Evil As Humans, page 159
Only then did Minister Zou straighten his clothes and walk in a certain direction.
“The spell was ineffective. Isn’t that an evil thing?” Minister Han was shocked to see Minister Zou not reacting to the green light. “How is that possible?”
“That must be Minister Zou himself. Strange. Is his faith so firm? This is the guy that hangs a safety talisman in his car on purpose.” The middle-aged woman frowned. “But he specially protected that guard… The guard only has limited clearance and can’t go to high-level places.”
The old man hastily nodded in agreement.
The woman turned to Wei Huaqian carefully. “Boss, do we continue to monitor his actions? Maybe there will be more…”
“Stop the spell and let the cleanup crew in.” Wei Huaqian interrupted flatly.
The woman gasped in shock.
Clearly, there was no intention of leaving any survivors.
The cleanup crew was a group of fugitives that Sunken Society kept in its branches. They generally had little education and didn’t leave the branch much. In a sense, these villains were regarded as twisted science posts—they neither believed nor disbelieved in science and only cared about money and face.
They couldn’t achieve complete immunity to magic, but they were tough-skinned and could deal with weak cultivators.
Wei Huaqian seemed to ignore the gasp of his subordinate. He turned his head, propped his hands on his forehead, and stared intently at the screen.
Minister Han cleared his throat with difficulty. “How much can we adjust?”
“As much as we can.” There was a hint of amusement in Wei Huaqian’s voice.
He wanted to see how much this unknown thing was capable of. After all, as long as he obtained the remains of the body, he could hand it over to the research team—it would be interesting to have the technicians in Department 2 study the remains of their former boss.
In the video, Zhong Chengshuo started to jog. He tried to keep his head stable as he ran towards the location the guard had pointed out—the relics warehouse, just like the underground corpse vault, was also located on the bottom floor. This wasn’t because it was super important, but simply because Sunken Society had killed too many “human guinea pigs” and accumulated too many relics.
This was his only chance.
Zhong Chengshuo had not run for long when he heard hurried and chaotic footsteps behind him. The once silent corridor suddenly became chaotic, and the overlapping echoes made the space crowded.
Conversations and running sounds came at him from several directions at the same time, full of hostility.
Without hesitation, Zhong Chengshuo instantly accelerated and rushed towards his destination. He jumped down each flight of stairs at an almost falling speed that the soles of his shoes barely scraped against the ground. He focused intensely on the small cellphone charm laying somewhere underground, as if it was the most important thing in the world.
Unfortunately, he was one step too late.
Just when he was one floor away from his destination, he was blocked by the chasing soldiers who had caught up to him.
The elevator in the storage area could go straight to the deepest level, and a group of them had even come up from underground to block him. Zhong Chengshuo was trapped at the corner of the staircase.
This group of people approached from all sides, looking down on “Minister Zou” with contempt, as if they were looking at a piece of meat on a cutting board.
“It’s a fat pig that runs fast.” One of them taunted, causing a few scattered laughs.
Zhong Chengshuo quickly scanned all the unexpected guests. The people sent by Sunken Society this time had nothing to do with cultivators.
As far as Zhong Chengshuo could see, there were at least twenty people, and there were even more outside the corridor. These people were strong, wore “cloth armor” made of fiber with hard protective parts on key areas, and wore protective helmets similar to football helmets on their heads.
Pairs of eyes peered out from the helmets, and Zhong Chengshuo was familiar with that look and those eyes—they had all appeared on the A-level wanted list.
Murderers.
Apparently, Sunken Society allowed its lackeys to have a little personality. The criminals had clubs, butterfly knives, and triangular blades, and the most extreme ones had shovels and machetes.
Perhaps considering the problem of accidental injury in a small space, there were no weapons of mass destruction such as shotguns.
Zhong Chengshuo quickly scanned the nearby lighting and cameras, moved his joints, and silently lowered his center of gravity. If he still had a heart, his heart rate at this moment would definitely shatter his ribs.
Half a second.
With these big executioners crowding together, and the originally cramped corridor seemed even more suffocating. The gaps between them weren’t even big enough for a child to stand in, so it was hard to find even a glimmer of life among them.
One second.
As long as he made a tiny mistake, this group of people could hold him down with their weight alone.
The next moment.
“Yo, this idiot still wants to move…” A thin man with a butterfly knife hadn’t finished his sentence when his tongue froze in his mouth.
The butterfly knife in his hand disappeared.
With a few light cracks, the butterfly knife was dismantled into three pieces in Zhong Chengshuo’s hand. Before the others could react, Zhong Chengshuo had flung the handle and the blade of the disassembled knife, instantly shattering the nearest three lighting fixtures.
This time, the darkness was even more complete than in the corpse vault.
The criminals on the cleanup crew weren’t stupid. The ones in front relied on their position to shout and charge directly at Zhong Chengshuo, trying to suppress him with a sea of people. But that bloated “Minister Zou ” was like a phantom, evaporating on the spot.
What followed was a warm and sticky liquid.
It sprayed everywhere, splattering everyone’s faces and bodies. When the criminals reacted and turned on their emergency lights, five seconds had already passed.
The surroundings were dark and blood-red.
The people in front had become headless bodies—the sturdy cloth armor and hard helmets couldn’t withstand the swift and precise knife strikes on their necks.
The heads had rolled on the ground with their helmets still on, while the bodies had collapsed with a dull thud. The ground was wet and slippery with blood. These people all had sharp weapons in their hands, but their movements had slowed down unconsciously.
“It’s a machete! My brother has lost his machete!”
“Fuck! That guy ran down. Chase him!”
At the same time, Zhong Chengshuo picked up a spare head with one arm, and with a machete in one hand, he came to a sudden stop at the bottom of the stairs.
As fate would have it, he didn’t have time to run far. The unfortunate end of the stairs had no elevator or transitional hall; only a plain metal door stood in the open. Next to it was the damn facial recognition device—this time, Minister Zou no longer had authority to open it.
He was just a door away from his hamster pendant.
Dozens of people had swarmed down the stairs behind him; their footsteps sounding like torrential rain. There was only a dead end in front of him, but even though his heart no longer existed, Zhong Chengshuo still felt a suffocating squeeze in his chest.
The familiar fear hit him again like a shot of adrenaline.
He didn’t want it to end.
Instead of the bank-style “vault” doors like the underground corpse vault, it was an ordinary metal door.
He held a thick-backed machete in his hand and a hard helmet that still had a head attached to it.
He didn’t want it to end.
Two seconds later, Zhong Chengshuo kicked hard at the door lock. He paid no attention to the dangerous cracking sound of the bones in his leg and kicked again. After four or five kicks, there was a slight deformation on the door.
Zhong Chengshuo raised the machete and precisely inserted the blade into a small gap. Then he jammed the head into the door frame and used all his strength to pry it open.
Crack.
The deformation of the door wasn’t significant, but the gap had widened a lot.
Time seemed to slow down, and countless equations floated through Zhong Chengshuo’s mind. He kicked his battered legs repeatedly, creating several gaps in different positions.
Just as he lifted his foot again, a dozen gunshots rang out. A wave of heat hit his back, and his left eye instantly lost sensation.
His back was riddled with bullets, and his left eye was probably shot through.
He had felt pain, but not much. It was more like a numb, dull ache, accompanied by the subtle sensation of foreign objects entering his body.
Compared to the sniper’s explosive bomb, this level of power was nothing.
Zhong Chengshuo used a flying kick, causing the metal door to shake unbearably and then collapse. There was no sound behind him. Zhong Chengshuo didn’t know if the criminals were scared by him, an “undead zombie”, or if they had other thoughts. He simply lifted his bent right leg and limped into the relic warehouse.
The hamster pendant Yin Ren gave him was there.
He remembered it clearly. It was a little hamster with “Wealth and Prosperity” attached to it.
However, the moment he saw the large relic warehouse clearly, another kind of fear crawled up and plunged into his back like a knife.
This was indeed a “large” warehouse for relics.
This underground warehouse was so big that he couldn’t see the end at a glance. The shelves led directly into the ceilings and were about six meters high, full of messy objects: common clothing, suitcases, handbags, and other casual items. Some damaged cameras lay quietly in the dust, and the cleaning tools used by the cleaners were also dumped in the gaps in the shelves. The skin of various balls was old and damaged, and most of them were deflated.
Stationery, books, bows…
Water cups, sneakers, remote controls…
The metal shelves used bones bonded together by glue and were piled high, making an extremely colorful but bleak maze.
His hamster pendant was just a drop of water in this sea of objects.
Zhong Chengshuo shook his head and forced himself to remain calm.
His task was still here, and theoretically, the possibility of completion wasn’t zero.
This wasn’t the end.
……
“He has been on the run for how long?” Minister Han asked cautiously.
“Fifteen hours and twenty-eight minutes.” The middle-aged woman rotated the steel pen in her hand. There were two empty lunch boxes by her side. “The boss instructed that if we can’t solve it in 24 hours, we have to consider a full lockdown of the relic warehouse. If he wanted to create a scene, I suspect he would have done it from the start.”
Since Minister Zou’s destination was the dull “relic warehouse”, Wei Huaqian was too lazy to watch a bunch of people play hide-and-seek and left before noon.
He ordered his people to completely seal off the underground corpse vault, wait until they knew the situation of the “evil being” that escaped before continuing further inventory work.
Once they entered the relic warehouse, there was no turning back—
The relic warehouse, internally referred to as the “dead man’s dump” contained “material items” that were tasteless to eat, a waste to discard, and could be completely sealed off.
Full lockdown meant they would lower the separators and fix the suspicious intruder in place. Then, they would completely seal off several divided spaces, pour in liquid nitrogen, and destroy all the physical things inside.
Now it was already late at night, and in the picture, “Minister Zou” was still limping and running away. In the vast “garbage dump”, that guy was dragging his broken body, painfully and awkwardly fleeing.
After taking so many bullets and still being able to move, he could only be a dead man. As for why this thing could evade magic, they would soon have an answer—
“Minister Zou” was already on his last breath.
He killed more than a dozen criminals, but they were all tough guys in the cleanup crew. Even if the crazy Minister Zou cut them down, they could still tear off one or two pieces of flesh in return. In contrast, Minister Zou could only strip the corpses and get some clothes to block his wounds.
He was like a small animal that knew it was about to be slaughtered, fleeing with a desperate and sad momentum.
What a pitiful guy. The middle-aged woman yawned.
“Minister Han, you continue to watch. I’ll go back first.” She stretched her neck.
The picture was too blurry, and there were too many obstacles in that ghostly place. It wouldn’t matter if they didn’t watch for a while. After all, the end was about to come, she thought.
Minister Han nodded obediently.
In a place they couldn’t see, Zhong Chengshuo used the cover of miscellaneous objects and gradually changed his blood-stained clothes, becoming more and more similar to the appearance of the criminals.
Half an hour later, a criminal bent down and sewed Minister Zou’s head onto another corpse. Then, he stood up unsteadily, covering his neck with the shadow of the helmet.
He played with the bayonet in his hand for a while as his bloodshot eyes scanned the dusty shelves. Slow motion covered the stiffness of his movements. This silent criminal, together with his other “companions,” continued to roam and explore.
But what others saw were just suspicious figures, and what he saw was the thickness of the accumulated dust.
At the same time.
“I know where our battlefield should be,” Yin Ren said.
“Wait, hold on. Don’t get excited yet. Even if the data is correct, I don’t know what this coordinate means!” Lu Xiaohe wiped the sweat from her face. “I need to study it. I have to wait until tomorrow when Fu Tianyi wakes up…”
Without hesitation, Yin Ren took out his phone and searched for Fu Tianyi’s phone number.
Lu Xiaohe: “…”
One day apart felt like three autumns have passed*, and this guy was becoming more and more ruthless.
*(一日不见如隔三秋) Idiom referring to the feeling of missing someone very much, as if even a short period of time apart feels like an eternity. It emphasizes one’s emotions when separated from a loved one or close friend.
“He must have gone to sleep as soon as he got back, so it makes no difference,” Yin Ren said while flipping through his contacts.
“I’m here.” A head with dark circles under his eyes stretched in from behind the door, sounding a bit resentful. “Miss Lu ran so loudly that it woke me up.”
“You came at the right time.”
“Also, do we need the assistance of Da Huang and Xiao Ge?” Lu Xiaohe tried to pull back the unrestrained Yin Ren. “You also need to rest…”
She hadn’t finished speaking when she saw the gap suddenly widen, like an eye suddenly opening.
This time, Yin Ren held on longer than any previous time.
In the darkness of the gap, various chaotic spatial bubbles were stacked, shimmering with strange textures of light.
“Fu Tianyi, I need more data,” Yin Ren said hoarsely.
“I just need to figure out one coordinate… Just one coordinate.”
Fu Tianyi was exhausted, as if his whole body had been run over by a car. “Breaking through the limit” was a training method, but he couldn’t help but mutter a few words of complaint. It was just that, when he saw Yin Ren’s expression clearly, he didn’t dare say anything.
In the dark waiting room, Yin Ren’s eyes were red as if a sharp blade had been unsheathed. He deliberately restrained his aura, but the oppressive feeling was still like a knife cutting through skin.
Fu Tianyi reached out with his sore and weak hand and tried to activate his power again.
He felt all the muscles in his body crushed into meat sauce. Even the most dangerous missions before weren’t as relentless as this endless night and day of feeling like his flesh was cut with a blunt knife.
Even though he grumbled in his heart, he didn’t hold back his power. Lu Xiaohe didn’t say anything more, and quickly started typing on the keyboard.
“Xiao Fu, be steady… I’ll adjust the space folding parameters…”
She didn’t even have time to wipe the sweat from her nose.
“Yin Ren, tonight I can only try to build a computational model as much as possible. I don’t have any equipment to simulate the signal right now, so I have to use the detection device from the Shian to adjust the gap. Promise me that when I finish the model, you’ll rest… Yin Ren?!”
Lu Xiaohe screamed, and Fu Tianyi was so scared that he lost his strength.
Without hesitation, Yin Ren tore off the hamster pendant from his phone and put his hand into the gap, then pulled it out. “The signal source is exactly the same. Is this okay?”
“It—it’s possible.” Lu Xiaohe swallowed hard.
It was possible, but she was afraid that if Yin Ren made a mistake, the gap would swallow his arm and the hamster pendant whole.
“Just in time.” Yin Ren’s hair tips couldn’t help but move as if to calm himself. “Trust me.”
Lu Xiaohe had just planned to get up from the chair, but then sat back down. She let out a deep sigh and said, “Anyway, I’ll take a break after I finish perfecting the algorithm. I won’t care about you anymore!”
“Thank you,” Yin Ren replied indifferently.
For the first time in his life, he was holding the hamster pendant in his hand that was full of sweat.
Finally, there was a turning point.
When he found the possible location of the hamster pendant, he used the opportunity to break through the “interstitial space” over there. The sniper had no reason to throw a phone pendant there, so Zhong Chengshuo must be nearby.
