CH 164

When Yan Suizhi roused, squinty-eyed, he unconsciously reached out and felt around, only to find that the space beside him was empty.

His low blood sugar upon just waking dulled his reaction. After a few seconds of disorientation, he sat up, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Gu Yan?” 

The room was quiet, and there was no response.

Startled, Yan Suizhi was instantly wide awake.

The clock on the wall indicated that it was now 4:32 a.m. in Fa Wang District. All outside the window was blanketed in darkness, the night yet to recede.

Yan Suizhi’s brows creased. He got up and pulled open the door of the room. 

The unfamiliar light of the corridor shone into his eyes. Delayed by his low blood sugar, he narrowed his eyes and raised his arm to block the light source, lost as to where he was just for that second.

Until he saw Gu Yan standing next to the staircase railing, speaking in a low voice with a hand pressed to an earpiece, only then recalling that he wasn’t in Gu Yan’s villa but on the second floor of Southcross’ office.

They had stayed up too late reading the case file last night and just made do with the office for the night.

The logo on the side of Gu Yan’s earpiece looked very familiar.

Yan Suizhi raised his wrist. Sensing the motion, the smart device projected a hologram that indicated an ongoing call with Dr Lin Yuan.

He suddenly broke into soundless laughter.

His footsteps had been muffled by the carpeting within the office, and he also didn’t say anything immediately, simply leaning next to the door with his arms folded.

“Mm, he’s in the office,” Gu Yan said, “he hasn’t been sleeping well the past few days and had only rested less than an hour ago.” 

Lin Yuan might have said something on the other side of the comms.

To which Gu Yan said, “Mn. Sorry for the trouble.”

With that, it was indicated on the smart device hologram that Lin Yuan had hung up.

Yan Suizhi closed the hologram, only then walking up to Gu Yan from behind, resting his arm on Gu Yan’s shoulder and touching his ear. “Stealing my earpiece and snatching my call, hm?” 

Gu Yan started, turning his head over to look at him. “Why are you awake? Did I disturb you?”

Thanks to Lin Yuan, the pain induced by the conflicting genetic modifications had already diminished to a negligible level, not so much to affect Yan Suizhi’s regular thought processes and lifestyle.

But there were still some remnant effects—poor sleep quality.

As he’d finally fallen asleep at a time past three in the morning, Gu Yan didn’t want any sound to startle him awake. 

“No.” Yan Suizhi shook his head. “The soundproofing is surprisingly good. I called you just now to no response and almost thought that the Manson brothers couldn’t resist coming over to pry away what’s mine.”

Propped against the railing, Gu Yan casually pointed towards an arbitrary spot outside the wall with his chin. “There’s been a lot of reporters camping the night lately. The Manson brothers aren’t so reckless.”

“Not that much,” Yan Suizhi agreed. “I just had a bit of a delayed reaction upon waking so I got a little worried. What did Lin Yuan say over comms?”

“He used the analyser to project the development of the gene segment and had obtained some results that he hopes we can go over to have a look at.” 

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Just as he said this, he found that Gu Yan had raised his eyebrows. 

“What?” Yan Suizhi asked.

Gu Yan said, “It’s nothing. After all this time, someone finally knows to avoid cold food and take it easy on the stomach. I’m glad.”

“Yeah, I’m quickly about to become an old fogey under your supervision.” Yan Suizhi huffed, spreading his palm open at him. “Give my earpiece back.”

One after the other, the two of them went downstairs. 

Yan Suizhi opened the steamer in the pantry, searching for something sweet to snack on, whereas Gu Yan leaned against the counter, pouring a cup of coffee for himself.

The pantry door was left open, and suddenly there came the shuffling of footsteps outside.

The two of them jolted, looking over with a frown, only to spot a female spectre… woman with unkempt hair, tottering and groping her way in.

“Fitz?” 

Seeing that the spectre was about to barrel into the refrigerator, Gu Yan extended his arm, blocking her. “Why are you here?”

Miss Fitz took three seconds to process it on her feet, finally chasing away half of her drowsiness, clawing her hair and grunting out, half-dead, “Overtime…”

“I thought you had already left yesterday?” After watching her rummage around the refrigerator for a while, Yan Suizhi conveniently stuffed a glass of freshly poured warm milk into her hand.

“Don’t remind me…” 

Fitz guzzled down half the glass, then made a gesture in thanks at Yan Suizhi.

“Didn’t I get delayed by the infusion yesterday? So I didn’t finish my work.” She yawned widely, clasping her glass of milk. “I wanted to bring my work home to do at first, but I forgot to upload the stuff into my smart device, so I came back.”

She moaned dejectedly. “The fever has broken my brain.”

With a head of unkempt hair, this woman finished her milk and only after did the cogs of her mind turn, prompting her to ask, “Why haven’t you guys left as well? Is it because of the case?” 

Yan Suizhi said, “Yeah. The office has things to eat and drink anyway; it’s a pretty good place to hole up for the night.”

“Makes sense.” Fitz jogged her shoulders. “It’s only that the sofa bed isn’t quite comfortable to sleep on. I’ve to find an opportunity to rag on management and petition for a rest lounge to be set up in our office. Other firms large and small alike all have them, but we actually don’t. It’s too petty.”

Gu Yan, “If I remember correctly, you’ve raised this to Adams before?”

“Ah, that I did.” Fitz harrumphed. “Guess what he replied?” 

“Hm?”

“He said, the provision of a nap room depends on how many lawyers are eternal bachelors there are in the firm. You see, Southern Lu has the most bachelors, so its rest lounges are the most well-furnished.”

Yan Suizhi, once upon a time a bachelor at Southern Lu, “…”

Fitz deepened her voice, jutting her chin out, mimicking the tone that Adams used back then. “Lawyers with someone at home to return to generally don’t work overtime in the office. Count them; how many bachelors are there of the lawyers upstairs?” 

She held out a finger and shook it before Gu Yan. “One. Lawyer Gu, the one and only.”

Gu Yan, “…”

After the drama queen was done with her caricature, she wore a woebegone look, wailing, “So I told him, don’t forget that there’s still me downstairs. Besides, isn’t Adams a bachelor himself? How can he have the gall to mock others?”

Gu Yan originally wanted to say, lawyers with someone at home to return to might also work overtime in the office on occasion with that special someone… but owing to the very real dejection this young missy wore and out of consideration for his friend, Lawyer Gu decided to spare this single dog for now. 

After having something light to fill his stomach, Yan Suizhi’s blood sugar rose. With that, he and Gu Yan packed their photon computers, ready to go to the hospital.

Taking a freshly brewed cup of coffee, Fitz asked them, “Are you going back now?”

“We’re making a trip to the hospital,” Yan Suizhi said.

“Don’t go around assuming that specialists don’t need sleep just because you don’t.” Fitz assumed, mistakenly, that they were going to look for a specialist to inquire as to their client’s health condition. 

Yan Suizhi didn’t care to elaborate, simply flashing his smart device. “It was the specialist who called, waking us up.”

“By golly, all of you are men of steel. Then be careful; I saw there were still paparazzi camping outside the firm when I came back just now.” Fitz waved at them, yawning and teary-eyed as she headed for her office. “I’m too lazy to move. I’ll just catch up on my beauty sleep and wake up to clock in later.”

—

At 5 a.m. sharp, Gu Yan and Yan Suizhi entered Lin Yuan’s research lab. 

Dr Lin was freshening up at the sink in the lab when they did. Seeing them enter, he typed furiously on the virtual keyboard with water droplets still hanging off his face, turning the display of the analyser towards them. “Look!”

The two elite lawyers who looked to see divine scripture filling the screen, “…”

“It may be a difference in specialisations here,” Yan Suizhi said peevishly, “but I’ll have to trouble you to translate this into language comprehensible to humans.”

Lin Yuan came around, went “right, right”, and let them look at a diagram first. “The middle point over here represents the gene segment taken from your body. Look at how this point branches out to many different paths. This is how the gene segment will develop under varied conditions… How should I describe what Mansons’ lot is trying to achieve, hm, I guess I’ll just call it ‘genetic drug’. Only these few pathways can develop the segment into a genetic drug.” 

Pointing to a few dots on each branch, he explained, “These dots represent relatively stable results that would emerge during research, or in layman’s terms, the milestones. After all, you can’t get it done all in one go.”

The two of them nodded.

“Do you mean to say that the research that the Manson brothers have been doing all these years, including the results of different maturity levels, are all visualised in this diagram?” Yan Suizhi asked.

Lin Yuan nodded. “Yes. Of course, theirs is one of these branches, and there might be twists and turns in the middle that might skew into another branch. But all the possibilities are here.” 

“What a powerful machine. If this was built three decades back, the Mansons would probably be willing to dish out astronomical sums for it.”

Lin Yuan caressed a corner of the analyser like it was his own child. “This baby took Spring Ivy nearly three decades to build on the sly.”

After collecting his emotions, he corrected his expression and said, “After obtaining these predicted trajectories, I used the data from these data points to build a model of the gene segment.”

“Is that equivalent to modelling the result from each stage?” 

“Exactly.” As Lin Yuan spoke, he clicked open another diagram. “Then I ran a comparison search with these models. To prevent alerting anyone, I used Spring Ivy Hospital’s internal database, which includes every person that has taken a genetic test at Spring Ivy before.”

Genetic testing wasn’t a routine test; only tricky and troublesome major illnesses would require this step, and the consent of the patient or custodial family would have to be obtained beforehand.

Just like any testing done during this infection, which was also performed on the pretext that the patients knew about it.

Of course, there were also those who had applied for testing of their own volition under special circumstances, such as Yan Suizhi. 

“These are just the initial comparison results.”  Lin Yuan brought up the results page. “The database is too big, so the search is still in progress. It’s sieving through it backwards based on the time the testing was done, and the first to pop out would be the most recent. Don’t these patients look very familiar to you?”

Yan Suizhi and Gu Yan read the personal details of each entry that popped up.

“Nevermind familiar, I saw them in the case file just a couple of hours ago.”

They were all victims of the Elderly Bobblehead case. 

According to the evidence the police currently had and one of the confessions by Suspect No. 1, the Elderly Bobblehead victims were semi-random, almost always elderly widows and widowers, the type whose disappearance wouldn’t be immediately noticed.

And the reason that the suspects detained the elderly was to facilitate drug testing for the suspect’s illicit research institute.

This was what the public had always known.

But this comparison by Lin Yuan revealed that these elderly victims all had abnormal genetic segments in their bodies that matched the Mansons’ research findings at some point. And the results indicated that these segments had been present for more than a decade, only showing signs of activity in the last few months. 

“So, with regards to the Elderly Bobblehead case… it was never about some illicit institute doing human experimentation, but that the Mansons had discovered leftover evidence a few decades later, and was using this case as a cover-up to dispose of the evidence?” Lin Yuan speculated with a horrified look on his face.

“More than that,” Gu Yan said, “they can even bury it.”

If the case was closed with the suspects convicted and sent behind bars, should the victims ever be mentioned again, even if traces were found on them thereafter, they would only be defined as ‘the result of a drug trial at that illicit institute’ and would not involve the Mansons.

Ten minutes passed and names of victims occupied an entire screen, with no new names being added. 

Just as they were about to turn away and discuss the Elderly Bobblehead case, another result was suddenly added to the bottom of the screen.

All eyes were fixed on the beginning of that message.