CH 185

Xing Conglian walked through the dark underground pipeline. At that time, he didn’t know that at a certain moment, Lin Chen and he were only separated by a wall.

As if he were aware of something, he stopped and raised his flashlight to illuminate the passage in front of him. The mining factory built by the British wasn’t so difficult to traverse. Most of the areas have maintained their appearance from the original blueprint, except for some creatures that were not within the scope of the plan.

In the damp and dark abandoned pipeline, a three-colored spearhead viper nestled in front of it.

Wang Chao was so frightened that he almost screamed.

Xing Conglian’s hand was stuck to the wall of the cement pipe, touching a greasy moss. He looked above his head and suddenly felt palpitations. A chill began to permeate his entire body from his chest, and a layer of goosebumps soon appeared on his arms.

He paused for a while, and Kang An squeezed in front of him and asked, “Boss, should I go?”

Xing Conglian ignored him. He recovered, drew out his dagger, and took a half step forward.  He stepped on the tail of the snake with one foot and pinched the slippery snake’s body with his other hand. The knife fell and blood spattered, then they continued to move forward.

……

In the cellar of the mine.

When Lin Chen’s consciousness was about to blur, he vaguely felt that someone was looking at him.

At that time, he was resting on Duan Yang’s lap. Duan Yang had already fallen asleep. His breathing was rapid as various chaotic images filled his head. Most of the images were related to Xing Conglian, as his consciousness no longer had the strength to restrain his subconscious.

There was a sound of breathing around that didn’t belong to him or Duan Yang. He could only open his eyes slightly. Through the thin, dim light, he saw someone standing in front of the iron cage and staring at them.

He woke up instantly.

The person outside the cage was wearing a long robe, and only after he looked closely did he realize it was a white coat, but the uniform was too long, as it went all the way down to the ankles. The person wrapped in the robe was too thin, making him look like a child who had stolen the clothes of an adult.

Lin Chen rubbed his forehead and moved his eyes with difficulty to the face of the visitor. At first glance, he simply wanted to curse. The other party was wearing a pure white mask on his face, and there were two drops of bright red blood that resembled tears falling from the eye socket, making him look like some kind of ghost.

Probably because he moved too much, Duan Yang also woke up. The moment he saw the figure outside the cage, the young man screamed, “Ah, what the hell?!”

Duan Yang’s voice seemed to awaken the sleeping beasts underground. Suddenly, many cages around them roared, and the iron cages shook, making loud clanging sounds.

“Shh.”

The masked man moved his index finger closer to his lips. What came from behind the mask was a pure electronic sound, with an inorganic coldness but also a sense of lightness that mocked everything.

Lin Chen sat up straight. He felt that Dana was a place full of insanity. Although he was dressed like a ghost, the one in front of him was still human.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

After he finished speaking, he felt that it was stupid. This wasn’t China. Speaking Chinese to the other party was equivalent to him talking to a duck.

But suddenly, he really heard the long-lost, pure Chinese. “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. Come… Come with me…”

The cell opened, and militants guarding the cellar pulled them out of the iron cage and walked out.

……

From the sewer to the designated location, they only traveled for about 15 minutes.

Very faint light poured down from the drain, and there was a rotten smell in the air that was different from that of underground water pipes.

They were blocked by iron fences. Kang An took out tools and wanted to remove the fence. Xing Conglian pushed the man behind him and kicked away the rusty railing in front of him with one foot.

The iron railing flew out and slammed to the ground, causing dust to kick up. Then they proceeded to crawl out of the pipe.

After a loud noise, there were running sounds on the floor, as if someone had heard movement and rushed down.

The floor was shaking non-stop. Taking advantage of the gap before an encounter, Xing Conglian didn’t choose to take out his gun. Instead, he took out a cigarette case from his wet, waterproof pocket and lit it.

The sound of dense footsteps came from around the corner and were approaching quickly. When it approached the door, a black barrel from a gun went through the door first.

After tracking the Gaomeng people for a whole week, they finally saw a bewildered rainforest warrior.

Wang Chao was holding his laptop to cover his chest and said to the Gaomeng man who was holding a gun in front of him, “Ah… Good afternoon!”

Xing Conglian took a puff of his cigarette, shook the ash, and said in Gaomengnese, “Take me to see your chief.”

……

Lin Chen’s footsteps were soft, but he had to pretend that he wasn’t in a terrible state.

With one hand on Duan Yang’s shoulder, he examined the scene in front of him.

To be honest, if he hadn’t been quite so sure that he was kidnapped deep into the Dana Rainforest, he would have thought he was visiting some kind of national laboratory.

There was only white in front of him, and under the incandescent lights was a space about the size of two basketball courts. Many people in white lab coats were busy inside the automatic door. No one would have thought that in the depths of the dilapidated and collapsed abandoned mine there would be such an advanced laboratory.

There was a weird smell of plastic in the air.

The staff of the laboratory handed over a full set of dust-proof suits. Lin Chen’s eyes kept staring at the ghostly masked man. The other party turned around and looked at them through the door, as if he were smiling at them.

He and Duan Yang were forced to stop at the door and put on light blue dust proof clothing. The moment he put on the mask, the blocked breathing made him feel as if his whole body was burning.

“Consultant Lin, where is this?”

Only then did Duan Yang recover from shock, as he asked tremblingly.

“A laboratory.”

“I know it’s a laboratory, but where is there such a huge lab here? Who’s funding this?”

The sliding door opened. The staff in the laboratory were obviously of high caliber. They just buried their heads in their work without even looking at them.

“You’re asking me, so who should I ask?” Lin Chen coughed lowly as he gave a rhetorical reply.

“I… Then what are they doing with us?” After Duan Yang finished his sentence, he hurriedly covered his mouth. “I won’t ask. I won’t ask.”

While talking, they passed an experimental table with some testers analyzing some kind of pure powder.

“Do you recognize these testing equipment and what they are used for?” Lin Chen grabbed Duan Yang’s arm and asked in a low voice.

“It seems they are meteorological chromatography, mass spectrometers, distillation towers…”

“What type of lab is this probably?”

“This should be a chemistry lab.”

“Huh?” Lin Chen paused. Thinking of the reason why Duan Yang was kidnapped, he asked, “Drug research lab?”

“I don’t think so. There are no centrifuges here…”

Lin Chen shook his head. He looked at the focused gaze beside the lab table and realized that his previous cognition was actually a little problematic. This place that looked like a laboratory might not actually be one. It should be a chemical factory.

Given that it was a chemical factory deep in the three-way zone, Lin Chen didn’t need to look at the scientific names of those powders to guess what they were.

He gently rubbed the ring with his hand as he thought of the middle-aged man who died unexpectedly and tragically as a stowaway, and the identity of the other party gradually became clear.

However, he was probably confused. He felt that although things were gradually being revealed, it was too confusing.

……

Xing Conglian had seen many miserable scenes, so the corpse in front of him wasn’t so terrifying.

In a warehouse on the first floor of the factory, there were more than a dozen corpses on the floor, most of which were young men whose bodies had been mutilated. Because the rainforest climate wasn’t conducive to storing corpses, many of them were already covered with white maggots and had a foul smell.

Wang Chao covered his mouth and nose in fright. He pressed his face tightly into his backpack. Xing Conglian looked away and then looked at the soldiers, who were pointing submachine guns at them.

The other party looked like he was going to kill them here and add them to the corpse pile.

“Bo… Boss…”

Wang Chao’s voice was tinged with sobs. Xing Conglian looked towards the corner where the teenager was pointing, only to find a young, naked Gaomeng boy sleeping in the corner of the corpse pile.

Xing Conglian sighed inaudibly.

The bald-headed bar owner started to go crazy at the door of the warehouse. He howled and wanted to rush in like crazy, causing the soldiers of the Gaomeng Tribe armed with firearms to nervously point their muzzles at them.

Kang An unlocked the safety of his gun and stood at the front.

“How many people are there upstairs?” Xing Conglian asked, throwing down his cigarette butt and stamping it out.

He didn’t know how he had offended these barbarians. In short, the other party became angrier, and their dark fingers tightened on the trigger.

At this moment, a weak voice came from the end of the dilapidated corridor in the distance. “Stop!”

Following the sound of footsteps, Xing Conglian looked in that direction and saw a person walking slowly against the sunlight.

……

After a short walk through the laboratory, Lin Chen and Duan Yang came to the last office area.

The style of the office was completely different from the cleanliness of the laboratory. It was full of all kinds of garbage. There was an old tire on the desk, paper scraps were everywhere, and a white magnetic board that was covered with black ink that scribbled out various complex chemical formulas that, at Lin Chen’s level, he couldn’t understand.

Therefore, he could only look at the masked man in front of him with more focus. The two traces of blood tears on the other’s mask were even more glaring under the incandescent light.

With a height of about 160 cm, a weight of 45 kg, and a shoe size of 6.5, he should be left-handed. Apart from this, Lin Chen found he couldn’t see any other characteristics of the other party, including gender.

He looked at the handwriting on the whiteboard again, then at the masked man, and couldn’t help frowning slightly.

“Let’s talk,” he said.

“Hee hee.” A mechanical cold laugh came from behind the mask. The man turned his head and pushed open the back door of the office.

Duan Yang couldn’t help screaming again and grabbed Lin Chen’s hand vigorously.

Lin Chen narrowed his eyes and looked into the dim space. Behind the door were countless small iron cages that he couldn’t see the end from a glance.

Inside the cages were taupe wild monkeys. Those monkeys had pink faces. When he was in college, Lin Chen had specially studied this kind of monkey. Their scientific name was rhesus macaque, and they were an important species used in scientific experiments in various countries around the world. A single rhesus monkey costs more than 10,000 yuan in the international market, so the value of nearly a hundred experimental monkeys in this lab alone was worth millions. Probably only in places like the Dana Rainforest could there be such an unscrupulous supply of monkeys.

The thin, masked man stopped in front of a cage.

The light shone on his pale mask. “Giving you a choice. Do something for me or be chopped into feed and fed to my babies.”