Chapter 73
The dead fish rolled up their pale white bellies, colliding against the glass window again and again with the flow of water. Their mung-bean–sized eyes were lifeless, fixed on the room inside.
The shadows of their swaying corpses fell across Jiang Shengnan’s face, flickering between light and dark.
Jiang Shengnan couldn’t help reaching out and pressing her hand against the glass.
“Doctor Chen… can you really not see them?”
Doctor Chen replied lightly, “I can’t see them. I’m a normal person.”
Jiang Shengnan fell silent for a moment, as if accepting this fact. She murmured,
“Then… do I need to take medicine?”
“No,” Doctor Chen paused before saying, “you need surgery.”
Jiang Shengnan looked a little confused, but her expression remained dull and lifeless.
“Mental illness… can be cured with surgery too?”
Doctor Chen: “……”
He cleared his throat twice.
“Of course it can. Meteorite Corporation has been researching related technologies in this field for years. Compared to medication, surgery has a much faster recovery speed.”
Jiang Shengnan hesitated.
“Then… the cost of the surgery?”
Doctor Chen said, “Naturally, the company will cover it in full. As long as you’re an employee, the company will take full responsibility for all your treatment.”
Jiang Shengnan slowly nodded.
“That’s good… that’s good…”
“I’ll work hard.”
Doctor Chen said, “Recite it.”
Jiang Shengnan said,
“The sea is our homeland. Life originated from the ocean…”
Yu Zhi lowered his eyelashes and opened the next video.
Jiang Shengnan’s hoarse voice slowly sounded: “Today is November 6. Last night, I dreamed that I was outside the window, inside the sea.
The water pressure made it impossible for me to breathe, so I kept pounding on the window, trying to get back into the room.”
As she spoke, she imitated the sound of knocking: “Bang, bang, bang, bang…”
Suddenly, the school of fish on the other side of the window behind her began to move, as if responding to her actions, crashing against the glass.
“Bang, bang, bang, bang—”
The impact of the fish nearly overlapped perfectly with Jiang Shengnan’s narration.
Her voice abruptly stopped. Her head twitched slightly, as if she subconsciously wanted to turn around, but she immediately restrained herself.
A flash of fear crossed her face. “Doctor Chen, can you see them?”
“The fish are hitting the glass again. They want to come in. They’re about to drown.”
Doctor Chen said, “I can’t see them, and I don’t hear them. Those are just your hallucinations.”
He was more interested in her dream and pressed on, “Continue. What happened afterward?”
Jiang Shengnan said, “Then I woke up.”
Doctor Chen let out a disappointed “Oh.”
Jiang Shengnan took the initiative to ask, “Doctor Chen, when can I have the surgery?”
Doctor Chen replied, “The day after tomorrow.”
Jiang Shengnan seemed to relax a little and muttered to herself, “After the surgery it’ll be fine… after the surgery it’ll be fine…”
She began reciting on her own: “The sea is our homeland. Life originated from the ocean…”
After she finished, Doctor Chen reminded her, “Remember to write your diary properly today. Write it carefully.”
Yu Zhi swiped back to the album homepage. Only two videos remained.
November 7 and November 8.
He opened the video from the 7th.
In this video, Jiang Shengnan was no longer sitting upright by the window. Instead, she stood somewhere farther away. Dense fish shadows wriggled across the wall behind her as darkness gradually enveloped the video.
She looked deeply exhausted, her pupils slightly unfocused. “Today is November 7. I’m Jiang Shengnan.”
Doctor Chen asked curiously, “Did you dream last night?”
Jiang Shengnan nodded. “I dreamed again that I was outside the window, in the sea. I couldn’t breathe in the water, and then I woke up—but even after waking up, I still couldn’t catch my breath.”
“I feel like… like I’ve turned into a fish without gills. I can’t survive in the water, and I can’t live long on land either.”
As she spoke, she took several deep breaths. She looked short of breath, each inhale especially labored.
Doctor Chen acted as though he didn’t notice her condition at all and asked,
“Do you know why you dreamed of becoming a fish?”
Jiang Shengnan replied, “Because there are only fish in here. Outside the window, it’s all fish.”
Doctor Chen said, “…No.”
He guided her patiently.
“Because the sea is our homeland.”
As soon as he said this, Jiang Shengnan subconsciously continued the line she’d been reciting for days: “Life originated from the ocean.”
Her pupils grew more scattered and dull as she murmured, “The sea is our homeland. Life originated from the ocean…”
Her hoarse voice, exhausted and numb in tone, mixed with her heavy breathing, sounded almost like a curse.
She herself sank into a trance, and the listener was dragged in as well.
Yu Zhi’s thoughts were involuntarily pulled along. The latter half of the phrase automatically surfaced in his mind: The ocean is the cradle of life, the birthplace of all living beings…
“Boom—”
Suddenly, a dull, thunderous sound came from somewhere nearby, as if a wall had collapsed. The ground trembled slightly.
Yu Zhi snapped back to his senses. He instantly realized this, too, was a form of mental contamination.
He immediately shut off the auto-replaying video.
In all these videos, Doctor Chen never stuck to a single topic with Jiang Shengnan.
The only constant was the final sentence Jiang Shengnan recited every time.
[The sea is our homeland.]
It was also Article Six of the employee code of conduct.
Meteorite Biotech had forced her to repeat this line endlessly, attempting to shackle her thoughts—this was a form of mental pollution.
The oppressive environment of the deep sea, the dense schools of fish outside the window, the endless work…
They pressed down on her nonstop, driving her mad, contaminating her.
Yu Zhi’s expression darkened as he realized what Meteorite Biotech was doing.
The contamination source controlled the logic rules of the entire contaminated zone.
If those rules were implanted into the contamination source’s mind in advance…
Wouldn’t that be equivalent to Meteorite Biotech artificially controlling the entire contamination zone?
Was this the true goal of their contamination-source experiments?
Yu Zhi pressed his lips together and opened the final video.
This time, Jiang Shengnan’s face didn’t appear in the video.
It seemed she had just started recording; Yu Zhi could only see half of her figure.
The next second, Doctor Chen’s voice sounded from a bit farther away.
“Don’t sit down. Go prepare for surgery.”
Jiang Shengnan responded and reached out to press the button to stop recording. Suddenly, the fish outside the window became agitated, slamming into the glass with loud thuds. Startled, her finger slipped, and the recording didn’t stop.
“Hurry and go,” Doctor Chen said again.
A nurse’s sweet voice rang out in the video: “Bed 5820, come with me.”
Yu Zhi’s eyelashes trembled. Jiang Shengnan was going to surgery.
Above the eighth underground floor were the laboratories; the ninth and tenth were hospital wards. The operating rooms had to be even lower.
The video didn’t end. Yu Zhi fast-forwarded it. After waiting two minutes without anyone appearing on screen, he opened the stairwell door, preparing to head for the lab.
At that moment, the video suddenly had movement again.
Several footsteps sounded—leather shoes clicking against the floor.
Yu Zhi looked down. No one appeared on screen; there was only sound.
Those people were likely standing in the doorway, outside the camera’s range.
“Professor Chu. Professor Lu.”
It was Doctor Chen speaking. His tone lacked the calm authority he used with Jiang Shengnan; instead, it carried a trace of obsequiousness.
One of his arms appeared in the video, pointing toward the glass window.
Outside, layers upon layers of gray-green fish crowded together, dull eyes pressed close, fish mouths opening and closing endlessly against the glass.
Like he was presenting an extremely valuable project, Doctor Chen said to the two men,
“The fish outside were drawn here by Jiang Shengnan—Bed 5820.”
“In the days she’s been living here, her mental stability index has kept dropping, and the number of fish she attracts has kept increasing.”
As he spoke, two male silhouettes appeared on the tiled floor in the video—likely Doctor Chen’s superiors.
Seeing that neither spoke, Doctor Chen continued, “During the pre-surgery contamination phase, 5820 has remained very calm. She’s shown no aggression at all. She’s extremely docile—one of the highest-quality experimental subjects we’ve had.”
Hearing the word docile, Yu Zhi became even more certain of their goal: controlling the contamination source.
After a moment, a man’s voice sounded. “What about the others?”
He sounded around thirty, with a lazy, careless tone that suggested a difficult personality.
Doctor Chen stammered and didn’t respond.
The man chuckled softly. “Only 5820?”
Doctor Chen said, “Y-yes…”
The man laughed again, louder this time, with unmistakable mockery.
“You spent such massive manpower, resources, and funding, dragged this out for so long, and you only found one barely acceptable experimental subject?”
“The surgery hasn’t even started yet. There’s no guarantee the experiment will succeed.”
“Chen Guanghe—what if the surgery fails?”
The video fell silent.
After a long while, Yu Zhi finally saw Doctor Chen carefully argue, “Professor Chu, people like 5820 are extremely rare. From a certain perspective, she’s mentally strong—mentally strong yet still able to become mentally ill. Those kinds of people are almost impossible to find.”
“Most experimental subjects have extremely unstable mental states and collapse at any time. Several couldn’t even make it to surgery.”
Professor Chu clicked his tongue impatiently.
“You think I don’t know that?”
“If they were easy to find, would the company need to spend this much money? This much manpower?”
Doctor Chen didn’t dare say another word.
At the stalemate, Professor Lu—who had remained silent—finally spoke slowly: “If there are no conditions, then create them.”
Doctor Chen, already overwhelmed by Professor Chu’s scolding, replied blankly, “I don’t quite understand… Do you mean raising a batch of orphans from childhood?”
Professor Chu sounded exasperated.
“From childhood? Why don’t you wait until we’re dead? Or until the apocalypse before starting real experiments?”
Doctor Chen: “…Then what do you mean, Professor Lu?”
“Idiot,” Professor Chu sneered.
“You can artificially intervene in a contamination source. Why can’t you intervene in creating personalities like 5820’s?”
“The company has so many employees. We sponsor tons of poor students. Just pick a few people and mold them like dolls, following 5820’s life model.”
“You know exactly how to drive someone insane. Push them, pull them back, shatter and rebuild them a few times—eventually, some usable ones will remain.”
He said casually, “They contribute to the experiment too. That counts as—wait—”
Suddenly, Professor Chu became alert and changed his tone.
“Hold on.”
“Weren’t those your words just now? How did the person coming up with the evil idea become me instead?!”
His voice rose sharply as he cursed, “Lu! You scheming, treacherous old bastard! You made me take the blame again!”
Professor Lu replied calmly, unfazed, “For the future of humanity.”
“You’ll be a hero one day.”
Professor Chu: “…Go fuck yourself.”
Doctor Chen hurriedly echoed, “For the future of humanity.”
Professor Chu snapped impatiently, “You can fuck off too. One of you comes up with rotten ideas, the other pretends not to understand, and somehow I become the most vicious one!”
“I’m going to watch the surgery. Where’s the operating room?”
Doctor Chen quickly replied, “All operating rooms are on the lowest level.”
“If the 5820 experiment succeeds, then Lu’s dirty tricks won’t be necessary—”
Their voices gradually faded as they walked away.
“Click.”
The door closed. They left the ward. The video ended.
The operating room was on the lowest level.
Yu Zhi locked onto the most crucial piece of information, pushed open the stairwell door, and sprinted downstairs, taking steps two at a time.
The stairwell lights were motion-activated. Each time he descended a floor, the lights below flared on abruptly.
Watching the lights illuminate floor by floor, Yu Zhi’s mind was exceptionally clear, his thoughts racing.
In the videos, they kept calling Jiang Shengnan “5820.”
Jiang Shengnan was Bed 5820, Room 356—the experimental subject of Laboratory 356.
In this instance, he was Employee 5820, Workstation 356—the experiment.
In the public welfare department, doing nothing would slowly contaminate his mind; trying to escape would subject him to even worse mental pollution.
For Jiang Shengnan, doing nothing meant being driven mad bit by bit by work and Doctor Chen. Trying to save herself only sped up her transformation into the company’s contamination-source experiment.
She struggled to live properly—only to sprint toward a bottomless abyss.
Yu Zhi’s breathing quickened. In this instance, he was the chosen 5820, reliving Jiang Shengnan’s life.
All signs pointed to Jiang Shengnan being the contamination source of this instance.
And yet, the reason he had found Jiang Shengnan so quickly… was because of the experiment report on the computer.
A unique report.
An unfinished report.
A report of an experiment subject who hadn’t died.
Yu Zhi suddenly stopped in his tracks, took a deep breath to ease the suffocating pressure in his chest, and quickly pulled out his phone to review the photos he’d taken of the experiment report.
He zoomed in on the dates.
November 2nd, 3rd… 7th.
The final report was dated November 7th. There were no records of Jiang Shengnan’s surgery or the days after.
—Because the later data had been destroyed.
The laboratory on the eighth underground floor was spotless, with no contamination. That meant the researchers had calmly destroyed the important data before safely evacuating.
They hadn’t failed to clean up Jiang Shengnan’s experiment report.
They’d done it on purpose.
They deliberately left behind part of the pre-surgery data.
The last time, in Taijiang High School, they deliberately provided clues to the contamination source, letting ability users seek it out and feed it with their blood and flesh.
This time?
Blatantly telling him they were using humans as contamination-source experiments, guiding him step by step toward Jiang Shengnan—what were they trying to do?
What was waiting for him in the operating room?
