Hidden in the shadows, his back pressed against the cold cliff face, Lin Ke's mind was a raging fire of calculation. The slumbering Alpha was a mountain of muscle and corrupted power, a living nightmare that his pet stood no chance against in a direct fight. But the real prize, the thing that sent a tremor of raw ambition through him, was that clutch of five, sickly purple eggs.
He pushed the Gene Editor, his will a silent command. Go deeper. I need to know what's inside them.
His vision plunged into the eggs' very structure. He didn't see a number; he perceived a vast, churning reservoir of volatile energy within each one, a concentration of power that dwarfed what he'd harvested from the adult lizard. His mind quantified it: 250 to 300 units per egg. Nearly his entire goal, sitting right there. But then came the warning, a screaming red flag in his vision, accompanied by a horrifying mental simulation of a violent, uncontrolled explosion. The essence was tied to the active embryos, making it semi-sentient and highly unstable. The Editor was blunt: a direct attempt to Purify and Absorb carried an 85% probability of catastrophic energy release. A polite way of saying it would vaporize him, his pet, and a significant chunk of this cliff.
So, he couldn't just kill the monster and Hoover up the goods. This was a different problem entirely. But as one path closed, the Editor proposed another, even more audacious one: External Decontamination. The protocol suggested that if he could get an egg back to the controlled environment of his lab, a slow, methodical purification might be possible. But that meant he had to steal one first.
The path forward split, a war igniting in his head.
There was the sane option. The Hunter's Path. Wait for the Alpha to leave on its patrol, then ambush it. A brutal, difficult fight, yes, but a straight fight. They could likely win, get a decent haul of maybe 100 units of essence, and go home. A profitable, logical day's work.
But then there was the other path. The Thief's Path. The insane path. To attempt the impossible: sneak past the sleeping god-monster and snatch an egg from its very nest. If he was caught… there would be no escape. They'd be cornered and torn to shreds.
For a moment, the sensible scientist in him screamed, Take the safe route, you idiot! A guaranteed return is always the superior strategic choice! But the ambitious visionary, the kid who had bet his future on a dead rock, knew the truth. Safe is for other people. Safe doesn't hatch a Mythical pet. The chance to study a corrupted embryo up close, to understand the phenomenon at its source, and to secure a massive payload of essence in a single, daring move… it was a siren's call he was powerless to resist.
He was going for the egg.
Okay, he thought, his entire physiology shifting from cautious observer to active predator. So we're doing the crazy thing. Now, how do we not die? His focus shifted, his gaze sweeping over the cave again, the Editor overlaying the scene with a blueprint of risk. He saw the Alpha's slow, four-breaths-per-minute sleep cycle. He saw its auditory sensitivity as a faint circle around its head. But then he saw its olfactory range, a massive, shimmering cloud of scent detection that extended far beyond the cave entrance, confirming his fear. The air was too still; it would smell him coming.
Worse, the cave floor was highlighted with dozens of red markers, a minefield of loose stones. One wrong step, one careless sound, and it would all be over.
A direct approach was suicide. He needed a diversion. His eyes scanned upwards, away from the cave mouth, up the sheer cliff face. And there it was. A cluster of loose, precariously balanced rocks high above the entrance, catching the faint moonlight. An idea, precise and ridiculously dangerous, clicked into place. I don't need to sneak past it. I just need it to look the other way. For five seconds.
He looked at the slumbering Alpha. He looked at the pulsating eggs. The risk was astronomical. One mistake, one sound, one unlucky shift in the wind, and they were dead.
But if he pulled it off…
Lin Ke settled back into the deep shadows of the warm Jamaican night, the chirping of the crickets a sound from another, saner world. His body became perfectly still, his breathing slowing until it was almost imperceptible. He became a part of the rock and the dark, a patient scientist waiting for the single, perfect moment in time to conduct the most dangerous experiment of his life.
The heist was on. And there was zero room for error.