Chapter 407: Chapter 397: Reproduction

Ten minutes later, Tang Mo was in the conference room, where everyone was already assembled. There were even more people present than last time.

After all, the current plan was going so smoothly, but they still hadn’t found a solution for the problems to come. The base’s leadership had formed a new think tank, hoping to face the difficulties ahead by pooling their collective wisdom.

After all, the light of hope was shining so brightly now; no one wanted to give up halfway.

As all eyes turned to Tang Mo once more, she pulled forward the middle-aged man who had been cowering beside her.

"Tell them what you just told me."

The man couldn’t stop his body from trembling. Not everyone could remain composed when faced with so many powerful presences.

Tang Mo was accustomed to such situations, but the man clearly was not.

But this was a rare opportunity—a chance to meet a benefactor and see the leadership in person. The man knew he had to treasure it.

He did his best to control his emotions, keeping his voice steady as he said everything he needed to say.

It turned out that the man had been a butcher back in the days of peace. After the apocalypse began, he had holed up in his little house, never daring to venture out due to his timid nature.

Later, after watching everyone else take to the streets to kill mutant beasts, seeing the bait become worthless and the beasts themselves being hunted down by the masses, he finally worked up the courage to join in.

After trading for food at the base just once, he figured out the secret behind the meatballs.

Though he was timid, he had sold meat for many years and understood the value of Exotic Beast Meat.

Once he started butchering the beasts and preparing the meat himself, his life improved considerably.

But everything changed when he was secretly dissecting a mutant beast in his house.

Through trial and error, he had learned that the best meat was along the mutant beast’s spine. But since every hunt required immense courage, he wanted to harvest as much meat as possible from each one.

But as he was carefully dissecting it, he suddenly discovered a litter of young inside the mutant beast’s belly!

He was certain that the nest of fully-formed creatures were the mutant beast’s young. There were a full seventeen of them—a reproductive rate rarely seen even in the animal kingdom.

Mutant beasts had no reproductive organs, and thus no ability to reproduce. This was a fact known to everyone.

With the number of mutant beasts dwindling, it seemed that through everyone’s combined efforts, the world would soon be cleansed of them.

And now, to discover that these mutant beasts possessed such a powerful reproductive ability... it was undoubtedly a devastating blow to humanity.

The man worried that he had been mistaken, or that it was just a massive coincidence.

He summoned his courage, hunted a few more mutant beasts, and dissected them meticulously, not missing a single fiber of muscle tissue.

Although he didn’t find young in any of the other beasts, he did discover something even more terrifying.

The mutant beasts did, in fact, have reproductive organs. They were just hidden deep inside their bodies, so deep that perhaps even the beasts themselves weren’t aware of them.

As for the one he’d caught carrying young, he guessed it had been injured and fled, then encountered another injured beast, and through some strange twist of fate...

What was even more astonishing was that every mutant beast had two different sets of organs in its body. In other words, there was no distinction between male and female—they were hermaphrodites.

The man knew exactly what this discovery meant. Their current way of life had been too hard-won to lose.

That was why he wanted to report this news to the organization he trusted most, while the situation could still be brought under control.

But he hadn’t found an opportunity for the longest time—not until he met Tang Mo.

After the man finished speaking, the conference room once again fell into a dead silence.

Or perhaps, it had been quiet the whole time. With every sentence the man spoke, everyone’s brows furrowed deeper, their expressions growing more and more grave.

They had been holding out hope that Tang Mo had called them here today to deliver good news. They never expected to hear such dreadful news.

"So, you’re saying that even if only a few scattered mutant beasts are left, as long as we don’t wipe them out completely, the moment they unlock their own reproductive functions, the world will revert to the way it was before."

No one else dared to speak. The first to break the silence was, of course, Yang Jie.

"That’s right," Tang Mo nodded.

’It’s just like cockroaches. As long as you don’t eliminate them completely, it doesn’t matter how many you kill. If there are any survivors, they’ll quickly come surging back by the thousands, like a plague of locusts.’

Even if humanity no longer feared the mutant beasts, anything that proliferated to plague-like proportions would be a devastating force.

Everyone fell silent again. No one knew when the mutant beasts would awaken their reproductive functions. It was like a time bomb, its countdown ticking away over the heads of all humankind.

"Actually, this isn’t entirely a bad thing..."

Tang Mo said.

’Not a bad thing? Could there possibly be anything worse than this?’

Everyone looked up, waiting to hear what she would say next.

"You’ve all been worried, right? But with the emergence of their reproductive abilities, doesn’t this give you the possibility of farming them? Where else are you going to find livestock that’s so easy to raise and reproduces in such numbers? Isn’t this the perfect, inexhaustible food source for humanity?"

Unlike everyone else, when Tang Mo learned that the mutant beasts could reproduce, her first reaction was, ’This is great!’ They wouldn’t have to worry about food anymore.

’These mutant beasts can survive on anything. They don’t get sick, they’re hard to kill, and once they’re in that docile state, they just spin in circles. Could there be any better livestock to raise for meat?’

"You’re saying we should farm mutant beasts? Let them keep reproducing?"

The idea was so audacious that another one of the base’s leaders couldn’t help but exclaim.

Their base had actually kept live mutant beasts before, but only as a reserve food supply that would eventually be turned into meatballs.

The idea of letting these mutant beasts breed unchecked within their base, raising them from birth... it was a terrifying thought.

’But then again...’

’Maybe it could work?’

"What’s the matter? Is there a problem? As for the mutant beasts out in the world, we still have time, don’t we? How can you be so sure humanity can’t hunt them to extinction?"

’These people have been frightened by the apocalypse for too long,’ Tang Mo thought. ’Their thinking has become so narrow. They always jump to the most pessimistic, negative conclusions and have no faith in humanity.’

In truth, Tang Mo had already considered the matter from every angle. No matter how she looked at it, this was a huge blessing—a development with countless benefits for humanity and not a single drawback.

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