Graduation Day
The graduation courtyard was alive with celebration. Red banners snapped in the breeze while deans delivered speeches about justice and duty to the legal profession. When Han Chen's name was called, he walked forward with that quiet grace he'd always carried, his robes flowing like shadows as he accepted his scroll. Hye Won followed moments later, her expression composed but unable to hide the satisfaction in her eyes.
In the crowd, their parents had found each other. Han Chen's father—who rarely showed emotion in public—allowed himself a genuine smile. His mother stood beside him with her usual dignity, though she reached out instinctively to clasp her husband's hand.
Next to them stood Hye Won's mother, tall and vibrant. The illness that had once ravaged her body was gone, leaving behind a woman marked by quiet resilience. She wiped away a tear as she watched her daughter and Han Chen on the stage—not from simple sentimentality, but because she understood the weight of this moment. She'd noticed the changes in them over the past year, how focused they'd become, how they seemed to carry themselves differently. Something had shifted in her daughter, and while she didn't know what, she recognized that both young people had supported her through her recovery in ways no one else could see.
After the ceremony, they gathered beneath the ancient gingko tree at the southern gate. Around them, other families celebrated with laughter and camera flashes, but their small group shared a quieter satisfaction.
Both Han Chen and Hye Won had completed their National Legal Qualification Exam during their final year, passing with distinction. The traditional path would lead them to law firms or government positions, but they had different plans. With their cultivation progress and accumulated wealth, conventional careers held little appeal.
Instead, they'd already secured positions at Yue Lan's biotech company. On paper, their titles looked impressive—Chief Legal Strategist for Corporate Affairs and Head of Legal and Compliance for Regulatory Affairs—but the formal descriptions barely scratched the surface of their actual roles. In reality, they would have the same freedom Yue Lan enjoyed within her own company.
Han Chen had no interest in playing corporate servant. His real motivation was proximity to Yue Lan's research—curiosity about what developments might emerge from her work. Hye Won, ever practical, actually wanted to dive into the legal complexities of biotech regulation. Han Chen saw no reason to object. If anything, having someone he trusted handling the legitimate business side would give him more freedom to pursue... other interests.
The Lab Problem
Yue Lan's biotech venture was barely getting off the ground, and progress on the Null Variant had hit a wall. The initial trials looked promising—enhanced muscle regeneration, neural optimization, all that good stuff—but they couldn't replicate the results consistently. Human application? Still a pipe dream.
Han Chen already knew how this should have played out in his past life. Some eccentric researcher, handpicked by Yue Ming as a guest reviewer, would steal the credit. Later, this same guy would poach the entire project and team away from Yue Lan with ridiculous incentives, right after she got bedridden with complications.
Standing in the lab now, he watched Dr. Sofia Lim—brilliant woman, but clearly struggling—poring over another set of failed data. The original team had shrunk down to just a skeleton crew of loyalists and interns. Frustration was written all over her face as she muttered about viral agents screwing with non-coding DNA segments, aggression spikes in test subjects, and the maddening inability to stabilize anything.
Han Chen glanced at Yue Lan. "I can help. It's partly why I'm here."
Sofia's head snapped up, her glare cutting. "Don't joke around, Mr. Legal Strategist."
She turned to Yue Lan. "Boss, why is he even in the lab?"
Yue Lan's lips curved slightly. "Consider him a partner in this endeavor, Sofia. He has... other talents." Her gaze locked onto Han Chen. "But before you do anything, I need to reject that pretentious guy who keeps asking for more incentives and credit."
She was talking about the person she'd initially contacted from Yue Ming's side—the same brilliant but eccentric researcher who was very much loyal to her cousin's faction.
After Sofia left, Han Chen let his features blur with a thought. Bones shifted, posture altered, until a sharp-eyed, silver-haired stranger stood in his place.
Yue Lan actually stumbled back. "What the hell—"
"One of my talents, name me Dr. Xia" He replied smoothly. "Credentials will be arranged under this name for a new researcher."
He had a game to play here. Hye Won would probably hunt him down if she knew, but he'd chosen to disguise himself in another role. Besides, he didn't really need any fame—Yue Lan would keep his secret.
He was quietly added to Dr. Sofia's lab roster.
"Point me at the problem," Han Chen said simply.
Sofia exhaled, rubbing her temples with obvious hesitation. "Fine, Dr. Xia. The Null Variant works—on a handful of primates. It accelerates tissue repair, boosts neural plasticity, but it also triggers uncontrollable aggression. We can't scale it, can't stabilize it, and half my team thinks I'm chasing ghosts." She gestured at the empty lab stations. "This isn't a research division anymore. It's a graveyard for good intentions."
Han Chen turned to Yue Lan. "What's the end goal here? A drug? A weapon?"
Yue Lan's voice dropped. "You already know."
"First, a treatment—for veterans, degenerative diseases. Then, if we can control it... an enhancer."
Han Chen nodded. "Focus on your public strategy then. Leave the science to me for now." He motioned for Sofia to follow him.
The private research facility hummed with the kind of silence that screamed money—all polished steel and whispered conversations behind reinforced glass. Han Chen didn't waste time with the whole wide-eyed newcomer act. Not here, not with what was at stake.
Sofia's research notes might as well have been children's picture books to him. He absorbed every detail in minutes, his finger tracing dead ends and failed hypotheses with the kind of precision that made Sofia's skin crawl. When she finally worked up the nerve to show him the experimental results, well... that's when things got interesting.
The early stuff was pretty crude, honestly. They'd been injecting these macaques with something called Variant-Zero—basically a retroviral serum that was supposed to enhance physical capabilities. And it worked, sort of. The monkeys got stronger grips, healed faster from minor injuries. Standard enhancement protocol stuff.
But then the anomalies started showing up.
Muscle density jumped twenty-five percent almost overnight. Reflexes that shouldn't exist in nature. One specimen—they called him M-Zeta-04—actually shattered reinforced glass with his bare hands. Eight point four kilonewtons of force. That's silverback gorilla territory, and this was just a regular macaque.
The problem was, um... well, the aggression came with it. Erratic pacing, adrenal systems going haywire, complete neurochemical imbalance. The poor thing's cells started dying off rapidly. They had to terminate the trial.
That's when Dr. Xia started getting more involved. Subtle at first—a question during a staff meeting here, redirecting a hypothesis there. Han Chen realized he needed to speed things up, so he started feeding them "discoveries" from Dr. Xia's supposed previous research. Just to move the process along, you know?
The breakthroughs came faster after that.
Instead of single injections, they developed this chambered protocol—four separate vials tailored to metabolic thresholds. The Neuromuscular Primer, Myofibril Enhancer, Mitochondrial Reboot, and the Stabilizer Complex. Fancy names for what was essentially controlled human evolution in a syringe.
When they restarted the primate trials, everything changed. Bao—the first subject under the new protocol—went into this almost meditative state. His theta waves elevated, vitals remained steady throughout. Post-treatment? He could lift twice his body weight, leap four meters horizontally, and solve cognitive tasks twenty-seven percent faster than the control group.
No aggression. No cellular degradation.
Meanwhile, three floors up, Hye Won was stalking through the corporate corridors like some kind of predator. She cornered Yue Lan in the executive lounge, eyes narrowed to slits.
"Where is he?"
Yue Lan barely looked up from her tea, that amused smile playing at the corners of her mouth. "Somewhere in this building, obviously. Isn't finding people supposed to be your specialty?" She took another delicate sip. "Besides, now that the experiments are actually yielding results, it's time to move toward human trials. I'm going to need your... assistance with that."
She paused, letting the implication hang in the air.
"Your boyfriend hasn't touched any of his actual assigned work, by the way."
Down in the lab, the macaque trials had officially concluded. Clear therapeutic index, no observable aggression, elevated muscle efficiency, cognitive retention intact. Everything they needed to advance to the next stage.
Two months since Han Chen's admission to the facility, and the product was nearly complete. But the transition to human trials—that would require formal submission to the National Medical Products Administration. The NMPA didn't exactly fast-track experimental enhancement serums, even ones that worked as well as theirs apparently did.
The real question wasn't whether they could make it work anymore.
Filed as Variant-Zero, Horizon Biotech's retroviral serum was its first major endeavor yet. Preclinical data showed promise: enhanced healing, strength, and cognition—this time without the aggressive side effects. Dr. Xia and Sofia's refined dosing protocols had worked. Now came regulatory approval.
But here's what those shiny documents didn't mention—Dr. Xia, who was really Han Chen playing dress-up, had gone way beyond what Horizon even knew they were dealing with. While everyone else was focused on their little enhancement serum, he'd been crafting multiple viral vector permutations in complete silence.
Some were treatments for degenerative diseases, sure. Others were enhancement grades for regular people. And then... well, then there were the augmentation series designed specifically for martial cultivators who were, toeing the edge of major breakthroughs. Some protocols actually imposed cultivation ceilings— to keep things from getting completely out of hand. Others removed those limits entirely, though the returns started diminishing pretty fast. Each one was this carefully calculated design, all bound by his control.
To keep it all secure, Han Chen wove this quantum neo-lattice encryption structure—basically an evolving cryptographic framework that he scattered across multiple data vaults. Made it look dormant within NovaGen's systems, but it was all there. Access was licensed to Yue Lan and Sofia, time-locked with these intermittent authentication triggers that looked like normal research phases to anyone watching.
And then, quietly as he'd arrived, Dr. Xia just... vanished.
No announcement. No farewell. Sofia and a few team members showed up at the lab the next morning and found nothing but empty space where their enigmatic genius used to be. No notes, no contact information. Just silence.
Yue Lan arrived that afternoon with her usual composed stride—you know how she is, always looking like she knows something you don't. She didn't elaborate on where he'd gone, just said Dr. Xia had left one final gift.
"He said you'd figure it out," she told Sofia, placing this slim, glassy device on the desk. "And he wants no credit."
It was a biometric ring—translucent, humming faintly with embedded latticework that seemed to pulse with its own life. "He called it a continuity key. Told me it'll only activate when you're ready."
Sofia stared at the thing, hesitant. It didn't look like storage, exactly. More like a signature—something encrypted into identity rather than just data. When her fingertips brushed it, the device pulsed once, then went quiet.
***
The application they submitted was..., it was careful. Just enough information: a therapy for degenerative neuromuscular diseases like ALS, combat trauma recovery. Safety data, minimal formulation details, and this thin veil of scientific disclosure that looked transparent but really wasn't. The deeper enhancements—all those breakthroughs derived from Dr. Xia's unpublished work—remained buried behind proprietary clauses.
Ethics clearance moved in parallel, thankfully. The internal board approved the risk-benefit profile pretty quickly: no cancer markers, no neural decay, and these striking neuromuscular gains. They assembled nine volunteers—six patients with terminal conditions, three "healthy comparators." Of those three, um, two were discreetly military. But nobody talked about that part.
Then came the blowback.
Yue Lan's estranged cousin, Yu Ming, lodged fresh legal complaints. Bioethics violations, safety breaches, media manipulation—all baseless, but the court had to take it up anyway. Protocol, you know?
Horizon's response was total silence. The company went into complete lockdown mode. No press statements, no public comments, only restricted lab access. Yue Lan didn't even attend the filing—just her signature alone was enough to trigger what could no longer be undone.
Yue Lan handed Han Chen the folder without any preamble. "He filed another one," she said, and there was this edge to her voice. "Same play—bioethics violations, regulatory breaches, trying to stall the trials. I've kept things clean on our end, but it's getting annoying now." She paused, studying his face. "I thought you might want to handle it."
Han Chen flipped through the documents, his expression completely unreadable. You could never tell what he was thinking. "Yu Ming doesn't know when to stop."
"He won't until someone pins him down legally," she said, casually leaning against the desk like this was all just another Tuesday problem. "You've got the license now. Want to take this one?"
***