“Professor Cui, and, this is?” Shen Congyu looked genuinely surprised to see Jiang Lin here.
Cui Yawen stepped to block his line of sight. “Shen Congyu, your office is on the second floor, isn’t it? Please head downstairs.”
The air between them turned tense. Cui Yawen made no effort to hide her disgust.
Today Shen Congyu wore a lab coat, and the sense of familiarity Jiang Lin felt only sharpened, the figure dissecting a zombie on the operating table gradually coming into focus in her memory.
Her pupils contracted slightly. She could now more or less confirm, this was the researcher from that night.
“No need to be so rude, Professor Cui. I just thought Miss Jiang looked familiar.” Shen Congyu’s expression soured.
“Xiao Li, take him downstairs.” Cui Yawen had no interest in dealing with him further and waved over a nearby guard.
The guard clearly knew Shen Congyu, and his own expression looked troubled. “Researcher Shen, let’s head down.”
Shen Congyu’s face twisted into something both mocking and faintly wounded. “I’ll go myself, no need to trouble Professor Cui’s people.” He bit the last words out through gritted teeth.
Cui Yawen closed her eyes briefly to steady herself. When she opened them, her usual cool composure had returned. “Let’s go in. This is your office.”
“Do you have assigned assistants?” Researchers of relatively high standing were usually given two, one for personal protection, one for handling documents. Jiang Lin had only just arrived, but her contributions more than earned that treatment.
But Jiang Lin herself was already highly skilled in combat, and she wouldn’t be running complex experiments. She thought for a moment, then sent messages to Sheng Wei and Xu An’an.
Cui Yawen felt a small pang of disappointment, she’d half hoped to become Jiang Lin’s assistant herself, curious how the reagent had come to be. People passionate about research, like herself, were easy for Jiang Lin to read at a glance.
“Professor Cui, honestly, I didn’t develop the reagent myself. I found it by accident. My water ability seems to gain a purification effect after contact with discarded batteries.” Jiang Lin lied without so much as a change of expression.
Cui Yawen believed her instantly. “Then can we study your reagent directly?” Hope and nerves both flickered in her eyes.
“Of course, go ahead.” The system had told Jiang Lin the technology behind the purifier outpaced anything in this world, maybe Cui Yawen’s team could push their own research further through it.
Cui Yawen looked faintly surprised by her generosity. Wasn’t she worried they’d simply replicate it?
“I will need you to supply me with a large amount of scrap batteries, though.” That was Jiang Lin’s real reason for coming, collecting them alone was far too exhausting.
“That’s not difficult at all. How many do you need daily?”
“The more, the better.”
Cui Yawen didn’t linger. Once satisfied Jiang Lin had everything she needed, she returned to her own office, a new researcher meant plenty to arrange.
Alone, Jiang Lin looked around her new office. Hydroponic plants lined the walls as expected, the only one she recognized after a long look was an inedible pothos. The rest were strangers to her.
Sunlight filtered through the specially treated glass, giving the room a cozy warmth. The work here was clearly relaxed, so she bought a folding bed from the system shop and settled onto it, soaking in the light.
…With no afternoon patrol, Sheng Wei stayed home to rest, sitting in her recliner and watching Zhou He read quietly by the window, lost in thought.
The peace didn’t last, a notification interrupted it. Sheng Wei opened the virtual screen to find an invitation from Jiang Lin.
Her hand paused. Before leaving, Jiang Lin had mentioned that if things went well, she might be able to bring Sheng Wei into the lab too, no more outer patrols.
She didn’t expect the invitation to come this fast. After a long pause, she sighed and politely declined. Jiang Lin could manage without her, but Team Sixteen couldn’t.
Jiang Lin, back at the lab, wasn’t surprised by the reply. Even in their short time together, she’d already sensed how deeply Sheng Wei cared about her team.
Xu An’an, unexpectedly, accepted.
Lying on her folding bed, Jiang Lin’s thoughts drifted. The mission required her to find out exactly what the secret experiment was doing. Now that she could enter the building openly, the question was how.
After failing to land on a good plan, she decided to fall back on her earlier method and risk sneaking in again.
She remembered blocking the back-entrance elevator with ice on her first visit, only to have Shen Congyu appear upstairs regardless, meaning a backup elevator had to exist somewhere.
She tried to reconstruct the building’s layout in her memory. When Gu Yuzhi had brought her up before, she’d studied the elevator they’d used, no indication of underground floors anywhere on it.
Cui Yawen’s attitude toward Shen Congyu had also felt strange. Did she know something, or simply despise the man?
No matter how she turned it over, no clear thread emerged. She had far too little information to work with.
Being so idle in her office left Jiang Lin restless. She stood and wandered out onto the fourth floor.
Every researcher hurried past, eyes fixed only on their work. She seemed to be the only idle person on the entire floor.
Wandering without direction, she found herself back near the elevator she’d first ridden up in. Cui Yawen had already granted her access, card or wristband, either worked.
Two pots of pothos sat by the elevator. Wait, pothos again? She remembered pothos by the elevator on her way up too, but those had looked somewhat withered.
These two looked lush and thriving.
The decor on this floor was almost identical everywhere. If Jiang Lin hadn’t looked closely, she never would have noticed this wasn’t the same elevator she’d ridden before. If not for the different pothos plants, she’d have missed it entirely.
Two patrolling guards walked past.
“Why do you think Professor Cui dislikes Researcher Shen so much? I think he’s decent, and good-looking too.”
“You don’t know? They’re… sigh, it’s complicated.”
“If you ask me, Researcher Shen’s kind of pitiful. Every time he rides this elevator up, he stops to fuss over these two pothos plants.”
“You’re right, these two really are healthier than the ones by the other elevators.”
Jiang Lin didn’t catch every word, but she pulled out the important piece: Shen Congyu used this particular elevator often. Could it access the underground levels?
She cautiously swiped the doors open. After a few seconds’ wait, the elevator arrived. She stepped in, but the floor panel showed no underground option at all.
Then she remembered the access card, the one she’d taken off the two knocked-out researchers, still in her pocket.
She tried swiping it.
“Error! This card has been canceled.” The elevator’s warning startled her.
As expected, the lab wasn’t careless. They’d already voided the lost cards.
She stepped out, a little deflated. Would she really have to repeat that night, knock out a few researchers and sneak in? Too risky. The moment she went down, she’d be facing a room full of them.
Dejected, she wandered back out and absently fussed with the two pothos pots, trying to shake off her frustration.
Because the soil was contaminated, all the plants here grew hydroponically. She had no idea what Shen Congyu could possibly be tending when he stopped here. She touched a leaf idly.
For some reason, her fingertip came away faintly green. She brought it closer, curious. Definitely green, and she hadn’t scratched the leaf.
Could the pothos be fading somehow?
She checked both pots carefully, running her fingers over every leaf, until one felt subtly different, tucked among the dense stems and roots, identical in appearance, yet somehow wrong.
A strange thought struck her. Could this leaf be fake? Something that never discolored, always green, meaning every time Shen Congyu came to “tend” the plants, he was really just making sure the rest didn’t stand out beside it?
She reached to touch it again, but a jolt like static shot through her fingertip, tingling and numb. She snatched her hand back just as the patrolling guards rounded the corner again.
They gave her a slightly odd look.
Jiang Lin felt a flush of embarrassment. “Ahem, I just started here, so I’m a little curious about everything. Are other floors off-limits?”
“Not off-limits exactly. As long as you stay out of the classified project rooms, it’s not a big deal.”
“What’s on the other floors?”
“First floor’s weapons research, second is biological genetics, third handles tech products.” The guard told her everything he knew.
A figure approached in the distance, and the quieter of the two guards elbowed his talkative partner. Both snapped back into work mode and resumed their rounds.
“Xiao Lin, if you’re bored, head back, approval for your housing probably won’t clear until tomorrow, so you might as well go tidy up early.” Cui Yawen, noticing Jiang Lin’s requested materials hadn’t arrived yet, assumed she was restless, and felt a little guilty besides, she’d promised the move-in for today and hadn’t managed it.
“It’s fine, I’ll head back.” Staying on the fourth floor longer wasn’t going to uncover anything else. Her shocked fingertip still tingled faintly.
The moment she stepped into the elevator, almost on impulse, she pressed the second-floor button. Those two guards had said she could go, as long as she avoided the classified rooms.
But the instant her finger touched the button, something shifted subtly on the panel, and the elevator’s descent sped up unexpectedly.
She thought it had malfunctioned. Bracing herself against the wall, she readied for a possible fall, watching the floor display, and something felt off. The number of floors passed didn’t match what should have already gone by.
At this speed, she should have hit the first floor already, yet the display was only now settling on the second.
“Ding!” The chime sounded, and the doors opened normally.