Volume 3, Chapter 19 – Remnants【2】

Bai Xiang analyzed.

The latter should be “Doctor”.

”Dr. Hannah”… Yao Qingyuan’s project supervisor?

”How do you know all that so clearly?”

”Back when this little one was small, they kept me in a ‘bottle’, and I could hear them talking.”

Bai Xiang nodded slightly and walked toward the door on the left.

Someone at Dr. Hannah’s level, a leader type, should have escaped long ago. She needed to first confirm whether Liang Qiusheng was still inside.

Using brute force to break open the alloy door once more, she was greeted by a pure-white corridor that wound away into the distance.

It was very futuristic. Doors were staggered on both sides, and the walls were completely transparent, letting her see the interiors at a glance.

This really was a prison.

She walked as she observed, the lights and shadows reflected in Bai Xiang’s eyes.

Not every room here had an occupant. Most were empty; only about a third held prisoners, and all of them were dead, their deaths quite miserable.

There were brute demons with two heads, and giant spiders covered in barbs.

There were also malformed experiment subjects whose upper halves were human while their lower halves were other beasts. These prisoners had all long since died; even their corpses had rotted and shriveled.

Interestingly, some of the cell doors were open, and the remains inside bore very obvious bite marks.

Bai Xiang kept walking forward and, at the very end, found what seemed to be Liang Qiusheng’s corpse.

It was undoubtedly a male corpse, wearing robes marked with Qizhou University’s insignia, a broken sword stuck in the top of his skull.

Judging from the degree of decay, he had been dead for some time. The bones of his left shoulder were missing without a trace—this should indeed be Liang Qiusheng, matching the arm the giant lizard had torn off.

But why had he killed himself?

The sword was driven into his own head. It had to be his own treasured sword.

She pulled out the broken sword and examined it, confirming that the Demon Pool inside had already dispersed.

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Looking again at Liang Qiusheng’s bones—especially the bite marks on the ribs around his gut—she felt it was quite possible… that this sword stroke had been to end his suffering.

After fleeing into this place, he had definitely tried to find a back door to slip out.

But there was no back door at all.

He must have tried to leave again, but this was a prison, after all. The door he’d come in through had most likely refused him.

So he had truly been trapped to death.

A few days later, he felt hunger and thirst. Driven by the urge to survive, he chose to open some cell doors and defile the corpses.

But he hadn’t expected there to still be living prisoners here…

Huff…

A sound of something cleaving through the air came from behind her.

Scythe-like claws cast their shadow across the wall, as if about to slice Bai Xiang open.

Bang!!

The claws stopped just a few millimeters from Bai Xiang’s back, as if they had slammed into an invisible wall and were violently bounced away.

”Grah!”

A sharp screech sounded behind her head, mixed with the giant lizard’s warning, “Immortal, be careful!”

Bai Xiang whipped around and swung her sword, cleaving the attacker from the top of its head down through its crotch at a slant, splattering black blood all over the floor.

A dinosaur?

Seeing the corpse clearly, she froze for a moment.

Although she had split it clean in two, if you pieced it back together, its skull and torso should look somewhat like a velociraptor.

No—far uglier and more grotesque than a velociraptor, more like something with some python traits fused in on top.

The proof was in its limbs, so shriveled as to be useless, completely unable to support its body. It moved much like a python as well.

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Another kind of reptile…

So it had gotten through the early period by hibernating, then, when Liang Qiusheng opened the cell door to “eat,” it had turned the tables on him…

The way it ate really wasn’t like a snake at all.

Thinking to herself that everything confined here was some kind of hybrid species, Bai Xiang chalked it all up to the experiments of madmen.

Science needed to be kept under lock and key.

What a pity.

There was no way to hold that Dr. Hannah accountable.

After carefully checking to make sure there were no other living things here, Bai Xiang searched Liang Qiusheng’s corpse and found a stack of staff ID cards, a key, and a USB drive in his pocket.

So these were what he had risked his life to obtain?

”Come with me.”

Bai Xiang ordered the prone giant lizard.

”We’re going to take a look at that last laboratory.”

After leaving the prison and returning to the fork from before, Bai Xiang originally intended to keep using brute force to break through the door.

But after thinking it over, she felt that since the research facility still had power, there might very well be some security routines in the lab.

She tried the ID cards, but not a single one was accepted by the card reader.

There was no keyhole here either, so Bai Xiang could only slot the USB drive into the port and give it a try. The red light above instantly turned green.

Whoosh.

The door opened.

She went in together with the giant lizard, and the first things to fill her vision were rows of cylindrical containers reaching up to the ceiling.

A few of the containers held deformed corpses that looked long dead. The largest one in the middle—fully three meters across—had already shattered, and the floor was covered in dark liquid, congealed and dried.

”That’s where I came out from,” the giant lizard rumbled like distant thunder. “I escaped all the way from there.”

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Bai Xiang gave it a look but made no comment.

The monitors at the console were still lit, and a long-haired skeleton slumped in the chair. She first locked onto the giant lizard’s vigorous qi presence, then walked over, pushed the chair aside, and bent down to fiddle with the machines.

Her luck wasn’t bad.

That was what she thought after reading part of the display.

It should be this big guy’s experiment log.

[… Day 320, the project is going more and more smoothly.]

[The physical toughness and vitality of the ancient demon race are unbelievably strong. Even “lower-tier species” extracted from fossils have data far surpassing modern demon beasts. I need to quickly analyze the source of this power. It is definitely not because of oxygen, contrary to what those papers claim.]

[Day 336, my child has awoken from its embryonic state. I can sense that it is conscious. Its thoughts can travel to me along those wires. It truly is a fascinating world…]

[Day 339, things have started to go bad. I don’t know what went wrong. The fetus’s brain has begun to atrophy. At this rate, it will die within three hours.]

[I have to save it, but brain transplantation technology is nowhere near mature enough, and its brain hasn’t completely failed yet. Am I supposed to remove it first? That would kill it instantly!]

[Unless—oh, right, there does seem to be one last method…]

[Day 345.]

[I feel… a bit strange.]

[I am controlling myself to write these things, but I’m not sure they come entirely from my own will… My mind is sometimes not clear. I suspect it must be it eroding my brain.]

[It wants to eat me, to devour everything that I am…]

[Day 347, I received news of Yao Qingyuan’s failure. That was more or less within expectations, I suppose. I don’t care. I have more important work to do now.]

[Day 348, the “mental stimulation agent” is finally complete. It was developed based on my personal genetic data and only works on my own body.]

[To the fated one… If you are fortunate enough to make it here, and extremely fortunate not to have encountered that big fellow, I hope you will open the small freezer under the machine—there is an injection there filled with golden liquid. You’d best inject all of it into it.]

[If you can do that… this little one offers thanks.]

Reading this far, Bai Xiang frowned.

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A few seconds later, she turned to examine the dried corpse sunk into the chair and found a golden letter “H” embroidered on its collar.

”Immortal…”

Just then, the giant lizard’s body began to tremble.

”I’m sorry, Immortal… Ever since we came to this place, my body has felt very unwell…”

”There’s a desire… I want to vent it!”

As soon as the words left its mouth, its huge body reared up, four blood-red pupils gleaming with eerie light as it swung its massive claws down at Bai Xiang.

But they struck nothing.

Her figure blurred and Bai Xiang was nowhere to be seen. In the next instant, she appeared behind the giant lizard, a syringe of golden liquid now in her hand.

Pftch!

With a shove of her hand, she drove the syringe into the back of its head, pushing it all in through the gaps between its scales. Bai Xiang stepped back, dodging the sweep of the giant lizard’s tail.

”Feeling any better?”

She stroked Feixiang Heaven’s cold sword guard, tilting her head as she watched the creature.

”Dr. Hannah.”

The giant lizard’s body shrank continuously as it trembled, scales sloughing off in great sheets, until it finally became a two-meter-tall lizardman-like warrior—more slender and willowy, with far more spines along its back.

When it opened its four blood-red eyes again, the lizardman flicked out a narrow tongue, Bai Xiang’s reflection showing in its gaze.

”I thought I’d never be able to introduce myself with this identity again…”

After taking a moment to get used to its current body, it gave Bai Xiang an elegant bow.

”Hannah-Jinlis.”

”Thank you for saving my life.”