3: The Origins of the Beast World
During the four days Qi Jun stayed shut in his room, Qi Tian brought him food every day. By then, he had basically become numb to meals that tasted atrocious beyond description. There was no helping it. If he did not eat, he would starve to death, especially when he received only two meals a day to begin with.
At first he had held onto a thread of hope. Perhaps the Qi family simply could not cook, or maybe the people in this city had such terrible culinary skills that the original Qi Jun had mistaken this garbage for delicacies. But after turning on the computer in his room, confirming that its operation was roughly similar to computers in his previous life, and looking through a mountain of information, he finally accepted reality. He had transmigrated into a world where food existed for the sole purpose of filling one’s stomach. For someone born in China, what kind of tragedy was this?!
Still, the internet taught him many things he had not found in the original Qi Jun’s memories. That did not mean Qi Jun had not known them; they were simply such ordinary facts, known by everyone, that nobody thought about them constantly.
The world Qi Jun now inhabited was still Earth, only approximately thirteen thousand years after the era in which he had lived.
Historical records described ancient humanity this way: after humanity endured a great catastrophe, fewer than one tenth of the original population survived. To ensure the continuation of the human species, the governments of various nations had no choice but to merge into a single alliance state. Yet Earth’s environment had been so severely devastated that the habitable regions grew smaller and smaller. Mutated beasts and plants increasingly threatened human survival. The Alliance government therefore decided to create a group of biochemical beastmen by fusing human genes with those of fierce animals, using these powerful warriors to fight the terrifying creatures.
The biochemical beastmen created at the time possessed very little human thought or emotion. They had beasts’ sharp teeth, claws, and agile limbs. They were weapons humanity used against powerful enemies. Not only could they repel attacks from fierce animals and mutated plants, they could also hunt those creatures and bring them back as food.
After the great catastrophe, eighty percent of Earth’s land had been contaminated by toxins, and the climate had changed drastically. Unmutated plants could no longer be cultivated at all, while mutated plants were poisonous to humans and could not be eaten. Thus, for a very long period, humanity once again lived by eating beast meat and hunting alongside the biochemical beastmen.
Yet even with cloning technology, biochemical beastmen still took time to grow. A daring research team came up with the idea of adding beast genes directly into the genes of adults, forcibly altering the human body. After ten years, they finally succeeded in injecting the strongest beast genes into healthy adults. This produced the first new species to possess both complete human intelligence and emotion along with tremendous physical power: the true beastmen. They not only had the fighting strength and self-healing ability of beasts, but one third of them could freely transform back and forth between a completely human form and a completely animal form. Whether in intelligence, strength, or physical agility, this one third of beastmen were extraordinarily close to perfection.
But even perfect experimental subjects were still experimental subjects. When the project was accidentally exposed, large numbers of citizens and scholars condemned the research team on moral and ethical grounds. Even the Alliance government considered the project unacceptable. The entire research team was placed under control, and the first thirty true beastmen were imprisoned in a castle.