Chapter 1 The Beginning of the Mutation
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Year 3035, March.
Night fell like a heavy curtain. The darkness bled through the city, painting everything in inky shadows. Anping City was unnaturally silent, suffocating in the quiet. Streets, buildings—everything seemed frozen in slumber.
But tonight, something was wrong.
The moon was swallowed by layers of thick, dark clouds. Not a single sliver of moonlight escaped, as if foretelling an ominous fate soon to descend.
Wooo~ Wooo~
Just as the midnight bell prepared to toll, a shrill, piercing alarm suddenly shattered the deathly stillness of the city’s night sky.
It was like a blade slicing through a dream, yanking Warden Hua Yue out of his sleep with a jolt. His eyes flew open, pupils dilated. A sharp, bone-deep premonition surged up from his chest.
No time to dress. In pajamas and barefoot, he snatched his sidearm from the nightstand and sprinted into the hallway like an arrow loosed from a bow.
Panting through the dim corridor, he slammed the walkie-talkie to his mouth and barked, “What’s going on?! Chunping! Where the hell are you?!”
His voice cracked from anxiety, echoing down the hall.
After a brief pause, a shaky, panicked voice buzzed through the static:
“Warden! I… I’m at Block G! The inmates… all of them… they’re gone!”
The voice was trembling with fear, like someone trapped in a nightmare.
The words struck Hua Yue like thunder.
All of them? Gone?
His mind blanked. Legs trembling, knees buckling—he almost collapsed.
He’d imagined every possible crisis a prison could face: riots, fights, breakout attempts. He’d prepared contingency plans for each. But this?
All the inmates… vanished into thin air?
“This is the end of me,” he muttered in a daze, cold sweat streaming down his pale face.
As the prison’s warden, he knew this wasn’t just a disaster—it was a career-ending catastrophe, one that could even lead to criminal liability.
“Warden! We’ve checked everything! Locks are intact, no signs of damage. No tunnels, no sabotage, not even the sewers! It’s like… they just vanished!”
The voice from the walkie-talkie was frantic.
The words hit Hua Yue like a bolt of electricity. Not a breakout?
He snapped out of it, eyes flashing. “What do you mean?!”
Not wasting another second, he bolted toward the control room.
Meanwhile, every security bureau and watch station in Anping City received Code Red emergency orders.
The city mayor and director of the Security Bureau, Liang Ren, was just finishing up a pile of land development applications when his phone rang urgently.
Who would dare call at this hour unless something had gone terribly wrong?
He answered with tension in his voice:
“Hello?”
“Mayor! It’s bad! Every inmate in all Anping City prisons—they’ve all disappeared!”
BOOM!
A thunderclap ripped through the city. The stillness was shattered. Sirens howled. Armed police, fire crews, and safety enforcement units swarmed the streets.
Checkpoints sprang up, sealing off the entire city. Anping was now in full lockdown.
Liang Ren’s face turned grim. “Take me to the control room. Now.”
“Yes, sir!”
Inside the surveillance room, everyone’s breath caught.
On the footage, inmates behaved as normal. Some snored loudly in bed, some exercised, some read books, others quietly sewed.
Then—static. Every screen flickered and went blank.
Just before the signal was lost, a flash of blue light burst across the prison—like a comet tearing through the dark.
When the footage returned…
Every inmate was gone.
The cells were empty. Silent. Like no one had ever existed there at all.
Gasps filled the room. Panic. Disbelief. Fear.
Nothing like this had ever happened in the entire history of the Dragon Nation.
“Keep the city on high alert. I need to make a call,” Liang Ren said, stepping outside. Even he, a veteran mayor, had no idea how to handle this.
He dialed Tianfu City. Maybe someone there would know what to do.
At the same time…
All 40,000 missing inmates slowly regained consciousness.
They remembered sleeping… some even had hands still in their pants. But now, they found themselves in a strange, alien space.
“This… where the hell are we?” one muttered.
“Weren’t you from Hou Lake Prison? Why are you here?”
“Bro, this doesn’t look like any prison…”
“What if the government’s executing us all in secret?!”
Panic erupted.
Suddenly—FLASH!
The space was bathed in blinding light. Everyone froze.
They looked around. Strange cage-like pods lined the walls. Metallic machines—robots—stood silently nearby.
Then, above them, a projection appeared.
A young man spoke through it, his voice echoing like thunder:
“Quiet.”
The thousands of voices fell silent instantly. The unknown always silences fear.
“Good,” the man said coldly. “I was considering suppressing you all, but it seems the reprogramming worked.”
His tone was calm—too calm.
“From this moment on, your only mission is: survive. I don’t care if you’re killers or innocent scapegoats. If you live—only then will I acknowledge your existence.”
[Note from the author:]
The male lead won’t appear often. Maybe once every few dozen chapters. He’s a stage-crusher—whenever he appears, it’s to turn the tide.
Don’t worry about the science—his tech is thousands of years ahead. He’s untouchable.
