Helena had not left her house for three consecutive days.
She locked herself in her rental apartment, switching between three computers.
She combed through all the evidence she had on hand, trying to find any loophole she might have missed.
The result was the same.
The existing materials could prove Professor John ferren’s academic misconduct, but they weren’t fatal.
From an administrative standpoint, penalties for academic misconduct in the country were generally weak, especially for established professor-level figures; the most common handling was “internal criticism and education” or “revocation of the problematic paper,” which wouldn’t hurt his foundation.
What Helena needed was something that could send him to prison.
Misappropriation of research funds was a criminal offense.
But she couldn’t get the complete accounts.
In the early hours of the fourth day, she finally couldn’t hold on anymore and fell asleep on the keyboard.
When she woke up, it was already afternoon.
Sunlight reflected from the wall opposite the window, stinging her eyes.
She rubbed her temples, took a sip of the cold boiled water that had been sitting on the table for who knows how long, and casually opened her email.
There was a new email in the inbox.
The sender’s address was a string of meaningless gibberish; there was no subject, no body text.
Only one attachment.
Helena’s hand paused over the mouse for two seconds.
She first checked the email header information, attempting to trace the sender’s IP, but the results showed it had gone through at least three layers of proxies, making it untraceable.
She downloaded the attachment into an isolated virtual machine environment and scanned it with antivirus software; no malicious code was found.
The attachment was an encrypted compressed file, with the decompression password written in the sender’s name field of the email.
She entered the password and extracted it.
There were nine PDF documents in the folder.
Helena opened the first one.
It was a financial statement.
Jianbin Biotechnology Co., Ltd., 2022 Annual Internal Financial Audit Report.
Helena’s fingers tightened on the mouse.
She quickly flipped to the expenditure details section of the report.
Starting from page seven, there was a column labeled “Research Equipment Procurement” with total expenditures of 3.78 million yuan.
Helena cross-referenced this with the scattered reimbursement records she already had and found that out of this 3.78 million, at least 1.5 million in expenditures did not match the actual equipment purchased.
She opened the second file.
This one was more direct: a series of screenshots of bank transfer records, showing multiple funds transferred from the company account to a personal account.
The account holder of the personal account was Professor John ferren’s wife.
The amounts weren’t large, thirty to fifty thousand each, but the frequency was very high; it had accumulated to over two million in the past two years.
Helena continued reading.
The third file was a screenshot of an internal email where Professor John ferren explicitly instructed the CFO to “flexibly handle” 600,000 from a research fund for “business reception and partner maintenance.”
The fourth, fifth, sixth…
Every single one was ironclad proof.
Complete, systematic, ironclad proof sufficient for audit departments and procuratorates to file a case.
Helena read through the nine documents from beginning to end three times.
Four hours had passed. Get faster updates on g.com.
It was already dark outside the window.
She leaned back in her chair, staring blankly at the screen for a while.
Where did these things come from?
Who sent them to her?
Who had the channels to obtain a private company’s internal financial audit report and bank transfer records?
Helena thought for a long time, but couldn’t figure it out.
But she didn’t care.
Regardless of who the sender of this email was or what their purpose was, these materials themselves were the weapon she had been waiting for for a year and four months.
She began to formulate a plan.
She wanted to throw everything out at once, at the most suitable time and in the most suitable way.
To make him fall from the highest point.
Helena opened her calendar software and flipped to next month.
March 15th, Jianbin Biotechnology Company’s second-generation gene-editing product launch, held at the Municipal Convention and Exhibition Center, broadcast nationwide, with an expected audience of over ten million.
Professor John ferren would personally go on stage to give the keynote speech.
Helena looked at that date and tapped her fingers on the keyboard twice.
This was the day.
She stood up from her chair, went to the communal stove in the hallway to cook a bowl of noodles, and brought it back to eat.
When she returned to the table after finishing the noodles, she noticed something wrong in the room.
A faint humming sound.
The sound surrounded her from all directions, and it also seemed to come from her own body.
Helena stood in the middle of the room, looking around vigilantly.
Then she saw the cup of cold boiled water on the table.
The water in the cup was vibrating.
A very subtle vibration, forming concentric circles of ripples on the water’s surface.
The frequency of the ripples was very regular, as if driven by sound waves of a specific frequency.
Helena crouched down and brought her eyes close to the cup.
The ripples intensified the moment she drew near.
Then the water cup shattered.
Three radial cracks appeared on the cup wall from the inside, and water gushed out from the cracks, soaking the documents on the table.
Helena took a step back.
“Who is there?”
Her voice was very flat, much flatter than most people’s would be when facing such a situation.
The humming stopped.
It was quiet for about five seconds.
Then Helena felt something on her right wrist.
A tiny, black thread was slowly crawling along the surface of her skin.
It was thinner than a strand of hair; if she hadn’t looked closely, she wouldn’t have noticed it at all.
Helena looked down at the thread.
She didn’t shake her hand, didn’t scream, didn’t have any violent reaction.
She just watched. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
The black thread paused on her wrist for two seconds, then began to move, climbing up along her forearm.
“What are you?”
Helena’s voice remained very flat.
The black thread stopped at the inside of her elbow.
Then a signal was transmitted into her mind.
The content of that information was very simple.
In the image, she was sitting at the table in her rental apartment, her fingers on the keyboard.
Then, from her wrist, an invisible force spread out, rippling like water.
Wherever the ripples passed, the water cup on the table shattered, the computer screen flickered, and the window glass hummed.
Sound waves.
The image switched.
She was standing in a spacious conference hall, someone was giving a speech on stage, and a dense crowd of audience members sat below.
She opened her mouth.
There was no sound.
But the words of the person on stage were replaced by another sound.
All the display screens in the venue simultaneously played a screenshot of a financial statement.
The image ended.
Helena looked at the black thread on her wrist.
She was silent for a long time.
“Are you here to help me?”
The black thread squirmed at the crook of her elbow, as if in response.
“What are your conditions?”
Another signal was transmitted into her mind.
No conditions.
We can cooperate.
Helena’s fingers curled slightly.
She looked at the thread, just as if looking at a blade she hadn’t been able to forge in a year and four months.
“Fine.”
Only one word.
The black thread started from the crook of her elbow, slowly drilled under her skin, and disappeared beneath the skin of her fair forearm, leaving no trace.
Hundreds of meters beneath the city, Knull completed the division for the third time.
This time the consumption was less than the previous two times.
His main body only shrank a tiny bit after the division, almost negligible.
The efficiency optimization brought by evolution was even more obvious than he had expected.
There was a third link in the spiritual network.
Faint, but stable.
The emotional signal transmitted back was completely different from the first two.
No scorching anger, no surging hatred.
Only a sheet of ice.
And the fire that had never been extinguished beneath the ice.