Base 83

After Summer shoved something unknown into my hand, he bolted from the house without looking back.

At first I thought he had given me a pen, so I looked down on reflex. The instant I saw what it really was, I shuddered. It was not a pen at all, but a finger.

It looked like a middle finger because it was so long, but unlike the narrow, delicate fingers of White Night and Gold Ze, this one had thick, heavy joints. It had to belong to a man.

I had no idea why Summer had handed me such a thing, but there was no time to dwell on it. I stuffed the finger into my pocket on the spot, then tightened my grip on the long blade in my hand and kept hacking at another wax figure beside me.

Because the wax figures were made to exact life-size realism, and because the material itself imitated flesh so convincingly, they looked every bit like living people. On top of that, they had already died once. Even so, when I took the blade to them with such ruthless force, I still felt a chill in my heart.

White Night, not far away, was unaffected. To him, all of this was as easy as eating a meal. With a flick of his wrist and a downward slash, graceful arcs flashing through the air, he had already severed the heads of several wax figures.

And like the one I had just cut down, although they were only wax figures, blood still gushed from their necks the moment their heads were severed, making it look as though real living people had been decapitated.

I knew the truth was not that the wax figures had come to life. It had clearly been arranged in advance. Kong Rain had injected blood into the figures themselves, which was why the sight of it spraying everywhere was so shocking. That was also why Summer had been covered in blood when he crawled out of a wax figure earlier.

So why had Kong Rain injected blood into the wax figures? Was it some strange hobby of his, or had he done it deliberately to frighten us? If it was the latter, did that mean he already knew we were here to assassinate him?

Had our operation been exposed?

I did not think White Night was the kind of person who could be discovered and have his trail traced. Then the problem might have been me. But I had been following White Night the whole time, so I should not have been the weak point either. The only time I had leaked anything was through a listening device to Fang Qinghe.

The thought struck me like a blow. What if the problem was Fang Qinghe?

Then a horrifying possibility rose in my mind, one that even made me afraid of myself. What if Fang Qinghe had sent me undercover into the Avengers Alliance not to solve a case, but to spy on the organization and feed the information back to Dawn?

What if Fang Qinghe was actually one of Dawn’s people?

At that thought, my skin prickled all over. I could not rule it out. If even the director of the city’s first hospital could be a Dawn operative, why could Fang Qinghe not be one as well?

Dawn was obviously an organization filled with elites. Otherwise the Avengers Alliance would not have gone to such lengths to train assassins and then hunt down Dawn’s members. If the police were truly effective, if some so-called Security Bureau could really wipe Dawn out, how could Dawn possibly have survived for so long?

And if Fang Qinghe were truly upright, then after Kong Rain entered this house, and now that White Night and I had come in as well, he should have been moving in to close the net. Why had the police not shown up by now?

Panic set in.

If Kong Rain really knew we were here to kill him, then this had to be a trap of enormous proportions.

And Kong Rain was a specialist in medical viruses. Since he could even develop virus-based cosmetics, creating some other kind of mixed virus would surely be child’s play for him.

The blood spilling from the wax figures suddenly seemed like nothing more than a smokescreen. Taken separately, it might not have been very dangerous, but once all of that blood came out together, who knew whether it would become some kind of lethal concoction? Maybe White Night and I were about to be poisoned to death right here.

Thinking that, I immediately called out to White Night, "White Night, watch out for a trick. Our operation may have been leaked. Be careful."

But I was already too late. The moment the words left my mouth, the long blade in White Night’s hand had already struck the head of the last wax figure.

When I looked over, I could not help but tremble. That last wax figure was actually me. I had never imagined that old bastard Kong Rain had even made a wax figure of me.

But White Night still showed no mercy. My own wax figure’s head was severed as well. When I saw blood spraying from its neck, my own throat went numb, as if it were mine that was bleeding.

The moment the last wax figure lost its head, I suddenly heard the heavy rumble of the room’s main door slamming shut.

My stomach dropped. This was bad. We might really have been caught.

White Night swept his gaze across the severed wax heads on the floor at the fastest speed possible. Seeing that Kong Rain was nowhere among them, a trace of faint surprise flickered in those peach-blossom eyes of his.

And then, just then, I felt my footing slip. The instant I tried to steady myself, I realized the floor had begun to vibrate beneath me, as though an earthquake were starting. But just as quickly, it returned to normal.

I froze for a moment, then prepared to sprint for the door to see what was happening and whether it could be forced open. Instinct told me we could not stay here. If those blood-like fluids on the floor really were mixed into something poisonous, or even explosive, my life would end here for sure.

But before I could move, I suddenly felt a chill around my ankle, as though something had caught my foot.

I looked down on reflex, and my whole body locked up.

Damn it. There really was a hand on my foot.

At some point, a wide crack had opened in the floor beside me, and that hand was reaching out from inside it.

The moment I realized what was happening and tried to fight back, the hand had already yanked me over. I was dragged straight into the gap.

As I was falling in free descent, I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of the floor beneath White Night’s feet splitting open in a huge crack as well, and his body dropping in after me.

There were mechanisms beneath the floorboards. Kong Rain had indeed left a second line of defense.

I had no time to think. By the time I regained my senses, I had already hit the ground with a heavy thud.

Luckily, the drop had not been very high, and I had braced myself for a fall, so I was not seriously injured. Even so, the pain was enough to keep me from getting up.

A moment later I heard another thud. White Night had landed too. But he was far more capable than I was. Letting his body sink with the force of the fall, he bent his knees on impact, rolled into the motion, and quickly steadied himself again.

Lights came on around us.

I took a look at the place.

The room was neither large nor small, but my instinct told me this was only the tip of the iceberg. We had merely fallen into some kind of trap, and there had to be other spaces surrounding it.

Maybe this was Kong Rain’s base for developing virus cosmetics.

I was still thinking when White Night immediately came to my side and helped me to my feet.

Then he walked ahead, slowly moving forward. On the left and right, behind us, and even overhead, everything appeared to be sealed with steel plates. There was nowhere to retreat. Only the space directly ahead seemed like a door.

Soon we reached it. White Night was just about to reach out and try to push it open when it suddenly opened by itself.

The moment it did, I was hit by a strong medicinal odor that made me feel profoundly uneasy. It was far harsher than the smell of disinfectant in a hospital.

At the same time, a very sharp voice rang out. "Welcome to my world, Kong Rain."

His voice was thin and piercing, almost eunuch-like, warped and strange, yet it made me shiver. Damn it, that old fox really had planned this.

But White Night was not afraid. He walked in calmly.

I had no choice but to harden myself and follow. The instant I stepped through the doorway and saw the scene before me, even though I had already witnessed many grotesque things, I still drew in a sharp breath.

This truly was a research facility. Everywhere I looked were brains, hearts, livers, even reproductive organs, along with peeled human skin, eyeballs floating in jars of liquid, and more.

Seeing all this, I could not help thinking of the first batch of human organs I had discovered earlier, the ones Liu Yang had used to make the basic materials for cosmetics. Compared with the makeshift workshop from before, though, that place was child’s play. This one was on an entirely different level, looking remarkably sophisticated. Every organ had its own special container, and I even saw an isolated heart still beating on its own.

While I was still reeling, several doors suddenly opened, and five or six people emerged from behind them. They looked as though they were about to turn the tables and hunt White Night and me instead.

I was a little tense, but White Night remained very calm. He wiped the tip of his blade clean, then turned to me and said, "Wood, it looks like we are killing people together again."

I gave a deliberately cold laugh, though inside I was panicking badly.

Then White Night leaned close to my ear and asked softly, "Will your police friends come to save you?"

I froze. "What do you mean?"

He looked at me with a smile that was not quite a smile and said, "That listening device on you was meant for the police, wasn’t it? Wood, after all these years, you finally have friends."

His voice was light and indifferent, but the moment I heard it, a chill crawled all over my body.