Wen Yan withdrew his senses and gently tapped the bed sheet with his fingertips.

The Song Dynasty was rescued by the Fire Seed Organization.

This outcome was within his expectations—Xu Suyuan and her group had an even keener sense of their own kind than hunting dogs, and given the commotion Song Chao had caused, it was impossible for them not to intervene.

However, the timing of his move came a little later than he had anticipated.

Wen Yan thought they would wait for the Song Dynasty to kill a few more, but unexpectedly they directly robbed the enemy from within the encirclement.

That's crazy.

He took a look at the current state of the Song Dynasty.

The crimson seed burned quietly within the soul link, and the damage caused by excessive mental energy consumption was slowly recovering. The members of the Fire Seed Organization were taking turns infusing his body with extraordinary energy.

Six forces flowed gently within the Song Dynasty, like six rivers flowing into a dried-up lakebed.

Wen Yan could even sense fragments of Song Chao's dream during his coma—all bloody trial scenes, with one sinner after another being swallowed by blood mist, endlessly repeating.

This kid's gone berserk.

Wen Yan made a mental assessment.

From the Public Security Bureau to the Cloud Tower, from the old family compound to Shikan Village, and then to the safe house and the encirclement of 30,000 people, he killed more than 170 people in three days. When he finally collapsed from exhaustion, he was still gritting his teeth.

The hatred that erupts when an honest person is driven to the brink is indeed the purest fuel.

The fruit that grew from the seed of the Song Dynasty was even sweeter than that of Li Rui.

Wen Yan stood up, walked to the window, and opened it. The cold wind of the early morning rushed in, carrying the salty smell of the distant sea.

Zhaoming City is a coastal city, and his hotel was not far from the dock, where he could hear the whistles of cargo ships in the distance.

He took a deep breath and assessed his own condition.

My body has fully recovered.

More than just recovery—the combined abilities of Xu Suyuan, Han Xiao, Li Rui, Liu Zhen, Meng Zhaowen, Lin Shen, Shen Qinghou, Shen Hanzhou, Su Wanxing, and Su Mingyu have already surpassed those of ordinary people.

His heart beats steadily and powerfully, his lung capacity is astonishing, his eyesight is good enough to see the expressions of dockworkers a hundred meters away, and his hearing is good enough to distinguish the sound of a cat stepping on broken tiles in an alley three streets away.

But he deliberately maintained a pale face and unsteady gait.

Feigning illness and weakness had become muscle memory for him, even more natural than his original gait.

He sat back down on the edge of the bed, closed his eyes, and his spiritual energy dissipated along the soul connection.

He needs to find a new suitable candidate.

Jeolla Province is in chaos right now—the Song Dynasty affair is still unresolved, and the list of officials implicated in the Emperor's Club's account books is being frantically destroyed. The Special Affairs Bureau's attention is completely focused on these two matters.

This is the perfect time to sow.

His consciousness swept across the streets, buildings, factories, and docks of Zhaoming City, sensing every individual emitting strong emotions.

In a shantytown near the train station, a middle-aged man was crying while holding his drunk wife. His wife had late-stage cirrhosis of the liver and they had no money for treatment. She was writhing on the ground in pain.

On a construction site in the south of the city, a migrant worker who was owed six months' wages was squatting on the rooftop smoking. He was 42 stories above the ground, and his toes were already sticking out of the floorboards.

In a high-end apartment building in the city center, a 15-year-old girl locked herself in her room, her arms covered with dense knife marks, and the notice of expulsion from school on the table was torn to pieces.

Each one meets the criteria.

Each one can become the next host.

Wen Yan did not rush to sow the seeds.

He slowly sifted through these emotions, like a gold prospector sifting sand through flowing water.

Hatred must be pure enough, without too much utilitarian calculation;

Despair must be deep enough, but deep down you must still retain a bit of the will to resist; you can't be a coward who completely accepts his fate.

The obsession must be strong enough to support the seed to split into its strongest ability in the shortest time.

Seeds grown under poor conditions produce sour and bland fruit, barely enough to satisfy his hunger.

He needs the sweetest fruit.

Consciousness continued to float above the city.

Suddenly, his mental energy was drawn to an extremely faint signal.

The signal came from outside Zhaoming City, across towering mountains, and was as faint as a candle flickering in the wind in another city hundreds of kilometers away.

But it's not a signal emitted by the seed.

It was his subconscious activation of his wide-area emotional perception that captured—an individual experiencing intense emotional fluctuations.

Wen Yan opened his eyes.

That emotion wasn't hatred.

It is despair.

Pure, unadulterated, and filled with a deep and heavy sense of despair and resentment.

He closed his eyes again and focused his mental energy on the direction of the signal.