A Hummer raced down a deserted highway, crushing the wild grass beneath its tires. The back bed was piled high with ornate, gold-trimmed doll cases wrapped in waterproof bags.
Di Yue was driving, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing thick arms covered in tough, resilient scales. Qi Shenggu sat in the passenger seat, propping his head against the window as he dozed off, occasionally fanning himself with a small feather fan to pass the time.
The puppeteer had a laptop on his lap, displaying a satellite map. Zooming in revealed the situation in every corner of Red Fox City. He wasn’t wearing a suit today; instead, he was still in the blue shirt he wore for work and a leather apron stained with paint and pigments.
Wangliang sat in the back row, head bowed, dozing off while clutching a glass hourglass.
The seats were spaced far apart, so Eris left her seat several times to crouch beside the puppeteer, using the muzzle of her shotgun to nudge Wangliang’s head away from the back of the puppeteer’s seat.
They had received word that on the evening of the 18th of this month, the research institute would carry out a mass destruction of thirty thousand test subjects. Today was already the 10th, and most of the test subjects transported from various breeding bases had already been stored at the Walhva Pharmaceutical Factory in Hongli City.
The destruction process was controlled by computerized equipment; it was not a simple incineration procedure. Instead, CNC cutting machines separated the test subjects’ flesh from their spines. The flesh and internal organs were ground up, then molded into chunks and dried to produce dry feed for the other high-level test subjects remaining at the institute. The remaining spinal columns are uniformly stored in active cold storage, where they are used in large quantities whenever the research institute needs to modify animal test subjects.
The cost of running this equipment through a single cycle is exorbitantly high, so the Puppet Master concluded that the research institute would certainly wait until all test subjects awaiting destruction had been stored before running the equipment in one go to handle the entire batch.
They had to reach the Walva Pharmaceutical Factory before the equipment was activated.
The night wind grew stronger, and dark clouds gathered, completely obscuring the moon. A few streaks of lightning flashed across the sky, and the muffled rumble of thunder grew closer. A light drizzle began to fall on the car windows, and fog gradually covered the glass.
Eris traced a cross on the car window with her finger and tapped the Puppet Master to get his attention.
The Puppet Master glanced at the glass, then looked down to continue studying the route.
Eris’s face, which had been twisted into a wicked grin, fell. Bored, she pressed her forehead against the glass to gaze at the pitch-black scenery outside.
Suddenly, the glass flashed. A distant bolt of lightning suddenly illuminated the night sky, and a eerie black-and-white smiling face appeared on the glass, separated from Eris by only a single pane.
“Aaaah!” Eris jumped in fright and leaned back. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a missing person’s flyer; the black-and-white face was the photo on the flyer.
Qishenggu woke up and said impatiently, “Be quiet. Don’t jump at every little thing.”
“Oh.” Eris rubbed his chin and used the light from the puppeteer’s computer to make out the text. The photo showed an Alpha in a high school uniform, with long, messy bangs covering his eyes, rebellious studs in his ears, and a row of interlocking, interlocking skulls tattooed on his throat and neck—he looked every bit the delinquent.
Below the photo were the parents’ contact details and a desperate plea: their child had run away after a fight with the family and had not been seen since. They hoped anyone who spotted the child would call the number xxxx to let them know. Unfortunately, the date at the bottom of the notice was already a year old.
The rain grew heavier, and the missing person’s flyer was battered by the downpour, flung into the mud by a speeding Hummer.
The billboard standing at the bend in the road was covered in rust. At the bottom of the massive structure was a thin crossbeam. Bai Chunian crouched steadily on the narrow beam to shelter from the rain, his white lion’s tail suspended in midair to maintain balance. In his hands, he held a stack of various missing person flyers, scanning them one by one.
“The number of missing persons has been rising over the past two years.” Bai Chunian casually folded the stack of papers and tossed it aside. He stood up and shook the rain from his tail; the crystal bell hanging from its tip emitted a pleasant jingle. He leaped lightly from dozens of meters above and followed the Hummer into Red Fox City.
Bai Chunian watched them from the shadows as they parked the vehicle near the Walhua Pharmaceutical Factory. Including the Puppet Master, five people got out of the car—all familiar faces.
Each of them retrieved a beautifully patterned box from the back of the truck, then scattered into the factory. Eris stayed close to the Puppet Master.
Only after their figures had completely vanished into the darkness did Bai Chunian emerge from the awning of the abandoned factory building. He followed them into the pharmaceutical plant, silently scaling the exterior of the corrugated metal structure until he reached the highest drying platform. There, he concealed his presence and scanned the surroundings.
The factory didn’t look like a busy, frequently used facility; much of the equipment and furnishings were covered in dust. Aside from a few offices where the lights were on and uniformed factory workers were moving about, all the other rooms were dark.
In the open yard at the northernmost end of the factory, nearly three hundred large trucks were parked, their cargo compartments tightly sealed and locked. A dozen or so security guards, each carrying an QBZ assault rifle and appearing to be at least M2-class, were patrolling the aisles between the trucks.
Two searchlights were operating inside the factory, their intense, blinding beams occasionally crossing paths. Bai Chunian observed the searchlights’ sweeping patterns for a moment, memorized their operating sequence, then rolled off the drying platform. His innate ability to move silently like a cat allowed him to cushion his fall from the height without making a single sound.
As the searchlight swept toward him, Bai Chunian rolled on the spot, rolling behind a stack of cardboard boxes on the ground to evade the beam. The moment the light moved away, he rolled out from behind the boxes, leaped lightly, clinging to the roof of a trailer parked outside the warehouse. As the next beam swept past, he quickly climbed aboard. The entire sequence was seamless; a single misstep would have given him away.
This was also why Bai Chunian hadn’t brought anyone else from the Search Division with him. Not just any agent could handle an undercover investigation like this; such missions were typically assigned to agents from the Cat Division. Aside from Bai Chunian, the Search Division included a Bengal cat omega and a snow leopard omega, but both agents were currently away on other assignments. Unable to find a suitable partner at short notice, Bai Chunian had no choice but to go it alone.
He dodged the searchlight and slipped into the shadows behind the factory building. He crept a few steps along the wall, avoiding the patrolling security guards, then slipped silently into the yard filled with trucks.
However, the security patrols were more frequent than he had anticipated. Just as Bai Chunian had spotted a truck in a suitable position and was about to inspect it, two armed guards approached simultaneously from two different entrances, their footsteps steady.
Bai Chunian immediately scrambled onto the roof of the truck and lay flat, avoiding the guards’ line of sight. It was impossible to bring a rookie on a covert investigation mission like this; executing such a mission required sufficient quick thinking and experience. One misstep could lead to irreversible consequences and mission failure.
Bai Chunian suppressed his breathing as much as possible. Thanks to his extensive experience, he remained calm—his heart rate and breathing stayed steady, minimizing the chance of being detected.
Through the metal panel, Bai Chunian faintly heard the sound of weak breathing coming from inside the cargo compartment.
Bai Chunian pricked up his ears, tilted his head, and pressed it against the roof of the cargo compartment to listen carefully for any sounds inside.
In addition to the breathing, there were faint whimpers and the sound of bodies rubbing against each other. The sounds of agony seemed to pierce through the airtight steel plate and reach Bai Chunian’s ears.
After the security guard left, Bai Chunian poked his head out from the roof. The moment the spotlight swept past, he scrambled down, tiptoed to hook his toes onto the roof, and hung upside down, his entire body pressed against the sliding door of the cargo compartment.
The cargo compartment was locked, but against Bai Chunian’s J1 ability—skeletal hardening—even or six heavy locks were of no use. With just a light flick of two fingers, the latch snapped open like wet mud.
The cargo door swung open slowly, and the sight inside sent a shiver down Bai Chunian’s spine.
He had originally assumed these test subjects would be confined in cramped glass containers, unable to stretch their limbs or even turn over. He had pictured cylindrical glass vessels stacked neatly inside the cargo compartment, the subjects unable to move or see the light—which was already the most agonizing scenario Bai Chunian could imagine.
But the reality was even more horrifying. The test subjects were crammed haphazardly into a large square glass container barely larger than the cargo compartment itself. It was impossible to tell whose head or feet belonged to whom; they were packed so tightly into the container that they resembled stuffed animals in a claw machine, A layer of excrement had accumulated on the glass bottom, and the filthy water was soaking the corpses of those who had suffocated to death at the bottom—it looked just like hundreds of locusts crammed into a single plastic water bottle.
Bai Chunian captured the scene before him with a miniature camera. He remained calm, but his lips trembled involuntarily—a reaction born of an overwhelming sense of empathy stemming from their shared background.
Bai Chunian transmitted all the photos he had taken inside the factory back to the Technical Department, adding a note: “The Puppet Masters have entered the factory. Their target is likely these immature, low-level test subjects. Security here isn’t high enough; they’ll probably succeed.”
The Technical Department replied: “Continue tracking.”
——
Upon receiving orders from headquarters, all major breeding bases packed the culled experimental subjects into trucks as instructed and transported them from various locations to Hongli City for destruction. However, given the large number of breeding bases, the destruction process would not proceed quickly.
The laboratory was pitch black. Xiao Yang sat at a desktop computer, intently watching the surveillance footage on the screen. Ai Lian’s ID badge lay on the authentication device beside the computer.
The footage transmitted from Hongli City showed Bai Chunian and the Puppet Master’s group entering the pharmaceutical factory.
Xiao Yang remotely controlled the pharmaceutical factory’s surveillance cameras, shifting the angles away from where they were. He then opened the floodlight settings, slightly adjusted the scanning path to move it away from the playground, and slowed down the scanning speed.
After completing these tasks, Xiao Yang erased his login history, shut down the computer, picked up Aileen’s ID badge from the authentication device, and walked toward the door in the pitch-black darkness.
As he stepped through the laboratory’s automatic doors, Xiao Yang’s footsteps faltered slightly. A cold gun muzzle pressed against his gland, and the foul scent of Blue Rose pheromones suddenly overwhelmed him.
In the darkness, Aileen pressed herself against him from behind, one arm wrapped around Xiao Yang’s slender waist, the other holding a gun to his gland.
Xiao Yang’s body went rigid; the ID card in his hand fell to the floor. He slowly raised both hands, turning his back to Aileen.
“Why?” Ailan rested her chin on Xiao Yang’s shoulder with a touch of sadness and asked him softly, “The people I love always end up stealing from me. You keep saying you’re different from Lin Deng, but how are you any different?”
My brain went blank and I made a typo, so I’ve corrected it.