Homo Sapiens

Four days passed in silence.

Yang Tiancheng’s assistant and bodyguards were still in the dock district, living a life of debauchery and marveling at the opulence of the wealthy.

They were completely oblivious that their boss was now meat on the chopping block, entirely at Li Qingye’s mercy.

Inside a specially modified underground interrogation room.

A Soldier and a female manager were intensely interrogating Yang Tiancheng, extracting every memory from his mind.

Outside the one-way mirror, Li Qingye sat in an ergonomic chair, flipping through the freshly compiled interrogation transcripts. He scanned the names listed within; some were expected, while others had been hidden remarkably well.

”Heh...” A low chuckle escaped him. He leaned back in his chair, muttering to himself,

”Father, so these are your good brothers and trusted partners.”

He walked out of the basement and onto the villa’s open-air balcony.

He let out a long breath, and the fire in his chest finally subsided. The night sky was dotted with countless stars. As he gazed out at the pitch-black wilderness, his heart filled with an immense sense of loneliness and grief.

He took a harmonica from his pocket, and memories surged, unbidden.

A hauntingly clear melody from the harmonica echoed slowly across the mountaintop.

’I close my eyes, my heart a sea of confusion.’

’I look up, dejected, my gaze reflecting only sorrow.’

’A single road leads into the wilderness.’

’Where can I find the way forward?’

’Ah... you scattered stars, adorning the night sky, you guide my fate.’

...

’This was your favorite song, Father. Your life’s song has ended, the audience scattered. Now, I will use my own life to compose the second movement of fate.’

Li Qingye stopped playing. His heart was preternaturally calm, but this very stillness was a testament to his unyielding resolve.

「Back in the villa’s study.」

He opened his portable biological computer and pulled up intelligence on the Yang Family, New Nanyang Company, and Xinxin Group.

Killing those people would be very simple for him now. Even in Huaguo, with its strict immigration and customs enforcement, a Soldier could smuggle certain items across the border.

After all, one of biotechnology’s key features was its stealth.

Both the biological computer and the Gu Insects could be hidden inside a Soldier’s body, allowing them to pass through security checks undetected.

But that wasn’t the kind of revenge he wanted.

Letting that scum die so quickly would be letting them off too easy.

No, he would reappear, openly and boldly, as Li Qingye. He would take back Xinxin Group, strip those scumbags of everything they had, and crush them piece by piece, leaving them to live in constant, unending terror.

What was the point of a revenge of mere assassinations?

He wanted everyone to know. He wanted them to know that it was Li Qingye who had done this, and he wanted them to be utterly powerless against him, left with nothing but impotent rage.

’It’s time to establish the second division,’ he thought.

He accessed the Spider Web database on his biological computer and pulled up a list of all its current members. At present, Spider Web consisted of 121 managers.

Of these, 24 managers were inside Homo Sapiens Company, 8 were embedded in the Fernando Clan, 5 in the Lopez Clan, and 6 in other clans throughout Luzon.

The remaining 78 managers were distributed as follows: 3 in the Blood Blade Special Team, 24 in the Security Department, and 51 in the Internal Affairs Department.

Only a small fraction of the managers from the Blood Blade Special Team, the Security Department, and the Internal Affairs Department were officially active within Homo Sapiens Company. The vast majority were sleeper agents, their true identities hidden.

The Internal Affairs Department, in particular, was clearly overstaffed with 51 managers. However, these individuals were reservists, ready to be deployed to positions within Homo Sapiens Company or elsewhere as needed.

To establish the new division, Li Qingye planned to pull some of these reservists and assign them to its ranks.

First, he selected a manager whose height and facial features bore a slight resemblance to his own. This manager would assume the identity of Li Qingye.

The public name of the second division would be the Qingye Group.

The identity of ”Li Qingye” was not legally dead, merely missing. As long as four years hadn’t passed, that identity still held all its civil rights.

He had gone missing in June 2017. A court could only declare the natural person ”Li Qingye” legally dead after June 2021.

And it was currently only February 2019.

In other words, the Xinxin Group shares held by Li Qingye were still in his name.

The moment the ”Li Qingye” identity reappeared, the parasites and rats infesting Xinxin Group were bound to react.

The Qingye Group would act as a decoy, drawing the attention of his enemies. Meanwhile, Homo Sapiens Company would continue to operate around the ”Jack Zhang” identity. With one company in the open and the other in the shadows, they could perform tasks that would be inconvenient for the other.

Besides that, he needed to find some profitable ventures for the Qingye Group.

Since the Qingye Group and Homo Sapiens Company were to be separate entities on the surface, they couldn’t have any overtly direct financial or industrial connections.

The Qingye Group’s starting capital would be around 150 million US dollars—the same funds he had previously retrieved from his mother’s secret account.

As for the business itself, he scrolled through a list of his research accomplishments, which included dozens of major and minor biotechnologies.

However, he definitely couldn’t give the Qingye Group any technology related to biological computers, nor any other overly sensitive tech.

After some deliberation, he selected two technologies he felt were suitable for the Qingye Group’s initial ventures.

These two technologies were: low-temperature glass manufacturing technology and Coral Cement technology.

Most people know that glass is formed by smelting materials at high temperatures. This process is the foundation of the modern glass industry.

But a technology exists in nature that upends this conventional wisdom: low-temperature glass manufacturing.

This technology comes from a type of algae—diatoms.

Diatoms can synthesize glass-like substances at room temperature. Their exoskeletal cell walls are composed of silica and resemble opaque glass.

Diatoms use silicon from the water as a raw material to produce these protective shells via an extremely simple chemical reaction:

They remove the water molecules between silicon particles. This is followed by what chemists call ”polycondensation,” where atoms link to one another with the help of oxygen atoms. These silicon particles then form minuscule silica beads, the building blocks of the cell wall.

Furthermore, different species of diatoms produce silica beads and cell walls with unique arrangements.

Although humanity has been mimicking diatoms since the 1980s by developing the ”sol-gel” process, its precision still pales in comparison to the real thing.

Li Qingye had studied the genes and characteristics of diatoms while he was researching biological computers.

He had previously planned to give the low-temperature glass manufacturing technology to Coral Building Materials, but he had since changed his mind. He would give it to the Qingye Group instead.

The advantage of low-temperature glass manufacturing was its low energy consumption. Based on Li Qingye’s lab tests, producing a one-square-meter sheet of flat glass using this method consumed only one-eightieth the energy of the conventional high-temperature process.

The cost savings alone offered a massive advantage. Moreover, using genetically modified diatoms as a culture medium for the glass offered another major benefit: production could be halted at any time.

With a conventional high-temperature glass production line, trying to halt production is disastrous. At best, the line is damaged; at worst, it’s a complete write-off.

This was one of the biggest pain points for many glass factories: once a production line was running, it couldn’t easily be shut down.