Chapter 107
Chapter 107
In the laboratory, several cages of white mice spun around like mad things, biting and tearing at one another.
G-CP-0001. Project codename-Gate.
When Qin Ying saw those large, blood-red words, her heart gave an inexplicable jolt.
Before she could open the file, the man leaning his elbow on the lab bench tapped the tabletop.
He was signaling that Qin Ying had to use the drug first.
The all-steel lab bench gleamed with a cold metallic sheen. Under the lights, the blue drug lying quietly atop it looked like a shard of deep-blue ice.
Qin Ying nudged the injector in front of her with one finger.
This kind of injector had no needle. All she had to do was lift the hem of her shirt and inject it within a three-finger radius around her navel.
As for what would happen after the injection, no one could say.
Qin Ying flicked her finger, sending the drug rolling away. “Show a little gentlemanly courtesy and yield to a lady, why don’t you? Let’s talk first.”
The injector bumped into a beaker on the lab bench with a soft clink.
The huge black dog beside the man, as large as a donkey, suddenly rose to its feet.
Its body was covered in half-congealed clots of blood. Lowering its head slightly, it aimed the blood-soaked horn between its eyes at Qin Ying.
Qin Ying seemed utterly unconcerned as she picked up the file beside her.
In the pouch hanging in front of her chest, Han Lie anxiously lashed his tail.
But remembering his agreement with Qin Ying, he obediently kept his aura restrained and remained silent.
Fuzhu, who was in the same pouch, did not have Han Lie’s courage to fight anyone who displeased him.
As for the conflict outside, neither side was something a little deer like it could afford to provoke.
A Disaster Beast of water that brought rain and storms was of no use whatsoever in a place with a fully equipped drainage system.
Just as the horned black dog was about to move, the man sprawled lazily over the lab bench chuckled.
He ran his palm over the vicious dog’s spine, calming it down.
“Fine!” Propping his chin in one hand, he looked at Qin Ying. “Who told you to be so pretty?”
Qin Ying ignored both his compliment and his sticky gaze, and opened the kraft paper envelope in her hand.
What she shook out, however, was only a collection of burned scraps of paper.
They looked as though they had been pulled from a fire, incomplete and fragmentary.
There were Chinese characters on them, and also… some obscure writing.
Characters more ancient than oracle bone script.
They were unlike any extant human language. They might not even have been the product of human thought.
But… Qin Ying could read them!
When the marks Fuzhu and Hou had surrendered to her in submission merged into Qin Ying’s palm, she had come to recognize these characters as naturally as common knowledge.
She had never needed to learn them. They were already engraved in her mind.
Fortunately, Qin Ying had always been excellent at controlling her expression, and revealed only the slightest trace of peculiarity.
But the man across from her started clucking with laughter like a hen laying eggs.
Pleased by his own prank, he smiled and said, “You don’t recognize those characters, do you?”
“If you’d injected the drug first and then realized you couldn’t read them, your expression would’ve been even more wonderful.”
As he wished, Qin Ying showed a flash of anger.
The man clearly had no fear of making things worse. After toying with someone, he was practically smug to death.
With exaggerated affectation, he raised a hand in invitation, signaling for Qin Ying to read the file first.
And so, a subtle situation arose.
The man believed no one could possibly understand such obscure writing, but Qin Ying recognized every single character.
Right under his nose, she began deciphering it word by word.
Because they were all fragments, Qin Ying could only do her best to piece them together.
It all began with certain elusive phenomena known as “Ghost Gate.”
In truth, calling them gates was not entirely accurate. They were more like passages drifting through the entire world and throughout human history.
The “Gate” was erratic and impossible to pin down. People had witnessed it all over the world, and it had been recorded throughout various histories.
“Mount Osore, the Tower of Babel, the Gate to Hell of Hierapolis, the Mouth of Hell at Masaya Volcano, the Lacus Curtius Great Rift…”
Perhaps because Qin Ying had indulged his prank, the man explained, “There are records of gates appearing at all of these places.”
Seeing that Qin Ying had no reaction to those names, the man named two she might recognize.
“Buzhou Mountain at the edge of the Great Wilds, and Jianmu, which the Huainanzi records as connecting to the heavenly realm or some mysterious world.”
The word Jianmu instantly made Qin Ying’s throat go dry.
Only she knew how fast her heart had started pounding in that instant.
“You’re saying all of these are connected to the gates?”
Even after she did her best to steady herself, her voice was still dry. “These places or objects all connect to gates?”
She asked two questions in a row. The man hooked two chairs over with his foot, then kicked one toward Qin Ying, indicating for her to sit.
“Yes!”
The man’s answer made Qin Ying lick her lips unconsciously.
“A very, very long time ago, all sorts of strange things came through the ‘gates’ and appeared in our world.”
“Ancient Huaxia was a continuous civilization, so it left behind the most records.”
Qin Ying’s breathing grew a little uneven. “So the Classic of Mountains and Seas is actually recording… what lies beyond the gates.”
The man tilted his head and smiled, acknowledging it.
Thinking back to the little humanoid specimen Old Miao had used to test the newcomers, Qin Ying felt as if she understood something.
“Something passed through the gates and came to our world.”
“It left behind some genetic information.”
Perhaps in fossilized amber. Perhaps in a corpse sealed in ice. Perhaps in remains buried under volcanic ash.
Or perhaps… in a living specimen that had been captured.
That genetic information had been used, and so Zhang Lang had appeared. So had the Black Hound before her, which resembled a Zheng.
Qin Ying looked around the laboratory she was in. “Fusion experiments are being carried out here too.”
Judging by the pile of deformed specimens in the corridor, this place was a canine experimentation base.
That was why famous breeds appeared here, and why there were also village dogs unsuitable for fighting.
Qin Ying suddenly laughed. “Don’t tell me the dogfighting business exists to fund the experiments.”
The man’s face stiffened for a split second.
So it really was for funding. Qin Ying rubbed the space between her brows, unsure whether she should applaud these people’s sheer recklessness.
The man tilted his head slightly. Before he knew it, Qin Ying had gradually taken control of the pace of their conversation, and that displeased him.
But before he could start acting up, Qin Ying saw through his urge to be obnoxious and lowered her head first to flip through the files.
With the help of the scorched text and the obscure ancient writing, certain pieces of the past gradually began to lift their veil before Qin Ying’s eyes.
In the late stages of World War II, the war-initiating nation of the Eagle Emblem in Central Europe, facing imminent defeat, had been driven into desperation.
To turn the tide of the war, they had conducted certain indescribably inhumane experiments.
After the war, that batch of experimental data fell into the hands of Country M in North America.
Country M, always fond of stirring up trouble and courting disaster, began an experiment on its own soil in Pennsylvania, attempting to link to the ‘gates.’
The experiment was carried out inside a homeless shelter in Pennsylvania. What happened there could no longer be known. In the end… a great fire burned everything to the ground.
But the remaining records showed that a Sevenfold Gate appeared in the flames.
By passing through this Sevenfold Gate, one could enter another world.
Country M was like a giant sieve, and its experimental data scattered all over the world.
With funding from interested parties, experiments involving the ‘gates’ began taking place across the globe.
Because Huaxia possessed a vast body of historical and literary records, and with the support of forces outside its borders, all kinds of illegal exploration experiments ran even more rampant there.
Such as this laboratory.
Such as… Cuiping Mountain.