29: Vague clues

Late at night, the entire apartment building was terrifyingly quiet, except for the thunderous snoring coming from Wang Dalong's bedroom next door; it alternated between rolling thunder and an electric drill, possessing a very rhythmic quality.

Lin Feng crept out of his room, controlling the "click" of the door lock so that it was barely audible.

He didn't turn on the light; instead, he sat on the living room sofa by the thin moonlight streaming in through the window, sinking into the soft cushions.

He pulled the tube of light blue Gene Repair Potion out of his trouser pocket.

In the dim environment, this small reagent tube became the sole light source. Within the dreamy blue liquid, billions of tiny specks of light seemed to swim slowly, like a brilliant galaxy contained in a glass bottle, filled with an indescribable sense of mystery.

There wasn't a second of hesitation.

The thirst for power and the obsession with survival had long since overridden everything else.

He unscrewed the metal cap, tilted his head back, and downed the potion in one gulp.

The liquid slid down his throat, icy and tasteless, as if he had just taken a sip of the purest mountain spring water.

One second, two seconds... a minute passed.

There was no reaction in his body.

Lin Feng sat quietly, waiting patiently. He knew that a potion of this caliber could never be just a bottle of mineral water.

Sure enough, about five minutes later, the change suddenly arrived!

An indescribable sensation of warmth suddenly exploded from his stomach!

This heat was not scorching; instead, it felt like the warmest hot spring in winter. Centered at his stomach, it instantly turned into thousands of tiny warm currents, like rushing rivers, surging into every corner of his body and through all his limbs and bones!

The next second, Lin Feng's body tensed uncontrollably!

He could clearly "feel" the trillions of cells in his body seemingly coming to life at this moment! They were like land that had been parched for centuries, suddenly welcoming a sweet rain; every cell was frantically and greedily devouring the incoming energy!

Beneath his skin, countless fine capillaries were dilating violently. A piercing numbness and itchiness emerged from the gaps in his bones, making him want to reach out and scratch, yet he had nowhere to start!

"Crack... click..."

He heard it—the sound was coming from inside his own body.

His bones and joints were emitting a series of pops so faint they were almost inaudible! It wasn't a fracture, but more like a... reshaping!

His lumbar and cervical spine, long overburdened from years of editing videos at the computer, were now being wrapped by a pair of warm, large hands, being corrected and repaired in an incredible way. The soreness was rapidly fading, replaced by an unprecedented sense of comfort!

Even more startling were his eyes!

His vision, which had been somewhat blurred due to long-term nearsightedness, was undergoing a world-shaking transformation.

He subconsciously looked at the quartz clock hanging on the distant wall. He could not only see the ticking second hand clearly, but even the hair-thin scratch on the tip of the second hand from long use was vividly in view!

The whole world had never been so high-definition in his eyes!

This incredible process lasted for nearly half an hour.

When the last trace of the warm current had completely integrated into his limbs and bones and vanished without a trace, Lin Feng collapsed onto the sofa as if he were exhausted.

He felt like he had just come out of a sauna; his whole body was sticky and emitted a faint, indescribable fishy smell. He knew that these were all the impurities and toxins expelled from his body during the potion's reshaping process.

Forcing himself to stand up, Lin Feng staggered into the bathroom and twisted open the showerhead.

Scalding hot water poured over his head, washing his body and rinsing away the layer of gray-black grime on the floor.

Ten minutes later, when he dried his body and stood before the mirror again, even though he was mentally prepared, he was still stunned by the person in the mirror.

The person in the mirror still had his features, but he looked completely different!

The contours of his face had become more defined, and his lines were much harder, losing some of his previous student-like air and gaining a bit of sharpness. The stubborn dark circles and bags under his eyes from years of staying up late to edit videos had vanished without a trace. His skin was no longer the pale color of someone who lacked exercise, but instead showed a vibrant, healthy glow.

He lifted his oversized T-shirt.

The soft little belly that had accumulated from long periods of sitting had completely disappeared. In its place were six well-defined abdominal muscles!

The muscle mass wasn't exaggerated; he hadn't turned into a lumpy bodybuilder. Instead, he presented an extremely symmetrical, explosive, streamlined aesthetic, much like the physique of a leopard, where every inch of muscle was born for speed and power.

This is... a complete transformation!

Lin Feng clenched his fist, feeling the unprecedented sense of full power in his palm. He even had the illusion that if he wanted to, he could punch through the wall in front of him!

He knew that from this moment on, he was different... The next morning.

"Haa—"

Wang Dalong let out a thunderous yawn and stumbled out of his room with sleepy eyes, immediately spotting Lin Feng busy in the kitchen.

"Holy crap! Brother Feng, did you... did you not sleep last night and go to the gym for an all-night bench press session?"

Wang Dalong rubbed his eyes and approached Lin Feng, sizing him up from head to toe with an expression as if he had seen a ghost.

The Lin Feng before him was wearing ordinary T-shirt and shorts, but the energy and spirit he radiated from the inside out made him look like a completely different person from yesterday! That straight back, the faint outline of muscles through his clothes, and that face—he was a bit too handsome!

Lin Feng just held the plate and gave him a faint glance as he walked past.

It was this one glance that made Wang Dalong's heart skip a beat.

He wasn't sure if it was an illusion, but he felt that Lin Feng's aura had changed; that moment of eye contact made him feel as if he were being watched by a lurking beast, and the hair on his back almost stood up.

"I didn't sleep well, so I got up to move around," Lin Feng said calmly as he placed the fried eggs and bacon on the dining table.

After finishing this rather eerie breakfast, Lin Feng sat back on his "throne"—in front of that high-end computer.

He uploaded the video about Captain Kidd, which he had edited all night, to both Bilibili and YouTube simultaneously.

The title of the video was very low-key, even having a bit of an "artistic flair":

Captain Kidd's Lost Nautical Log — Artistic Concept Short Film》

This was his usual tactic: packaging the "True Illusions" he obtained through the system as his own imaginative artistic creations. This allowed him to complete tasks while avoiding unnecessary trouble.

However, less than ten minutes after the video was posted, the backend data started skyrocketing like crazy! Views, bullet comments, and regular comments exploded instantly!

"Holy cow! Catching Feng God alive! Finally an update!"

"My god, what kind of divine CG is this? This image quality, these details—this has to be movie-level, right? Feng God, is your family running a mine?"

"I'm crying, I'm crying. It turns out Captain Kidd was sold out by his own people and then framed as a pirate. That's so tragic!"

"Brothers in front, stop crying and look! Wait! This Golden Mural in the captain's hand in the video... isn't this the one that was stolen in the Caribbean Sea a few days ago?!"

"It's exactly the same! Holy crap!!"

Sure enough, just as Lin Feng had expected, after a brief moment of marveling at the video quality, everyone's focus eventually converged on that Golden Mural.

The video, from Captain Kidd's immersive first-person perspective, completely and in detail showed how he had personally cast this mural in a secret base on an island years ago and had seamlessly embedded an Ancient Astrolabe with an extremely peculiar design into the groove on the back of the mural.

This detail was a top secret that no historian or archaeologist in the world knew about!

The video's comment section instantly transformed from a "praise group" into a massive online decryption site.

"Case closed! I declare the case closed! So that group of Mercenaries who snatched the mural didn't do it for the gold at all, but for the astrolabe hidden in the mural?"

"What is this astrolabe for? It doesn't look like something from Earth. Could it be a treasure map left by aliens?"

"Hiss—thinking about it is terrifying! Feng God is using his own way to throw the answer directly in the face of the whole world!"

"Awesome! Feng God is the GOAT!"

Watching the massive amount of comments and bullet chats scrolling rapidly across the screen, a curve formed at the corner of Lin Feng's mouth.

He closed the webpage.

The bait had been cast; his goal had been achieved.

Next, he would see if those guys would get anxious and reveal themselves because of this unexpected "surprise."

He clicked on another folder on his computer.

Stored inside were all the clips containing that mysterious group of Mercenaries, which he had captured frame by frame from his previous Caribbean Sea live broadcast recordings.

Unfortunately, the sunlight in the Caribbean Sea was too intense at the time, and coupled with the extreme chaos and the heavy rocking of the ship, all the shots were a blurry mess.

In the footage, the figures of those Mercenaries were almost just clumps of fast-moving black shadows; the weapons in their hands and the equipment on their bodies could not be seen clearly at all.

"Brother Feng, stop looking."

Wang Dalong had leaned over again at some point, looking at the mosaic-like images on the screen and curling his lip.

"This stuff is blurrier than an eight-layer mosaic. What the heck can you see?"

Lin Feng didn't speak; he naturally knew it was difficult.

But he didn't give up.

He imported all the video clips into a professional-grade image processing software. He had bought this software from the Dark Web for a high price, and it was said that even the FBI used it.

Sharpening, noise reduction, super-resolution... he tried every algorithm available.

The computer's fan began to spin wildly, making a loud noise. After more than ten minutes of long calculations, the quality of the image finally improved a little; at least, it went from "a clump of black shadows" to "black shadows where human forms could be seen."

Just when Lin Feng himself was about to give up, his movements suddenly paused.

His attention was fixed firmly on one of the frames!

It was a frame with the most severe shaking. In the image, a Mercenary running toward a speedboat had a tactical medical pouch tied to his arm. When he leaped, it was hit by the midday sun, causing a reflection for less than a tenth of a second!

That was the reflection!

Lin Feng selected that small area, only about the size of a fingernail, and then pressed the button for infinite zoom.

The image was instantly pulled closer, and the pixels became as coarse as building blocks.

Yet within this sea of blurred color blocks, Lin Feng, relying on his vision that had been enhanced by the gene potion and was comparable to a falcon's, faintly identified the outline of a pattern!

It was a circle, and in the middle of the circle was an open palm that seemed to want to control everything!

This was their emblem!

Found it!

Lin Feng's heart jolted, but his excitement didn't last long.

He forced himself to calm down and continued to enlarge and sharpen the image of the emblem.

He discovered that directly below that palm emblem, there seemed to be an even smaller mark composed of several letters!

But it was simply too blurry there. No matter what algorithm or filter he used, he couldn't make those letters clear.

He could only barely see that it seemed to be a combination of three or four letters.

But what they were exactly, he couldn't see at all.

Lin Feng was not discouraged; he saved the screenshot of this extremely blurred mark.

Although he couldn't see it clearly, he remembered that unique, blurred shape.

That was enough.

This would be his first clue to follow the trail and hunt these people down!