Ding — —
As the door to the small shop was pushed open, a gentle female voice rang out.
"Welcome."
At the same time as the voice rang out, a beautiful face appeared on both sides of the door. Large wavy blonde hair, bright red lips, a flickering smile, and an ostentatious sweetness.
However, the person who pushed open the door and entered did not look at this beautiful face for long. Instead, he frowned and shouted towards the counter: "Silin, get old Devon to change this face. How many years has it been!"
The youth who was busy holding a bottle of wine behind the counter shrugged his shoulders. "Can't be helped. The boss likes it."
"Come on, getting old Devon to change his welcome image is harder than getting him to quit gambling." Some people in the bar jeered, laughing and shouting loudly.
As the dream lover of the entire planet's males 30 years ago, the face on the door had indeed made many people obsessed. Time is the cruelest killer. A beauty grows old easily. However, before this killer could make a move, this beautiful singer, screen lover, had perished due to the failure of the genetic transformation. In the first 10 years, there were indeed many people who placed the holographic image of this beautiful singer in their rooms. However, 30 years had passed after all. The tides rose and fell, the fleeting clouds disappeared. The new beauty had buried the lost beauty, and not many people were willing to look back on the fantasy that no longer existed.
Of course, the owner of this bar, old Devon, was a sentimental person. Even though it had been 30 years, he still placed the beautiful singer's image in the bar's welcome image. 30 years had passed, just like before. This was also one of the topics that the customers who came here talked about.
The person pursed his lips, seemingly very disapproving of the owner's actions. He was also too lazy to say anything more. He walked to an empty seat at a table and sat down. Everyone around him was familiar with him. Very quickly, they began chatting and did not order anything.
Silin, who was also the youth standing at the counter, took down a bottle of wine called "Smile Under the Scorching Sun" from the wine cabinet. Placing it on the table in front of the person, he opened the bottle cap and left to fetch wine for the other customers.
Without any superfluous words, the person continued chatting with the fellows around him. His hand grabbed the bottle that had already been uncorked and took a gulp.
"Ha, this wine is still the best. It's spicy enough. Good kick!"
Silin smiled, returned to the counter, and recorded the accounts in his e-book.
This bar was very ordinary, and the town it was located in was also very ordinary. Almost all the people here were at the grassroots level. In the words of the people in the central city, they were the "lower class". To put it bluntly, they were the "untouchables".
The untouchables had their own happiness. They liked to sit in bars that did not have high-end robots and only relied on human services. They liked to drink cheap but strong alcohol and talk about what happened in the day with their familiar drinking buddies. They would also complain about their superiors who squeezed them dry and gossip about someone's gossip. It was simple and beautiful.
The "upper-class people" in the prosperous areas did not understand the happiness of these poor people. It was like a successful person wearing exquisite clothes running on the road of money and power, occasionally passing by a ruin and seeing a stray cat excitedly swatting away flies. They would think, "How bored must this person be to do such a thing? They are indeed lowly beings."
What was lowly? What is nobility?
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, the seven genetic ranks separated everything. People with lowly genes were lowly people, and people with high genes were noble people. That was all.
The people in the bar, including Silin, were all rank F genotypes. On this planet, they could be classified as the lowest of the poor. People with rank E genotypes would be given the opportunity to work in the prosperous areas, and only people with rank D and above could truly establish themselves in the prosperous areas.
As for rank G, they were the most pitiful type of people. They were born with poor and incomplete genes, and the diseases they brought could not be cured with simple treatment. For example, there were severe deformities, premature aging, and other congenital diseases. Silin's former girlfriend, Hena, was a rank G genotype. Premature aging and congenital diseases, coupled with poverty, made it impossible for the cute girl to live out the most beautiful years of her youth.
The descendants of superior genes and superior genotypes would not be bad, and might even be better. The descendants of inferior genes and inferior genotypes would be the complete opposite, and the polarization would become more and more serious. Therefore, more people with lower genotypes would try to change their genes, but those who succeeded were few and far between. Apart from the huge expenditure of funds, the success rate of genetic change was extremely low to begin with, and the higher one went, the harder it would be. This was the reason why those with higher genotypes were so proud. And the screen lover from thirty years ago had become history precisely because of the failure of genetic change.
People were born to be unequal, it was just that habit would make people numb.
"Hey, Silin, Old Devin hasn't appeared for many days. He still hasn't returned from his blind date?" Someone shouted.
"Yeah, the success rate this time should be quite high." Silin replied with a smile.
"Tch —" The crowd did not think much of it, and began to criticize Old Devin's failed blind date history.
Silin only listened with a smile, and did not express his opinion. He did not tell those people that Old Devin had actually gone to fulfill his dream because he had hit the jackpot and became rich overnight.
Old Devin's dream was to find an E-rank genotype woman who was neither too young nor too old, and extract the sperm he had stored in the sperm bank long ago. It would be best if he could give birth to an E-rank genotype baby, open a small shop in the city, and live a stable life. As long as he had money, there was no need to worry about not being able to find an E-rank genotype woman, even if Old Devin was an F-rank genotype that was one level lower.
The annual water, land, and air competition was something that the people of the entire planet paid special attention to, and it was also what gamblers looked forward to the most. This was because the stakes were big enough that even if they did not win completely, as long as they reached a certain standard, the poor would still become rich overnight. Old Devin had been able to escape his impoverished status precisely because he had hit the jackpot in this competition.
Of course, the reason why Old Devin was able to hit the jackpot was mostly because of Silin. Every time Old Devin made a bet, he would ask Silin first before he dared to bet.
Although Old Devin was a money-grubber, he was still very good to Silin, otherwise Silin would not have helped him. Moreover, Old Devin had already sent the bonus for this time's jackpot to Silin on the same day.
As the night deepened, the customers slowly left.
Silin took a shower, changed his clothes, sprayed a special kind of chemical to remove the other smells, and then locked the shop door. He looked at the black sky, where there were a few tiny specks that looked like starlight flashing.
The weather forecast said that there would be a moderate rain lasting an hour starting from midnight, and there were still forty minutes until midnight.
Forty minutes … would be enough.
Thirty minutes later, Silin arrived at a factory area under the cover of some protruding eaves and sheds. He deftly and skillfully avoided the peripheral scanning, took out a magnetic card that he had prepared beforehand, opened the main door, and silently snuck into a staff dormitory next to the warehouse. After all, this was not the central city, and the security system in such a small place was neither brilliant nor complicated.
The person lying on the bed seemed to have sensed something, but before he could do anything, he lost consciousness, as if he had fallen into a deep sleep again. However, somewhere behind the person's ear and neck, a place covered by hair, there were three pitch-black thin needles inserted soundlessly.
Silin's hand swept over them lightly, and after making sure that there were no other traces left, he left through the cover of the eaves and sheds, just like before.
There was a "Heaven's Eye" in the sky, and thermal weapons would be detected by the local area detection network. If he wanted to solve things without anyone knowing, he could only use the most primitive method, because they did not have energy waves.
As a hunter, Silin could be considered to have had a hard time. Due to his age and genotype, he could not become a hunter in the open. To be more precise, Silin was a shadow hunter. The so-called shadow hunter was the collective name for the type of people who worked with hunters but were hidden in the dark, with sensitive identities that could not be exposed to the public.
From the age of 14 until now, Silin had been a shadow hunter for close to three years. He had initially chosen to be a hunter because of Hannah's illness. After Hannah passed away, Silin had been maintaining this profession. This was because he needed a large amount of money to leave this planet safely.
Five minutes after Silin left, another shadow sneaked in and took the person Silin had killed away to exchange for bounties, then split them evenly.
Throughout the close to three years of working together, the hunter had never known the identity of the 'shadow'. Of course, the hunter did not care. As long as he could successfully capture the prey and exchange it for bounties, the rest was not important. Moreover, Silin believed that the hunter he had chosen would not waste too much effort to investigate the identity of the 'shadow'. This was because Silin had put in a lot of effort to analyze all possible situations before he had chosen the target to work with.
To some of the less qualified hunters, without the 'shadow', they would not be able to complete their mission at all. They would not get any bounties, and would even lose their lives. Therefore, to a certain extent, these hunters and shadows were in a symbiotic relationship. As for the top hunters, they did not need shadows at all. Of course, hunter regiments were an exception. They were a special kind of existence.
The hunter would not have thought that the 'shadow' he was working with, a Rank D genotype, was only a Rank F genotype. No one would believe him even if he said it out loud.
At midnight, the pitter-patter of rain could be heard. Silin sat in an abandoned building, looking at the water droplets that were getting bigger and bigger outside. The rain had washed away Silin's lingering scent and tiny traces. This was also one of the reasons why Silin had chosen to act at this time.
Silin had no idea what natural raindrops looked like. He had only seen them on television, and they did not exist on this planet at all. There were only weather stations that controlled the weather precisely, adjusted the intensity of sunlight precisely, and simulated wind, rain, and lightning. Everything was man-made.
A gust of wind blew past. Through the cracked walls, Silin caught the scent of cement and waste slag. Other than that, there was also an unexpectedly familiar scent …
The corner of Silin's eyebrow twitched. He carefully identified the scent in the wind, and after confirming it, he had a strange expression on his face. He did not expect someone to use that in this day and age.
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