Chapter 100#
The afternoon of the ninth day after Nie Xu left Fanzhou.
The latest news that the Blue Sea Engineering Laboratory had been discovered spread to every official organization center.
Around that uninhabited border island, border patrol speedboats converged on the center from all directions like arrows, yet with tacit understanding they stopped a hundred meters short of the island, forming an encirclement. Waiting for their superiors to issue the latest orders.
Armed forces along the shore lay prone, rifles set up in sniping position. The same.
The air was tense and silent.
On the public channel, the commander’s voice rang out clearly: “Attention all. According to reliable intelligence relayed from the island, the number of suspects is as high as a hundred. Our objective this time is not merely to let not a single person escape — we will resolutely strike at crime — but more importantly, we must give one hundred percent to ensure the personal safety of the forty-three victims on the island.”
Every heart trembled at the word “victims” — among them, over a dozen children.
From smuggling, to human trafficking, to live experiments.
This was no longer a cold inter-agency bulletin. This was the massive underground laboratory right in front of them. Every living person still waiting for rescue.
If the ones still alive numbered in the dozens, what about those who were not?
Those who vanished while walking down the street, those deceived and lured in — no one could predict where those people had ended up.
Time passed second by second.
Sweat dripped down past chins, but no one spoke. No one moved an inch.
The signal to act had not yet come. Those on the periphery did not know the situation on the inner island.
Meanwhile, in the underground laboratory, the second floor was the first to descend into chaos.
Emergency lights flickered ceaselessly.
The people in the monitoring center and equipment rooms were the first to burst out. Cries of “Intruders!” typically cut off halfway. The men Nie Xu had brought in had been assigned to separate zones. Every one of them possessed terrifying skill.
Information was constantly being exchanged over the internal comms.
Along with cursing.
“Signal successfully cut. Monitoring center is now under our control.”
“Ran into two who screamed the second they saw me. Am I that ugly?”
“Are the outside boys ready or not? Don’t let us come out with rescued people and the rescue team can’t keep up — now that would be a real problem.”
“Shit — what the hell’s wrong with the people in the cage-raising area? They don’t understand a single word.”
When Nie Xu’s voice came through, you could tell the situation on his end was remarkably calm: “Leave the cage-raising area for last. Those are failed test subjects. Rescue the children first.”
“Understood.”
“Understood.”
……
Nie Xu bypassed the lowest-level sample storage area, his gaze lingering briefly on the human organs suspended in the glass tanks.
The sample storage area connected to the core experimental zone, separated by a door requiring dual iris and voice recognition. The door had already been forcibly breached from the inside by some kind of high-pressure means, the metal edges curling outward like they had been torn by an explosion.
Nie Xu paused at the door for two seconds, then stepped inside.
The interior space was smaller than expected. Not only were there no researchers to be seen, but everything of importance seemed to have vanished into thin air.
In the center, behind a glass case, a red light blinked with a countdown.
The display showed the last thirty minutes.
Nie Xu’s jaw tightened. After observing for two seconds, he raised his arm and drove a heavy elbow strike into the surface. The glass shattered into dust on the spot.
At the same time, a fist came hurtling from the dark corner beside him, trailing wind.
Nie Xu raised his arm to block, staggering back two steps. He got a clear look at the attacker and his brow furrowed hard.
Wang Weitao.
At this moment, Wang Weitao’s eyes were bloodshot, as if he had completely lost his mind.
Someone in his earpiece asked: “Brother Xu, you okay?”
“Ran into someone I know. Looks like he’s had an accident.” Nie Xu silently glanced toward the countdown, then spoke: “All units, pick up the pace. If you encounter anyone with abnormally red eyes or abnormal strength, don’t engage directly. Notify the demolition team outside to come up. You have twenty-eight minutes left to withdraw.”
Someone cursed in shock: “Sam really fucking wants to blow up the island? We haven’t found any explosives in the armory.”
Nie Xu: “It’s RDX. Pre-planted in advance.”
The air froze for an instant.
With power one point five times that of TNT, never mind sinking the island — leveling the entire laboratory would be the work of a moment.
Another voice came through: “You think Sam bolted? We’ve searched every floor and haven’t caught a single trace of him. Could he not even be on the island?”
Nie Xu’s gaze swept over the mindless, strength-swollen Wang Weitao. “He’s here.”
The moment the word left his mouth, Nie Xu struck.
His foot launched off the wall as he vaulted into the air, his arm wrapping around the other’s neck in a scissor lock. The sheer ferocity of the force sent the man flipping and crashing to the ground.
Nie Xu pressed in, gripping the scapula and driving it forward, seizing the man’s hair and slamming him headfirst into the cement floor.
At the last millimeter, he suddenly paused.
It gave his opponent the chance to erupt upward once more.
This kind of grapple — one side holding back, the other going straight for the kill — stretched the time on and on.
When the countdown timer hit twenty minutes.
A figure inserted himself between them, catching Wang Weitao’s fist in one moment, then twisting to shout at Nie Xu: “Leave this to me — go!”
Nie Xu glanced at him, showing little surprise.
Lu Li could only have gotten here by coming with the police.
He was someone who had genuinely had contact with Blue Sea Engineering through Ji Chengyi. Securing such privileges wasn’t unusual. The only difference between him and Wang Weitao was that one had been abandoned during the arrest process, and the other had been sacrificed to the experimental center.
Nie Xu left only one instruction: “Don’t kill him. There might still be a chance to save him.”
Lu Li gave him a gesture that said save the chatter.
Only after Nie Xu left did Lu Li steal a backward glance mid-fight, the words he wanted to say held back until the very last moment before finally being swallowed down.
What Lu Li had wanted to say was really only one thing.
Ji Yang was here.
The firefight on the outer island lasted only a very brief time.
The island’s armed forces had already been cut down by more than half from the inside. With nowhere to run, suppression was only a matter of time.
A large force of police charged in the moment they received the signal.
People were escorted out through the narrow exit, batch after batch.
Rescue workers ran while holding children, shouting: “Hurry, hurry — there are more behind!”
One, two, three, four.
Ji Yang caught a child who looked no more than three or four years old. The moment he felt those little arms wrap around his neck, he froze, then held the child tight, patting a back that was nothing but protruding bone, his voice soft: “It’s okay now. It’s okay.”
Many of the medical staff and female officers in charge of first aid were crying.
The holding area was a cold, damp stone room.
Most of the victims wore only thin clothing, cowering like quail, eyes timid, not daring to speak.
But among those being escorted out, some were still struggling and shouting.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Where did I break the law? I just do patrol duty!”
“Some Sam — we don’t have a boss.”
Some were even worse: “Go ahead and shoot me if you’ve got the guts!”
Ji Yang ignored these people entirely. He took off his overcoat, wrapped up the two nearest children, and handed them to the police officer in charge nearby.
His spot on the island had come with the medical rescue team.
Most people didn’t know his specific identity, but if he was allowed to come, he must have passed the official screening.
The leader of the medical team, the only person who knew Ji Yang had a bad leg, walked over and said: “Xiao Yang, you need to go. Leave the rest to us.”
“Team leader.” Ji Yang shook his head. “It’s alright. I’m a man after all. No matter how bad my leg is, I’ve still got more strength than any of you.”
Seeing that she couldn’t convince him, she let it go.
Then she asked quietly: “Is there someone you know among the victims?”
Otherwise it was impossible to fathom. He wasn’t a police officer, didn’t work at a hospital, yet had somehow ended up on the front line.
Ji Yang denied it. “No. I’m just here to pick someone up.”
The team leader naturally interpreted this the same way as herself and added a reminder: “Then be careful.”
“Okay.”
Ji Yang’s hands never stopped moving.
Comforting, handing over, taking headcounts.
His focus differed from those doing the arrests, as did the people he faced.
But from beginning to end, Ji Yang kept glancing toward the exit at intervals.
Everything was proceeding at a frantic pace.
The demolition team had been inside for ten minutes.
The last victim was brought out safe and sound.
Lu Li came out.
Wang Weitao came out too.
Even Ji Chengyi — with horrifying finger marks around his neck, still unconscious — was carried out on a stretcher.
Everyone was shouting: “Move! Five minutes left for withdrawal!”
“The bomb can’t be defused! There’s a tamper-proof circuit between the detonator and the explosives. Finding the actual explosives will take time — there’s not enough time!”
Ji Yang heard someone shouting.
“If we can’t defuse it, we have to try! There are still people inside!”
“Do you know how many lives this project has taken?! How much of people’s blood, sweat, and tears it consumed! Sam deserves to be punished by the law, not to die here so easily!”
“Team One has charged back in!”
“Team Two went too!”
Ji Yang felt the people around him coming and going, yet somehow seemed impossibly far away.
He knew Nie Xu was right here.
But once again, he felt that unbearable agony of being a breath away and yet an eternity apart.
Someone was pushing him to hurry up. Ji Yang turned his head one last time to look behind him.
Suddenly—
BOOM!
A deafening explosion.
The earth shook, the mountains quaked.
Ji Yang reflexively shoved the nurse beside him to the ground and threw himself down, letting the cascading dirt and debris bury him.
A massive cloud of dust erupted from the earth. The thunderous, muffled shockwaves kept roaring up from underground. This group holding the rear — Ji Yang among them — needed at least a full minute before they could force themselves back upright.
The second team that had charged inside was already forced to retreat the way they came.
The moment they emerged, everyone watched in helpless silence as the ground before them slowly caved in.
It was a scene Ji Yang had only ever seen in movies.
Thousands of square meters collapsing before your eyes, buckling into a jagged crater thirty meters deep. The sheer force of the blast had severed the underground structure’s load-bearing beams at their roots, exposing its hideous, terrifying face.
Ji Yang didn’t know how to react anymore.
The air was thick with the smell of gunpowder and dust.
With the explosion over, everything seemed set in stone.
Excavation was a massive undertaking, and the remaining rescue work — after a brief, collective silence — resumed with tacit urgency.
Ropes were dropped down again this time, descending along the cliff face, centimeter by agonizing centimeter.
But the atmosphere had grown heavier still.
Heaven and earth themselves seemed to change color.
Ji Yang said nothing. He moved aside the bricks buried under the dirt, picking up the jutting steel rebar and setting it to one side. When the digging tools broke, he used his bare hands. When crouching became too painful, he simply knelt on the ground.
Lu Li came over halfway through and pulled at him. “Stop this. Go sit over there.”
Ji Yang sat on the ground, looking up at him.
“I can’t.” Ji Yang shook his head. “If I stop, it means I’ve given up. It means I accept that he’s dead. Tell me — how am I supposed to accept that?”
The moment the words left his mouth, the emotion he had been holding back finally surged back up.
Lu Li stared at him for two seconds, then silently looked away.
As if to himself: “You’re still like this.”
“Like what?” Ji Yang forced himself not to sink into the black hole of his feelings.
Lu Li: “Even a stray dog passing by, you’d want to show some kindness. Someone you care about? Forget it. What I want to say is — don’t hold things in. When he was twelve, he could lead you — lead me out of those woods. He doesn’t do things without a good chance of pulling them off.”
Ji Yang said nothing.
Just then, someone suddenly shouted: “They’re back! Someone’s coming back!”
Ji Yang whipped his head around, rising to his feet. He stared at the wretched scene before him, searching desperately for a familiar face.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Where was anyone?
At that moment, everyone around him sprang into motion.
They all surged toward the hillside in the distance.
Several groups were emerging from there.
The crowd embraced one another in wild excitement, their jubilant release of near-death emotion expressed through fervent physical contact.
Someone said: “Shit, we’d only been inside a few minutes when it blew. We all thought we were done for. Thank God for Brother Xu.”
“That mass grave was a disposal pit. Several researchers had hidden back there — rounding them up ate up some time. That’s why we only just found another way out.”
“No idea where Brother Xu came from, but he nearly beat the guts out of that foreigner at the bottom of the pit.”
“He got hurt though. Pretty badly.”
The moment those words fell, Ji Yang saw him.
That hint of short stubble emerging above the edge — gradually rising into view as he climbed upward.
He had already taken off the ruined jacket, carrying it in one hand, refusing the offer from the person beside him to hold it. His other hand pressed against his waist, blood seeping between his fingers as if he couldn’t see it. His stride was no different from any ordinary day, his expression as calm and unruffled as ever.
Quite a few people walked beside him, but midway up the slope he suddenly stopped.
The people around him were confused, and simply followed his gaze upward.
Standing there was a young man covered head to toe in dust, the tails of his white shirt still spotless and crisp.
The wind stirred his slightly long hair.
He stood there — and finally, he had come to pick up the person he had come for.