“You definitely have something wrong with you,” He Suowei said, squinting at him through the smoke. “What kind of man lets an omega bite him?”
Bai Chunian was clearly an alpha—broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, at least six feet tall. He did not look like someone inclined that way.
That said, after giving him a more careful look, He Suowei had to admit he was strikingly handsome. Especially those peach blossom eyes. Even his voice lacked any rough edge—slow, lazy, unhurried.
With that preconceived impression forming, He Suowei glanced back at the merman sitting off to the side.
Lan Bo loosened his uniform tie, tilted his head slightly, and stretched his neck with a blank expression. There was an innate arrogance and indifference in his bearing.
Within seconds of silent assessment, He Suowei had roughly categorized Bai Chunianas a pampered pretty boy being kept and thoroughly dominated.
He patted Bai Chuneian’s shoulder earnestly. “Brother, with your skills, you could easily establish yourself at PBB. Why not consider coming to us?”
“Hm?” Bai Chunian was already crouched down, examining the floor tiles. He finished his cigar and ground the stub beneath his fingers. “The military is too harsh. I cannot stick it out.”
“A few days ago, I mentioned you to the Major. He admires you.” He Suowei switched on a flashlight, searching for hidden mechanisms as he spoke casually. “You sure you do not want to try?”
“Oh, your Storm Unit’s Major. I have heard of him. Second son of the Hongye Xia family. Puma alpha. Very strong. Top-tier.”
“Yes.” He Suowei exhaled smoke slowly. “But three years ago, during a raid on experimental subjects, he injured his arm. It has never fully recovered.” He paused. “I had just joined the team then. I did not participate in that operation.”
At that moment, the He brothers came over from the corner with their flashlights raised and reported to He Suowei, “Captain, there’s no door on the east wall, but the other three walls each have one. They look like doors, but they won’t open. It’s just a two-centimeter indentation in the shape of a door—no keyhole, no keypad. We’ve been prying at them with knives for half a day.”
“You missed one.” Bai Chunian tapped the floor with his knuckles. Along the wooden flooring tight against the north wall, there was also a two-centimeter-deep outline of a European-style arched door. “Could be a basement.”
“At the very least, we should know the question first.” Bai Chunian lifted a candlestick and walked slowly around the room, examining every trace for clues. “Right now we don’t even know what they want us to answer.”
The room was decorated in an elegant European style. A long dining table stood in the center, set with three wrought-iron candelabras, surrounded by goblets and high-backed chairs. The cotton tablecloth was of fine quality.
In one corner stood a Steinway grand piano. Bai Chunian tried to open the storage compartment beneath the piano bench, but the lid would not budge. There was a visible seam, so it did not look nailed shut. He gave it a hard yank.
A dull clang suddenly echoed from the wall. Everyone heard the unmistakable thud of something striking the wall and then falling to the ground. Startled, they all fell silent and strained to listen.
The He brothers pressed their ears to the wall where the sound had come from and whispered, “There’s someone next door. That was someone hitting the wall. There has to be a way to open the door.”
Bai Chunian was still wrestling with the bench. In his experience, anything abnormal had a reason. If so much effort was required to open the bench, there had to be something inside—clues, documents, a password device. There should have been something.
There was nothing.
Lan Bo, who had been sitting at the long table, tapped the tabletop with his tail.
Everyone turned toward him.
“P. S. E.,” Lan Bo asked. “What is it?”
Bai Chunian thought for a moment. “PSE? Psychological stress evaluator? Project support equipment? Packet switching equipment? Pacific Securities Exchange?”
The older He brother clapped his hands. “The escape room designer bought stock in it.”
The younger added, “Using stock profits as prize money to reward fans. Not bad.”
He Suowei turned around and smacked each of them on the head.
“Where did you see letters? Let me look.” Bai Chunian went to the table and leaned over it. Three oversized letters were printed on the cotton tablecloth. When they had been sitting close to it earlier, they had mistaken them for decorative vertical patterns.
“What the hell… is that PSE? Baby, this P doesn’t even have the top closed.” Because the letters were pressed right against the table’s edge, it was hard to notice that the top of the P was incomplete.
Bai Chunian ruffled Lan Bo’s hair and shifted angles to examine it. When he happened to walk in front of the full-length mirror he had used earlier to admire the blue fish mark on his neck, he paused.
“Mirror image,” Bai Chunian said.
He returned to the table, yanked off the tablecloth, flipped it over, and spread it out again.
He brought the candlestick closer to the surface. The three letters transformed into three digital numbers: 324.
Suddenly, the piano bench lid that Bai Chunian had forcibly pried open snapped shut on its own. The grand piano lid flipped open, and the black and white keys began playing automatically. The rhythm was lively, yet the melody carried a bone-chilling eeriness. It was unfamiliar—clearly an original composition, not the work of any famous pianist.
Bai Chunian found himself holding his breath. The candlestick loosened in his hand; one candle dropped onto the tablecloth. Instantly, a surge of blue flames erupted. The blue fire shot upward, lighting the entire room in a dazzling glow. The flames devoured the wall, tracing out several floating words in their path:
“Welcome, my friends.”
The wall had evidently been coated with fuel.
After burning fiercely for a short while, the flames shrank back. The tablecloth had been reduced to ashes, yet the numbers 324 on the tabletop still burned with brilliant blue fire.
The piano fell silent.
The indented door in the floor had opened without anyone noticing. Stairs were visible, leading downward—apparently to a basement.
Everyone’s attention had been captured by the bizarre piano and the towering blue flames. No one had seen how the door had opened.
“I thought we’d be heading home for late-night snacks by now,” Bai Chunian sighed. He picked up Lan Bo and walked toward the floor door. “Didn’t expect this to just be the beginning. If I’d known, I would’ve brought food.”
“If you talked less nonsense, we’d get out a few minutes earlier,” He Suowei muttered, shining his flashlight ahead as he took the lead. “324. The Major was injured by Experimental Subject Number 324.”
Bai Chunian had not known that detail. He had only heard that the ocelot Major’s differentiation level had reached M2, making him extremely powerful. The elite members of the Storm Unit followed his commands completely in combat. Any experimental subject capable of severely injuring him must have been at least in the mature stage.
“You’ve seen 324?”
“Special Operations Experimental Subject 324.” He Suowei shook his head. “No one’s seen him. The brothers who participated in that siege all said they never caught sight of him. Even the Major himself refuses to talk about it.”
“Oh, I know,” Bai Chunian said, lifting his head. “In the ATWL exam, was your AC hallucinogen taken from a hospital lab?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you take any lab reports from the bookshelf?”
“No. That wasn’t part of our mission, so we didn’t. But later, when we were hunting people down, we found one in a squad’s gear. It was titled ‘Special Operations Weapon 613—Wraith Hourglass.’ I flipped through it a bit.”
“When we got there, there were only two reports left on the shelf,” Bai Chunian said. “One A-team took the report on the Serpent Woman project. Our team took Number 324—Formless Infiltrator.”
“What did it say?”
Bai Chunian replied, “It said: Special Operations Weapon 324 has entered the mature stage and is capable of normal communication with researchers. However, 324’s thoughts are always wildly unconventional, and researchers are completely unable to keep up with his leaps in thinking.”
“Three-Two-Four is extremely gifted in the arts. His desire to attack is not particularly strong. On the contrary, his temperament resembles a dreamy young man on the streets of Florence who loves graffiti and music.”
“And there was one more note: A mature-stage experimental subject has a normal outward appearance. Their ability to express and comprehend has reached perfection, and they can control their appetite. However, some mature-stage subjects continue devouring organic matter, causing their growth stage to deteriorate into a malignant phase.”
“At the end there was a CT image—an omega with very large eyes and an unusually long coccyx.”
He Suowei looked up in surprise. “You memorized all of that?”
Bai Chunian smiled easily. “If you’ve got a brain, it’s not hard.”
“But that’s all I know. The lab report only had that much written on it. I’m guessing other examinees in the ATWL exam got more detailed files on this Formless Infiltrator. But it’s too late to go looking now.” Bai Chunian clearly held no hope of that. “You went into the ATWL to protect that husky, didn’t you?”
“Not entirely,” He Suowei replied. “Wulu’s strength was enough to handle the exam on his own. The real reason was that the Major received a hacker email the night before the ATWL. It said the sender had cracked the database of Research Institute 109 and would expose all of its crimes to the public during the ATWL exam. The Major sent us in to verify the situation.”
“Looks like the hacker didn’t just contact one faction,” Bai Chunian said.
“You got the email too?”
“No. The Crow omega from the A-team did. He’s a police officer from an international prison. I’m guessing the other three omegas were police too—Mo Chan, Sea Spider, and Bellbird. Otherwise, there’s no way they could have thrown together a team on such short notice.”
The casual conversation came to an abrupt end.
As they descended the stairs, Lan Bo clung to Bai Chunian’s neck and looked around. He spotted a crystal chandelier mounted on the wall and flicked the tip of his tail, sending an electric current through it.
The room was instantly flooded with brilliant golden light.
It was a European-style bedroom. The bed and vanity were strangely nailed to the wall. The wardrobe was fixed to the wall as well. The wallpaper was odd—it was patterned like wooden floor tiles.
The crystal chandelier hung from the opposite wall. That wall’s wallpaper was even stranger, resembling a ceiling, with European-style wave trim along the edges. The chandelier’s hanging crystals were oriented parallel to the surface Bai Chunian and the others were standing on.
“What the hell is this?” Bai Chunian took a few casual steps while holding Lan Bo. Suddenly, the light went out, plunging the room into pitch-black darkness.
The other three, crowded in the room, fell silent at once. They drew their guns and aimed at their predicted targets, red laser dots sliding through the dark.
“Relax. I just stepped on the switch,” Bai Chunian said. He crouched down, fumbled around, found the switch under his foot, and pressed it. The light came back on.
He studied the switch thoughtfully. Normally, a light switch would be installed on a wall.
He stroked his chin. “Well, damn. I think we’re standing on this room’s wall.”