The two of them drove out of Aphid City, taking turns behind the wheel.
They sped down the highway for nearly twenty hours.
The last city they passed through was Tongkou City.
On the way, they stopped at Zhengyuan Restaurant, located at the intersection of Fengcheng South Road and Hongya Avenue, grabbed a meal, and then continued onward.
Due to its classified nature, the exact location of the 109 Research Institute headquarters was blocked from appearing on normal navigation software.
But Instructor K had already given them the satellite coordinates.
Bai Chunian also had his own rough prediction of where the place was.
Back at the Pyramid Cabin, the Formless Infiltrator had duplicated twenty-eight rooms. The clocks inside each room represented the time he arrived there.
Using that information, Bai Chunian had roughly calculated that—
About an hour’s drive after leaving Tongkou City—
They should reach the institute headquarters.
The 109 Research Institute headquarters sat in an ungoverned border region.
Three sides faced the sea.
Industrial waste disposal was extremely convenient, and some equipment even used tidal energy generation to maximize efficiency.
In the minds of certain clever people—
It was the perfect location.
They ended up staying in Tongkou City three hours longer than expected.
Because Bai Chunian suddenly had an idea:
Why not investigate Ellen’s private residence first?
If there happened to be extra Promotive Compound hidden in a safe—
Or even under her pillow—
Then they wouldn’t have to go through all this trouble.
Reality, unfortunately, wasn’t so simple.
Ellen’s residence looked long abandoned.
Only the gardener remained outside, trimming the overgrown pine branches.
Lan Bo secretly avoided the housekeeper and maid, climbing into the villa to search through it.
Meanwhile, Bai Chunian disguised himself as a humble job applicant carrying a forged résumé and approached the gardener to ask about Ellen’s whereabouts.
As for the owner—
The gardener could only say she had likely gone to work or on a business trip.
After Bai Chunian pressed further, the gardener revealed:
About a month ago, Professor Xiao Yang, who had been temporarily staying in the villa, packed his luggage and drove off, looking as though he were leaving on a long trip.
After personally seeing Xiao Yang off from the second floor, Ellen had hurried back to the institute in a rush.
Something at work must have gone wrong.
She had seemed desperate to return and deal with it.
During that period—
No one else had entered or left the villa.
Ellen was a workaholic.
More often than not, she simply lived at the institute itself.
Going several weeks without coming home wasn’t unusual at all.
So the household staff—the maids, butler, gardener—continued their normal routines, thinking nothing of it.
After the investigation yielded nothing, Bai Chunian and Lan Bo drove straight toward their destination.
Once they left Tongkou City, there were no longer smooth, wide asphalt roads. The scenery changed from neatly trimmed roadside trees into barren patches of wild grass. The road grew increasingly bumpy, though fortunately they were in an off-road vehicle, so it didn’t shake itself apart.
When a silver building with a futuristic, 22nd-century technological look finally came into view, Bai Chunian pulled the car into a reverse slope and used the tall grass to conceal it.
The entire vehicle had been enhanced with Han Xingqian’s M2 ability, “Eye of the Wind.” With this, the car’s signal would not be interfered with by any instrument, could not be tracked by cruise missiles, and could not be detected by radar or the institute’s military-grade targeting systems.
The season was hot and humid. The grass was full of mosquitoes.
Bai Chunian opened the window, glanced down at the map, and patted Lan Bo’s fish tail.
The tail lit up with electric-blue light.
A swarm of mosquitoes buzzed into the car—and were instantly electrocuted, falling to the floor in crackling heaps.
“This is it. Looks like none of the public entrances are guarded,” Bai Chunian said, tucking the map back into his bag. “Did you find anything like an ID card in Ellen’s room?”
“No.” Lan Bo spread his hands. “The room was very clean. I found a weapons room, but all the weapons were gone. Only this key was left behind.”
Bai Chunian took the copper key and examined it. It looked old-fashioned and elegant, but otherwise nothing special.
“The gardener said that aside from Ellen and Xiao Yang, no one entered or left the villa in the past month. Ellen left alone, and Xiao Yang took a suitcase. So the weapons were probably taken by Xiao Yang. Sounds like they didn’t travel together.”
He casually stuffed the key into a zipper pocket and checked the time.
“7 p.m.”
He double-checked their gear and glanced at Lan Bo in the passenger seat.
Lan Bo was counting bullets in his gun one by one.
“What are you thinking about?” Bai Chunian leaned over from the driver’s seat.
“This is the place I escaped from.” Lan Bo raised his head slightly. “In nearly three hundred years of my life, these three years are the ones I can never erase. A group of so-called great humans gathered together to dissect and study me. Ridiculous.”
The evening glow slowly faded from the sky.
The distant silver tower remained dark, its windows tightly shut with no sign of movement.
He had been betrayed by his own kind, cast out, then dragged into laboratories and modified.
Blades cut into his body, but he never even blinked. He only found it boring.
As Lan Bo’s expression darkened, Bai Chunian worried he might recall the day his pearl had been forcibly extracted.
But Lan Bo wasn’t wallowing in sorrow.
He lifted a hand and rested it on Bai Chunian’s head.
“Randi,” he said, “I actually care about the way you look at me when I twist off a human’s head.”
He ruffled Bai Chunian’s black hair.
“Would you like me more if I were compassionate and merciful?”
“I only like your real self,” Bai Chunian said, pulling him into a damp kiss.
“Cry if you want to cry. Laugh if you want to laugh. Reliable when stern, cute when wronged. Pretending is just a dishonorable trick. Don’t learn it.”
Lan Bo’s lips curved slightly.
“Go on.”
According to Professor Lin Deng’s recollection, the testing chamber was located in the westernmost underground level of the institute—Level B15.
To get there, they would need either a public elevator or the stairwell.
The elevator required an ID card.
So the stairs were their only option.
They exited the car.
Bai Chunian concealed it fully in the reverse slope, then they shouldered their compact gear packs and moved toward the massive silver structure under the cover of grass and night.
“7:15. The stairwell guards will rotate shifts soon. We only have five minutes.”
They climbed along the cliffside behind the building, circling to the western side.
Bai Chunian extended his bone-hardened fingers, slicing through a steel protective window, then silently pushed it open and slipped inside.
Lan Bo followed, reseating the window and sealing it shut again with a touch—electric sparks flashed, and the metal fused back into place as if untouched.
They had entered about ten meters above the ground.
Bai Chunian landed silently, ready to lunge and kill any guard on sight, even prepared to swap into a guard uniform if necessary.
But—
There was no one.
Not only was there no one—
The entire interior was unlit.
It was barely past 7 p.m., and yet the building was sealed off from all light. The interior was completely dark, eerily silent.
This wasn’t what they had expected.
“Something’s off. Stay alert,” Bai Chunian signaled.
Even with his extremely sharp hearing, he detected no footsteps, no breathing.
It could be due to soundproofing—but at minimum, there should have been signs of life.
Lan Bo climbed the wall like a gecko, sticking to the metal surface, his tail flicking.
Blue light flared from his fishbone structure, illuminating the darkness.
The first floor of the institute was normally used for exhibitions and external partnerships. Luxurious glass display cases held experimental drugs and AI products—part of the institute’s public-facing business.
Only in recent years had IOA obtained enough evidence to expose its crimes.
To ordinary people, the institute still appeared to be a powerful, innovative tech company.
And even now—
Some people still chose to believe it.
As long as their investments brought returns, they didn’t care about the truth.
They confirmed that this floor truly had no one. Bai Chunian turned on his flashlight and inspected every corner.
The hall was fairly spacious, with wide gaps between displays. At a resting round table beside a display rack, Bai Chunian found a July issue of a tech magazine and a cup of fruit tea—already dried out. Moldy, rotting fruit was stuck at the bottom of the glass. White mold covered the surface. Small insect corpses were scattered inside and outside the cup.
Aside from darkness, the hall carried a suffocating heat.
When Crayfish had pulled the building blueprints earlier, he had mentioned that the tech tower’s exterior walls used insulation materials, with an inner waterproof vapor barrier layer. The seams were sealed with highly airtight materials. The entire structure had excellent thermal performance. The hall was temperature-controlled by central air conditioning, and the fresh air system was also extremely well-designed. Some independent exhibition rooms even used separate fan units to control indoor air circulation.
In other words, even in peak summer, a brief power outage should not make the interior feel stifling.
Bai Chunian reached the elevator area and pressed each button, but none of them lit up. Clearly, even the backup power was exhausted.
At that moment, Lan Bo returned from the wall.
“The riot gear cabinets in the corners have been smashed open,” he said. “Everything inside is gone.”
“Let’s go. We’ll find the stairs.”
Bai Chunian had already memorized the entire map of the research institute. His sense of direction was strong, and he rarely got lost in darkness—this was also basic IOA operative training.
The stairwell’s hydraulic steel door was tightly locked. A keypad was embedded in the wall beside it, but due to the power outage, the screen was dark. Even the decoding device K Instructor gave them was useless.
Bai Chunian activated his J1 ability—bone steel reinforcement. His hardened left hand punched through the heavy steel door, reaching inside to feel for the internal latch.
Lan Bo climbed onto the top of the door, hanging upside down on the wall as he waited.
Suddenly, Bai Chunian stiffened.
Something cold and rigid had touched the fingertips of his extended left hand inside the door. He clearly felt it move—testing him.
It was alive.
A chill exploded through his spine. Bai Chunian tried to pull his hand back, but the cold thing grabbed him and locked finger with finger.
The force was too strong.
He couldn’t withdraw.
Without hesitation, he drew his tactical knife with his right hand and severed his left arm at the wrist.
Blood sprayed out. Bai Chunian retreated instantly, pressing himself against the wall. The severed arm’s blood splattered across the floor and wall.
He drew his pistol and aimed at the door with cold eyes.
Lan Bo narrowed his gaze, staring at the creature behind it.
A faint click sounded as the internal latch was undone.
The steel door slowly opened.
Two black figures appeared behind it.
Bai Chunian shone his flashlight forward.
In the beam of light was a pale, corpse-like face marked with a black-and-red cross.
Eris stood there.
His right hand was still holding Bai Chunian’s severed left hand, fingers interlocked.
The expression on his face shifted into something almost delighted the moment he saw Bai Chunian.
“Oh! Bro, this is your hand.”
“….”
Bai Chunian gritted his teeth and flexed his left wrist. A new arm regenerated rapidly.
Lan Bo curled his fish tail and dropped down from above, landing a punch that knocked Eris to the ground.
“Bad luck,” he said.