Chapter Forty-One: Activate, Veronica!

“Hey, hey, hey! You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“How on earth were these high-level mutants brought together and made to submit to one ruler?”
Faced with the scene before him, Joe was utterly stupefied.
He had already realized that all the mutants had been organized, and there was no doubt that the one commanding them was the massive queen bee hovering in the sky—most likely a ninth-level mutant.
Joe simply couldn’t comprehend why those powerful eighth-level mutants would willingly submit to the rule of a queen bee, especially when they belonged to entirely different species…
Ye Hai’s hoarse voice rang out: “Intelligent mutants and the primary ecosystem! Once mutants develop intelligence, the primary ecosystem starts to evolve toward a primitive social structure!”
Joe was taken aback. Although he didn’t fully understand what Ye Hai meant by “primary ecosystem,” he grasped the ideas of intelligent mutants and social structure…
Immediately, Joe’s face turned grim. “You mean this giant bee has developed intelligence?”
“And has begun constructing a mutant society?”
Ye Hai nodded in response. “The bee you’re talking about is called Erita! She’s one of the first intelligent mutants on Zombie Star—she’s been around for over twenty years. Her intelligence now might not be inferior to that of humans…”
Joe had no idea how Ye Hai knew all this, but he was already completely stunned.
Just then, two flashes of light streaked down from the sky in succession.
The main cannon’s area bombardment resumed—clearly, Teach up on orbital station had noticed what was happening below.
He decisively ordered the Borogen Star and the Helm Master to fire their main cannons.
At that moment, the queen bee moved; to the onlookers, her speed was nothing short of teleportation.
As the area bombardment descended and a massive sphere of light began to form, the queen bee appeared instantly at its edge, and before the sphere could explode, she plunged her giant stinger into it.
Under everyone’s astonished gaze, the sphere seemed to be enveloped by an invisible force field and didn’t detonate.
The queen bee’s abdomen writhed as she started to absorb the energy.
It’s important to note that released energy is nothing like an energy core—the energy unleashed is wild and volatile. For a mutant to forcibly absorb it would be like swallowing a bomb set to explode inside their body.
Thus, most mutants absorb energy primarily through stable energy cores!
Neither Ye Hai nor Joe had ever seen a mutant absorb attack energy directly like this queen bee.
As the queen bee’s abdomen rapidly swelled, the energy sphere quickly shrank, and within seconds, it was completely absorbed.
The queen bee’s abdomen ballooned to an astonishing size of two hundred meters.
After absorbing the energy sphere, her abdomen writhed again, and massive clusters of eggs began to pour out into the sky.
Each egg was caught by a worker bee, who then flew off with it toward the rear!
The other sphere of light was divided up among a hundred queen bee guards, each over thirty meters long!
Joe was dumbstruck and couldn’t help but ask, “Boss! What just happened? Why didn’t the area bombardment explode? Did a bunch of bees just absorb it like that?”

In his super tyrant form, Ye Hai’s face remained expressionless, but inwardly he was in turmoil.
“Psionic power…”
“It actually manifested psionic abilities?!”
In many games and films, when genetic evolution reaches a certain stage, a strange power appears—some call it special ability, others call it superpower, but the names vary.
But Ye Hai knew that whether it was Resident Evil or StarCraft, there were powerful individuals who, upon evolving far enough, developed this terrifying force known as psionics.
Like the final form of Veronica in Resident Evil… Alexia.
Or the psykers of Warhammer 40K…
The Queen of Blades, Kerrigan, and so on.
All were such cases.
Now, Ye Hai had finally witnessed the first living psionic creature!
After seeing that the two area bombardments had failed to cause any damage,
Joe began to panic. “Boss! Do something, or we’re dead for sure!”
Liana and Zera, who had been silently listening behind them, suddenly gasped in shock.
Staring at the mutant before them, Liana cried out, “You’re Ye Hai? You’re alive?”
Ye Hai turned, revealing a terrifying, sinister grin, and said, “I hope you two can keep my secret.”
Liana and Zera nearly lost their heads from fright.
Ye Hai’s gaze locked onto Liana’s face and didn’t waver.
Feeling his eyes on her, Liana shuddered involuntarily, swallowing hard.
“I had planned to give you more time, to let you experience more trials, even to face life and death head-on,” Ye Hai said slowly.
“But something unexpected has occurred—now it’s your turn…”
“If you can break through your limits in a situation like this, nothing will ever defeat you again…”
“Are you ready?”
Everyone was stunned by his words.
Joe’s jaw dropped.
“Boss! You can’t be serious—our lives are all riding on her?”
“Can she handle it?”
Ye Hai ignored Joe and simply fixed his intense gaze on Liana.

In the end, Liana glanced at the oncoming torrent of high-level mutants surging in the distance and nodded fiercely in resolve!
Ye Hai then took out a vial of T-virus and handed it to her.
He said, “Every corpse hunter has their own favorite spot for the injection—a small tradition in the corpse hunter organization.”
“Choose the injection site yourself, but let me warn you: if you inject too close to your brain, the virus will reach it quickly and you might lose consciousness before you can react, allowing the virus to take over.”
“If that happens, you’ll never see your loved ones again!”
Hearing this, Liana trembled all over.
Without hesitation, she crouched down and plunged the needle into her sole.
Ye Hai nodded in satisfaction. “Good. Variation is best.”
As the T-virus solution entered her body,
Liana instantly felt her heart pounding furiously, her whole body burning as if set aflame.
The next moment, flesh and blood began to churn violently from her foot upward.
In mere seconds, half of Liana’s body had swelled to dozens of meters long and over ten meters high.
When the flesh finished taking shape and the residual fluid faded away,
her tail had transformed into a pitch-black, metallic-looking abdomen.
Aside from Ye Hai, Joe and Zera stared in shock as the delicate young girl they’d known had, in the blink of an eye, become a monstrous creature.
With one glance, Joe recognized that half of Liana’s body had become the abdomen of an ant.
The transformation continued, soon spreading above her abdomen.
At this point, however, the pace of change suddenly slowed.
Ye Hai nodded ever so slightly in approval. “Better than I expected.”
“The ‘Veronica’ virus, originally fused with the genes of an ancient queen ant, has a much less violent reaction when the queen ant’s genes are substituted in!”
“Even so, the first-stage ‘Veronica Composite’ should be able to rapidly establish the Veronica ecosystem!”
“Queen Liana…”
“Queen Bee Erita…”
“Let the battle begin!”