Lu Yan never felt more like a corporate drone than at that moment.
A small dot representing Ning Huai appeared on the map, sometimes flashing green, sometimes red.
"He originally wanted to end it himself, but he had already lost control of his body."
Raindrops fell into Lu Yan's eyes, causing a slight stinging sensation.
The system remarked, "You look really pathetic running in the rain, but handsome nonetheless. I really like it."
After crossing two blocks, Lu Yan finally saw Ning Huai.
If Ning Huai used to be mostly "human," now the distorted part seemed to dominate.
The intersection of streets was littered with the aftermath of fierce battles; roads were torn apart, and crumbling skyscrapers leaned dangerously. It looked as if an earthquake had struck.
A giant spider crouched on the ruins, its abdomen torn open, with many smaller spiders crawling out from within, surrounding their mother.
These smaller spiders were already pollutants.
Some of the smaller spiders farther from their mother opened their jaws like traps, lunging at Lu Yan.
Lu Yan immediately covered his body with scales; these newly born spiderlings didn't have high pollution values, and they couldn't even penetrate his skin. But for ordinary people, they were still deadly.
If Ning Huai completely mutated into a pollutant, he and his legion of spiders would wreak havoc wherever they went, leaving devastation in their wake.
Ning Huai looked at him, growling softly, "Get away!"
New deep purple eyeballs grew on both sides of his cheeks, different from the previous three pairs of eyes. The eyes on the sides had no whites, much larger than normal eyeballs, with a fierce gaze, resembling avengers from the abyss.
The system's tone was calm, "99.1... 99.2... Ning Huai, expected to fully mutate in 2 minutes and 17 seconds."
Ning Huai told Lu Yan to leave.
The reason was simple: he knew that with his current physical strength, the likelihood of Lu Yan killing him in a short time was minimal.
He didn't want Lu Yan dead, at least not by his hands.
When Ning Huai acted as a harbinger, he killed the pollutant Bluebird. He didn't want to be the first to kill after becoming a pollutant, especially his former teammate.
"I'm going to save him, tell me how." Lu Yan said.
He knew the system must have a way.
Otherwise, it wouldn't have let him come to this street; it would have found a way for him to retreat and minimize losses.
During the original God's Country operation, out of the 21 harbinger who ventured into Changjia, only four were still alive.
Lu Yan hoped that people like Ning Huai could see the outside world with their own eyes, rather than hearing some secondhand information from him and then responding with a mix of relief and melancholy, saying, "That's good."
God's Country was a cage, not only trapping the true God but also the majority of the harbinger's lives.
The system said, "Bad boy. You only come to me when you need something."
"You haven't performed surgery in a long time. Do you still remember the pollution fusion surgery you learned in Tang Xunan's dream?"
That was decades ago at the First Research Institute. He briefly interacted with the top researchers at the time and gained some inspiration and knowledge from them.
"Grafting parts of pollutants onto humans. After the fusion period, humans can gain characteristics similar to pollutants."
"Gong Weibin calculated rationally and created the talent transplantation surgery. Transplanting talents from humans has fewer rejection reactions and makes it easier for the transplanted to survive. But if you want to transplant advanced talents, the mortality rate for both parties is very high."
"And if you want to suppress the increase in degeneration, there's a simple method. That is to remove the degenerate parts of the body."
"This method is theoretically feasible, but few have tried it. Because the harbinger and their degenerate parts are almost integrated. It's like scraping off all the fish scales from your body. Can a fish still survive?"
"In the early stages, after several experiments, a mortality rate as high as one hundred percent made the research institute abandon this research direction and instead focus on highly concentrated drugs."
"In fact, their train of thought was correct; it's just that they were cutting the wrong things."
Lu Yan saw some green and red halos appearing on the spider-human in front of him.
"Green parts can be preserved, and the red parts need to be excised."
"Pick up your knife. I've been wanting to say this; Hellfire looks too much like Scalpel No. 26."
It was still raining now, and the surgical environment was very rudimentary, but it had to be done.
According to the system, if the surgery failed, there was a seventy percent chance that Ning Huai, who had degenerated into a pollutant, would swallow Lu Yan whole.
"Ning Team." Lu Yan kept it brief, "Let's do the surgery, cooperate."
Ning Huai lay on the ground as tiny spiders continued to crawl out of his abdomen. These were the insect eggs hidden inside his body, now fully hatched.
The spiders were pitch-black with purple spots on their backs, resembling finely crafted iridescent porcelain.
Lu Yan wasn't sure if Ning Huai had heard him clearly. His Hellfire pierced into the new eyes growing on Ning Huai's face.
Ning Huai's limbs trembled slightly; he exerted all his strength to control his eight legs, gripping the ground tightly to refrain from striking Lu Yan.
One eyeball was forcibly gouged out, leaving behind a blurry mess of flesh and blood.
But the most concentrated red area was actually Ning Huai's completely mutated abdomen, similar to the lower half of a spider, round and swollen with tiny spider eggs inside, dripping white mucus from unformed silk.
Lu Yan took a deep breath and plunged into Ning Huai's abdomen.
The smell of blood inside the abdomen was heavy; many eggs about to hatch were soaked in translucent mucus. Many small spiders had already wriggled halfway out of the membrane, joyfully dancing in mid-air.
"There are five egg sacs inside Ning Huai's body, totaling over a thousand spiders. About half of them have hatched; cut off four," instructed the system.
Lu Yan was puzzled, "Normally only female spiders have egg sacs, right?"
"He was originally contaminated by a mother spider. Any issue with that?" the system responded.
Lu Yan had no words. With a knife in his mouth, he used his hands to peel back layer upon layer of flesh from Ning Huai's abdomen.
If he couldn't breathe through the gill slits on his sides, he might have suffocated inside Ning Huai's belly already.
This big belly was much harder to deal with than Zhou Kaiwen's; especially given the short time left.
"Removing the eyes can briefly keep Ning Huai awake, but the focus should be on the egg sacs growing on his abdomen. You have 82 seconds left," instructed the system.
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