Experimental Samples

The waiter opened his mouth, clearly stunned by Ren Yi's brand of bandit logic.

He looked at Dr. Lin, who was already cracking his knuckles and rolling up his sleeves, then sighed helplessly and let out a chuckle.

"Fine, fine. It's not like the profit was going into my pocket anyway."

He turned to Dr. Lin, his tone carrying a hint of teasing. "Dr. Lin, this little friend you brought along has adapted much faster than you did back then."

Shifting his gaze back to Ren Yi, he added, "However, I must warn you: they have no right to leave the Entertainment City. Don't go thinking you can turn them into NPCs."

"Furthermore, Alliance staff will come to reclaim them every so often."

"This trade of yours... you're not going to make a profit."

Ren Yi tilted his head.

Those three stowaways had already helped him refill his ammunition. He certainly hadn't lost anything.

As for not making a profit... that wasn't necessarily true.

Seeing that a fight wasn't going to break out, Dr. Lin's face filled with disappointment. He muttered, "What do you mean, 'not going to make a profit'? He still owes us three chips..."

The waiter ignored his grumbling entirely.

Ren Yi felt a bit helpless. He had only used that bandit logic to see what would happen; he hadn't actually expected the casino to pay up.

But one question remained.

How did those people make it all the way here in a casino with such a high density of Anomalies?

The restaurant was on the second basement level. They would have had to at least enter the main doors, take the elevator, and walk through a corridor to get here.

That entire path should have been crawling with Anomalies.

"So, why didn't you stop them?" Ren Yi looked at the waiter, his tone carrying a faint note of interrogation. "This all happened because of your poor management, allowing stowaways to disturb us."

"My apologies," the waiter said after a brief hesitation, though he repeated his earlier stance. "Our Entertainment City is a legitimate enterprise."

"It is not appropriate for us to handle Participants who fall outside of the Alliance's planning and permission."

Oh, so that meant the number of invitations issued by the Entertainment City was approved by the Alliance.

These Participants who had somehow smuggled themselves in were like unidentified gifts suddenly appearing on a high-ranking official's doorstep.

If the casino took the initiative to touch them, they would be acknowledging their right to dispose of them, which would be equivalent to being suspected of illegally accepting unauthorized goods.

Therefore, the Entertainment City chose to ignore them entirely. If the stowaways dared to provoke the rules, they wouldn't last three seconds inside the casino.

But as long as they didn't provoke the rules, they could live—existing like the very air itself.

However, that was only the attitude of the Entertainment City itself.

Why weren't the other Anomalies interested in these walking "snacks"?

"What about the other 'adults'? Aren't they interested?" Ren Yi felt that his diplomatic phrasing was reaching its peak.

His underlying meaning was: why hadn't they been cleared out by other Anomalies?

Before the waiter could answer, Dr. Lin interjected gloomily from the side, "Because he's hogging the stall without doing his business."

"Dr. Lin." The waiter's voice was flat. "I believe uttering such vulgarities while dining is a profanity against food."

After snapping at Dr. Lin, he sighed and turned to explain to Ren Yi.

"Because if another Anomaly wants to move against a stowaway, they must do exactly what you just did: first, they must obtain the legitimacy to act."

Ren Yi understood. He meant something similar to what he had just done—turning the stowaway into his own property.

To put it simply, although stowaways were unowned property, being within the casino's space meant they were already marked with an implicit label.

For any Anomaly other than the casino, they were in a "non-targetable" state.

If another Anomaly wanted to make use of "worthless items" and claim them as their own, they needed to "notarize" them.

And that action required paying one chip.

Under a mess of various restrictive rules, it boiled down to this: after giving a stowaway a chip, you could then move against them.

But here was the problem.

Stowaways could not be converted into NPCs. The only thing they could provide an Anomaly was "food."

Based on Ren Yi's observations, the "food" of Anomalies—at least the lower-level ones—seemed to follow an ironclad law:

A single Participant could only provide "food" to a single Anomaly once.

Ren Yi himself was the most obvious example; each Participant could only provide him with progress points once.

His conditions were relatively simple and didn't have much impact on the Participant.

Rules like those of Lu Zihan or Zhang Qiuqiu, however, required the direct "consumption" of a Participant.

One Participant equaled one progress point, which equaled one energy crystal, which equaled one chip.

The equation held true.

Ultimately, it meant that if you paid one chip for a stowaway, you would gain exactly one chip's worth of progress points.

An Anomaly would go through all that trouble for zero profit, while also bearing the implicit risk of acting on the casino's turf.

Naturally, no Anomaly would bother with such a thankless task.

As a result, everyone tacitly chose not to touch them. The stowaways continued to exist in the cracks of the rules, barely hanging on.

But without a formal identity, they could never leave.

Ren Yi fell into thought after hearing this.

Ren Man leaned back in his chair, no longer frowning. He tilted his head, his gaze resting on Ren Yi's profile, not asking what he was thinking.

Ren Yi was thinking about one thing.

When he gave away those three chips, he hadn't thought that far ahead.

He simply felt that Ren Man was uncomfortable and that the pain of those three people was too loud.

Since he couldn't use direct force, he had to use another method.

He gave the chips, the pain was suppressed, and Ren Man's brow relaxed.

That was enough.

But now he knew that those three chips hadn't just bought the silence of three people.

Before this, they were air, transparent, mere dust suspended in the cracks of the casino's rules.

From this moment on, they regained the qualification to participate in the game.

Ren Yi looked down at his hands.

When he gave the chips, familiar energy had overflowed from those three people, and Ren Yi had taken the opportunity to plant Seeds in them.

He had given three chips and simultaneously gained three progress points.

But at the same time, he had gained three living samples carrying his Seeds.

It was a perfect opportunity to test his new ability.