Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Bai Xiaoyu's face turned slightly cautious as his slender fingers gently caressed the surface of the eggshell. His right hand curved two fingers to lightly tap it a few times.

He even unconsciously leaned in to sniff it, making a motion as if he were going to pinch a bit and taste it.

Yu Xi watched intently from the side. It was said that excellent cultivators had their own unique methods for diagnosing eggs.

These methods were usually kept secret. Was it really okay for Bai Xiaoyu to demonstrate this in front of an outsider like him?

Or was he intentionally teaching him?

Everyone who came to be an assistant at the cultivation center dreamed of learning the master's unique skills. But that depended on whether the master was willing to teach them.

Yu Xi felt both nervous and delighted. Was Bai Xiaoyu hinting at teaching him something?

Unaware of his assistant's excitement, Bai Xiaoyu stopped just before his fingertips touched his lips.

He stared blankly at the basketball-sized egg for a while before coming back to his senses.

It seemed his professional habit had kicked in again.

He withdrew his hand and looked at it.

His hands were fair and slender, with distinct knuckles and no calluses.

Most importantly, the palms and fingertips were plump and tender, glowing with a pinkish sheen.

They were a pair of familiar yet strange hands he hadn't seen in a long time.

He once had such hands, but after the apocalypse, he picked up weapons to kill zombies—both hot weapons like guns and cold weapons like swords and bows. He had experience with all of them.

Thus, his hands were covered in calluses and stained with blood.

Blood from zombies, mutated animals and plants, and... humans.

In the apocalypse, people lost their humanity. Some would do anything for food.

He remembered the first person he killed during a mission. A leader of a remote small base and his henchmen were treating the people there like livestock.

When they arrived, what they saw was a large-scale slaughter scene.

Their team killed everyone who had eaten human flesh.

Blood flowed like a river.

Thinking about those past events, Bai Xiaoyu realized how long it had been.

Back then, he had already stopped his old profession. On one hand, his sense of touch had dulled, and on the other, many of his old customers had disappeared. Without their supply of elixirs, he, as a pill incubator, had no source of business.

Pill incubator, Bai Xiaoyu's profession before the apocalypse.

In the era of declining magic, the country could not produce spirits. They were cultivators living in the modern world.

Bai Xiaoyu's ancestors were alchemists. When the era of declining magic arrived and the potency of spirit herbs decreased significantly, it became impossible to create pills.

As a result, pills became scarce. Many cultivators relied on the old stock saved by their ancestors.

Over time, the potency of these preserved pills diminished.

Alchemists, unable to create new pills due to the lack of potent herbs, gradually changed professions or gave up. The art of alchemy declined irreversibly.

However, Bai Xiaoyu's ancestor was a genius. Seeing that the potency of herbs was insufficient for creating pills, he focused on restoring the potency of degraded pills. After decades of research, he successfully restored the potency of degraded pills using less potent herbs.

From then on, the Bai family transitioned from alchemists to pill restorers, passing down the skill through generations. During the turbulent times, pill restorers changed their name to pill incubators.

Since then, "pill restorer" became less common, and "pill incubator" became widely known.

By Bai Xiaoyu's generation, only he and his nephew remained.

Bai Xiaoyu had a natural talent for judging the degree of potency loss in pills, a process similar to traditional Chinese medicine's diagnostic methods of observation, listening, questioning, and palpation.

After adulthood, he could usually determine it with a glance and a sniff. If that didn't work, he would need to handle the pill. Thus, a pill incubator needed sensitive hands to feel the texture of the pill's outer layer to make an initial judgment. If still unsure, a taste test was necessary.

Sensitive hands were also crucial for restoring pills. The temperature of the pill, the temperature of the restoration liquid, and the viscosity of the medicinal solution were all important factors that required tactile measurement.

Lacking spiritual energy, other cultivators relied on elixirs for cultivation. However, most couldn't progress far without sufficient spiritual energy, making foundation building impossible.

Bai Xiaoyu pursued it naturally rather than forcing it.

His nephew lacked talent in this area and was more interested in serving the country, so he attended a military academy.

Bai Xiaoyu opened a veterinary clinic until the apocalypse began.

His nephew, Bai Ji, was on a mission when the apocalypse erupted and never returned.

He traveled northward through great hardship to the capital, where he learned from his nephew's comrades that his nephew had been pushed into a horde of zombies while rescuing a high-ranking official.

Despite appearing gentle and kind, Bai Xiaoyu was cold at heart and cared for very few people.

With his nephew gone, he spent ten years ruthlessly bringing down the one responsible.

Later, during the apocalypse, spiritual energy recovered, and Bai Xiaoyu's mental strength broke through, allowing him to create a potion to cure the zombie virus.

Just as he was about to deliver the formula to the leader who established the new order in the post-apocalyptic world, he was assassinated.

He self-destructed, taking his attackers with him.

The formula had already been sent through three different routes.

Those were his nephew's battle-hardened comrades, who had set out a day earlier.

His final wish was for the world to return to its pre-apocalypse beauty.

In that beautiful world, there were no zombies, only birds singing and flowers blooming, with people living peaceful lives.

His only family member was still alive.

Bai Xiaoyu reined in his emotions; the potion formula should have been successfully delivered, otherwise he wouldn't have gotten a chance to live again.

Merit, for cultivators, is the universe's reward.

The warmth in his palm reminded him that now he was in another world.

But becoming an egg incubator from being a pill refiner was a bit of a stretch.

Closing his eyes, he channeled his mental energy into the eggshell. He had just discovered that his mental power from the apocalypse had also followed him here, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to easily assess the condition of the egg.

Pulling his hand back, Bai Xiaoyu turned to Yu Xi, "Xiao Xi, do we have any egg repair agents in the facility?"

He knew they had it from the original host's memory; he just didn't know if they had it here.

Yu Xi thought for a moment, "We only have one, which the district worked very hard to get approved. Master Bai, is this egg so severely damaged?"

Bai Xiaoyu nodded, "Go fetch it."

After Yu Xi left, Bai Xiaoyu ran his fingers over each egg, reminiscent of when he first learned to refine pills, feeling each one individually.

After going through all of them, out of eighteen eggs, only the largest one was critically damaged, at risk of yolk dispersal, while the others were all weak and showing signs of congenital defects. If not discovered early, more would likely have dispersed yolks.

At this moment, the system appeared: "Beep beep beep, host has finished checking the condition of the eggs. Mission completed. Rewards are now available. Please check with the system grid."

Hearing this, Bai Xiaoyu became interested, "How do I check?"

The system: "The system can merge with your optical brain. You can open the interface through your optical brain. Do you want to merge?"

Bai Xiaoyu: "Yes."

He opened his optical brain, a silver metallic sphere shaped like a watch. Upon opening it, he discovered a new world.

Combining the original host's memories and the system's prompts, he found the system interface on his personal page and opened it to see virtual grids.

Like game grids, there were currently only ten, three of which showed items. Two were dark, and clicking on them did not allow retrieval. The last bright one, when clicked, prompted a dialogue box asking if he wanted to retrieve it.

Bai Xiaoyu clicked yes, revealing a pale green scroll. Opening it, several large characters appeared before his eyes—

Egg Incubation Guide?

Expectant, Bai Xiaoyu closed the scroll, "System, are you messing with me?"

The system: "Given the host's severe lack of knowledge about egg incubation, the system has collected relevant materials to help you get started. Host, please do not thank the system. Please work hard on incubating the eggs and strive to make them hatch soon."

After this incident, Bai Xiaoyu now harbored some expectations for this seemingly unreliable system. He asked the system if randomly appearing items could be monitored. The system assured him that storage spaces were widely used in the star system, and optical brains came with a small storage space. Also, the system interface was invisible to others.

However, he did need the scroll, so he opened it to read.

It turned out that in the star system, most eggs only stayed in the mother's body or artificial wombs for seven months before birth, after which they were sent to incubation facilities.

Once incubation began, newborn eggs absorbed nutrients and gradually grew until around ten months when they hatched.

Hatched infants could take three forms: beastmen, half-beastmen, and pure humans.

Before the star system was contaminated by the dark matter of the insect race, the ratio was 3:3:4.

Now, the ratio had changed, with the birth rate of beastmen dropping by one percent. Eggs that should have hatched as beastmen were instead converted to half-beastmen due to dark matter contamination, changing the ratio to 0.5:5.5:4.

Basically, out of twenty eggs, only one would hatch as a beastman. Even in incubation facilities where the ratio was still favorable, some facilities needed hundreds of eggs to produce a single beastman.

This was related to the incubator's skill.

The system explained that dark matter could be dispelled during incubation, and excellent incubators used various methods to stop or reduce its impact, thus increasing the birth rate of beastmen.

An incubator who consistently maintained a beastman birth rate of 0.05 after multiple incubations was considered qualified. Those with higher rates were deemed excellent.

At this moment, Yu Xi returned with the repair agent, and Bai Xiaoyu put away the scroll.

Mixing the repair agent with the nutrient solution, he poured it into the incubation hood of the problematic egg.

Just as he finished, he turned to see Yu Xi looking at him with admiration.

Bai Xiaoyu paused slightly, "Xiao Xi?"

Yu Xi: "Master Bai can tell the condition of the eggs just by touching them, especially such severe cases like yolk dispersal. I remember other districts using instruments couldn't detect problems in the early stages, and by the time they did, it was too late. So every incubation facility inevitably faced egg deaths. If the death rate is too high, the incubator faces trouble, potentially losing their certification and facing lawsuits from the parents of the dead eggs."

Listening to this, Bai Xiaoyu sighed, feeling that his current situation was quite dangerous.

He still had no clue how to handle those problematic eggs.

Fortunately, the most critical one had been addressed.

The system popped up again: "Not yet, host. You haven't finished reading the guide and don't know that three doses of the repair agent are needed. One dose per week, and only then will the egg stabilize. Currently, repair agents are rare on this edge planet. Host, please try to obtain one within seven days."

He opened his optical brain again and checked the repair agent. He had the purchasing eligibility, but it cost fifty thousand credit points per dose.

He remembered that the facility's energy supply would run out in three days. Searching further, even the lowest-grade energy boxes cost one hundred thousand credit points.

And the nutrient solution was also running low. The original host had squandered the facility's nine hundred thousand credit points for the quarter to return to the capital!

Checking his balance: 0.

Bai Xiaoyu: “...”

Yu Xi cautiously: “Master Bai, do you need to buy anything? I still have over a hundred credit points.”

As soon as he spoke, Bai Xiaoyu remembered that the original owner had 'borrowed' five thousand credit points from Yu Xi, adding another debt to the list.

“No need, Xiao Xi. Go out for now and let me think.”

Bai Xiaoyu didn't stay quiet for long; time did not allow him such waste.

Soon, he went online and searched—how to earn credit points quickly.

A pile of answers appeared, and he patiently sifted through them, looking for useful information.

At this moment, a message came through on his light brain. Bai Xiaoyu opened it and found it was from the main computer.

Breeder live stream registration?

After quickly reading through it, Bai Xiaoyu realized that breeders needed to livestream the hatching of eggs daily.

This could be considered public supervision.

Various breeding centers were ranked and often competed against each other, making the competition fierce.

The original owner had received many system messages before, all of which were ignored.

Now, looking at the last line in large red letters, Bai Xiaoyu saw that he must start livestreaming within three days, or someone would come to enforce it.

Just how many messes did the original owner leave behind, and can they all be settled at once?