They stared blankly at the green lines on the monitors, then slowly turned their heads to look at the slender girl standing next to the fallen beast.
Stabilized?
She actually stabilized him?
Dr. York had led a team of the most brilliant underground doctors, geneticists, and pharmacists in a desperate, hour-long struggle to save Asset 07.
They had pumped him full of stabilizers, neural inhibitors, and cellular repair serums. They threw every cutting-edge medical trick in the book at him.
And not only did they fail to stop the rejection, they nearly caused him to explode.
But this young girl they had all written off as a fraud...
Used nothing more than a few silver needles and a single vial of unknown black liquid.
She grabbed a feral monster by the throat and dragged him back from the edge of death in seconds.
So this was The Panacea.
The legendary miracle worker who could fix the unfixable.
Dr. York's face was a mask of utter devastation. He stared at the monitors, completely unable to process reality.
Impossible.
This is impossible!
He knew better than anyone how convoluted Asset 07's genetic makeup was.
A rejection of this magnitude couldn't just be suppressed with a single shot.
But the data on the screen felt like a dozen public slaps to his face.
Just minutes ago, he had been mocking her age.
He had called her a fraud, a product of black market hype.
All his arrogance, his disdain, his unearned superiority...
It had all just been reduced to a pathetic joke.
Silas stood frozen for several long seconds.
It wasn't until he double-checked the readouts that his mind finally caught up to what had just happened.
When he looked at Serena again, the calculating scrutiny in his eyes was entirely gone.
It was replaced by a profound, chilling sense of dread.
The Panacea was far more dangerous than the rumors claimed.
So dangerous that... she solved a
catastrophic failure that his entiret
elite
couldn't fix, and she did it
in under a minute.
Was this her true power?
The medical team who had spent the last hour sneering at her were practically suffocating on their own embarrassment.
As professionals in the illegal medical trade, they fully understood the gravity of what she had just accomplished.
Asset 07's crisis wasn't a simple chemical imbalance.
It was a simultaneous, cascading failure of a genetically altered nervous system.
Even the most advanced medical institutions in the world would have pronounced him dead.
But she saved him.
And she made it look effortless.
"The Panacea truly lives up to the
ley breathe
pharmacist was the the silence, plasteri
sycophantic smile on his face
first
"We were totally blind! We failed to recognize true brilliance when it was right in front
of us."
"Absolutely! That technique was nothing short of miraculous!"
"We are in absolute awe of your talent."
"We racked our brains for an hour and got nowhere, and you solved it before we could even blink."
"No wonder the underground network says if The Panacea takes the job, nobody dies."
The men who had been practically spitting on her earlier...
Were now falling over themselves to kiss her feet.
"Miss Serena, how did you calculate the exact ninety-second window for his neural collapse?"
"Miss Serena, what exactly was in that serum you used?"
"Miss Serena, are you open to I private commissions? I have a few high-level research projects, and can guarantee a massive payout!""