Volume 1, Chapter 12 – Inside the Lab Building

After putting on the black stab-proof jacket brought over from the dojo, Bai Xiang tried stretching her body.

The jacket looked much like a hoodie, with a hood of its own, and felt like waterproof fabric.

Finding it didn’t hinder her, Bai Xiang prepared to move.

Yes: after weighing it, she still decided to go into the lab building and take a look.

On the one hand, she now had confirmation: Chen Jing was one of the students who’d gone missing inside.

On the other, if she could also save the Fang family’s noble daughter, some of Shenming Sword Dao’s current troubles would naturally untangle.

Risk and reward rise together.

With others spearheading, if she still shrank back—what was the point of practicing the sword in this life?

“Wait!”

Zhang Longze called from behind.

Bai Xiang turned back, and saw Gao Feng jogging over with a strip of black cloth in his hands.

Zhang took it, peeled the cloth away, and revealed a two-chi short sword sheathed in its scabbard.

“This sword is called ‘Dingbo.’ It isn’t a famed blade, but it was a gift when I first came to No. 1.”

He handed the short sword over.

“What you’re about to do is too dangerous. If you insist on going, take this.”

Bai Xiang looked down at the sword.

The bluish-black guard connected to the tang, and the pommel was carved with a wakeful lion.

The scabbard was the same bluish-black, about four centimeters wide and sixty long, its whole look exuding an old, austere air.

She took it. It was much heavier than the cloud-pattern wooden sword.

She drew the blade and confirmed it was live-edged, then slid it back and inverted it into the sword clip on the back of the stab-proof jacket. She nodded to Zhang Longze and the others and stepped into the curtain of rain.

“One of the few things we can do.”

Watching her stride into the lab building’s lobby, Zhang shook his head with a sigh.

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“The calls are out,” Ma Bolan came to report. “Quite a few people… changed their tune once they heard who it involves.”

“Together with people from the Inspectorate, we can muster at least fifty who have entered the Dao.”

“And what good is that now!” Zhang snorted.

“Fang Xiaochun loathes climbers most of all. Otherwise why have his daughter hide her identity to study in Chilong?”

“Principal…” Gao Feng grumbled, “Why would you…”

“Only after things went sideways did someone call and tell me who she is,” Zhang said darkly. “That Fang Xianzhang…”

“Now we can only hope someone with her is protecting her—and with Inspector Han and Bai Xiang’s group, they can hold out until backup arrives.”

“Otherwise, if something happens, the whole Chilong Circuit—perhaps all of Qizhou—will be turned upside down…”

Elsewhere, in the first-floor lobby, Bai Xiang—Dingbo on her back, her own cloud-pattern wooden sword in hand—surveyed the level as she recalled the Demon Pool briefing the school had given her.

Zhang Longze had clearly been the first to get the bad news. By his account, the first affected by the Demon Pool was the teacher assigned to test the poisoned water—a man named Luo Yu.

The lab building had seven stories; Luo Yu had been found in a chemistry lab on the fourth.

By then he was dead cold—and in a ghastly state: all his flesh seemed to have dissolved and sloughed off, leaving a blood-slick skeleton seated at the desk.

The eerie part: more than one witness had reported seeing Luo Yu in a raincoat going to the cafeteria to buy food just before.

At the death scene, a raincoat lay by the lab door, and three lunch boxes—food spilled everywhere—beside it.

“After that, of everyone who said they’d seen Luo Yu—including the cafeteria worker who served him—over half turned up in similar condition.”

“That is, inexplicably found as blood-slick skeletons by the roadside—while their rain-soaked clothing popped up somewhere else nearby.”

The Demon Pool was showing weird and aggressive transmissibility.

Hence No. 1’s swift, decisive evacuation.

Grandpa had posited three possibilities, with a Demon Pool as the likeliest. He’d hardly have expected two of the three to hit.

No. 1 really had been hiding an important person.

Thinking, Bai Xiang slid down by the wall to sit.

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She kept a cautious eye on her surroundings as she pulled off her shoes and socks, wrung the water hard from the socks, then shook out the shoes.

The soles were non-slip.

At a critical moment, she didn’t want her feet sliding inside.

“If I hadn’t crossed over, the original me would’ve died quietly in her single room, and the news would never have spread.”

“By the time Fang Wenya returned to the dorm that night, the whole building might already have turned into a ghost warren.”

“Even if the original caught on, it would’ve been noon or afternoon. The thermos would’ve been rushed here for testing, and with Fang Wenya in class, she’d likely still have been doomed.”

“Meticulous thinking…”

“So willing to drag in so many, just to kill one.”

“They must be aiming at the Provincial Governor—or flat-out at the imperial house.”

Working through the threads, Bai Xiang felt more and more that she’d accidentally been caught up in a struggle… aimed at Great Yu’s officialdom.

Enough—no more of that for now.

She pulled on the wrung-out cotton socks, took two steps in her shoes, and looked toward the central elevator.

……

Meanwhile, on the sixth floor, down a different corridor, a dozen people in all were stumbling into the hall, led by two black-coated Inspectors.

“Move, move!”

Han Li gripped his electric baton in one hand and tugged a door with the other, hissing for everyone to hurry, urging them into an empty classroom.

When the last person tried to slip in, Han caught a glimpse of two bare legs under the oversized coat.

“You!”

He barred the way with the baton. “Open the coat.”

“Inspector Han?”

It was a pale boy. His voice shook. “Why are you keeping me out? Those things are coming… hurry! Let me in!!”

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The answer was the baton whistling down.

The extendable, current-spitting weapon checked Demon Pool aberrations and wasn’t lethal to humans—so Han Li ran the test without hesitation.

“Aah—!”

The baton jabbed the boy’s waist; he screamed, and under the shock his face abruptly turned translucent—then his whole body evaporated at once.

“Abomination!”

The empty coat dropped from midair. Han’s expression changed again.

When had he been eaten?

This Demon Pool… it was everywhere and nowhere at once!?

“Out—now!!!”

He waved the classroom back out the front door and drove them into another empty room across the hall, ducking in himself and throwing the lock.

“Huff… huff…”

Drenched in sweat, he braced against the metal door, gulping air and listening hard.

Tap!

Tap!

Tap!

Before long, crisp footsteps came from afar, mixed with odd knocks and bangs.

Bang!

A collision—sounded like it slammed open the door of the room from before.

It seemed to search the room for a bit, found nothing, then tap-tapped back out and went downstairs the way it had come.

Whoo—

Only once he was sure it wasn’t on this level did Han dare breathe properly.

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Then he opened tired eyes and looked to his partner Zhao Xiaoqin—especially her mangled left shoulder.

It wasn’t there.

The stump was ragged flesh and blood. Instructor Li from the dojo had bandaged it on the fly; Zhao Xiaoqin’s face was bone-white with pain.

“Inspector Han…”

A twin-ponytailed girl edged close—Chen Jing.

“Did that thing… go?”

“For now,” Han murmured, as if afraid a louder voice would call the filth back.

He glanced at Chen Jing, then at the exhausted students sprawled around, his voice hoarse.

“But unless we find its weakness, we aren’t getting out of here…”

“Inspector Han.”

Another voice came from the side.

Han looked over. A girl with sleek long black hair and black-rimmed glasses.

“Miss Fang…”

He didn’t dare be as casual with her as with Chen Jing.

Because this was Fang Wenya.

Fang Xiaochun’s daughter—the Governor’s girl hidden in Chilong.

“Inspector Han,” Fang Wenya nudged her glasses and said earnestly, “I’m deeply grateful that you and Inspector Zhao and Instructor Li rushed here as soon as you got word.”

“But at this rate, we’re just waiting to die.”

“My thought is: you’ve faced them many times—you know them better than we do.”

“And ideas grow richer the more minds there are. If you’re at a loss for a starting point, tell us what you know about them, and we can work out a plan together.”