Just after Lan Bo left, the lights in the room suddenly came back on, and electronic devices resumed operation with a series of beeping sounds.
A head suddenly poked out from under the lead curtain of the inspection passage. The Puppeteer glanced sideways. Eris tilted his head.
“I just went and turned the power back on. Weird thing is—the headless corpse in the freezer is gone. It’s completely clean inside, like new. No idea who cleaned it.”
“Impossible.” A thought flashed through the Puppeteer’s mind. He immediately turned around.
The corpse that Lan Bo had pinned with a dagger moments ago had vanished. Only the dagger remained, still stained with filth.
He swiftly stepped back, drew a pistol from his apron pocket, and fired at the dagger blade.
With a deafening gunshot, a round, snow-white infant dropped from beside the dagger, slowly revealing itself from a translucent state.
The baby was unnaturally white, with small bat-like wings on its back and a black, heart-shaped devil tail extending from its spine. It had no facial features—only a mouth on its face, licking a crimson tongue as it chewed on the last fragment of flesh in its mouth.
Its bullet wound slowly healed as it crawled back to the dagger, licking the blade clean with its small tongue, savoring it as it cleaned away every trace of blood and flesh.
Only then did the Puppeteer realize: from the moment they entered the building, there had been no bodies, no blood, not even fingerprints in places where people should have worked—all of it had been consumed and cleaned by this creature.
——
Lan Bo followed Bai Chunian’s call, crawling toward him. Bai Chunian was waiting and waved him over. “Wife, come help me.” As he spoke, he turned around.
“A.” Lan Bo stopped abruptly.
On Bai Chunian’s back lay a snow-white infant, sleeping peacefully on his shoulder. Bai Chunian seemed not to notice it at all and continued trying to push aside the tangled vines blocking the exit.
Lan Bo crawled over along the wall, reaching out to pick up the white infant on Bai Chunian’s shoulder—but his fingers passed straight through it. He couldn’t touch it.
Bai Chunian turned back in confusion. “What are you doing? Help me pull these vines apart.”
“There’s a white child on your shoulder,” Lan Bo said truthfully. “I can’t touch it.”
A chill ran down Bai Chunian’s spine. He shook himself hard. “Is it still there?”
“It’s still there.”
Bai Chunian slowly turned his head. A white infant’s crown came into view over his shoulder.
The baby noticed it was being watched and slowly lifted its head, its featureless face staring blankly at Bai Chunian.
“—!” Bai Chunian’s fur bristled again. He darted around wildly, unable to shake it off no matter what. Lan Bo calmly followed his movements, turning his head left, right, up, and down as he watched him scramble through the air. As the saying in How to Care for Kitten Cubs goes, kittens really do tend to panic and launch themselves into the air when stressed.
In the end, Bai Chunian drew the pistol from his thigh holster, racked it smoothly, and fired backward without hesitation.
The infant was blasted away by the impact, slammed into the wall, and slid down like a lump of batter. It reformed itself on the ground, its bullet wound slowly healing as it absorbed the embedded projectile into its body.
The infant rubbed its bruised head and toddled off, making incoherent baby-like sounds.
“…Where did this little thing even come from?” Bai Chunian crouched down to examine it. The creature had no face—just a smooth white head with two small pointed devil horns. Above its tiny butt, the coccyx extended into a thin black tail, ending in an inverted heart shape.
He tried to pick it up, but his hand passed straight through it. Its body was intangible—impossible to touch.
“When did it even climb onto me? I didn’t feel anything at all.” Bai Chunian rested his chin on his gun, thinking. He entered the infant’s external traits into his watch, but no matching experimental subject data was found.
It couldn’t be helped—there were many unfinished experimental subjects at the institute headquarters that were not yet catalogued. Not finding records was normal.
Lan Bo crawled down the wall and blocked the infant’s path. The little thing paused briefly, then changed direction and kept crawling, its stomach growling loudly.
“It has no aggression,” Lan Bo said. He very much wanted to touch it, but his hand passed straight through its body every time. “It’s hungry.”
The infant crawled to a sterilization cabinet and sniffed the scent of corpses inside. Then it laboriously climbed up, its small limbs working hard. The closed cabinet couldn’t stop it—it squeezed through the seam in the door as its body deformed, hugging the decaying corpse and opening its mouth.
Its crimson mouth and tongue contrasted sharply with its snow-white body as it devoured the corpse with apparent satisfaction. It slurped away the rotting bodily fluids inside the cabinet. In less than a moment, the corpse inside had completely vanished. Everything else remained intact, as if nothing had changed.
Lan Bo sat outside the cabinet door, chin in hand, watching it. “Cute.”
After finishing a corpse, the infant squeezed back out through the gap, flopped onto the ground, its face squashed flat for a moment before slowly reforming. Then it crawled toward the next body.
From the corner of his eye, Bai Chunian noticed a glass specimen cabinet against the wall containing a heavily obese woman and instinctively walked over.
Her body was extremely bloated, almost like a sumo wrestler’s. Her facial features were still faintly recognizable as attractive, but distorted by excess fat. On her abdomen was a neatly stitched horizontal incision from a cesarean section.
A digital screen in the lower-left corner continuously scrolled information about the specimen. According to it, the woman’s name was Marielune, gland type White Mushroom. She had been a sanitation worker in life. During pregnancy, she developed a rare multiple-fetus condition and traveled from a rural town to a central city hospital for further examination.
The institute secretly reached a deal with the hospital leadership and, citing insufficient medical capability, transferred Marielune to the 109 headquarters.
Bai Chunian also learned that the trainee responsible for her transformation experiment was a subordinate of Ellen, named Renault.
At the end of the specimen description, Renault proudly left a note:
“Thanks to my mentor Ellen for giving me this rare opportunity for practice. I dedicate my work ‘Experimental Subject 6125: Little Cleaner,’ aiming to cleanse the earth’s filth and make our home cleaner and more beautiful.”
“Fantastic. What a great project.” Bai Chunian sneered.
“Hey! This brat won’t come off my head no matter what I do.” Eris strode over from the other end of the inspection passage, muttering as he walked. On the way, he was blocked by another crawling infant, which he kicked away while grumbling, “Why is there another one here?”
The infant was kicked into the wall, slowly sliding down into a puddle of white mush, then reformed back into its baby shape on the ground.
“Oh, I see.” Bai Chunian quickly reached out and grabbed the little thing that had climbed onto Eris’s head. This time, his hand did not pass through—it was solid.
“Experimental Subject 6125, Little Cleaner. Its body is a non-Newtonian fluid. It only manifests physically when subjected to strong impact. The one that probably ate my severed hand earlier was it too. I must’ve accidentally hit its head when I entered.”
He tested it: slow gentle stroking passed through its body, but a quick slap produced a clear smack sound and revealed a soft, tangible texture.
“As for why it keeps climbing onto your head… maybe it thinks your porcelain skull is full of trash.”
“Get lost.” Eris brushed his hair disdainfully.
Lan Bo had also mastered how to pick it up—if he grabbed quickly, he could hold it properly.
“I’m naming it Newton.” Lan Bo said, pressing his face against the little devil-horned creature, then tossing it up and catching it again.
Bai Chunian tossed another bat-winged one into Lan Bo’s arms. “This one’s Galileo for you too.”
“We should keep moving deeper. Something happened here—experimental subjects escaped, researchers were killed despite resistance. This is a serious incident for the institute.”
The Puppeteer walked over from the other end of the room, examining the specimen cabinets as he went, speaking slowly. “I checked the previous room. There were indeed indentations behind the door and friction marks on the ground. We can confirm there are other lifeforms in this building besides us, moving throughout the structure.”
“Let’s pull these vines apart first,” Bai Chunian said, grabbing a thick vine and pulling it leftward. Eris lazily walked over. “Move aside, lucky cat. Without removing your collar, you’ve got no strength at all.”
Eris pushed Bai Chunian aside and lightly hooked his ceramic fingers into the gaps of the vines, pulling hard in opposite directions.
His ceramic joints rolled smoothly with his movement; his muscles stretched as if alive despite being porcelain.
The sturdy vines were forcibly torn open into a gap. Bai Chunian tilted his chin, signaling for the Puppeteer to go first. Eris frowned. “What are you doing? You go first.” Then he looked back at the Puppeteer. “Nyx, you go behind me.”
“Quit it. I’ll go first.”
Lan Bo crawled in ahead of them, and Bai Chunian followed right behind.
After passing through the door, it felt as if they had entered a primitive jungle filled with drooping banyan vines. The entire room was overrun with tangled roots and branches. Golden flowers hung from the vines, and some fruits had already ripened—large, translucent, golden fruits hanging upside down from the branches, each nearly twenty centimeters in diameter.
“This is that melon. Not bad.” Lan Bo plucked one down, split it open, revealing golden, jelly-like flesh. He took a bite—crisp, sweet, and juicy.
But the vine-choked room also reeked of corpse rot. There was no time to take in the full layout—what they saw first were bodies scattered everywhere.
“Don’t eat that…” Bai Chunian quickly counted the corpses. Thirty-two researcher bodies inside, plus five outside—thirty-seven headless corpses in total. Then he looked up at the fruits hanging from the vines and counted again.
Thirty-seven fruits.
“Wife, that’s not melon. Those are their heads.”
Lan Bo ate even more happily.
——
Bai Chunian bent down and searched the bodies for clues. On one of them, the chest name tag read “Renault,” and there was an ID card in his pocket.
He took the card and stuffed it into his pocket, then kicked the corpse lightly. “Go back home and be an intern there.”
The Puppeteer was flipping through a document rack. The vines had grown wildly out of control, knocking the entire shelving unit over. Files were scattered across the floor.
He picked up a stack and read it under the light. Bai Chunian came over and took one as well.
Most of the documents detailed “cooperative projects” between the 109 Research Institute and various national powers—reframing experimental bio-weapons trade as “technological product import and export.”
It was easy to understand: once a country possessed such powerful weapons, others would inevitably try to acquire the same level of armament to avoid falling behind. From there, competition escalated into accumulation, mutual deterrence, and suppression. The institute had already become the biggest winner.
Unfortunately, the institute had not existed for long—or rather, not long enough for Ellen. If that ambitious woman were given more time to develop it, experimental subject trade would eventually begin consuming small nations’ oil and mineral resources. Combined with the institute’s pharmaceutical R&D and weapons technology, nothing would easily be able to shake Ellen and her 109 empire.
“I like this crazy woman,” the Puppeteer remarked. “It seems our goals align, though cooperation is still impossible. Intelligence does not bring disaster. Disaster always comes from those who think they are intelligent, and from ambition mismatched with intelligence.”
“What’s this?” Bai Chunian picked up half a document from the ground.
Experimental Subject No. 0520
Codename: Brainmelon Vine
Body: Banyan Tree Omega
Development Direction: Purification (consume all visible ‘waste’ and bear edible fruit)
Result: Failure. It developed unexpected violent aggression, consuming the heads of all living things within its line of sight—even white mice and fruit flies.
Decision: Termination approved but not executed; compressed into seed form and stored as a specimen display.
A scraping sound suddenly came from right behind them.
Bai Chunian reacted instantly, leaping away. The ground where he had stood erupted as a vine burst upward. At its tip bloomed a golden flower whose center was lined with sharp, grinding teeth, opening and closing like a meat grinder.
The Puppeteer swapped positions with Eris using his chess-piece substitution ability. The rapidly growing vines wrapped around Eris’s limbs, but he drew a bone blade and severed them cleanly.
“Whatever was blocking the door earlier was probably this tree,” Bai Chunian said, leaping onto the top of a document rack. Vines shot after him; he flipped to another rack, moving fluidly to avoid debris and tendrils.
“We couldn’t push it open, but Lan Bo opened it with one shove.”
The Puppeteer looked up. “It’s afraid of electricity.”
Bai Chunian tilted his chin toward Lan Bo. Lan Bo raised his tail high and slammed it into the ground.
Blue lightning spread outward in a spiderweb pattern.
The Puppeteer quickly formed a web-like barrier under his feet for insulation, but the vines still writhed beneath the shock, throwing him off balance against the wall.
Bai Chunian and Eris were also destabilized, though they managed to stay upright as debris rained down from above.
After a crackling burst of electricity, the vines recoiled in pain, retreating like a tide. Their tips were charred black and smoking.
But something else was affected as well.
From the walls outward, countless white infants began to appear—covering the entire surface, climbing across walls, racks, and floors like a living, writhing white beach.
“Shit.” Bai Chunian glanced at his arm. Two or three infants clung to it, crawling; his legs were covered in over a dozen more. Looking at Eris and the Puppeteer, both were already completely swarmed.
They had always been there.
——
The vines tried again to surge forward, refusing to give up, but Lan Bo gathered lightning into his tail tip a second time and slammed it down.
“White!” he let out a deep, low roar from his throat.
An expanded spiderweb of lightning exploded outward. The force threw the infants across the floor, while electric sparks erupted across the vines. The vegetation convulsed violently and retreated completely, temporarily unwilling to approach again.
Eris muttered in confusion, “White? The color white?”
The Puppeteer corrected quietly, “Not English. It’s merfolk language—‘purge everything.’ I studied it after our first encounter with Lan Bo.”
The snow-white infants clinging to the walls and ceiling liquefied and dripped down, then reformed into their baby shapes. They toddled over to the rotting headless corpses and began chewing them in small, content bites.
They numbered in the thousands; their devouring power was astonishing, and in just a few minutes they had completely swallowed the more than thirty corpses in the room.
Eris pinched his nose and shouted, “It’s shitting!”
The little babies excreted a green substance, but there was no odor. The Doll Maker brushed off the little imps crawling on him and squatted down to examine their excrement.
This pale green excrement was being rapidly absorbed by the roots of the vines that had just been driven back by the electric shock.
“These little imps really seem to have no aggression; only corpses attract them. They can rapidly break down organic matter to provide nutrients for plants. The conversion speed is astonishing.” The Doll Maker stood up.
“Is it useful to you?” Seeing the Doll Maker’s interested expression, Eris quickly bent down and picked up two little babies, stuffing them into his leather apron pocket. “Take a few back.”
“They’re mushroom spores.” Bai Chunian suddenly realized. “They’re all the children of that pregnant multiple-birth woman in the specimen cabinet outside.” His body was still covered with white little imps; no matter how he brushed them off, they kept climbing back on—endlessly.
Lan Bo crawled over, bit Bai Chunian’s waistband, and climbed onto the bookshelf, shaking off the little babies that clung to him from above.
“The central elevator is blocked by vines. Shock her again and drive her back once more.” Bai Chunian hung from the bookshelf like a cat, turning his head to look at the elevator entrance sealed by the brain-vine across the room.
Lan Bo shook his dimming fish tail. “Charging. Need two minutes.”
“While the vines haven’t recovered yet, I think we’ll have to pull out its roots to completely get rid of it.” Bai Chunian kicked off and swung from the top of the bookshelf toward the doorway, squeezing through the gap between vines that were about to seal it shut again.
Once through this door, it felt like entering a primitive jungle full of hanging banyan vines. The entire room was covered in creeping vegetation, vines draped everywhere, with golden flowers hanging from them. Some fruits had already ripened, their golden, translucent pulp hanging heavily from the branches, each about twenty centimeters in diameter.
“This is that kind of sweet melon. Pretty good.” Lan Bo plucked a fruit, split it open, revealing golden jelly-like flesh. He took a bite—crisp, sweet, and full of juice.
Inside the vine-blocked room, a thick stench of corpses lingered. Before they could properly observe the layout, they immediately saw bodies of research staff scattered across the floor.
“Don’t eat anymore…” Bai Chunian silently counted the corpses on the ground—thirty-two. Adding the five outside, that made a total of thirty-seven headless corpses. And the fruits hanging from the vines—Bai Chunian counted them one by one.
Thirty-seven.
“Wife, those aren’t sweet melons. Those are the researchers’ heads.”
Lan Bo ate even more happily.
——
Bai Chunian bent down to search the corpses for clues and found that one of the uniforms had the name tag “Reynolds.” There was also an ID card in his pocket.
Bai Chunian put the card away and kicked the corpse, muttering coldly, “Go back to your hometown and be an intern.”
The Doll Maker was flipping through the document shelves. Because the vines had overgrown wildly, the entire wall of shelves had been overturned, and documents were scattered everywhere.
He picked up a stack and read it under the light. Bai Chunian came over and also took a copy.
Most of the documents described the “cooperation” between the 109 Research Institute and various national powers, beautifying the trade of experimental bio-weapons into import-export business of technological products.
This was easy to understand: once a country possessed such powerful weapons, other countries would inevitably strive to obtain the same level of weaponry in order not to fall behind. After obtaining them, they would pursue even greater quantities, mutually restraining and pressuring each other, while the research institute had already become the biggest winner.
Unfortunately, the institute had not existed for long enough—or rather, not enough time had been given to the ambitious woman, Ailian. If she were allowed to continue rapidly developing the institute, experimental subject trading would eventually begin to devour small countries’ oil and mineral resources. Combined with the institute’s powerful drug development and weapons technology, nothing would be able to easily shake Ailian and her 109 empire.
“I like this crazy woman.” The Doll Maker remarked. “We seem to share the same goal, though we still can’t cooperate. Intelligence doesn’t bring disaster; disaster is always brought by those who think they are intelligent, and by ambition mismatched with intelligence.”
“What is this?” Bai Chunian picked up a torn half-page experimental report from the ground.
Experimental Subject No.: 0520
Codename: Brain Vine
Body: Banyan Tree Omega
Development Direction: Purification (devour all visible ‘trash’ within sight range and produce edible fruit.)
Result: Failure. She developed unexpectedly strong aggression, devouring all living beings within sight range—including white mice and even fruit flies.
Decision: Destroy. Not approved. Compressed into a seed and placed in a specimen cabinet for display.
From behind them, a scraping sound suddenly came very close.
Bai Chunian was the first to react. He spun around and jumped away just as a vine shot up from beneath his original position. A golden flower bloomed at the tip, and its center was a mouth full of sharp teeth opening and closing like a meat grinder.
The Doll Maker switched positions with Eris using a chess-piece substitute, and the rapidly growing vines wrapped around Eris’s limbs. He drew out a bone blade from his leg and cut them apart.
“The thing that blocked the door earlier was probably this tree.” Bai Chunian leapt onto the top of the document shelf. The vines chased after him, and he flipped again to another shelf, evading debris and vines with silent precision.
“We couldn’t push the door, but Lan Bo opened it easily.”
The Doll Maker looked up. “It’s afraid of electricity.”
Bai Chunian tilted his chin toward Lan Bo. Lan Bo raised his fish tail high and slammed it down. Blue lightning cracked outward in a spiderweb pattern centered on him.
The Doll Maker quickly formed a web-like barrier beneath his feet for insulation, but the vines still shifted, causing him to lose balance and slam into the wall.
Bai Chunian and Eris were also thrown off balance; although they could keep their footing, falling debris from the shaken vines still rained down on them.
After a burst of electric crackling, the vines recoiled like a tide, their tips scorched black and smoking.
But in this seemingly empty room, there was more than just that tree.
From the walls outward, dense white babies began to appear, covering the entire wall, shelves, and floor. They wriggled upward like a moving white beach.
“Fuck.” Bai Chunian looked at his arms—two or three little white imps clung to them, more crawling up his legs. Eris and the Doll Maker were already completely covered.
They had always been there.