Chapter 846: A Hidden Disaster: The Secrets behind the Bear Hunt

“All the weapons the Trapping Team carried—aside from those smashed by rocks—were wrecked by wolves or bears. Here’s the inventory from the chopper.” Yang Jin handed the list, organized by Hu Zifeng, to Xia Qing.

Beasts in the Evolved Forest who’ve fought humans are wary and even hostile toward human weapons. Once they seize any, unless it’s evolved monkeys or apes who can actually use them, the rest just smash, claw or stomp them to pieces.

“Thank you.”

Xia Qing took the list with both hands, scanning it quickly. She’d already skimmed these items on the helicopter, so she knew what was there. “The most valuable thing here is the military transport helicopter. I heard the poaching team was sent by Hui Six Base, right?”

After seeing Yang Jin nod, Xia Qing pressed further. “Something’s off about this. Why did they come all the way to our base, right by the human activity zone of the Evolved Forest, just to catch a bear?”

Hui Six and Hui Three may share a border, but their human settlements are separated by two thousand miles of wilderness. For Hui Six people to come here to hunt bears doesn’t add up.

No wonder the poachers used such a massive dose of sedative on the evolved brown bear.

Thinking of that, Yang Jin’s anger boiled over. It took a sip of tea to calm down before telling Xia Qing what really happened.

“To wipe out the increasingly dangerous troop of evolved monkeys near the Safe Zone, Hui Six resorted to any means possible. The monkeys that invaded the Western Wolf Pack’s territory this spring were actually infected with evolution bacteria—because of a bioweapon disaster…”

Macaques are close relatives to humans. The evolved monkey troop is sharp. When attacked by a large group, they bolt and scatter. But if it’s just a few humans, they’ll fight back and even loot supplies.

The macaques near Hui Six’s Safe Zone have spent so long watching humans that they learned to use guns, load magazines, even operate shell launchers—and picked up how to throw darts and spears for long-range attacks.

Among them are speed and strength evolvers, who use stolen weapons to wreck protective masks, smash car windows and tires, and even target helicopters.

To get rid of the evolved monkey troop, Hui Six secretly deployed internationally banned bioweapons.

They implanted contagious, targeted evolution bacteria inside live-captured monkeys, then released them—using the infection to wipe out the whole monkey troop.

But the lab-grown, supposedly monkey-specific bacteria, after being released, ended up sparking a terrifying evolution with the ever-present fungus—Aspergillus—in the Evolved Forest.

This advanced, evolved fungus began indiscriminately infecting every species it could reach—including humans.

As soon as things spiraled out of control, Hui Six’s leaders rushed to secretly cull infected animals and treat sick humans. But something always slips through—some of the infected monkeys escaped, and the disaster spread.

The monkey carrying all kinds of bacteria attacked the Western Wolf Pack’s territory and were wiped out there. Xia Qing sent a sample to Territory Seven.

The leading biomedical expert, Fu Tianfeng, dissected the monkey’s body, mapped the genes of the bacteria and traced everything back to the real cause, reporting it up to Huicheng Base management.

Huicheng Base cracked down hard on the people involved at Hui Six, but then they covered it up—didn’t report to higher ups, or release it to the public. Zhang San was gagged. Even Yang Jin only heard about it today.

Luckily, not long after the outbreak, Crippled Wolf brought two infected evolved wolf bodies to Xia Qing. Zhang San extracted bacterial antibodies from them, developed a cheap miracle cure, and finally put an end to the man-made disaster.

Busy repairing the damage to their part of the forest, Hui Six didn’t dare use bioweapons on the monkeys again. This time, they started looking for ways to solve things that made sense ecologically.

They discovered that in the Hui Three wolf territory ambushed by infected monkeys, there was no spreading disaster. So they set up a research group to investigate the Western Wolf Pack’s territory.

One month of research later, the team concluded that besides the chopper’s chemical dispersal, it was the Western and Northern Wolf Packs and Bear Pack who made a real difference fighting off the monkey invasion.

This uncovered truth fired up Hui Six Base. They wanted to bring wolves and bears from these two regions into the Evolved Forest near their own Safe Zone—dividing up territory so the animals could serve as a shield against monkey attacks.

Naturally, Hui Three management refused to let Hui Six capture their own “shield.” Hui Six started snooping around and learned there was a two-year-old brown bear in their northern forest, already fitted with a tracker.

At two years old, the evolved brown bear would just be leaving its parents to live alone.

So they paid a fortune for access to the tracking signal from that bear.

That’s why, once the target bear left Hui Three’s Hill Sixty-One alone yesterday, the poachers showed up right away this morning!

“To avoid being caught by our base, they sent a high-performance military chopper loaded with radar and noise stealth. They almost pulled it off.” Here, Yang Jin stressed:

“Hui Six has moles in our base. They knew there’d be no combat units or troops from Hui Three in the northern Evolved Forest this morning. That’s why they dared come poaching so openly. But you and Xin Yu snuck out through the North Gate, right under their noses—caught them totally off guard.”

Xia Qing felt a chill at that. Still, in front of the brain-evolved Iron Rooster, she kept a poker face. “A two-year-old cub, sedated and taken two thousand miles away, probably can’t ever get back. Once the huge bear at Hill Sixty-One discovers the cub is missing, it’ll follow the scent to Hill Fifty-Three and realize humans took it.”

That’s what set Yang Jin off. “Section One of the North will be the target of the huge bear’s revenge. If they’re patient enough to join forces with the giant python during the next Devastation Rain and whip up a beast tide, this whole territory won’t stand a chance.”

The over-four-meter iron mesh wall that gives humans a sense of safety?

In the face of a bear that’s just as tall, that wall is nothing.

Electrify the wall to stop evolved animals from breaking in?

Never mind that electrifying it during Devastation Rain is just asking for an explosion—even if you’re lucky, you’ll never keep out a fully evolved giant bear.

Back in year four of the disaster, a brain-evolved giant bear led a pack of evolved bears and crushed Bai Si Base—a stronghold with over ten thousand people. It smashed human walls with rocks.

Now it’s already year eleven. Who knows how monstrously those brain-evolved bears have transformed by now?

Besides, the huge bear here is allied with the giant python—and probably the monk-faced monkeys, too. Just last July, they invaded Hill Fifty-Five. Even the Queen could only retreat with her wounded followers.

Xia Qing was sure the wolves lost more than Crippled Wolf and Broken Back in that fight. It must’ve nearly wiped out the pack. Handsome Huge Wolf probably joined the northern wolves afterwards.

If the bear-python-monkey alliance launches a strike during the next Devastation Rain, Xia Qing could only abandon her supplies, throw her idol over her shoulder and make a break for it with Old Goat and Er.

“Captain Yang, the tracked brown bear—wasn’t it that one the Territory Two refugee squad tortured last November in the bear cave on the Third Peak of Hill Fifty?”