Chapter 72: First Containment Room: Blood Crystal

Chapter 72: Chapter 72: First Containment Room: Blood Crystal

Ning Ye didn’t hesitate for a second. "We have to get rid of these bodies. The military will definitely come looking, and leaving them here is basically handing over evidence on a silver platter... Maybe we should bury them?"

"Bury them where, exactly?"

Disposing of the bodies was non-negotiable, but coming up with an actual plan was easier said than done.

Ning Ye thought it through — two people and a Corpse Ghost, digging graves in an abandoned district — and immediately dropped the idea. There was no way they’d be able to hide the traces completely.

She’d seen plenty of corpses in her time, but actually making them disappear was a first. She turned to Xiang Yi with a look that was basically a plea for help.

Xiang Yi met her gaze. "How do you feel about doing something... unsavory to the bodies?"

"What kind of unsavory?"

About ten minutes later.

All fifteen bodies, along with the two pieces of equipment from beneath the hospital, had been loaded onto the vehicle the Scavengers had driven over.

Ning Ye took the wheel and drove Xiang Yi back to the underground research facility.

It didn’t take long before one of the three containment rooms was packed solid with corpses.

The bodies of over a dozen people were spread across the floor in a single dense layer.

Ning Ye leaned against the door of the adjacent isolation room. "Is this actually going to work?"

Xiang Yi pulled the jar of Blood Crystal Worm Eggs from his backpack. "Don’t worry about whether it works. What you should be doing right now is getting the equipment ready to record data."

"Fine."

Ning Ye stepped out of the isolation room and moved to the monitoring station set up alongside it, where she had a fuller view of everything inside.

Xiang Yi poured the Blood Crystal Worm Eggs over the bodies, then stepped out and sealed the isolation room behind him.

Stimulated by the blood, the eggs began hatching one by one, consuming flesh and tissue, transforming the corpses into clusters of brilliant, gleaming crystals.

The faint disgust on Ning Ye’s face gave way to something far more eager.

Her fingers danced across the control panel, logging data in rapid succession — none of the irritation she’d shown while handling the bodies anywhere to be seen.

Inside the isolation room, several mechanical arms extended from the walls and captured one of the Blood Crystal Worms, beginning to extract various samples from it.

The Blood Crystal Worms were still in the middle of converting the bodies when Ning Ye’s curiosity got the better of her. "What happens to them in the end?"

"Once they’ve finished feeding, they should go dormant — until fresh bodies are introduced. I only have a rough idea of how these things work, honestly."

Ning Ye looked a little disappointed by that, though what she had in front of her right now was clearly more than enough to keep her busy.

"By the way — when they convert human bodies, the Blood Crystals they produce are significantly higher quality. From what I observed in the prison I was held in, animal flesh doesn’t seem to yield High-Quality Blood Crystals."

"Same difference as between the two samples I gave you before."

"Fifteen bodies, all converted into Blood Crystal Clusters... I wonder how much that adds up to."

Ning Ye’s expression stiffened for a moment. Then she started doing the math, slowly. "An average adult male weighs somewhere between 50 and 70 kilograms. Call it 60 as the mean."

"Average conversion rate... based on what we’re seeing, probably around 15%. Blood and muscle tissue convert at a slightly higher rate."

"So by that math... theoretically, we’re looking at roughly 130 kilograms of High-Quality Blood Crystals."

"My buyers pay 2,000 per gram for this grade."

"That’s 260 million..."

"No — wait, that’s not right. Look at the containment room."

Ning Ye cut off their daydreaming abruptly. "The conversion rate has been slowing down since they started feeding."

"They’ve overeaten. Too much food at once, too many Blood Crystals stored up — the ones that hatched first are already going dormant."

"The remaining bodies won’t be converted. They’ll just rot in a couple of days. We’re looking at over 70% waste."

Xiang Yi leaned in beside Ning Ye and frowned at the monitor. "That shouldn’t be happening. When I released Blood Crystals in the prison, they didn’t stop over a handful of people."

"Maybe it’s because the prison was an open environment? This containment room is pretty small, after all."

"That’s possible, I guess." Xiang Yi couldn’t say for certain why they’d gone dormant so fast, but he wasn’t ready to give up. "What if we go in and pull out the finished Blood Crystals now?"

"It’s too late for that."

Ning Ye zoomed the camera feed in on one of the dormant Blood Crystal Worms.

Its outer shell was visibly hardening, its body crystallizing from the surface inward.

She’d only just encountered this Abnormality, but from the data she’d already observed, Ning Ye had begun piecing together how Blood Crystal Worms actually functioned.

"The moment a Blood Crystal Worm enters dormancy, it’s essentially dead. Its body gradually transforms into a new batch of eggs. See those cracks forming on the surface? Notice how they’re shaped like eggs?"

"They have no reproductive organs. They reproduce purely by consuming enough to split themselves."

"Even if you went in right now and took every Blood Crystal in there, you couldn’t stop them from going dormant."

"The remaining bodies are just going to rot. Though it’s possible the dormant worms might still interact with decomposing flesh somehow?"

Ning Ye was genuinely curious about that. For Xiang Yi, though, it was decidedly bad news.

"My estimate is this batch sells for 70 million at most. After setting some aside to sustain the next generation of Blood Crystal Worm Eggs, we’re probably looking at around 60 million in actual profit."

"Only 60 million..."

The drop from 260 million to 60 million was, honestly, a pretty brutal gap.

But Xiang Yi quickly reframed it.

He was going from zero to 60 million — not dropping from 260 million down to 60 million.

The money wasn’t even in his hands yet. Calling it a loss would be ridiculous.

"It’s still a lot. And you only got into this to deal with the bodies in the first place."

Xiang Yi nodded. "So about the payment..."

Ning Ye jumped in immediately. "Don’t look at me for a deposit — I don’t have that kind of cash on hand. You’ll have to wait for the buyers."

"Wait for the buyers? How long are we talking?"

"Probably another week or so."

"A whole week? Can you speed that up at all? I’ll cut you in on a bigger commission — same 10% we agreed on before."

If the payout were only in the tens of thousands, Xiang Yi wouldn’t be in any rush — that kind of money wouldn’t change anything. But tens of millions was a different story. That was enough to completely reshape his plans.

Ten percent of 60 million was 6 million. Not bad for Ning Ye herself, but...

"It’s not about my commission. The buyers need time to pull the funds together."

"And they definitely can’t absorb that volume on their own — I’d have to go out and find you new buyers on top of that. So a week is the earliest we’re looking at, realistically."

"And don’t forget, I still have to head out. By the time I get back, who knows if they’ll even have the money ready."

Xiang Yi couldn’t help himself. "Then maybe don’t go. What if something—"

"Don’t you dare jinx me! It’s a Level 1 Abnormality incident. It’s not like I’m walking into certain death."

"And don’t bother trying to talk me out of it. This is my business. You handle yours, I’ll handle mine."

Xiang Yi had nothing left to say. He was only doing what instinct told him — warning a friend away from somewhere dangerous.

He didn’t want Ning Ye to end up like the friends he’d lost before.

But Ning Ye had already made up her mind. He wasn’t going to change it.

"Then I guess all I can do is wish you luck."

Ning Ye finished configuring the monitoring program for the Blood Crystal containment room, then left the research facility without lingering.

Left alone, Xiang Yi found his thoughts beginning to turn.

Because somewhere in that 60 million, he could just barely make out the shape of an escape route.

A civilian ship rated for intra-Star System travel — the cheapest models started at just 8 million.

An interstellar-capable civilian ship, on the other hand, ran at least 30 million even at the low end.

Then there was outfitting the interior, installing functional modules and components, and the containment room Xiang Yi wanted aboard — something equivalent to the one in this underground facility.

Sixty million would evaporate in no time at all.

And that was before ongoing maintenance costs, fuel, and everything else that came with actually running a ship.

Sixty million really wasn’t going to stretch very far.

Buying a ship was one thing.

Actually flying it was another.

Getting it out of the Star System was yet another thing entirely.

Making it somewhere far enough from the Iron Shell Company and that prison — that was a whole separate problem on top of everything else.

Sixty million from Blood Crystals sounded like a lot on paper. But right now it was nothing more than a reflection on water — beautiful, and completely out of reach.

He needed more. Money that could keep coming in.

Which meant there was no way he was going to sit around for four days waiting for Ning Ye to come back. And if she didn’t come back — well, that didn’t bear thinking about.

Blood Crystal production was too brutal a trade to sustain long-term.

The Living Iron Extraction Device he’d hauled out of the hospital basement — that might be the real answer. A path that could actually keep going.