Translator-Rhapsodite
Editor-Pierce, Proofreader-adjective
Ji Dong froze for a second and tried to go after Annie.
“Wait!”
Rose immediately stopped him without thinking, “Let her go!”
The red-haired woman said eagerly.
“We don’t have to take her with us; let her die if she wants to!”
The Research Institute was full of monsters, and Rose thought that Annie, a weak woman who didn’t even have a weapon, would probably be dead in less than ten minutes.
But Ji Dong brushed aside Rose’s hand that was blocking his way and rushed out the door.
From the beginning until now, Ji Dong could see that Annie wasn’t a woman with an insane mind.
Frankly, everything this woman has done, from why she insisted on leading this expedition to the fact that she concealed the inside story of the vaccine, she did it for a reason, that much Ji Dong understood.
Therefore, it was not an impulsive act of suicide for her to suddenly run out. The definitive possibility was that she knew the way here. At the very least, she must have a destination that she felt she had to go to.
Ren Jianmo naturally followed behind Ji Dong.
Rose spat bitterly.
Alas, Rose didn’t remember the floor plan of the Research Institute; it was hard to find the right way back, and she didn’t think that she could get through this [Film] alive on her own.
With no other choice, Rose ran out and followed Ji Dong and Ren Jianmo with a dark face.
———————–
Annie didn’t run very fast, and the destination was not far.
Ji Dong was right behind her heels.
Annie’s long, tousled chestnut hair was as conspicuous as a flag. She took a turn along the corridor and got into a door.
Ji Xiao’niao rushed over before she could try and lock the door; he stretched out his hand against the door panel, and fixed her with a warning glare.
Annie had enough sense to know which fight she shouldn’t pick and didn’t try to resist and let Ji Dong in, as well as Ren Jianmo and Rose, who arrived later.
They saw that it was a security guard room.
On the east wall of the room, there were twelve fluorescent screens neatly arranged in two rows; all of which were live feeds from the surveillance cameras.
Annie didn’t say anything, and just jumped to a monitor screen. Two seconds later, she reached out and covered her mouth, making a gasping sound that was almost sobbing.
“He’s alive… He- He’s alive…”
The chestnut-haired woman’s feet went weak as she sat down on her knees.
This was the first time that Annie has exposed her vulnerability in front of everyone; her whole body was shaking, and tears were pouring out of her round eyes, sliding down her cheeks, and dripping between her fingers.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
“Zs rbc… Lf lr jilnf… Lf lr gfjiis jilnf…”
Pcvffv, jr Ccclf tjv rjlv, atfgf kjr jc lwjuf bo j qfgrbc bc atf rmgffc bc atf eqqfg ifoa gbk—j ilaaif ybs lc j ktffimtjlg!
Ktlr kjr atf olgra ilnlcu qfgrbc atja Al Gbcu tjv rffc lcrlvf atf Efrfjgmt Pcralaeaf rlcmf atfs tjv fcafgfv la.
The monitor screen showed that the child was in a small suite of about ten square meters.
But compared with hotels and hostels, it seemed to be closer to a single ward in a hospital in terms of the layout and furnishing of the room. The snowy white walls were covered with damping material, drabbed gray checkered sheets and duvet covers, an infusion rack at the foot of the bed, and an instrument of unknown purpose in the corner.
A thin little boy was sitting in a wheelchair. The angle of the screen could only capture his disheveled head but his appearance couldn’t be seen clearly.
However, Ji Dong was sure that this was a living person.
Because the child that was using the wheelchair slowly pushed forward in front of a cabinet, and then painstakingly leaned out his upper body and searched in the cabinet for a while.
“Oooh ……”
Annie let out a choked sob.
Then the little boy on the screen took out something flat from the cabinet, around the size of a palm, and bent over his head to it. A few seconds later, he raised his head again and put back what he had just taken out, then he turned his wheelchair and went to get some water from the tap, and drank it slowly.
——Amazing! This was great!
Ji Dong couldn’t help but admire him.
So a half-paralyzed child could survive alone for half a month in the Research Institute with a horde of monsters and corpses?
“That’s Su Lin’s room.”
Annie choked up and whispered.
“I used to come here, like now, to watch him from the monitor… I didn’t expect that he was really… alive… ”
Annie suddenly raised her head, a tearful pair of dark brown eyes looked around, and finally landed on Ji Dong’s face.
“I beg you…”
Annie whispered softly, seeming to be talking to herself, “Can you– take him with you?”
Ji Dong: “…”
He hesitated.
Idealistically, he was eager to take that child with him.
After all, it was a human life, and his heart wasn’t made of stone.
Strategically, he knew that extracting a handicapped little boy out of the room would be an exceptionally risky task. Not only would it cause extra trouble but also the possibility of putting himself and his companions in danger.
But…
Thinking of this, he turned his head to look at Ren Jianmo, trying to ask the other party’s opinion.
But Ren Jianmo didn’t say anything.
He just looked intently at the two rows of monitor screens in front of him, as if he was pondering about something.
“Heh!”
At this moment, Rose spoke up first.
She let out a sneer.
“Now you know to beg us?”
She raised her hand and pointed towards the surveillance screen, fiercely saying:
“Look, so many monsters! There are seven or eight of them on the screen! You know with your butt how hard it is to save people, right? Then you dared to ask us to die for your cheap son? You are fairly capable, why don’t you go in and save your son by yourself?!”
Annie was speechless by her scolding.
Rose did have a good point.
She had insisted on “showing them the way” from the beginning because she wanted to take advantage of their lack of information and understanding of the internal structure of the Research Institute. Ultimately, she wanted to find a way to lure them to the bottom level, and then find her adopted son for her.
However, humans were not as good as heaven. The Research Institute was far more dangerous than Annie expected, and she lost the trust of the team because of her deception on the vaccine. She could only coerce herself to be protected by others to flee all the way. It was already a blessing that she was able to survive this far.
Through a fortuitous event, they had rolled through the garbage disposal channel to the bottom floor by mistake, and what made Annie feel bittersweet was that her adopted son, Su Lin, was alive and well, but she was unable to rescue him from the room by herself…
However, when things came to a head it was too late to repent. Annie didn’t dare to argue with Rose, only a pair of teary eyes resentfully stared at her, biting her lips, and remained silent.
The only thing she could do now was lower herself and appear more pitiful and helpless—after all, the curly-haired child wasn’t a bad person at heart and may have a moment of weakness and agree to help her out.
Using her commanding persona, Rose continued to rebuke Annie, but Annie just resisted the impulse to answer back and only bowed her head and cried silently.
“Hey.”
Ji Dong watched the confrontation between the two women and looked down at his watch.
He was a little surprised to find that the progress bar had indeed moved forward a bit, and it had reached almost three-quarters of the way.
He reached out and gently tugged on Ren Jianmo’s sleeve and showed him the dial of his watch.
“What do you think…?”
Ren Jianmo looked down and was met with Ji Dong’s rounded pair of puppy eyes, and felt some amusement in his heart.
He didn’t know when Ji Xiao’niao became openly expressive before him.
Ren Jianmo pursed his lips lightly, and the corners of his lips outlined a very shallow arc, “What do you think?”
“If the progress bar of the watch didn’t deceive us, I think…”
Ji Dong came up to Ren Jianmo’s ear and lowered his voice, “This can at least show that Annie…”
He gently gestured with his chin in the direction of the screen. “And that little boy named Su Lin are the crucial keys in this [Film]…”
Ji Dong thought for a moment, “Therefore, to find out what happened in this Research Institute, we must make contact with this little boy.”
He decided then after a pause, “So, I think maybe we should try to save him.”
“Shh.”
Ren Jianmo raised his index finger at him, motioning for him not to worry, “Let me think about it first.”
Ji Dong obediently retracted himself and pursed his lips hard, not daring to disturb him again.
Ren Jianmo refocused his attention on the twelve real-time surveillance displays in front of him.
He was comparing and superimposing these images with the map printed in his mind, reconstructing them into a 3D diagram in his head.
——If they want to save the child, they must go out of this security room and go through a corridor at the front corner. The corridor was about 30 meters long and probably had some Skeleton Monsters roaming around the place…
Ren Jianmo touched his chin.
If the number of Skeleton Monsters was one or two, he was confident that he could solve them quickly and efficiently without making any noise…
——But the more troublesome problem would come later…
He frowned as he thought about it.
——Wait!
His eyes fell on the monitor screen where the child was.
“Here.”
Ren Jianmo reached out and tapped the bottom right corner of the screen.
He was so tall that he could easily reach the fluorescent screen even if it was hanging in the top row.
“This thing on the wall, is it a phone?”
This sentence woke Annie from her depressed state, she jumped up and grabbed Ren Jianmo’s arm.
“Yes! There was a telephone in his room! I remember very clearly that it was a telephone!”
Ren Jianmo unconsciously shook his sleeve and easily broke away from Annie’s grasp.
“Then, let’s try to contact him first.”
The security room had communication equipment that could contact most places in the Research Institute, as well as a summary of the internal phone numbers of each room.
Ji Dong didn’t know how Ren Jianmo figured out how to operate the buttons and switches of the equipment, but after about two minutes, he heard a “beep beep beep beep” call coming from the speaker.
The child in the monitor screen also froze at the same time, turning his head to look at the phone hanging on the wall. About three or four seconds later, as if snapping out of a daze, both hands turned the wheelchair, propelling himself to the phone.
“Hello?”
On the speaker, a timid childish voice of a young boy was heard, “Who is it?”
“Su Lin!”
Annie exclaimed.
“It’s me! Su Lin! It’s me!!!”
The boy on the other end of the call shivered, and as if in disbelief, called out a name.
“… Auntie Annie?”
Ji Dong frowned.
Although they were not biologically mother and son, calling his adopted mother, who has cared for him for over ten years, “Auntie”… This didn’t appear to be consistent with his idea of the typical mother-child relationship.
Then the child’s next sentence deepened his doubts.
Because he heard the child’s trembling voice and asked in horror, “You– You– why are you here?”
Thank you for the chapter！