Translator: ThatLazyPotato
Translation Checker: Rin
Editor: DragonFae
Before opening the door of the bathroom, Bai Chunian turned around and noticed the square hanging mirror above the sink.
He stepped back, supported both his hands on the edge of the sink, and looked carefully in the mirror. When he first woke up in the bathroom, the mirror once turned into a surveillance screen. He didn’t know what could trigger the monitor to show up. He felt the mirror frame to see if there was a button that could be pressed manually, but couldn’t find any mechanism after touching it.
He straightened up, stood in a daze for a while in front of the mirror with his hands in his pockets, looking at himself in the mirror.
He gently raised his right hand, and the him in the mirror raised his left hand.
He raised his left hand, yet the him in the mirror still raised his left hand.
Bai Chunian froze. The white lion alpha in the mirror suddenly lifted the corner of his lips and smiled frivolously. “You guys are almost done for.” He gave him the middle finger with the raised left hand.
“AH!” The horrifying reflection made Bai Chunian unable to restrain himself and punched the mirror. The mirror shattered to a spider-like crack, the broken glass left a mottled wound on Bai Chunian’s left knuckle, and blood dripped from the crevices to the fingertips.
“…” Bai Chunian helplessly slapped his forehead; he couldn’t even tell whether what happened just now was a hallucination or the real surveillance screen. A slight fear and a strong killing intent spread in his heart.
Was it the Inner Demon Reflection just now? Then it should be the fake him. He should now be in a room on a different floor from his other self. Bai Chunian picked up a big fragment of the mirror, gripped it in his palm, and tightly clenched it.
The uncertainty of Rimbaud’s life and death made Bai Chunian feel uneasy from the bottom of his heart. Although he seemed to keep calm all the time, being trapped in such an endless narrow room, the sense of despair was actually eating away at the calm person’s rationality little by little.
Bai Chunian hated the face in the mirror, wanting to kill him right now.
He suddenly became sober again, and held up the mirror shard in his hand, his own shadow reflected in it.
“Will the reflection know it’s a reflection? I keep wanting to kill them.” Bai Chunian stared at his blood-stained palm. “Or am I actually the reflection?”
He touched the suppressor filled with the blue agent on his nape. There was a bump on the suppressor that could be unlocked with a chip. This suppressor would initiate a self-destruct program if it encountered someone forcibly pulling it off, injecting poison into the experimental subject’s gland.
A beautiful melody with lyrics that were hard to make out could be heard humming gently in the communicator in his ear—it was like sea anemones slowly blooming, birds whispering in the clouds, and whales singing accompanied by shell wind chimes.
Rimbaud lay in the bar sink, the water flowing from the faucet to his head. He hummed leisurely, holding the notes Bai Chunian left him in both hands and looking at them carefully.
“Rimbaud, I heard him sing before. So while getting here, I’ve been repenting on this brain of mine that has fallen for somebody else. The more I thought about it, the more difficult it became. He’s a terrifying siren; Satan sent him to confuse me. I know his real appearance is a ugly goblin. However, he doesn’t sing as good as you, really.”
The tune in Bai Chunian’s ears made his disoriented eyes gradually clear up, and his congested brain snapped out of it.
A faint muffle sound of metal being hit interrupted Rimbaud, his humming coming to a sudden halt. He looked at the ceiling, then looked around, asking Bai Chunian, “Did you hear something?”
“You mean your song?” Bai Chunian was fully awakened and rubbed his temples.
“No, the sound of a 7.62mm sniper bullet hitting steel.”
“I didn’t hear it. Was it near you?”
“It was far, at least outside this room.”
“Forget it, let’s leave it for now. I’m really confused right now and don’t understand what is going on. What are we going to do if we can’t get out?”
“I don’t care. Rooms will age and collapse one day, but I will still be here even after tens of thousands of years.”
“Such a long time, won’t you be lonely? Ah, no, it doesn’t matter if you’re here or not—won’t I not be here anymore?”
“It’s not long. However, it’ll be lonely.” Rimbaud asked, “How long can you live?”
“90 years? I don’t know, but it should be 100 years at most. Hah, I have never thought about it.”
“The days are short, sleep deeply for a bit and it’ll pass by in a flash.” It was the first time Rimbaud thought about the topic of longevity. He piled up the notes that Xiao Bai had left for him, put them on his lips and kissed them. “That was a close call.”
“Let’s continue. Once I meet my wife, I will ask him to forgive you.”
“I don’t need it.” Rimbaud said, “But I will forgive you.”
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.
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There was a dead body lying on the ground.
It seemed like Bai Chunian suddenly remembered something. He didn’t mind the dirtiness, so he crouched down and searched the corpse in a researcher’s coat.
The corpse was lying beside the cupboard, with its hands stiffly resting on the edge of the drawer under the cupboard. As Rimbaud had previously described, the corpse was wearing plastic slippers, no socks, and there was a small wound on the big toe of the right foot.
Bai Chunian lowered his body to observe. He discovered that there were a few small glass shards on the bottom of the corpse’s slippers, the glass was almost black in color.
After searching the body, there was only this wound on the toe, which wasn’t fatal.
Bai Chunian turned the corpse over. The researcher was slightly fat, around 1.7 meters tall, there was a small black mole on the right cheek, and wore black-rimmed glasses; he looked magnanimous. However, his earlobe was a cherry red, and his skin had some red spots.
He leaned close to the mouth and nose of the corpse and sniffed—there was a very faint smell of bitter almond. He could pretty much determine that the corpse died of cyanide poisoning.
Bai Chunian went through the corpse’s pockets and fished out an ID card in a card holder. He was an Irishman who worked for the 109 Research Institute. Judging from the serial number, it didn’t look like he was working alone in some department; there should be at least a dozen colleagues working in this department.
“Good brother, help me out here.” He took the Irishman’s ID card, then lifted the corpse up, propping the corpse up with his shoulder. He walked over to the fingerprint lock step by step, took the Irishman’s left index finger and pressed it on the fingerprint lock.
The fingerprint lock lit red. Wrong.
I already missed twice, Bai Chunian thought silently. There were still two more tries, so he chose the right index finger to press on the scanner.
It was still wrong.
There was only one last chance to try. Bai Chunian’s Adam apple bobbed slightly. He hesitated for a moment, then pressed the researcher’s left thumb on the scanner.
Wrong.
“… Fuck. Am I really that unlucky?” Normal people were only used to registering the passcode with these four fingers. There was only the right thumb left to try, but Bai Chunian didn’t have any more chances for trial and error. If it was wrong again, the suppressor would initiate the self-destruct sequence.
Bai Chunian held the researcher’s right thumb and hovered it over the scanner. It lingered there for more than ten seconds before he decided to let it go.
It wasn’t necessary, gambling on it would harm him.
Bai Chunian placed the corpse back in its original place, took his ID card, and went to the next room.
He went back to the infirmary cupboard, opened the drawer, and found a few boxes of commonly used medicine.
The medicine boxes’ instructions were written in English, but Bai Chunian could tell that the letters were written in reverse—all the letters were. Bai Chunian turned around and looked at the calendar next to the flower shelf; the number on it was 81.
He remembered when he had passed the infirmary the number written on the calendar was 18. No wonder Rimbaud had answered “81”, he really wasn’t lying.
Bai Chunian entered the passcode as he asked, “You should have arrived in the bathroom by now, right?”
Rimbaud, “Mhm.”
“How’s the mirror in the bathroom?”
“Nothing special about it, it looks like a normal mirror.”
“Hmm…” Bai Chunian confirmed that Rimbaud had entered a bathroom different from the one he was in. He quickened his steps and entered the next room.
The door was easily pushed open, and Bai Chunian searched around. He did put two dumbbells behind the door before, but now the two dumbbells have returned to their original positions on the dumbbell rack.
The little bit of blood on the floor had also disappeared.
“It’s reversed, the fitness room is a reverse point.” Bai Chunian suddenly realized that all the signs confirmed his speculations about the rooms.
“It seems that now we are stuck in five rooms—the bathroom is the first one, the infirmary is the second one, the fitness room is the third one, the fourth one is the dorm room, and the fifth room is the restaurant. Each of the five rooms has a mirrored room, which makes it seem like there are two floors. In actuality, it’s more like two rows of rooms with the base glued together. Now we’re standing while our feet are facing one another.
“If from the start I was on the upper floor while you were on the lower floor, we’ll end up passing through the fitness room, and I would be on the lower floor while you enter the upper floor. The reverse will happen every time we pass the fitness room, the lower floor is a mirror of the upper floor.”
Rimbaud, “Oh.”
“So what I just passed through were two mirrored rooms. So the fitness room that I am in now is a mirrored fitness room, and the next room should be the dorm room.”
Rimbaud, “Oh…”
“I have thoroughly understood what’s going on.” Bai Chunian traced the 81 on the calendar with his fingertip. “This is not an apartment building, but a free-time area of the laboratory. The researchers off-duty eat and rest here. The wallpaper on the walls is not ordinary wallpaper either. The principle is similar to the methyl orange-mercuric chloride test paper; it is very sensitive, and it is used to prevent the things they are producing or the raw materials from leaking into the living area.”
“Dr. Han said this thing contains hydrogen cyanide.” Bai Chunian touched the suppressor on his nape, the blue liquid agent swaying slightly. “My guess is that the researchers were secretly mass-producing this type of agent that quickly kills experimental subjects.”
“Do you still remember the restaurant with the pink wallpaper you passed by? The broken wine bottle most likely contains this agent. I don’t know what method they used to make it evaporate without leaving any traces in a short period of time, but the wallpaper turning pink is proof that the agent has been dispersed into the air.” Bai Chunian knew that neither Rimbaud nor Rimbaud No. 2 could understand, so he could only talk to himself.
Bang!
There seemed to be a muffled sound coming from the corner of the room. Bai Chunian pricked up his ears to listen, but the sound did not reappear. However, for those who used all kinds of firearms as their daily routine, they could indeed tell that it was a bullet hitting steel. The sound was faint because the steel was too thick, but it was unmistakable.
“I also heard that sound.” Bai Chunian became vigilant and hurried to the next room.
And as expected, the room was indeed the dorm room.
There were a few blood-stained footprints on the ground, the direction going from the combination lock to the fingerprint lock.
It looked like this was left behind by the researcher who died in the infirmary.
Bai Chunian carefully scanned every corner of the room, checking for any details and clues he missed. He inadvertently saw the power button under the desk in the corner was turned on.
“Hmm, this one seems to work.” Bai Chunian hurried his steps and went over. He turned on the screen, brought the mouse over from the right side, and clicked twice on the lock screen.
It asked for the password.
Bai Chunian took out the magnetic ID card he took from the researcher’s pocket, and swiped it on the card reader under the display screen.
The lock screen successfully unlocked.
Bai Chunian brought the computer chair over and sat on it. This computer was obviously a public computer, it could only be used to receive messages temporarily. It was not equipped with a keyboard, like the ones in a library.
Bai Chunian was an expert in research equipment and planning operations, but unfortunately he was not particularly good at computers. It would be great if Duan Yang was here, even Little Crawler would’ve been fine, too.
When he was about to give up, the desktop showed that an email had been received, the sender was: Lovelaunchpewpewpew
“Ay.” Bai Chunian clicked on it without even thinking about it. Anyway, it wasn’t a virus in his own computer, so he didn’t feel bad.
After clicking it, the printer placed under the desk made a beeping startup sound, and then began to spit out A4 papers one by one.
Bai Chunian bent over to pile up the papers one by one and sat on the computer chair to read them.
There were actually two documents. The cover of the first one read, “Detailed Analysis of IN Infection Agents”, which was actually in Chinese.
Bai Chunian flipped through it. Some characteristics of the IN infection agents were roughly summarized.
“It means that this blue agent contains hydrogen cyanide and cyanovirus. The key point is the cyanovirus. The experimental subject can only be infected via injection. They will die within ten minutes after being infected, but humans will die if they inhale too much. This is a highly volatile poison that evaporates quickly the moment it leaves the container, and disappears on its own after three minutes, making it extremely difficult to obtain evidence of it.”
Rimbaud suddenly responded, “It’s only an infection?”
“Yeah, there’s nothing radioactive in it.”
The cover of the second document read, “In April K034, it’s been decided to destroy the data of experimental subjects”, and it was written entirely in English this time.
Bai Chunian looked at them one by one. There were a total of more than one hundred experimental subjects’ profiles, and the small size of the text made his eyes hurt. He swiftly skimmed through them and was amazed at the variety of experimental subjects.
Experimental Subject 516 Pink Peppa, could produce 10,000 shepherd’s purse buns at a time, the trigger condition being that they have to consume 20,000 shepherd’s purse buns. Experimental Subject 707 Little Fatty Chirp, could make a specific target feel compassion for everything, instantly making them become Buddha and save all sentient beings. Experimental Subject 248 Lazy Caterpillar, could reduce target productivity by 90%, but it was too lazy to use its ability.
And so on.
“Ah… I can understand from here…” Bai Chunian continued to read the following content.
The last page was the experimental subject Satan’s profile.
“Eh? Looks familiar.”
Special Operations Weapon No. 535: Satan
Status: Maturity Stage Omega
Appearance: Head has two horns
Cultivation Direction: “Inner Demon’s Reflection”, construct a reflection with the same shape as the target, and completely inherit the memory of the original body. The mirrored body will kill the original body and the lover and relatives of the original body; replacing the original body and eliminating the fetters.
Cultivation Result: Failed
Seeing this part, Bai Chunian’s expression froze. There was a note on the back.
Remarks: After research, the experimental subject Satan cannot achieve Inner Demon’s Reflection. However, he has developed a new ability, the J1 differentiation ability, Mobius Torque, which can arbitrarily select a closed space for reversing, making it a reverse point. Targets that pass through the reverse point will go from a relatively positive space into a relatively negative space.
M2 differentiation ability, Future Deduction: Accurately calculate and substantially demonstrate the development of things inside a specific space. External interference will affect the deduction process.
His differentiation ability is too powerful, to the point that our existing technical means cannot control it. If it continues to grow, it may cause irreparable losses, so he will be destroyed.
Signed by: Aileen
Bai Chunian remembered that not long ago, the warden of the International Prison resigned, and even the previous assurances by the 109 Research Institute began to be unconvincing. The higher authorities strictly searched the interior of the research institute in accordance with public opinion, which was why they rushed to destroy all the experimental subjects that seriously failed to meet the regulations.
It seemed that the 109 Research Institute had intended to do the same thing this time, destroying this batch of experimental subjects as planned, but they didn’t expect the plan to fail. Not only were they set up by Satan, but they also lost many researchers.
They went through all the trouble to catch him and Rimbaud just so they could deal with Satan.
If they successfully kill Satan, the 109 Research Institute’s destruction task would be completed, their own search results would receive a pass, and everyone would be happy. If they become imprisoned in this looping place by Satan forever, the 109 Research Institute would also destroy the two powerful aids of the IOA.
But why didn’t Aileen just use the infection agent to kill them directly?
“…” Bai Chunian thought about it for a while.
Until Rimbaud asked him, “Brat, are you still alive?”
“Yeah, I’m still here.” Bai Chunian didn’t have a shredder at hand, so it was not easy to carry such a thick stack of documents with him. Thus, he clipped the ballpoint pen to the first few pages of the materials, and casually pressed the materials under the pillow of the dormitory bed, pretending to be materials that the researcher himself had read. The email on the computer had been automatically deleted. With the destruction of the email, the computer blue screened for a while and then automatically shut down.
“I’m in the fitness room.” Rimbaud said.
Bai Chunian stood up and looked toward the fitness room where he came from.
A dumbbell was stuck tightly between the door and the door frame, which was stuck there by Bai Chunian when he came.
He found that the condition for Rimbaud’s door to be opened was not that his own door was locked, but that the infrared detector in the center of the room detected him.
Bai Chunian forcefully yanked open the door he jammed with the dumbbell and tried to squeeze himself through the gap.
There was nobody inside the fitness room.
“Rimbaud, I have something I need to explain to you, but listen to me first. I have figured out how to get out of here, just do as I say…” Bai Chunian pressed on the communicator in his ear and said to Rimbaud who was in the other fitness room.
“No need.”
Rimbaud stood in the fitness room with his hand resting on the suppressor on his neck.
“If it’s just an infection,” Rimbaud’s slender right hand showed blue veins. He dug into the place between the suppressor and the neck bone and yanked it hard.
The suppressor let out a sharp alarm sound and immediately injected the blue IN infection agent into Rimbaud’s glands. The blood vessels connecting to the glands quickly turned blue and black, and quickly spread along the blood vessels to the whole body.
The onset of the infection agent was extremely painful. Rimbaud gritted his teeth and let out a low growl, tearing the suppressor off his neck bone. The torn flesh was still attached to the lock hook.
As his fish tail was recharged with electricity, the rapidly spreading venom in his blood vessels gradually stagnated, as if it had condensed, and then the black and blue slowly fell back.
The blood in Rimbaud’s body flowed with lightning, purifying the contamination and uncleanness that entered his body, and the wound on his neck healed. In a short ten seconds, his blond hair glowed, his scales returned to its original brightness, and his whole body exuded a faint soft light.
He jumped up, came back down, and punched heavily on the ground with a punch full of strength. Lightning exploded at the place where his fist landed, splitting the ground into a huge scorched black hole. He stuck his arm into the hole and fished for something.
Then he grabbed a hold of a collar, and pulled Bai Chunian out from the hole.
The two sides connected by the giant hole were two identical fitness rooms.
Bai Chunian witnessed a blonde merman with sparkling eyes and gleaming scales, pressed down on him with his eyelashes slightly drooping in a majestic manner—it couldn’t be anyone else but Rimbaud.
A stack of notes fell out from Rimbaud’s bandages and landed on Bai Chunian’s cheek. The one with the sketch of a cat’s paw was right on his face.
Bai Chunian lay on the ground, raising his hands harmlessly like a cat showing its belly. He sincerely said, “Wife, listen to my explanation about the fact that I directed you throughout to deceive me into almost committing suicide.”
Impatient as always~ Ok, now everything is clear, I was about to ask how they were walking on the ceiling xD
Thank You for the new chapter ( ꈍᴗꈍ)❤️
I thought you couldn’t do that Rimbaud. I mean isn’t that the same as cheating. Wait! Why couldn’t you have done this in the first place? I used so many braincells trying to figure this out!??!
AHG— I was wrong, AGAIN!
😵😵😵
Still confused, hehehe, will be waiting for the next chapters 😋😋😋
oh wow Rimbaud….?