“Where’s Zhong Ziqian?”
Xi Zirui crouched behind a cabinet, looking over at Zhang Xiangyi and Xiao Xingzhi on the other side.
Everyone was accounted for, except Zhong Ziqian.
Fire was everywhere now, with the constant danger of another explosion. Zhang Xiangyi scanned all around too, and saw no sign of Zhong Ziqian. All she could say was, “Let’s find what we came for first. A grown man that size knows to run when he hits danger.”
If he couldn’t get away, there was nothing to be done. They weren’t familiar with the lab either, and searching for him would just be flailing around like headless flies.
The three split up.
Clutching the whip the little boy had handed back to her, Zhang Xiangyi headed deep into the lab.
Scattered footsteps, the occasional “person” appearing, she lashed out at every one without hesitation. The whole way she met with no great danger, which only made her uneasier inside.
The lab was this important, how could the defenses be this thin, and the ones sent to stop them this pathetic?
The more it was like this, the greater the danger waiting for them.
“Rumble, rumble, rumble—”
As the wall before her slowly slid to the right, the layout inside was revealed.
There was a girl with all kinds of tubes stuck into her, the tubes connected to all kinds of instruments, the monitors full of data, the “beep, beep, beep” especially loud in the empty space. Zhang Xiangyi stood where she was without moving. She recognized the girl’s face.
Zhou Lan.
The presumed police mole, and, as later verification confirmed, indeed she was.
But was the one before her really Zhou Lan?
Having been through too many cases in this game of identical faces belonging to different people, Zhang Xiangyi didn’t dare believe it.
The girl hadn’t woken, she was still unconscious.
A question rose in Zhang Xiangyi’s mind.
If this was the real Zhou Lan, then who had set off that explosion just now?
According to what the police had let on, the only mole who could get into the lab was Zhou Lan.
Whether or not the person before her was really Zhou Lan, things had gotten serious…
“Over here!”
“Someone’s broken into the test lab!”
“Some of you put out the fire, the rest move the subjects—”
Hearing that, Zhang Xiangyi thought for a moment and then went straight into the so-called test lab. The instant she stepped in, the door shut on its own behind her, sealing seamlessly.
She walked slowly up to the girl, reached out and lightly tugged at the tubes stuck into her, her gaze settling on the girl’s rising and falling chest, and said flatly, “Still not getting up?”
The words had barely left her mouth when the girl’s eyes snapped open and her leg shot toward Zhang Xiangyi’s face. At a startling speed, she braced the hand that had been lying at her side, pushed herself up, and whipped a dagger out from behind her, slashing at Zhang Xiangyi’s face.
Zhang Xiangyi had only just dodged the foot, and now she had to dodge the hand.
The two of them went back and forth, blow for blow, not a single movement wasted, every strike aimed at the face, no less.
“Mm…”
A hand pressed down on the wound on her upper arm, and the pain made Zhang Xiangyi let out a sound before she could stop herself.
Her eyes went cold. Without hesitation she whipped the lash toward the woman’s eyes, and at the same time kicked straight at the other’s heart with all the strength she had.
She just didn’t know whether an NPC’s heart was as fragile as an ordinary person’s.
As it turned out, NPC or ordinary person, no heart can withstand a violent impact.
Zhang Xiangyi tilted her head slightly and caught sight of the spot on her arm where blood had already begun to seep out, the red staining her white work coat, very conspicuous.
The girl wiped the blood at the corner of her mouth with her thumb, looked at the red on it, and suddenly smiled. “You’re the first.”
“Then you’re pretty pathetic.”
A creeping numbness in her arm made Zhang Xiangyi pause. Realizing what it meant, she lifted her head and stared at the girl’s face like a villain. “Very nice.”
The numbness gradually spread through her whole body. Zhang Xiangyi went limp, as if she’d completely lost the ability to resist, her eyes betraying despair and yet an unwillingness to give in. The girl lunged a step forward, clamped a hand around Zhang Xiangyi’s throat, and bore down with all her strength.
Soon Zhang Xiangyi’s face flushed scarlet, turning liver-purple.
“It’s you people who ruined the apartment!”
She glared at Zhang Xiangyi with hatred. “Don’t worry, your friends will be along to keep you company soon. Maybe they’ll even go ahead of you.”
Zhang Xiangyi was unmoved, and her lifeless look made the girl angry. “Why won’t you say anything?”
“Huh?!”
“Aren’t you supposed to fight back? Don’t you people love saying things that make me angry?!”
“I prefer doing over saying.”
The words had barely left her mouth when Zhang Xiangyi stabbed savagely into the woman’s chest, even more brutally than the 4-2 girl who’d killed herself out of control, driving the blade in so deep that a good part of the handle sank in too.
She shoved the woman away, staggering back a few steps, coughed a few times, and rubbed her aching neck, while ignoring her own arm, which was still bleeding.
The first time she had truly, genuinely killed someone left Zhang Xiangyi’s hands weak and trembling, the other’s blood still lingering on them, warm, sticky, reeking…
When had she, who’d grown up safe and sound under the new era’s red banner, ever done anything like this?
On the way home from the commercial street, she’d killed plenty of zombies and felt nothing, because the gap between zombies and normal people was so vast she’d never regarded them as human.
Inside the game, the ghostly thing that had first impersonated Xiao Xingzhi vanished into smoke the moment its throat was slit, even less of a real sensation, like swiping a couple of times at thin air.
In the basement, to get into the lab, she really had whipped a lot of people just now, with no time to even think about who was alive or dead, just repetitively swinging the whip.
But now, only now, did she feel it for real.
To stay alive…
Yes, to stay alive!
Over and over, Zhang Xiangyi drilled it into her own head, her face unchanging as she looked at the girl fallen on the floor. The girl had reverted to her original appearance, a face you wouldn’t notice in a crowd. Sure enough, not Zhou Lan.
Her fingertips rubbing together, not Zhou Lan meant the big Boss behind it all knew of their existence, and had been guiding them step by step. And the real Zhou Lan…
It came down to who had set off that explosion just now.
She stepped up and crouched in front of the girl, searching her pockets from top to bottom.
The knife was the one the little girl had given her. She hadn’t told anyone, hadn’t mentioned it at all, just kept it tucked at her waist. The lab coat was long, reaching her knees, easily covering it.
There was nothing on the girl.
As for what she’d said, Zhang Xiangyi felt little stir within. It was just as Zhong Ziqian had said back at the start, when everyone was first going into their rooms on the first floor: it’s down to who gets lucky.
She couldn’t save them.
Already on her feet, Zhang Xiangyi thought a moment, then bent down to pull the knife out. With the motion, the blood at the girl’s chest instantly gushed forth. Zhang Xiangyi had anticipated it and tilted her head, but there was no dodging the front of her collar.
A great swath of red, blossoming into a vivid flower on the white lab coat.
Already starting to survey the test lab, Zhang Xiangyi suddenly thought of something, drew the knife from her waist again, and drove it hard into the girl’s brain.
The long-haired monster had lost its body and its head had still come back to life to cause trouble, who was to say?
When doing a job, you have to learn to make sure of the kill.
After pulling the knife out again, she wiped it on the girl’s clothes, then returned it to her waist.
Her wrist throbbed from the impact. Thank goodness the knife was sharp enough, there was no telling what material it was made of.
It could even pierce a skull.
Her whole body was limp and weak. Whatever this girl had done to her, lasting until now really hadn’t been easy. She found a relatively clean stretch of wall, leaned against it, and rested while she observed.
The entire test lab had only a single platform set in the dead center, the girl had just been lying on it, surrounded by all kinds of instruments. The wall at the very back was one enormous screen, covering the whole surface, displaying data.
The test lab was very bright and open.
She didn’t find anything particularly special either.
So it was just the burial ground prepared for her?
“Rumble, rumble, rumble—”
Heedless of her limp body, Zhang Xiangyi hurried to hide behind a large instrument. After the sound of the door opening stopped, the footsteps drew closer and closer.
Hand resting on the knife at her waist, she watched the shadow draw nearer, then drew the blade and stabbed straight at it.
“It’s me, it’s me!”
“One of us!”
At the familiar voice, Zhang Xiangyi calmly withdrew the knife and sized up the person before her. About the same state as her: white lab coat covered in blood and tears, complexion poor, multiple wounds on his body, but his spirits were good, and his mouth could still keep yammering.
It was the real him, all right.
“Give me a hand.”
Xiao Xingzhi’s hands moved faster than his mouth, he’d already caught her in his arms. “What happened? This woman was that tough? Your old wound hasn’t even healed and now you’ve got new ones, oh boy, what are we going to do about this.”
“Good thing tonight—”
“Shut up!”
He was giving her a splitting headache.
Told off, Xiao Xingzhi could only change the subject.
“The ones in here are pretty clever. What I can’t figure out is, there’s clearly no surveillance in here, so how did they find us?” After confirming for the third time that Zhang Xiangyi was all right, he started wandering around the test lab. “And they even rigged it to try and catch us all in one net. Tell me, do you think what we saw earlier, what Zou Yue did to Zhou Lan, was real or fake? Could that have been staged for our benefit too?”
Xi Zirui crouched on the floor, carefully examining the girl’s corpse, a sharp little blade in hand that he couldn’t help putting to work on the dead woman’s face. “It shouldn’t be. There has to be a police mole in here, if it’s not Zhou Lan, then who?”
Especially if the intel from Zhang Xiangyi’s side were all fake, then what was even real in here?
“Just now she still had Zhou Lan’s face. After she died she turned into this.” Seeing that Xi Zirui was interested, Zhang Xiangyi said a bit more. “I found a card. Is there anywhere else in here?”
“Don’t know. I was being chased all over the lab just now and didn’t find anything. All I can say is the ones in here really can run.” Xiao Xingzhi lay flat on the platform, settling down as serenely as a corpse. “There’s nobody in the lab now, they should all be outside waiting. And it’s not like we can just not go out. I still can’t work it out, when exactly did they figure us out?”
It had been a bit conspicuous of them, true, but there was reason behind it.
Surely they couldn’t have memorized the face of every single worker in here?
“You’ve collected everything?” Zhang Xiangyi caught her breath, then went and took photos, bagged a few things, and looked at the two of them, one lying down with his mouth running nonstop, one crouched in front of the corpse studying it without end. After a silence, she said, “Where’s Zhong Ziqian? Still not found?”
“No idea where that guy ran off to. Didn’t see him outside the lab door earlier and never saw him again after that.”
Zhang Xiangyi found a slightly cleaner spot and sat down on the floor, resting and thinking at the same time.
Time ticked by second by second. Suddenly Xi Zirui spoke up. “This technique is genuinely impressive!”
Zhang Xiangyi: ???
Xiao Xingzhi scrambled up and ran over to Xi Zirui’s side, watching closely. “You figured out how they swap faces?”
“I’ve got a rough idea, but it would take a huge amount of equipment, and there’s no time.” Xi Zirui put away his tools and stood, withdrawing reluctantly from the girl’s face. “If you gave me the time, I might even win some kind of prize for it.”
Especially with this many test subjects in here.
Zhang Xiangyi: “……” You’re more NPC than the NPCs.
Xiao Xingzhi wasn’t the type to keep his thoughts inside. At that he just blurted it out. “You’re such a freak…”
Xi Zirui smiled faintly and was about to say something when the alarm sounded again, louder and more urgent than the last time. This time not just the corridor flashed with red light, the entire test lab did too.
The ground even began to shake.
“Bang—!”