Volume 3, Chapter 47 – Rebellion (Double-Length)

In the lab, Xiang Xian and the other two donned protective suits and placed the silver dart into a cylindrical culture tank.

Pale green nutrient solution had already been injected into the tank. Two mechanical arms locked onto both ends of the dart, and Hannah immediately began operating them, making the manipulators press along the dart’s surface back and forth.

Like playing an instrument—each press caused the point of contact to light up with a white dot.

“That’s the code,” Hannah explained to Xiang Xian even as she worked. “I just happened to memorize the permutations. Anyone else would never be able to pull this off.”

“Enough. Don’t talk.” Xiang Xian pressed a palm to her shoulder. “Focus.”

Feeling the pressure, Hannah shut up at once. She sped up her movements, and finally, after what looked like a completely random sequence of taps, the dart split open along its length with a seam and, like a pea pod, was pried apart by the mechanical arms.

All three of them stared at what lay inside—a lump of frozen ice, a shell of white frost on the surface and dark red underneath.

“That’s it.” Hannah finally let out a breath of relief. She quickly removed the outer shell of the dart and handed it to Han Yuanfeng to place into the isolation cabinet, saying as she did so, “This is the thing. Once it thaws, you’ll see just how freakish it is.”

As if responding to her words, the ice block floated at the very center of the nutrient solution, and the outer layer of frost began to melt at a speed visible to the naked eye.

“It’s not going to dissolve into the nutrient solution?” Xiang Xian asked.

“It won’t dissolve into anything .” Hannah shook her head. “It’ll only absorb them, devour them. Practically speaking, it needs nutrients to thaw—otherwise I’d never have suggested you use nutrient solution. Letting it get too full is not a good idea.”

“And that doesn’t count as one of its interference abilities?”

“Not every trait qualifies as an interference ability,” Hannah explained. “Interference has to be active —very few passive traits are judged as interference, unless its mere existence is highly contaminating. If that were the case, it wouldn’t just be B2 anymore.”

Xiang Xian nodded. “So their criteria are actually pretty rigorous…”

She did, in fact, like things that were rigorous and standardized. Just as Hannah had sensed, she was a “research enthusiast” herself, and the presence of the Jade Spirit made her even more sensitive to changes in data.

Studying the substance in the tank carefully, Xiang Xian saw that most of the ice had already melted. The floating mass gradually revealed its true form—it really was just a lump of writhing blood.

About the size of a palm, a blood-red gelatinous clump that kept flexing and bulging.

The thing seemed to sense there were people outside watching it. It suddenly curled up, condensing into a horrifying eyeball trailing nerve-like tendrils, which slammed into the glass and stared straight at Xiang Xian.

It had no effect, though.

Xiang Xian was wearing a protective suit, and the matching safety goggles were enough to block “gaze-borne contamination.”

“Fascinating stuff.” Xiang Xian narrowed her eyes in a dangerous way. “If I want to take a bit off for separate study, how do I do it? Do I just use a syringe and draw some out, or do I freeze it again and cut it?”

No answer.

“Hannah?” Realizing something was off, Xiang Xian looked down at her and found that Hannah was typing at the keyboard, checking a stack of pop-up windows.

“What is it?” Xiang Xian read panic in the movements. “What’s wrong?”

“The numbers don’t match.” Hannah glanced at her, then said in an eerie tone, “It should weigh 268 grams… but we’ve only got 208 grams here. There are 60 grams missing.”

“What does that mean?” Han Yuanfeng turned around, his expression behind the visor one of shock.

“It means someone cut part of it off—someone out there is walking around with 60 grams of a B2 containment object,” Hannah said, bracing her head in one hand with a soft sigh. “And that someone can only be Bruce Evan .”

“You’d better notify your people quickly and get them ready to deal with a ‘lost of control’ scenario.”

……

Elsewhere, Bai Xiang was cross-checking the coordinates described in Elend’s memories, trying to locate those three hidden safe houses.

She’d already gone over the Nanluo Mountain Range topography—the whole thing had been included in that construction dossier. Matching coordinates wasn’t hard, so she quickly locked onto the location of one safe house and leapt from the mountaintop into the dense forest.

Wind howled like blades at her ears. From the shadows under the canopy came constant roars and cries, and then, all at once, a massive wave of shrieking air exploded outward, turning into invisible edges of sword-Qi radiating in rings, lopping a swath of trees into thick round slices midair that crashed down with the falling crowns.

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“Even their instincts are being suppressed, huh.”

Standing at the center of the newly exposed clearing, Bai Xiang held her sword and swept a gaze around her. Another ring of various demon beasts was closing in, blood-red eyes fixed on her.

Demon beasts weren’t mere wild animals. Take those pig demons from before—once awakened, they had a rudimentary intelligence and knew how to seek benefit and avoid harm.

And even if they were just wild animals, wild animals on the hunt weighed gain against risk, gauged whether it was worth risking injury to fight. That was instinct guiding them; almost every creature had it.

Yet anything contaminated by the Blood Sea’s mists had lost that instinct.

They didn’t care if they got hurt or bled, didn’t care to assess the gap between themselves and the enemy. All they knew was to throw themselves forward and attack with single-minded focus, to tear apart and devour every living thing.

Beasts were like this.

Demon beasts, too, were like this.

That made this basically a different kind of zombie plague…

Bai Xiang suddenly felt glad that the Blood Sea mists erupting in Nanshan reacted so violently against the human race. Ordinary people who entered the blood mist would be corroded and dissolved on the spot in no time, which made it impossible for anyone to inhale the mist and then return to society—cutting off a huge potential danger.

“A fine green mountain, and not a single birdsong left.”

“You really are a filthy lot.”

Stroking the blade, Bai Xiang flicked its edge with a finger.

Zheng—

The sword hummed, and five semi-transparent sword-Qi tigers, each over three meters tall, sprang out at once.

Zheng—

Another flick, and a patch of clouds above went pitch black as five bolts of lightning crashed down onto the tigers, turning into armor of crackling thunder.

With a thought, the five thunder-armored giant tigers scattered and leapt out, charging the demons all around.

They were sword-Qi to begin with. Even if demon beasts managed to break through the thunder armor, the moment they touched the tigers’ outer bodies their extended claws would be shredded off. The outcome was never in doubt. After just a few swipes and bites, the giant tigers had slapped and torn the demon beasts into chunks, leaving nothing but blood-mud and mangled carcasses.

And this was far from over.

The deeper she went into the forest, the more demon beasts Bai Xiang encountered.

Savage demons, wolf demons, fox demons, even huge flocks of tiny birds gone bad—all of them polluted. It was as if every demon beast and wild animal in the mountains was swarming this one point. Every ten steps she took, one or two demon beasts sprang out and had to be killed.

By the end, Bai Xiang stopped wantonly using techniques that released external qi-force.

Based on the Divine Fetus cultivators she’d seen, Core on the path of qi had more than five times the endurance and recovery of a Divine Fetus immortal. Her stamina was indeed very strong, but that didn’t mean she could endlessly unleash sword techniques without pause.

So she simply gathered all her power, coating only a thin layer of qi-force on the blade of Feixiang Heaven . Then she dove alone into the tide of demons, hacking away. With every strike, that thin coating of qi-force would be flung out along the cut, wrapping the body and shredding it into mush.

Cutting her way through the forest like this, Bai Xiang stepped out from between the trees in a single stride.

When she looked back, behind her was already a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood.

Her eyes lit with a strange golden glow as she switched to another view. Now she could see that the earth, trunks, and canopy were smeared everywhere with blood-mud, and tangled within it were countless demon beast ghosts, silently wailing as they writhed with the sludge.

“Amitabha.”

Murmuring the Buddha’s name with her eyes closed, Bai Xiang raised her sword and offered a sword salute toward the carnage. Only then did she shake the blade and send out a spreading wave of sound, drawing in all the souls trapped in the blood-mud and pulling them into the clear, bright edge of the sword.

Held in her hand, Feixiang Heaven kept letting out a thrilled hum.

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The feeling of its linked heart reaching her, Bai Xiang knew the sword had just grown the tiniest bit stronger.

Fine, then.

She nodded slightly.

Better some gain than none.

She herself, for example—Core on the path of qi had transformed her spirit-soul. After that breakthrough, soul-harvesting could no longer give Bai Xiang any further increase in power.

And she had no desire to taste demon beasts’ memories anyway—leaving Feixiang Heaven to reap the benefits.

“Eat up.”

Her golden eyes half-lidded, Bai Xiang stroked the blade’s edge with a fingertip.

“Anything tasty we find later, I’ll feed it to you.”

Hum, hum…

Under her caress, Feixiang Heaven sang, as if nuzzling her finger—without cutting her skin.

Nodding in satisfaction and confirming that she’d probably killed every demon beast in the area, Bai Xiang sheathed her sword, rolled up her sleeves to the elbow, and strode quickly into the next stretch of forest.

Two minutes later, she stopped under an unusually thick locust tree.

Piled around its roots was a mass of branches and rotting leaves. Soaked through when the snow had melted, they’d turned into natural fertilizer, giving off a faint stink.

She rolled up the topsoil with sword-Qi, revealing a hidden metal hatch.

Bai Xiang reached for the handle; the instant she touched it, a string of sparks and arcs exploded out.

Just as she’d expected—standard safety measures. Useless against her.

She crushed all the electricity into a ball in her bare hand. With a squeeze, the glow went out like a swarm of noisy mosquitoes being pinched to death.

The second time she pulled the hatch, there was no resistance. Bai Xiang followed the open passage down and found another world underground.

She didn’t need to send sound waves to scout; the lights were already on here.

At the bottom, a three-meter stretch of corridor extended ahead. Beyond that was a room three meters high and five meters wide. Both spaces were lit by warm orange lamps, illuminating the many sheets of paper tacked along the corridor walls and the computer rigs stacked on the long table against the wall in the room beyond.

This was the first safe house.

Bai Xiang stepped into the corridor and started with the papers pinned up there.

Their arrangement was strange; hardly anyone hung documents like this. In her experience, only pages torn from a calendar got casually spiked onto nails.

So these were all discarded files?

She took down the top sheet, only to find it covered in scrawled symbols.

Mostly numbers and signs—it looked like scrap paper for mathematical calculations. Here and there a few lines of messy, run-together Federal letters showed up, and even with Bai Xiang’s excellent command of the language, they were a chore to read.

There was also a string of characters she didn’t recognize at all—neither Yu script nor Federal. She had no idea where the writing came from, but it had a certain primitive beauty.

So they were all calculation drafts.

After staring for a while and getting nowhere, Bai Xiang flipped through the pages beneath and confirmed that everything pinned here was draft paper used for calculations.

She noticed that the bottom right of each page had a number written on it. Most of the numbers formed a neat, orderly sequence, with only a few pages missing here and there—either gone entirely or pinned into another series.

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Closing her eyes to think, Bai Xiang quickly guessed the reason.

Clearly, whoever had occupied this safe house had been hiding here to carry out some kind of computational research, something important enough that he hadn’t wanted to rely on computers and had insisted on working everything out by hand.

But if you did things by hand, you were bound to make mistakes.

He’d deliberately numbered and sorted the pages so he could quickly find errors, pull the relevant sheets, and correct them.

Was that Dr. Evan?

Backed by the Ruffen Federation and a star researcher of Laidi Life Sciences, he should have had plenty of resources. Why would he be holed up here doing this kind of grunt work?

Thinking it through, Bai Xiang suddenly realized that Dr. Evan clearly had secrets of his own.

Otherwise, he wouldn’t have dared avoid using electronic devices for the calculations… He was afraid of being monitored by the company, which meant he had some separate scheme he didn’t want his own people to know about.

Leaving the corridor and entering the room, Bai Xiang found three computers that had been rebuilt from various parts.

So it wasn’t that there were no electronic devices.

She narrowed her eyes.

It was that the amount of calculation was so big that even with these, it still wasn’t enough.

Power was still on, and the three machines weren’t shut down. She woke the screens and began probing for stored files, discovering that the three displays formed a single extended desktop. All the folders on it were named with the prefix “EO.”

She skimmed a few files. Mostly specialist terminology from synthetic biology and piles of equations.

Bai Xiang skipped quickly through the content until she finally found a thread to follow.

It was a scanned document—a compilation of newspaper clippings. The headline on top read: “The ‘Devourer of Order’? How Many Lies Hide in Yu Mythology?”

An op-ed, introducing a myth from Great Yu folklore. Its focus was on a beast-god worshiped as a divine entity. The Ruffen called it the “Devourer of Order,” and its original name was “shiling.”

Shiling… ‘shi-ling’?

The character ling could mean season or command, and by extension order.

So “shiling” would mean “eroding and devouring order”… Was that the right way to translate it?

As she read further, Bai Xiang became certain her analysis wasn’t wrong.

The computers contained a huge amount of material on the legends of “shiling”—both news reports from the Ruffen Federation and records and folklore from Great Yu.

The former just introduced it as a curiosity to entertain readers. The latter was the real focus of the research. They described “shiling” as a “colossal insect demon, a thousand zhang long, with hundreds of legs, two horns upon its head,” saying it normally hid in the cracks of time to avoid its enemies, and once in every leap year it would emerge to devour all things.

Because the destruction it caused was so extreme—enough to make “sun and moon go out of order, with long days and short nights,” “winter and spring reversed, snow falling in the eighth month”—it had been named “shiling”: the one that erodes order.

If he’d collected this many stories, was Dr. Evan secretly researching “shiling”?

Bai Xiang frowned. She didn’t think it was that simple.

The dossier was too detailed. Some of the information on “shiling” wasn’t even recorded in the Yuming archives. That was not normal.

How many generations had contributed to the Yuming archives? Even if, back then, Dr. Evan had had the Prince of Nanling’s Manor and Yao Qingyuan funding him, the two sides shouldn’t differ that much in how thorough their records were.

Not normal.

Bai Xiang concluded that whoever was researching “shiling,” whether it was Dr. Evan or not, definitely had an additional source of information.

She spent a few more minutes checking the data and the storeroom, confirming there was nothing else to be gained here. Then she left and headed to the other two sets of coordinates, finding the same kind of calculation drafts in both places.

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The traces left behind were fewer and fewer. In the first safe house there were still signs of long-term habitation. By the third, there was nothing but cold flooring and metal walls, and the food and supplies stored there were almost untouched.

At this rate, the man’s movements had grown more and more hurried—and he was heading north.

Bai Xiang pondered this as she turned to leave, but then she saw that a wooden picture frame still hung on the wall of the third safe house.

It was clearly handmade. The person who’d made it wasn’t very good with their hands—the burrs on the wood hadn’t even been sanded down.

And yet they’d stubbornly made a frame anyway. That meant the photo it had held had to be very important.

At least, very important to him .

As if remembering something, Bai Xiang took a folded old newspaper from her sleeve and opened it to reveal a yellowed page.

“Island of Ernido Hit by Once-in-a-Century Tsunami; Heavy Casualties Among Residents.”

The publication date was twenty-seven years ago, a long time in the past.

There was nothing special about the article itself—just a very normal disaster report.

Bai Xiang had found it in the second safe house. It had stood out among the piles of draft paper, so she’d taken it with her.

So—

Closing her eyes, Bai Xiang began to collate the information.

A senior researcher hiding things from his own company.

A secret pursuit and study of an ancient Great Yu demon, a mysterious force.

A disaster article that had been carefully preserved.

And a trail leading straight toward the Jing River demon tide.

Just then, the picture frame fell from the wall and broke apart. On the back of the board, someone had carved a sentence in three different written languages.

[We swear to reclaim justice and fairness, to let the ancient rules cleanse this filthy world once more.]

He probably wasn’t truly Ruffen.

Bai Xiang picked up the wooden board and then looked at the yellowed newspaper she was holding in her left hand.

“So he slipped away and hid among his enemies, trying to borrow another power to take revenge…”

Just then, Xiang Xian called, her tone extremely grave as she told Bai Xiang that Bruce Evan was likely still carrying 60 grams of the B2 containment object, and that she needed to watch the demon tide’s behavior at all times.

“Hannah says if you really did snatch this thing from a giant robot, then knowing how those people operate, they’ll definitely order Evan to release whatever filth he’s holding,” Xiang Xian said tensely. “They’ll want to silence him no matter what! Even if it means contaminating over twenty million people… they will do it!”

“Bruce Evan won’t,” Bai Xiang said.

Huh?

Xiang Xian was taken aback.

“He won’t take orders from anyone ever again,” Bai Xiang said, tossing aside the board and striding toward the exit.

“…At least, that’s what he thinks.”