An Zhe had not slept for twenty hours. If he counted from the incident with the Madam, about five or six hours had passed, and it was now midnight.
He had revealed nothing to the doctor. Once the time limit was up, the senior colonel lost all of his patience and ordered a forced confession.
The interrogation room was very well equipped. Humankind's torture method was very civilized, for it would not cause blood and flesh to fly. It was a kind of electrocution.
The feeling of the electric current traveling through his body was like thousands of venomous ants all gnawing at the nerves throughout his body at the same time.
Pain.
Pain that he had never experienced before.
An Zhe closed his eyes, gasping for breath and trembling all over. Fine beads of cold sweat formed on his forehead, and every inch of his skin was twitching.
When his spore was in the laboratory, had it experienced this kind of treatment? Perhaps it had.
Amidst the immeasurable pain, he lost virtually all of his lucidity. His mind was a chaotic mess; it was as though he had thought a lot, yet he didn't know exactly what he had thought about. He just vaguely felt that it was something very important.
He also did not know exactly how much time had passed. This painful torment stretched the seconds out, making each one feel like a lifetime.
Amidst his grogginess, he suddenly heard a sound from the corridor outside!
"Doctor—the magnetic field frequency has risen again!"
Like a thunderclap, this cry made him give a start, and he abruptly came around. Likewise, the atmosphere in the interrogation room changed in an instant.
An Zhe's heart thumped a few times. The magnetic field frequency has risen again, the magnetic field frequency has risen again—
This meant that the Underground City Base had been saved. It also meant that Lu Feng was coming back, assuming he was still alive.
He heard the doctor's eager voice. "It's risen again? Is it a large extent? Can it return to the normal frequency?"
"I don't know," an unknown person replied. "But the aurora has already appeared, and the frequency's fluctuation indicates that the Underground City Base is manually performing frequency adjustments. They are safe."
"Good heavens…" The doctor's voice trembled. "They… they really were able to be saved. What about communications? Have communications been restored? Quickly get in touch with the military and open the emergency channel right away. What happened over here was too big, we must tell Lu—"
"Doctor," Seraing spoke up all of a sudden, saying in a low voice, "I just received an emergency message from the military. We're prohibited from making any form of contact with the Colonel."
After a brief silence, the doctor asked, "How come?"
"I… do not know," Seraing said. "Perhaps it is because of Madam Lu and An Zhe."
In an instant, An Zhe suddenly recalled what he had been mulling over the entire time.
He was the murderer who had stolen the important sample.
Madam Lu was the xenogenic who had infected the entire Garden of Eden.
And both he and Madam Lu were people who had direct connections to Lu Feng.
He was still not yet clearheaded, but in that moment, with strength that sprang from an unknown source, he acquired an astonishing calmness. After coughing a few times, he said weakly, "… I'll talk."
The electric current disappeared, and his head became a little clearer. He was deeply regretting what he had said to the doctor just now about the Garden of Eden, Madam Lu, and the queen bee, but he believed that the doctor would definitely be able to understand what he meant.
But the effects of the electrocution were too severe. He could not speak at all, his head felt heavy, and his entire body was continuously spasming and retching. In the end, the doctor opened the interrogation room door and poured him a cup of sugar water.
An Zhe finally recovered a little.
"Everything I said before was untrue. I'm a xenogenic," he said. "There's a kind of wave that induces contactless infection, and xenogenics can feel it. Five days ago, I came into contact with Si Nan at the Lighthouse and was infected. I destroyed the inert sample because you people said… it was very important to humankind. Then, in order to avoid arrest, I went to the Garden of Eden, where Madam Lu was very friendly to me. Under the breeding season's influence, I infected the women there, using her as the center."
The doctor looked at him and asked with a frown, "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that I'm a xenogenic who has already obtained human intelligence. I was infected five days ago." An Zhe's voice was very soft and certain. He knew that his lie was very shoddy, but with the doctor's intellect, he would definitely be able to understand.
The doctor was suddenly seized with terror, a slight tremor in his voice as he said, "You—"
All at once, snow-white hyphae fluttered in the air. The doctor's eyes flew wide open, but then the hyphae forcibly covered his mouth and nose. In the event of suffocation, people would reflexively open their mouths and breathe wildly, so the hyphae took advantage of the opportunity to feed themselves into the doctor's mouth.
After a fit of violent coughs, the doctor's gaze instantly went unfocused, and then he pitched forward and fell unconscious onto the ground.
Seraing yanked out his gun!
"When Lu Feng comes back, or when the people from the military ask, tell them… what I said." While looking at Seraing, An Zhe's tone of voice carried a hint of an entreaty. "Then, just as I lost my mind and was about to attack the doctor, you shot me and my body evaporated. In this world, I never existed."
The muzzle of Seraing's gun was pointed at him. "… Why would you do this? Exactly what are you?"
"I…" An Zhe slowly tightened his grip on the Trial Court badge in his hand.
He was a mushroom, but he could not say it. He could not be a mushroom.
However, he was about to leave. This was something he had decided upon from the very beginning. After he left, no matter how other people viewed him, it would no longer have any meaning.
He knew how important the human base was to Lu Feng. As for why he was able to enter it, it was because the Arbiter had chosen to believe in him based on a strange intuition, and he knew how valuable this trust was.
If Lu Feng came back and knew the truth of everything, he would know the depth of his mother's hatred for and disappointment in the base's institutions as well as how she semi-voluntarily turned into a xenogenic and finally destroyed the entire Garden of Eden. And then, even the person he had always kept at his side and placed his trust in was a xenogenic who had always been harboring evil thoughts and designs against the sample—
What would happen to Lu Feng? Would he be able to accept it?
An Zhe did not know, but he did not wish to have Lu Feng face these kinds of things.
It was not necessarily because he was worried about how the base would look upon Lu Feng. He and Lu Feng could not be considered as having a deep friendship; in fact, he was bullied very badly by the man.
He just…
He just felt that Lu Feng was a very good human.
The Madam had said that Lu Feng would die a miserable death and that being unable to personally see the day Lu Feng went mad was her greatest regret. Then… Lu Feng being able to stay forever unwavering was his sole aspiration worth speaking of within this human base.
The Madam has already left, so there remained nobody to tell the tale. Just let what happened tonight to be an ordinary accidental infection event, An Zhe thought.
"I'm saying," he murmured, "that I'm already no longer human."
With a bang, Seraing's bullet fired toward An Zhe's right shoulder, but after the gunshot rang out, the bullet embedded itself into the wall opposite, while An Zhe himself swayed briefly. All of his clothes dropped to the ground, but the body inside them disappeared without a trace. There was only a white shape that abruptly appeared in front of Seraing before disappearing just as quickly, as if it were simply an illusion.
An Zhe dove into the vent in the corner behind him. Whatever Seraing thought, he was in no position to care. He entered the convoluted pipes at top speed, almost recklessly finding one room after another until he finally got out at a deserted office that had a window. Using his human form, he pushed the window open, and the aurora shone down on him. He braced his arms against the windowsill and leaped down. Swiftly turning into hyphae, he slid all the way down along the outer wall and landed on the ground.
The aurora had just appeared, and the power supply had not yet been fully restored, so there were no people outside nor any surveillance. He changed into human form and, clad in a robe made from hyphae, sprinted outward.
People could come chasing at any time; this was the most stressful journey of An Zhe's life. He crossed the entire Main City and returned to the Outer City. At the Outer City's abandoned supply depot, he picked up a backpack containing simple clothes, hardtack, and maps—
maps were the most important thing. Holding the backpack in his arms, he traveled outward along the rail transit line. The journey was very long. He walked for a very long time in the night, but it didn't matter.
When the aurora was fading little by little and the eastern horizon lit up with a hint of red, An Zhe had reached the Outer City's gate.
The examination office, the Trial Court… The buildings at the city gate were identical to when he arrived, but because the Outer City had emptied out, everything was locked up. An Zhe turned and came to the base of the wall. He climbed up onto the roof of an armored vehicle, then reached out, his fingers turning into hyphae before he started climbing up the city wall—perhaps because of the solar wind over the past few days, a strange sight appeared at the top of the city wall: it was covered with an even layer of sand, the fine grains seemingly fused with the steel wall to form an amalgamation. When the hyphae got there, fine white sand fell down, but the inner layer was sand as well.
After a slow climb, An Zhe stood atop the wall. Right at that moment, something next to him quivered. An Zhe instantly looked over to discover that there were two black bees the size of humans next to the heavy machine guns at the top of the wall and a few more not far away. One could imagine that they had flown out from the Garden of Eden not long ago and were temporarily resting here.
That gray bee had been awoken by his movements, and its trembling wings indicated that it was about to fly off. An Zhe pursed his lips. In the span of a moment, he made a decision—
In the following moment, part of his body transformed into softer, more flexible, and more weightless hyphae. He threw himself forward and wrapped himself around the black bee, and his body sank into the bristles on the black bee's back.
Frightened, the black bee's wings started vibrating with a buzzing sound, and it swiftly flew toward the sky, catapulting into the distance.
An Zhe stayed securely on its back. The cool early morning wind blew into his face, and he narrowed his eyes as he looked back at the entire human base. The sun had risen, and the glorious daybreak poured its magnificent golden light down, enveloping the foggy city. Suddenly, he heard a thundering noise travel over from a distant place.
He opened his eyes slightly and saw a black dot gradually increase in size. It was the shape of a familiar fighter plane, the PL1109. Its jet-black body was plated with a golden shimmer amidst the dawn's sea of clouds, and on each side of it was a team of wingmen. Their flight speed gradually slowed, and the entire fleet slowly descended, appearing to be preparing to land.
Lu Feng had come back safely. Although going to the rescue of the Underground City Base was a nigh-impossible mission to complete, the Colonel seemed to have always been an invincible person.
Stimulated by the sound, the black bee flew even faster into the distance. The fierce winds lifted up An Zhe's sleeves, causing them to flap noisily.
As An Zhe looked over there, he didn't know why, but although the early morning wind made his eyes sting, he still smiled.
He recalled the scene when he first saw Lu Feng at the bottom of this city gate. That day, the humans' Arbiter had lifted his head to look at An Zhe from afar, and beneath the black hat brim was a pair of ice-cold green eyes.
The Madam's roses withered, but he hoped that the Colonel would always be the Colonel.
Goodbye.