Chapter 182

Chapter 182

“Eighteen years?” Nan Mu seized on the number at once. “Why eighteen?”

Why not ten, twenty, or thirty? Why did it have to be precisely eighteen?

As far as he knew, experiments generally continued at full steam until they succeeded, or were shelved after researchers ran out of leads and finally gave up.

That made the decision by Wisdom Biotech Company’s leadership utterly baffling.

Meng Ran had been in her forties at the time. Eighteen years later, she would be in her sixties.

Some of the project’s participants might even be dead by then. Restarting it after so long would essentially force the entire research team to begin from scratch. It was a blatant waste of time and resources.

He had hoped Meng Ran could explain it, but she did not know either.

“I don’t know.” Meng Ran shook her head, helplessness showing in her eyes. “I never asked why it had to be eighteen years. All I could think about then was that I had to keep the experiment going. I couldn’t let Li Xiangyi’s sacrifice be for nothing.”

===

The final test subject was a girl who looked about twenty, young and beautiful.

Meng Ran seemed to sink into the memory. “When she saw me, she smiled and greeted me. She said I made her feel strangely at ease.”

In truth, Meng Ran had also thought the girl looked a great deal like her younger self.

But every test subject had signed a confidentiality agreement. For security reasons, research staff were forbidden from having excessive contact with them, much less speaking to them about anything unrelated to work. Meng Ran therefore knew nothing about the girl’s background.

When the test began, Meng Ran set the destination year to 2004.

According to plan, the subject was supposed to return to 2020 after thirty minutes. Yet the machine had been running for only twenty minutes when someone opened the door of the Time Machine and stepped out.

It was the girl. Meng Ran could not tell whether it was her imagination, but the girl’s skin looked slightly less healthy than before she went in.

That was not unusual. Traveling faster than light in the Time Machine did have some effect on the human body.

Meng Ran asked why she had returned so soon. The girl appeared deeply unsettled. She bit her lip and stared at Meng Ran for a long time, then looked nervously around the laboratory.

At the time, Meng Ran had not realized anything was wrong.

She assumed the subject might have encountered some unusual situation in the past. The good news was that after more than twenty days under observation in the lab, the girl showed no signs of pathological changes.

It meant the Time Machine test had succeeded.

===

Nan Mu’s heart lurched. “You succeeded?”

“No.” Meng Ran shook her head, her expression grave. “I told you the earlier subjects fell ill one after another within a month. But the last subject stayed in the laboratory for only a little over twenty days. She showed no symptoms during that time, but…”

Senior executives had overseen the final experiment. Once word of the Time Machine’s apparent success reached them, everyone was eager to try it. Meng Ran and the head of Team Two led the first group.

To everyone’s shock, after traveling in the Time Machine, every member of that group developed the same symptoms as Li Xiangyi.

Meng Ran did not have long to live.

…

After hearing the whole story, Nan Mu was more confused than ever. “You knew the other subjects had fallen ill within a month. Why didn’t you keep the last subject there a few more days? Why let her leave after only twenty-some days?”

“It wasn’t that we chose to let her go.” Even now, Meng Ran remained puzzled by what had happened. “The subject had been staying in the observation room assigned to our materials team. Then one day, the laboratory suddenly lost power. No one knew why. It lasted only ten minutes… but when we went back, she was gone.”

“G-gone?” Nan Mu frowned.

Meng Ran nodded, her eyes reflecting the same bewilderment as his. “After the girl disappeared, I tried to find her-especially after our group developed the same illness as Li Xiangyi.”

She had wanted to know whether the girl’s constitution was somehow unique and she was truly unharmed, or whether their observation period had simply been too short and the girl had fallen ill after leaving.

One look at Meng Ran told Nan Mu she had never found her.

“I tried to investigate her background, but I discovered that senior management had sealed all her records. Her identity seemed… unusual. So I could only search for clues in the past. I was the one who programmed the Time Machine, so I had a rough idea where she would have arrived. I traveled all over looking for archived surveillance footage from that year. The only footage I found came from the amusement park at the end of Line 11. She took a little boy there and spent the entire day with him. Other than that, I couldn’t find a single image of her anywhere.”

Nan Mu, who had been listening in silence, shot to his feet the instant he heard “the end of Line 11.”

The abrupt movement startled Meng Ran out of her memories.

Disbelief filled his face. His hands clenched into fists, and his voice trembled as he asked, “What year did you say you sent her back to?”

Meng Ran did not understand his sudden agitation. “2004.”

Thirty years ago. The end of Line 11. A woman taking a little boy with her…

It was her.

The mysterious woman who had taken Nan Mu to the amusement park thirty years ago-and warned him never to become friends with Wen Miao.