Warden of the Beast World: Everyone is a Hakimi

Ye Tang squatted under the old tree in the yard, holding her personal terminal. On the screen lay a quiet notification of a deposit of 50,000 star coins—Note: Prison Zero, salary payment. Her fingertips hovered over the string of numbers, counting them back and forth three times, her lips curling into an uncontrollable smile.

The account already held tens of millions in deposits: Chi Xiong's ten million, Jing Yao's one million, Han Zhou's one million, Chi Heng's one million, Cang Ming's two million, and She Qing's one million four hundred thousand in "compensation for mental distress"—each of these sums was far larger than this fifty thousand. But this fifty thousand was different.

This was her first paycheck earned through her own work—the first paycheck she received after a month of diligently working, going to work on time, cooking, managing five top-tier Imperial furry animals.

In her past life, she received countless salaries, but a portion of each one went to her landlord, to Alipay's credit service, and to the subways packed with people during rush hour, leaving her with hardly any money at the end of the month. But this 50,000 yuan, completely and entirely, was hers. It was a monthly salary she had never received in seven years of coding on Earth, and she received it in her very first month in this beast world.

"Hehe." Ye Tang chuckled foolishly while holding the quantum computer.

The personal terminal suddenly vibrated, and an encrypted communication from Lu Yu popped up. In a good mood, she casually clicked on it, and Lu Yu's virtual image appeared on the screen—his usual white military shirt, gold-rimmed glasses, and antlers that gleamed warmly under the office lights.

But his expression was more serious than usual, and there was a very fine line between his eyebrows, which was his habitual reaction when he encountered a difficult problem.

"Warden Ye, I need you to come with me to the Imperial Research Institute."

"What's wrong, Boss Lu?" Before Ye Tang could share her joy at getting paid, he pulled her back to reality with his businesslike tone.

"There's a problem with the catnip; we can only determine the specifics once you arrive."

After the call ended, Ye Tang blinked several times at the personal terminal. Was there a problem with the catnip? Wasn't that stuff supposed to grow like crazy with just a little water? She had planted a large patch of it in her spatial spiritual field, harvesting a crop every day only to have it grow back the next day—easier to care for than weeds.

She fed Jingyao and the others for almost a month, and the five of them became shiny and energetic, their breakdown thresholds plummeting. Cangming had even been released from prison—what could possibly go wrong? Uncontrollably, some unpleasant images flashed through her mind, and a cold sweat broke out on her back.

Could she have eaten someone to death? No, when she delivered food this morning, Jing Yao was still licking his paws, Han Zhou was complaining that she hadn't put enough vinegar in her sweet and sour pork, and Ling Shou was arguing with her—they were all perfectly fine. But Lu Yu's tone clearly indicated it wasn't a trivial matter.

With a belly full of unease, Ye Tang followed Lu Yu into the military hovercar heading to the Imperial Research Institute.

The Imperial Research Institute is located on the edge of the capital. Its gray-white towers pierce the clouds, and its exterior walls are undecorated, consisting only of cold alloy plates and densely packed energy protection patterns.

The security level at the entrance was even higher than that of Prison Zero—triple biometrics, full-body scanning, and even the hair clip on her head was required to be removed for separate inspection.

Lu Yu swiped the highest-level access pass and led her through a series of security doors and winding corridors. The corridors were lined with transparent laboratories, where researchers in white lab coats were busy working, and various instruments were flashing with a ghostly blue light.

The further Ye Tang went, the more uncertain she felt. Finally, Lu Yu stopped in front of one of the doors, placed her hand on the recognition area, and the heavy metal door slid open silently.

Behind the door was an enormous plant cultivation room. A seemingly endless row of transparent incubators stood neatly arranged, each containing catnip—or rather, the place where catnip should grow, but instead, there were only pots of withered, crooked, half-dead seedlings.

Some leaves had scorched and curled edges, some drooped over the edge of the pot, and some were completely dead, with brown, dry leaves scattered all over the ground. She had killed countless potted plants on her balcony on Blue Star before she transmigrated, so she was all too familiar with this scene—this was the catnip that had died.

In the center of the culture room stood an elderly woman with a full head of silver hair, bending down to carefully pick up a withered leaf with tweezers and place it into a sample bag. Hearing the door open, she straightened up and turned around, her amber eyes scrutinizing the doorway through her reading glasses.

An Ning, 147 years old, is the director of the Imperial Research Institute and the only remaining S+ level female orc. She wore a faded lab coat with mud and plant sap on the cuffs, and her silver hair was casually tied back. She looked nothing like the head of the Empire's highest academic institution.

"You are Ye Tang." An Ning put down the tweezers, her tone certain.

"Hello, Dean An." Ye Tang stood up straight, unusually well-behaved.

"Little girl," Anning pointed to the withered seedlings filling the room, "the catnip you gave Lu Yu last time, we used the best potting soil, the most precise temperature control, the most professional light cycle, and strictly followed the standard procedures to cultivate it. We even tried different proportions of nutrient solutions—" She paused, her tone more confused than blaming, "...without exception, they all withered and died."

Ye Tang stared at the withered catnip filling the room, her lips twitching, a black line appearing on her forehead. This? Things that can be revived with a little water, and they managed to kill them? Nutrient soil, temperature control, pesticide ratios—all that effort, and it's all withered—what's the difference between this and her roommate killing a cactus on Earth?

No, her roommate survived for at least two months, but all the people at the research institute died in just half a month. For something so trivial, they made her rush over; she thought the catnip had given them something bad.

"Is it possible that this plant doesn't need to be cared for so meticulously?" Ye Tang squatted down, poked at the edge of a withered seedling's scorched leaves, her tone carrying a hint of tactless helplessness. "I usually plant it in the yard and water it every three days, and it's doing quite well."

An Ning adjusted her reading glasses, a hint of undisguised surprise flashing in her amber eyes. She had been engaged in botanical pharmacology research for nearly a century, handling no fewer than a thousand rare and exotic herbs. The more potent the medicinal properties of a plant, the more demanding its environmental requirements—this was an ironclad rule of imperial botany. Had the empire's research direction been flawed from the very beginning?

She pondered for a moment, as if remembering something, and suddenly changed the subject: "Warden Wild, the Imperial Research Institute wants to purchase a batch of new catnip plants from you, at the same price as Lu Yu last time—500,000 per plant, as many as you have."

Upon hearing "as many as you want," Ye Tang's eyes instantly lit up like two searchlights. 500,000 per plant, as many as you want—this wasn't a dream; the director of the Imperial Research Institute had said it himself, and Lu Yu was standing right there—there was no way he could renege on the deal. Only two words kept flashing through her mind: I'm rich! I'm rich! I'm rich!

"Dean An, please wait a moment!" Without saying a word, Ye Tang's consciousness sank into the space and headed straight for the spirit field. The automatically partitioned catnip field had grown like a tropical rainforest, a lush green expanse. Because it hadn't been harvested on a large scale for so long, some of the catnip had become old, with leaves so thick that you could squeeze juice out of them.

She rolled up her sleeves and started pulling them up, carefully selecting those with good appearance and intact root systems. Each plant was accompanied by a large clump of moist soil, her movements as swift as a professional gardener. As she pulled, she laughed inwardly—these things grew so fast; if left unattended for a few days, they would become a plague, even more tenacious than the weeds in the flowerbeds of the Blue Star residential area. The research institute had spent 500,000 yuan per plant; she now felt that feeding them to Jing Yao and the others by the bundle before was practically throwing money away—no, it was an investment.

After collecting enough, she faced another technical problem: what to use to hold the catnip? She had quite a few flowerpots in her space, but those were for herself, and she couldn't bear to give them away. Plastic flowerpots might be rare items in the beast world, and wasting them on these catnip plants would be a waste. She glanced at the shelves of her space supermarket, her gaze landing on a stack of disposable paper bowls in the corner—the kind of cheap, lightweight brown paper bowls used by roadside stalls for fried noodles, costing only a few dollars a stack. Cheap, lightweight, and just the right size to hold a single catnip plant with soil—perfect.

She neatly packed the catnip plants into the paper bowl, one by one, and then started carrying them out. One stack, two stacks, three stacks—Anning and Luyu watched as this little female magically produced a continuous stream of catnip plants from her "storage ring."

Paper bowls piled up one after another, stretching from the lab bench to the floor, and from the floor to the doorway, one after another. The lush green leaves stood out starkly under the harsh white lights of the research institute, and a fresh herbal scent filled the air. The entire office floor was completely covered, leaving almost no room to step.

"Wildflower," Anning looked at the crooked disposable paper bowls and remained silent for a while, "Did you use all your storage rings to store catnip?"

"Yeah, right," Ye Tang replied without changing her expression. Of course, she couldn't say that this was just a drop in the ocean of her consciousness space, and that her real base was that vast, overgrown spiritual field that couldn't be harvested indefinitely. What if she was captured and dissected for research as a monster? The storage ring was a pretty useful excuse.

"There are one hundred plants here. Deer Feather, pay up," An Ning said.

"Okay, teacher." Lu Yu turned on her personal terminal, and a moment later, Ye Tang's personal terminal popped up a notification that the money had been deposited. The account balance jumped up again, and the 50 million star coins she had earned in exchange for the disposable paper bowl lay quietly in her account.

Ye Tang glanced down at the string of numbers, her inner voice practically soaring with excitement. She was rich! Really rich! She had achieved financial freedom in the Beast World through growing grass and selling disposable paper bowls.

She struggled to suppress the wildly upturned corners of her mouth, took the last few paper bowls out of her "storage ring" and put them away. She patted the dirt off her hands and gave An Ning a standard professional smile: "Dean An, if you need anything, just contact me anytime. I'll give you more if you buy more."