Translator: Khun & Kii
Editor: DragonFae
After crossing over the caved-in floor that was twenty meters wide, they moved away from the light of the testing area and returned to darkness.
Under the dim lighting, Puppet Master could still clearly see Bai Chunian’s current condition. He was lying on the ground, and although both his hands were holding Rimbaud in a protective posture, his lion ears popped out uncontrollably from the mental shock, clinging to his head. His pupils were dilated, and he was gasping for air with his mouth slightly opened; this was a sign of stress.
And the only thing nearby that could cause him to go into stress shock was only—Puppet Master looked around, all that could be seen was a fleeting black shadow in the dim environment—a white research rat. Puppet Master had worked with them everyday at medical school until he graduated.
Seeing him looking like he had lost his soul, Puppet Master couldn’t laugh, though. He observed Rimbaud’s skillful and ordinary movements and expression while he caressed and comforted Bai Chunian. This seemed like a habit developed years ago.
Rimbaud was indifferent toward others. He kneeled on the ground and held Xiao Bai in his arms. Bai Chunian buried his head and hugged him for a while. He quickly collected himself, and acted as if nothing had happened. He raised a hand, pulled up Rimbaud’s hair, bit off the small blue plastic fish hair tie on his wrist, and tied Rimbaud’s hair behind his head.
“I’m fine. I just fell down and was dizzy.” Bai Chunian’s face and Rimbaud’s cheek were very close to each other, they would rub against each other from time to time.
“Is that so? I picked up something, come and look.” The sound of footsteps stopped near them, and Puppet Master bent down slightly. He was holding something metal, let go of it, and the thing fell. It landed next to Bai Chunian’s feet with a clatter.
Bai Chunian heard the sound and turned around. He took a look and his pupils immediately shrank. Like a severely frightened cat, his fur stood up and he bounced off the ground.
Rimbaud was frightened by his sudden reaction. He turned around and glanced at the thing which fell on the ground. They were medical forceps that were much larger than regular models. To be precise, it was a beast nail tool.
“The shadow left during the larvae stage will form a conditioned reflex that lasts for a long time.” Puppet Master described calmly, “After a little testing, whether the degree of closeness of the experimental subject is inversely proportional to the damage suffered in childhood, it looks not to be the case. It seems that adult personality depends more on nurture than innate genes.”
“Get lost.” Rimbaud raised his eyes and looked sharply at Puppet Master. He picked up the medical forceps and grasped it in his palm. An electric current surged from his palm, and the steel turned red and melted due to electricity. The molten iron flowed to the ground and emitted hot smoke, which slowly solidified on the ground.
“Are you okay?” He hurriedly went next to Bai Chunian and gently patted him on the back. Rimbaud had lived for a long time, living on this world for almost three hundred years. He was already used to the pains and fears. However, Xiao Bai was different—he was still a blank paper when he was born, but was crumpled and torn.
“I’m fine.” Bai Chunian held the edge of the table in the center of the room with both hands, and he shook his head to calm himself.
Rimbaud lightly rubbed his ears, and said some comforting words in his ear.
Bai Chunian’s eyes turned red, and he couldn’t help but clench his fist, his fingers aching.
Rimbaud wrapped him from behind, gently putting a hand on his shoulder, with the other hand rubbing his belly.
Eris laughed happily at an inappropriate timing. He placed a hand on Bai Chunian’s other shoulder and laughed out loud. “Da-ge, you’re such a weakling.”
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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“Empathize.” Puppet Master reprimanded him in a low voice.
“Got it, got it~” Eris awkwardly put away his taunting expression and walked back to Puppet Master boredly. He grabbed the suspenders of his pants and looked at the surrounding furnishing.
This humid room was filled with the smell of disinfectant that was almost gone, as well as a stench that almost covered the disinfectant smell.
Bai Chunian shook Rimbaud’s hand to indicate he was fine. He turned on the flashlight and illuminated the furnishings inch by inch.
There was a yellow trash can on the ground to the left of the desk, which contained medical waste. Puppet Master’s suture needles and medical forceps were taken out from here.
Puppet Master was standing in front of the desk and reading the files left in the drawer.
“This is where the experimental subjects who passed the ability test get their physical examination.” Puppet Master put down the slightly moldy file and pushed back the drawer containing stethoscopes, thermometers and other miscellaneous items.
The rat was squeaking in the dark corner. Bai Chunian carefully directed the flashlight’s beam over. He saw a door at the far right side of the room, but the door didn’t budge when he pushed it with force.
Bai Chunian turned his head and discovered a crack in the wall.
“The wall is cracked.” Bai Chunian stuck close to the wall that was farthest away from the rat and walked to the corner, his fingers groping the crack. “It seems like the drill next door cracked the wall.” However, the crack was too small, so he couldn’t see the situation on the other side even with the light shining on it.
He felt around while moving, then his feet suddenly kicked a box, so he crouched down to check it out; it was a freezer. There were many broken medicine test tubes scattered on the ground. It had been so long that the chemical had already evaporated, only leaving some stains on the ground.
“Xiao Bai, I just ate a melon.” Rimbaud leaned over and pressed close to him. Bai Chunian turned around and came face to face with Rimbaud holding the squeaking rat by its tail with two fingers. He swung it around in a circle and threw it into the cave-in ditch outside the room.
“It’s alright now, it’s dead.” Rimbaud comforted him.
“…Where did you get the melon?”
“In the fruit basket next to the clothes hanger.”
“Aren’t they all rotten? They stink.”
“The melons aren’t.”
“Hey, don’t randomly eat things.” Bai Chunian discovered that the freezer couldn’t be opened directly. There was an electronic lock on it, but because of the outage, the screen was black.
This type of lock was pretty much the same as the one in the stairway of the entrance hall. A passcode needed to be entered for it to open when it was on. The hydraulic lock would automatically lock when there was an outage. It couldn’t be opened from the inside or outside without violent smashing, but the material of the lock was the same as the metal plate used to test punch strength, so it couldn’t be easily broken open by just anyone.
“There’s an electrical control panel here.” Puppet Master used his thumb flashlight to light up the wall on the left side. He opened the control panel casing and took a closer look. “The switch was turned off by someone.” He flipped the main switch up.
He could only hear the sound of the overhead lights making a zztt zztt sound, then lit up.
The room was brightly illuminated. Beside Eris, the other three covered their eyes to adapt to the sudden brightness.
“Not bad, it’s much brighter now.” The freezer in front of Bai Chunian also lit green to show it was running. The lock buttons lit up, displaying the requirement to enter a six-digit passcode. Bai Chunian patiently took out the decoder from his backpack, connected it to the lock and waited for it to decipher.
“Why are you fighting with the freezer? There’s a door, just smash through it and go in.” Eris was already getting so impatient that he couldn’t wait to break down the door, but it seemed like there was something blocking the other side of the door, and it was too difficult to push it.
Bai Chunian’s decoder finished going through the data, the password was automatically filled in, and the hydraulic lock of the freezer was released.
As soon as the cabinet lid was opened, swarms of flies swooped out, like a buzzing black whirlwind, mixed with a violent stench.
The tip of Rimbaud’s tail discharged electricity, and a thunderbolt grid was pulled out in front of Xiao Bai, covering the freezer. The flies were scorched and fell by the grid, and within a minute or two, they were all cleaned up.
The freezer was bloody and messy, with dirty blood stains covering all four walls. A highly decomposed, headless corpse was curled up and squatting inside, wearing a white coat from the 109 Research Institute.
“Oh, this smell, he died a long time ago.” Bai Chunian picked up the small metal half-face gas mask on the collar of his combat uniform and fastened it on his mouth and nose, “Look for anything useful on him.”
Rimbaud lay on the edge of the freezer and reached in to rummage. His arm was stained with rotten flesh, blood, and corpse oil, but it was purified within ten seconds. After searching for a long time, he was still clean.
The Puppet Master couldn’t help but sigh in his heart, merfolk were indeed ancient, mysterious and holy creatures. Only such advanced creatures that can maintain the development of the planet they live in in the direction of restoration rather than destruction are worthy of living in the world.
Rimbaud found an ID card in the body’s pocket. According to the information on the magnetic card, the deceased’s name was Abby, alpha, and his department was the “specimen room.”
Eris was still banging on the door and making noise. Bai Chunian put his hand on his head and started thinking again, reviewing what happened in this room in his mind.
Puppet Master, “The soft tissue has been almost all eaten by flies and maggots. The adult insects have bred. The deceased should have been dead for nearly four weeks. There are two important points. First, a human without a head cannot climb into the freezer and close the lid with his body alone. Second, the body was moved naturally and was not put into the freezer artificially. He threw everything out of the freezer and then squatted in the freezer. It was obvious that he was hiding from something. It meant that the murderer was chasing him. Was it a human or an experimental subject?”
Bai Chunian, “He ran out, used the password to open the lid of the freezer, left it open, then ran to turn off the power switch, then came back and hid in the freezer to lock himself, but the murderer cut off his head first and slapped the lid shut. ”
Puppet Master, “Or he squatted in the freezer first, and then the murderer chopped off his head, then closed the lid on him, and finally turned off the electric switch and locked him up.”
Bai Chunian, “The murderer took his head away, or bit it off and swallowed it.”
“Mn.”
“Forget it, this question is meaningless. We’ll think about it later.” Bai Chunian put his hands in his pockets and walked to Eris, who was still banging on the door.
“This door isn’t locked. But it can’t be pushed or banged open. There seem to be many things leaning against the door on the other side.” Eris shook off his hands.
Bai Chunian also tried it, and it was indeed not easy to push. The door seemed solid, and there seemed to be something pressing close against it on the other side.
Rimbaud also tried to push.
There was a faint sound of electric mosquitoes from the crack in the door.
The door creaked open without any resistance. Rimbaud used too much force and almost stumbled in. Bai Chunian grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
Rimbaud frowned and swept away the dust on his shoulders. “There is nothing blocking it at all.”
“Go in first.” Bai Chunian cautiously poked half of his head in to observe the situation. The inside became brighter due to the restoration of power. This place was similar to the subway security inspection machine, except that only luggage was checked by subway security, while the whole person was checked here.
There was a duty table outside the closed security channel, with a computer placed on the table for checking security imaging.
Rimbaud was quite familiar with this place, so he raised the lead curtain without hesitation and walked into the dark x-ray security inspection channel. Eris had also gone through the institute’s security check and knew there was nothing to fear, so he dragged the Puppet Master after him.
Bai Chunian deliberately slowed down his pace and stepped back silently when he walked onto the security conveyor belt.
He quietly sat down in front of the security check computer and tried to enter the permission code on Abby’s ID card into the computer.
The surveillance computer successfully displayed the security x-ray image.
The first person to walk over was Rimbaud. Only his bones could be photographed, and any internal organs were wrapped in random electric currents and could not be imaged.
It seemed that because of this that Pearl’s existence in Rimbaud’s body was not discovered in the breeding base and research institute, and he was rashly injected with a mimicking agent, causing tragedy.
“Rimbaud…” Bai Chunian sighed deeply.
After Rimbaud’s x-ray security image moved away, Eris ran over. The image was a ball-jointed doll with a solid body. Only the glands on the back of the neck were translucent like ordinary internal organs. The other parts were all ceramic, shining white, and couldn’t be imaged.
What Bai Chunian wanted to see most was where the Puppet Master had hidden the Sacred Wind-up Key. There was indeed a mechanism in his apron pocket, and the Sacred Wind-up Key was hidden in the mezzanine of the mechanism.
Other than that, the Puppet Master’s other organs and bones are the same as those of ordinary humans. Except the heart.
What’s more strange was that the white patch of the heart couldn’t be imaged.
🥺 Pearl
mindblown
Thank You for the new chapter (⋈◍＞◡＜◍)。✧♡
Waaaaaaaa im really sorry abt the unnecessary replies my intention is to comment 😆😆
Wut da fudgecakeeeeeeeeeeeeee im ready sorry kowtow