Ren Yi looked down at the boy covered in blood, his thoughts racing frantically.
There was something wrong with Evans.
To Ren Yi, this was no longer a matter of debate; it was a settled fact.
Let's spread out those scattered, seemingly chaotic clues on the table once more:
First, why did Dr. Cyril deliberately arrange for Staff B-050 to lead Evans into the laboratory, whether intentionally or not?
Second, why did S-099 break out without warning at a time that violated its established patterns?
Furthermore, why was there an Anomaly in the lower deck that mirrored the behavior of S-099?
The most critical piece of evidence lay in that Seed.
That Seed, which had supposedly merged into S-099, was actually flickering inside the boy's body, perfectly intact—and even clearer than before.
And then, of course, there was the matter of the nuke.
That was a two-megaton yield nuclear missile!
Even Ren Yi himself had barely survived by relying on invincibility frames.
Moreover, despite having been eaten, he had managed to crawl out of the Red Tide perfectly intact!
It was too obvious. Did he really take Ren Yi for a fool?
When all these coincidences overlapped, they were no longer coincidences.
Every sign pointed to the fact that this seemingly malnourished Wilderness youth had a thousand inextricable links to that terrifying calamity.
The only thing worth pondering—and the thing that left Ren Yi most baffled—was one question:
Evans, the "Stomach of Glat" spoken of by the Wilderness tribes, and the Sky Eye Organization's man-made Anomaly, "S-099"...
What exactly was the tripartite relationship between these three different names?
In the beginning, Ren Yi had indeed held a conservative hypothesis.
He once thought that Evans was a puppet remotely controlled by S-099 on the Wilderness—a ghostly servant whose self-awareness had been completely stripped away by infection, leaving only a husk to walk the earth.
Or, to use a more modern scientific term, he was Patient Zero, used by S-099 to spread its own mutated symptoms and create chaos in the civilized world.
But this seemingly reasonable hypothesis had been personally overturned by Ren Yi after he escaped the sealed chamber and witnessed the corpses inside the land ship that had been mutated by S-099's infection. The probability of it being true had dropped significantly.
It didn't quite add up.
S-099 did indeed have the ability to mutate others, turning corpses into a tide of flesh, but that was fundamentally different from the mental control he had envisioned.
If S-099 possessed such high intelligence in its normal state—the ability to silently parasitize a human, control the host to perform sophisticated disguises, and achieve perfect infiltration...
Then its danger level would have broken through the ceiling long ago!
The Sky Eye Organization's method of monitoring it would never have been such crude physical imprisonment.
If it were truly that smart, it could have just secretly infected the entire ship, controlled the Doctor, killed the Lord of the City, and turned the land ship into its own nest. Wouldn't catching them like rats in a trap be far more effective?
Why would it still be acting like a brainless single-celled organism that only knows how to feed?
In short, the monitoring methods for an Anomaly that possessed both the power to contaminate and human-level intelligence would never be as crude and lax as what the Sky Eye Organization had displayed.
This led to a premise:
In the eyes of the white-coats of the Sky Eye Organization, the true form of S-099 locked in that special alloy cage...
Was, for the vast majority of the time, merely a raving beast with terrifying power but no complex thought.
However, later on, when Ren Yi escaped and came into contact with S-099, he vaguely noticed some inconsistencies.
When facing him, that beast had displayed a sense of "humanity" and "cunning" that was far too prominent.
At that moment, a new theory about their relationship began to form in Ren Yi's mind.
Looking back at the series of seemingly seamless and logically consistent painful confessions Evans had made in front of that mushroom called the Honest Gift.
That mushroom could be viewed as a subjective lie detector.
"I don't remember exactly what happened..."
"It was like my consciousness fell into a sort of chaos in an instant, and even my soul was shredded..."
"They saw with their own eyes as I was spat out by the Stomach of Glat..."
"I brought the calamity..."
"I always feel hungry..."
"I always feel that I am similar to that creature..."
"The Stomach of Glat recognizes it as kindred."
In that confession, the boy's way of describing things was very strange.
In just a few sentences, he had switched between three subjects with high frequency and awkwardness.
"I," the "Stomach of Glat," and the "people of the tribe."
By constantly switching narrative perspectives and utilizing logical blind spots and information gaps...
He had forcefully crafted an image of himself as an "unlucky guy who was innocently caught up and whose body had undergone mutation" in front of the Honest Gift.
But if one combined the files on S-099, the patterns Dr. Cyril had mentioned, and certain parts of Evans's confession...
As those shattered puzzle pieces were reassembled, the outline of the truth began to emerge.
This boy hadn't just been contaminated this time.
He was the problem from the very beginning.
Or rather, from the first day he was born as a "life" on the Wilderness, he was the problem itself.
【S-099 originally possessed extremely high utility value, but after an attack by external forces, it suddenly became uncontrollable.】
【"At the beginning of every month, S-099 falls into a state of regular loss of control and rampaging."】
Evans had once told the old chief, "I shouldn't have collapsed by the Red Mud Swamp three years ago. I shouldn't have let you pick me up..."
At this point, the situation was as clear as it could possibly be.
Evans was the Stomach of Glat, a part of S-099!
He wasn't some unlucky victim, nor was he a ghostly servant.
He was the Will of S-099 that had been forcibly stripped away, lost, and manifested during that great war three years ago!
The attack three years ago had taken away S-099's wisdom and core.
The physical body, having lost its will, became nothing more than a raving beast in a cage. For the Sky Eye Organization, it had lost its experimental utility.
Ultimately, it was heartlessly discarded by the Lord of the City at the center of a nuclear explosion.
But that stripped-away will had somehow escaped years later and been lost on the Wilderness.
In the Red Mud Swamp of the Wilderness, it had condensed into the form of a human youth and was picked up by a foolishly kind tribe.
"So... that's how it is."
When Ren Yi looked at Evans again, his gaze had completely changed.
From this perspective, the words Evans had spoken before the lie-detection mushrooms could be re-translated.
"I" accidentally lost control that day and was unfortunately seen by the people of the tribe.
"I" often feel hungry because I lack the anomalies I need to feed on.
When "I" saw the white Anomaly, I felt it was kindred. That was my thought—the thought of the Stomach of Glat.
"I" drew the attention of the Sky Eye Organization to the tribe. I am the cause of everything that happened on this Wilderness.
"I" will find a way.
Rate on N.U.
