I am the Clone of a Death Row Inmate

After hearing such shocking news from Su Ze, combined with the many unexpected incidents on this hunting trip, Chen Suifeng lost all interest in continuing to wander the wilds with him.

He immediately took Su Ze back to Dongli University.

Su Ze also got to experience ”Venerable-level speed” firsthand. It was much faster than an airplane. In less than an hour, they had returned to Dongli University from deep within the Blood Earth Forest.

Chen Suifeng had a lot on his mind and didn’t linger, leaving quickly. Su Ze, carrying his bountiful harvest, headed straight for Liou Wenxin’s laboratory.

”Senior Su Ze!” Han Xiaoke, whom he hadn’t seen in a long time, was helping out in Liou Wenxin’s lab. She greeted him enthusiastically the moment she saw him.

”Long time no see. Here, have some milk tea.” Su Ze handed a cup to Han Xiaoke and another to Liou Wenxin. ’Good thing the Secret Ice City milk tea shop by the entrance has a buy-one-get-one-free special,’ he thought.

Su Ze and Han Xiaoke exchanged a few pleasantries, and he asked how things were at the Sunshine Children’s Welfare Institute.

”Oh, by the way, Senior Su Ze...” Han Xiaoke suddenly remembered something and changed the subject. ”Final exams are coming up soon. How’s your studying going?”

”Final exams?” Su Ze froze for a moment. ’Oh, right, I’m still a freshman!’

Han Xiaoke was the class president. The counselor knew she had a good relationship with Su Ze, so he had specifically asked her to check in on him.

The counselor’s reasoning was that Su Ze was the face of their class, not to mention the star student of all of Dongli University. It would be more than a little embarrassing if he failed his exams.

That’s why he had asked Han Xiaoke to remind Su Ze to study up.

One look at Su Ze’s expression told Han Xiaoke everything she needed to know. She took a stack of documents and notes from her backpack and said,

”This is all the key material that’s guaranteed to be on the exam this semester. Senior Su Ze, you should review it when you have time. As long as you memorize this, you definitely won’t fail.”

The counselor, Jiang Hong, had really gone to great lengths. The stack of materials he’d entrusted Han Xiaoke to give Su Ze even contained several actual questions from the upcoming final exam.

”Okay, thanks a lot.” Su Ze readily agreed, but his mind was elsewhere. He casually tossed the stack of documents into his storage item.

After Han Xiaoke left, Su Ze began telling Liou Wenxin about his recent trip.

Then, he took out a lead box, removed Bai Guishou’s phone from within, and said, ”Wenxin, could you take a look at this phone? I want to see how it works. It can be controlled and used for messaging with Spiritual Power, completely bypassing service providers. If this technology became common, wouldn’t the three major providers in Lin Hua go out of business?”

”Let me see.” Liou Wenxin was quite interested as well.

After tinkering with it for a while, she had a general idea. ”The technology itself isn’t too complex,” she said, ”but we can’t replicate it.”

”How so?”

”From what I can tell, the difficulty isn’t in manufacturing the phone. The problem is the lack of a ’base station’ for transmitting information. This phone uses Spiritual Power directly instead of microwaves, which requires an evolver with immense Spiritual Power to act as the station—at minimum, it would have to be a Venerable Powerhouse who specializes in Spiritual Power!”

”And even an organization like Filth Earth couldn’t afford to have a Spiritual Venerable do nothing all day but act as a communications base station. Therefore, the status of this Spiritual Venerable is highly suspicious. They’re most likely being controlled by the Filth Earth Organization...”

”If we want to achieve communication via Spiritual Power, we’re missing exactly that: a ’base station.’ It’s impossible unless you can manage to kidnap a Spiritual Venerable.”

’So that’s how it works...’ Su Ze abandoned the unrealistic idea.

He turned the phone back on and found that it could no longer communicate. He couldn’t connect to any wireless networks to message the Filth Earth Organization, either. This confirmed that Dongli University was too far from the ”base station” and outside its coverage area.

Su Ze placed the phone back in the lead box and stored it away again. He didn’t discard it. ’It might come in handy later, who knows?’

Next, he took out various natural medicines he didn’t recognize from the Bai Guishou Storage Ring, along with all the extracts, and had Liou Wenxin identify them one by one.

The human-derived extracts among them couldn’t be sold, so Su Ze simply left them for Liou Wenxin to use in her research.

Regulations on human-derived extracts were extremely strict on the Lin Hua Continent. Liou Wenxin immediately reported the matter. She wouldn’t be able to begin researching them until all the procedures were completed and she received official approval.

The Bai Guishou Storage Ring also contained a vial of a Tier 4 extract. After Liou Wenxin’s analysis, it turned out to be a Tier 4, Grade-A extract—worth a small fortune!

Perfect!

If he sold this vial of Tier 4, Grade-A extract, Su Ze was certain he’d have enough wealth to buy a Tier 4, Grade-S extract.

”If you’re looking to sell any extracts, I suggest you sell them directly to Dongli,” Liou Wenxin said. ”Lately, the domestic demand for high-tier extracts has surged, and the government has raised its acquisition prices.”

”Why the sudden price hike?” Su Ze asked, puzzled.

Selling to the government, so to speak, really meant turning in extracts in exchange for contribution points. However, the prices Dongli offered had always been significantly lower than the market rate.

For the same Evolution Item, you could get a million credits selling it to Evolutionary Technology, but turning it in to Dongli might only net you seven or eight hundred thousand contribution points.

Liou Wenxin explained, ”It’s because the Sovereign Country has completed mass production of the first batch of ’Skill Suppression Potions.’ We in Dongli received a large allotment, and all the extracts that had been piling up in the national treasury were redeemed. Now, supply can’t keep up with demand.”

The ”Skill Suppression Potion” was an evolutionary medicine Liou Wenxin had developed back when she was in the Ancient An Country. Its effect was to allow an evolver to absorb an extract without gaining its skill, thus freeing up a skill slot.

That empty skill slot could then be filled with a different skill the next time they absorbed an extract.

The Filth Earth Organization had always coveted the formula for the Skill Suppression Potion, but Liou Wenxin ultimately managed to protect it and hand it over to the Sovereign Country.

However, looking back on that decision now, it may not have been the right one. The Sovereign Country wasn’t necessarily trustworthy.

But to get back to the point, the mass production of the Skill Suppression Potion made some previously undesirable extracts viable.

Su Ze knew that the Dongli National Treasury had a large stock of high-grade Tier 2 and Tier 3 extracts that no one wanted to redeem because their associated skills were too bizarre or impractical.

But with the Skill Suppression Potion, things were different. It didn’t matter what garbage skill an extract contained; as long as the quality was high enough, people would absorb it first and ask questions later.

When paired with a Skill Suppression Potion, you could avoid learning an extract’s skill, leaving a skill slot open. Then, the next time you found a vial with several skills that suited you, you could absorb two skills at once.

That’s why all the high-quality extracts that had been sitting in the Dongli National Treasury for years were recently redeemed, creating a shortage.

And it was easy to predict that after absorbing a high-quality extract with a useless skill, these people would—once they had fully digested it—crave a new vial containing two or more powerful skills.

Therefore, in the near future, Dongli’s demand for high-quality extracts would skyrocket. Furthermore, since all these people would need to digest the extracts they absorbed, the demand for any evolutionary medicines that aided digestion would also increase.

And once this frenzy passed, the overall strength of the Dongli Kingdom’s evolvers would see a significant boost.

In essence, the Skill Suppression Potion was helping Dongli convert a portion of its backlogged inventory into tangible power.

Liou Wenxin agreed. She said, ”The Sovereign Country will supply several more batches of Skill Suppression Potions in the future. Demand will be high at first, but it will naturally decrease over time. The Sovereign Country will then reduce production to ensure the Filth Earth Organization can’t get its hands on too many finished potions.”

Once the potion was mass-produced, some were bound to leak to the Filth Earth Organization. However, the Sovereign Country had already applied certain safeguards to the finished product, making it nearly impossible for Filth Earth to reverse-engineer the formula from the potion itself.

As long as the Sovereign Country controlled production and strictly monitored and recorded every evolver who took the potion, not many finished vials would fall into the hands of the Filth Earth Organization.

Even if the Filth Earth Organization managed to acquire a small number of finished potions, it wouldn’t change much. The impact would be negligible.

Su Ze suddenly had an amusing thought and couldn’t help but laugh. ”Since Skill Suppression Potions will be widely available for a while, Dongli’s official evolvers are about to go on a massive extract-digesting frenzy. Wenxin, have you considered using this opportunity to popularize the ’Swan Dance’?”

The Swan Dance was vastly more effective than the ”Dragon-Slaying Posture,” the official Training Skill currently in use by Dongli!

Su Ze was confident that after the official Dongli evolvers, who were desperate to digest their extracts, experienced the effects of the Swan Dance, they would find it impossible to resist.

When that happened, Dongli would enter an era of the Swan Dance for all, and Su Ze could finally dance freely without worrying about dying of social embarrassment.

”Well... that’s not out of the question.” Liou Wenxin shot Su Ze an amused look, instantly seeing through his little scheme and wicked sense of humor. ”In that case, I’ll leave it to you.”

”Let’s leave it to Mrs. Yun. I’m sure she’d be delighted.” ’I still have a backup of the video of her dancing on my cloud drive,’ Su Ze thought. ’To avoid social death alone, she’ll definitely promote the Swan Dance with everything she’s got.’

Having finished that conversation, Su Ze planned to take the few vials of extract he had, including the Tier 4, Grade-A one, to the Li Min Association to see what prices they would offer.

If the price was right, he’d sell them all to the Li Min Association. While he was there, he’d also ask how many contribution points it would cost to have one of Dongli’s top powerhouses hunt on his behalf.

”Oh, right, Wenxin, can you help me check the quality of this Tier 5 extract and see what skills it has?” Su Ze took out the River Fish Monster extract he had just acquired.

Liou Wenxin placed the extract into a testing instrument and asked Su Ze what the River Fish Monster looked like.

Su Ze simply took the dead fish out of his Storage Pendant for Liou Wenxin to see for herself.

An extract from a Tier 5 monster like the River Fish Monster wasn’t like the more common low-tier ones, where you could get all its information just by putting it in a scanner.

For some species of Tier 5 monsters and above, you couldn’t find a second one on all of Blue Star. There was no data to reference, so they had to be analyzed from scratch.