Chapter 143: Your Doom Has Been Delivered (26)

After the zombies outside banged against the door for a while, the sound gradually faded away.

"Good grief, how did these zombies get down in the elevator?"

Zhou Shun slid down to sit on the floor, raising a hand to wipe the cold sweat from his forehead.

This question made the atmosphere in the control room even more oppressive.

No one could answer it.

Even if the elevator had malfunctioned and opened by itself, it still wouldn't have packed that many zombies inside.

The whole affair reeked of something bizarre.

Jiang Xunchu stood before the control console, rapidly switching between the available security feeds.

"There's an elevator over here," Jiang Xunchu quickly found a lead. "We should be able to leave this floor."

"But we currently have a very important problem," Ling Qiong said without a trace of tension, spinning around in her chair.

Several gazes turned toward her as her fair hand pointed toward the door. "How are we supposed to get out?"

Although the zombies had stopped ramming the door, they hadn't left; they were still right outside.

"..."

Jiang Xunchu continued switching camera feeds, pondering how to lure the zombies away from the corridor.

"What are they doing?" Mu Chen pointed at a screen on the left.

On the screen, a crowd of zombies had gathered in front of a door, slamming their bodies against it as if desperate to break it open.

That door led to the room housing the gigantic meteorite from earlier...

Jiang Xunchu touched the spot where he had been injured; it still throbbed with a faint, stinging pain.

He felt as though those black veins were crawling beneath his skin once more...

...

The number of zombies appearing on this level was growing, and all of them were congregating in the corridor.

The zombies in the front slammed against the door.

The zombies in the rear let out low, guttural growls.

It was almost as if they were cheering them on.

Though it was impossible to figure out what that pack of zombies was trying to accomplish, the one saving grace was that the door was exceptionally sturdy.

After all this time, the door remained completely unshaken.

"This is a ventilation duct; we should be able to get out through here." Stepping onto a crate, Mu Chen pushed open the vent cover above, revealing an opening just large enough for an adult to crawl through.

Resting her chin in her hand while playing Minesweeper on a nearby screen, Ling Qiong glanced back at the sound and asked, "Without a map, how do we know which way to go?"

"I remember," Jiang Xunchu said. "It should lead toward the elevator."

Ling Qiong: "..."

Was her darling's memory really this good?

Jiang Xunchu wasn't just relying on memory; he hadn't even finished walking through this entire area.

Instead, relying on his memory and the things he had glimpsed, he was piecing together a route map in his mind.

...

Ding—

The elevator doors slowly slid open.

Scattered across the corridor like snowflakes were various sheets of paper. There were no zombies, and there was no blood.

The people on this floor seemed to have simply evacuated.

The papers on the ground consisted of messy data, or else academic papers where technical jargon made up sixty or seventy percent of the text.

This floor resembled an office area.

It was in utter disarray, as if it had been thoroughly ransacked.

Ling Qiong flipped through the documents left behind on a desk; most of them were related to the meteorite.

Material composition analyses of the meteorite, various experiments conducted on it...

Useless.

Any standard laboratory could replicate these findings.

That was likely why those people hadn't bothered taking these items with them when they evacuated.

Ling Qiong dropped the documents and went to look for her darling.

"Did you find anything?" Zhou Shun ran into her in the corridor and asked casually.

Zhou Shun shook his head. "No."

Reading those technical documents was giving him a headache.

Ling Qiong asked curiously, "What is it you're looking for?"

"A document pouch." Perhaps because the girl's voice was soft and gentle, lowering his guard, Zhou Shun answered off the cuff.

He didn't even realize anything was amiss after speaking.

"What's inside?"

"I don't know. A professor Mu Chen knows asked him to come here and find it."

"..."

You don't even know what it is and you're still looking for it?

Unable to hear the gossip she was hoping for, Ling Qiong put her hands behind her back and continued searching for Jiang Xunchu.

"Miss Xu," Zhou Shun caught up to her, "those zombies from earlier were so strange. What do you think is going on?"

"You're asking me?"

Zhou Shun nodded. There was no one else around here, after all!

Ling Qiong put on a sugary, fake smile. "How would I know?"

"Brother!"

Catching sight of Jiang Xunchu, Ling Qiong abandoned Zhou Shun and darted over to him in a flurry.

Jiang Xunchu turned around just as the young woman crashed directly into his arms, muttering in a soft complaint, "Why are you wandering off? I looked for you for ages, I almost thought a zombie had dragged you away."

Zhou Shun: "..."

Judging by how leisurely you were strolling around just now, you certainly didn't look worried.

The person in question, unaware of the truth, felt a pang of guilt at being accused.

"Sorry, I didn't notice you hadn't followed behind." Jiang Xunchu patted Ling Qiong's back in a gesture of reassurance.

The young woman wrapped her arms around his waist, tilting her head up to look at him. "You need to pay attention next time. If you lose me, you'll be taking a huge loss."

Jiang Xunchu instinctively replied, "...Alright."

"What did you find?"

"Found a safe, but it won't open."

"Let's go take a look."

The safe was embedded in the wall of the room, standing about half a person high, but it was so cleverly concealed that it was a mystery how Jiang Xunchu had managed to spot it.

Jiang Xunchu was not particularly skilled at picking locks.

Ling Qiong pushed up a non-existent pair of glasses. "Leave it to me."

Zhou Shun was astonished. "Can you do that?"

Ling Qiong chuckled. "Please, of course I can. I'm a professional."

Back in the day, she had practically driven the lock-making industry forward by several generations.

Jiang Xunchu: "..."

This wasn't the first time he had heard her use the word "professional."

...

By the time Mu Chen arrived, Ling Qiong had already managed to pop the safe open.

"I told you I could do it!" Ling Qiong pulled the safe door open. "Pretty impressive, right?"

Mu Chen: "???"

Jiang Xunchu nodded. "Mn."

Inside the safe were only a few document pouches.

The preceding pouches bore no special labels, but the final pouch had a distinctly different cover.

Mu Chen stepped forward and took that specific pouch first.

Jiang Xunchu had already unsealed the remaining pouches, scanning through their contents at a lightning-fast pace, flipping pages as if he were cheating.

Finishing the final page, Jiang Xunchu handed it to Ling Qiong. "These are their real-time observation logs of the meteorite."

Zhou Shun piped up, "Weren't there observation logs before?"

"Not the same kind." Ling Qiong flipped open the documents.

The records inside were entirely different from the useless ones found outside.

These were the observation logs for the meteorite located in the room downstairs.

Just as they had surmised, when that meteorite was first delivered here, it was only the size of a washbasin.

The remaining files, aside from the observation logs, detailed live experiments.

Specifically, animal vivisections related to the meteorite.

Jiang Xunchu turned to the very last page of the documents.

The signature was unfamiliar.

Jiang Xunchu looked over at the document pouch in Mu Chen's hand.

Mu Chen: "..."

Ling Qiong followed her darling's gaze. "Is that what you were looking for?"

Mu Chen let out an affirmative "Mn."

Ling Qiong raised an eyebrow. "Since we all chipped in to find it, we have the right to share it, don't we?"

Mu Chen: "..."

Mu Chen opened the document pouch, which contained several papers alongside a black notebook.

Jiang Xunchu seemed to recognize the black notebook.

"May I see that notebook?"

Mu Chen glanced at him before handing the notebook over.

Jiang Xunchu opened the notebook, revealing a single character written on the first page: Jiang.

"This belongs to my father," Jiang Xunchu said as he flipped further back through the pages.