Drake stood in a corner of the wall with a grim face, a frozen tree still in its juvenile stage inside the wall had not yet stopped shaking and the falling ice particles hit Drake’s shoulders, making his face even more frosty.
Several young Alpha soldiers stood before him with mournful faces, not daring to say anything. The army commander had told them to keep an eye on Eno, and they had only changed shifts when Eno had gone straight over the wall.
The wall was so high that no one would have thought that Eno, an Omega with a baby, would be able to climb out.
Drake looked sullenly at the tree, stepped on the trunk and climbed it, stepping up onto the fence in a few strokes, looking around with the binoculars hanging around his neck but not finding Eno. He jumped off the wall, his anger rising again and again, and finally said helplessly, “Forget it…inform the whole team to prepare for a strong assault.”
He couldn’t blame the youngsters. Comrade Eno had no other skills, but climbing trees and walls was something he had practised since he was a child, and was definitely not inferior to him. I don’t know which one of them had OCD to enclose the wall in a square and enclosed this unlucky tree in it, but fate was to blame.
Drake’s original intention was to stabilise Eno first and take good care of him to nurse the baby. Since there was no fundamental conflict between them, they could have settled the important matter of the base first, and then sit down and talk about Martin’s problems calmly after the revenge. Now that Eno has run, the problem is big. He couldn’t guarantee Eno’s safety, and what would he do if something happened?
The fire in Drake’s heart rose to the surface and he led the men off to an emergency combat meeting. He couldn’t let anything happen to Eno, not only because he was his wife, but also because, according to Duke Kersi, he was the only one who had been implanted with the improved genes by Ivan himself. That experiment had in fact been completed twenty-eight years ago, and Eno was the perfect, experimental subject with almost all side effects erased. He was of great importance to both the Federation and the Inhumans, and he had to survive. The Silver Cross had only hastily informed Grey and the Council President of the operation, there had been no formalities at all, and he would not have been able to explain to them if he had lost Eno here.
Halfway through the meeting, however, Robert from the technical department rushed in, pointing at his lightbulb and shivering: “Boss… look…!”
The light-brain screen was white with snow, and the camera was facing the gates of the base cast in black iron.
“Sister-in-law said before he left…before he left that he wanted to borrow…borrow my optical brain to look at it.” Robert, who often couldn’t say his name because of his stammer and was often jokingly referred to as the little carrot, had a shaky voice, “It’s…it’s the electronic eye.”
Drake immediately understood what Eno was trying to do. He wiped his face heavily and made an immediate decision: “Stop the operation and wait. The technical department will prepare a 3D model of the building, and Nightingale will inform the ‘White Eagle’ to act immediately.”
In front of the ‘Red’ base.
Eno took out the small bottle of alcohol left in his bag and looked at it with some hesitation.
He had bought the bottle in the last town before entering the frozen forest, to drink it for courage when he was about to enter the base. But now there was only a small half bottle left, and he wasn’t sure if there was enough of a dose left to numb his fear. Eno was actually scared, he was only an Omega after all, unlike the Alpha who had been born a wise and brave warrior, and had never thought he would one day be standing here.
But his confession with Drake made him feel relieved again, his thoughts of Martin transcended his fears, and every bit of his efforts here would turn into the building blocks of his future happiness.
At this thought, Eno could not help but smile, and his body did not feel so cold. He decisively threw away the half-bottle of alcohol and hammered the iron door in front of him with a heavy, dull sound of old corrosion, and a tiny camera protruded from the side and scanned him back and forth for a while. Eno didn’t have to wait long for the door to open, and a couple of darkly clad Inhumans emerged as if they had been expecting him, leading him straight to the depths of the base.
As he walked, Eno looked at the base. It was a dome-shaped design, covering a huge area, and was divided into three levels: upper, middle and lower. There were very many white clad Inhumans walking around, ranging in age from 30 or 40 to young children. All wore long shackles and their eyes were an eerie crimson. Eno knew they were all experimental subjects, unable to control their traits because the implants performed were not complete, and had to remain alive in this state for the rest of their lives.
The base was black and white, and all non-experiment subjects wore black. Eno also got a white robe. The fabric was so rough that it made his fingers ache just to touch it, making it hard to imagine that anyone would wear such material in this day and age. Silently, he removed his thick coat, covered in pale blue blood and layers of dirt, to reveal a torso covered in crude bandages – too neatly wrapped by the medic, which he had torn before setting out on his own. The guard grinned at him: “Bitten by an ice beast ba?”
Eno turned a deaf ear to it, and slowly changed into the white robe of the base, and tucked the electronic eye that had been stuck in his palm into his sleeve, and followed the black-clad people with his ragged bag.
The lift took them straight up to the third floor and through a long corridor to the experimental area. The doors to all the rooms were closed, and behind the glass walls there were many Inhumans lying on the operating tables, as quiet as if they had died in their sleep.
Suddenly the lab in front of Eno stirred, and one of the subjects awoke, howling in pain with crimson eyes, struggling so hard that he almost broke free of his restraints. Several black-clad researcher-like men went in to hold him down, grabbed a nearby injection and stuck it in his arm. When the clear liquid had disappeared completely from the syringe, the subject, whose struggles were diminishing, fell quietly to the bed, his round, red eyes still open.
His red pupils and hideous appearance were imprinted on Eno’s mind, and he shook his head silently as he followed the guards onwards.
He was led deeper into a lab that was obviously much more luxurious than the one outside, the tall figure who had been away for a long time was standing in front of the experimental table, not sure what he was tinkering with.
Eno was unceremoniously strapped to a lab chair by the guards and had double-layer restraint belts buckled on his arms. Only when the guards had retreated did Viktor slowly turn to him and give him a gentle smile: “My Eno, it’s been a long time.”
Eno said coldly: “You’re not Ivan.”
“But I’m not Viktor either.” Instead of the anger he expected, Viktor cocked his head and gave a wry, slightly playful smile, “Our mimicry powers’ ability to change shape can only be used once in a lifetime, and when I turn into Ivan, I can never change back again.”
Eno sneered, a lazy look on his face. Viktor laughed back: “The Frost Forest is not easy to go through, is it? Every year, the strongest warriors we produce are sent there for three weeks, and when they return alive they have the honour of going to war and giving their lives for the revival of the race. According to the statistics, less than one in ten make it back. So you are strong, no doubt you are the experimental body that Ivan himself implanted.”
Eno rolled his eyes wordlessly.
Viktor laughed again: “Why are you so calm to see me? You came all the way here and you didn’t want to ask me something?”
His gaze, hidden behind golden lenses, was sharp as a knife: “Or do you already know everything?”
Eno snorted, as if finally interested in looking at him: “If I ask, you’ll tell?”
“Of course.” Viktor finally got a satisfactory answer and smiled as he pulled a newly unsealed syringe from the lab counter and placed it in front of him, “But you’ll have to pay a small price. I promise it’s a fair trade.”
The long, thick, shiny metallic needle stabbed into his arm, gurgling blood flowed down the long tube into the blood collection bag, and for a moment Eno’s vision began to blur. He braced himself to ask the first question: “Why?”
As if he had expected this, Viktor recounted unhurriedly: “If you are obedient in the future, I will take you out to see our land, to see how we struggle to get by in a barren and unproductive land. Then you will understand why, everything we do is just for a better life.”
Eno watched coldly as the blood flowed into a second bag of blood before asking: “When did you all focus on my father?”
“When the Federal Biological Laboratory made a secret call for researchers from various biological laboratories in order to form Ivan’s project team.” Viktor said nonchalantly, “Omegas are genetically homologous with the Inhumans, and if this experiment works on Omegas, with a few modifications, it could be perfectly adapted to the Inhuman body. We realised that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and the Kersis had a spot in their biology lab for a referral, and I passed the test and made it into the experimental team as Ivan’s assistant.”
Ivan was someone who worked so hard that he often slept in the lab at night, and after seven years of spending time together, his every move, even every tiny detail of his habits, was seen by his assistant to be able to mimic them without a hitch after his death, even hiding them from Allie.
Eno nodded and asked again: “Why did you set the fire?”
Viktor seemed surprised that he would ask such an innocent and stupid question: “To run away, of course. If you want to ask why I killed everyone, it was because Allie was investigating me, so both she and the Earl and his wife had to die. As for you and Lea, keeping you is also a trouble, I had already taken all the experimental data at that time, leaving a living body that has grown up for the Federation to continue to study?”
His eyes narrowed slightly with a cruel yet enjoyable smile: “You know, for every person you kill, you connect a thread of karma. So why not burn the whole ball of thread so that no one will remember and I can sleep soundly at night. I thought little Kersi was a lustful idiot when he begged me to let you go, and I just didn’t want to break faces with him. I didn’t expect him to be useful.”
He stepped forward and picked Eno’s chin, looking admiringly at his beauty: “You’re the perfect experiment. Ivan really loved you, so he spent a lot of time modifying that gene to fit your body, and the end result is that your powers are manageable with little to no side effects.”
“It’s a pity that I always thought you were his failure, and it wasn’t until you killed little Kersi that I realised how perfect you turned out to be. It’s not like that Omega of the Kersis knew any better, all she did was yell for revenge and revenge every day.” Viktor removed the blood collection bag and replaced it with a new one, “It was three months after you got out of prison before she dared to come and talk to me about it, almost pissing me off…but thankfully it’s not too late.”
Feeling extremely dizzy from the excessive blood loss, Eno braced himself to ask one last question: “What did you draw my blood for?”
“To extract blood serum.” Viktor answered him graciously, “As you can see, the genes I got are a finished product in the common sense, but because of the flawed embedding technique, they don’t match well with the clan’s bodies. I had Irene draw a few tubes of your blood while you were still in prison and accidentally discovered that your blood serum could temper the side effects of this gene.”
Eno let out a small laugh, suddenly weak: “Are you idiots who kill the donkey1卸磨杀驴 (xiè mò shā lǘ): an idiom, to unload the mill and kill the donkey, It is a metaphor to kick away those who have done their best for them, demolishing the bridge after crossing. before you learn the skill?”
Viktor shrugged his shoulders: “He’s already succeeded. Wouldn’t we be more foolish to wait for the Federation to build an Omega army before killing him? It’s not like we haven’t given him a chance to live, he’d just rather be reported to the arbitration court for a death sentence than accept our offer.”
“And it’s not like I didn’t do anything in the nineteen years I was alive in his place.” Viktor removed the blood collection bag and tossed a hemostatic pad to Eno for him to press himself, “I’ve taken my research in a different direction, my warriors don’t need to be so perfect, they just need to learn to unleash their powers and learn to fight. So what I have done so far is still satisfactory so far, I just need a bit of your blood serum to make these not so obedient little children better at following instructions.”
He patted Eno’s shoulder with a soft expression: “Go and get some sleep. Don’t worry, you still have plenty of use, we won’t do anything to you.”
Eno grimaced, slid his electronic eye into his sleeve and hid it, turning his head to pass out.
Eno woke up to a blinding white light over his head, in a trance, he thought he was back in prison, Irene had kept him in bright light twenty-four hours a day to torture him, how he couldn’t sleep, so he just stayed up and thought about something endless.
Still dizzy, he saw the tube of nutrient solution sitting beside him and Eno took it and drank it straight away. There was a camera pointing straight at him in front of the white hospital bed, and seeing that Eno was awake, the sound-controlled door to the lab bay quickly opened and Viktor walked in.
“Awake?”
Eno sat up and asked: “Still drawing?”
Viktor shook his head: “Your blood is a renewable resource, we need to make good use of it. You should rest for the next two days, and then draw when you recover.”
Eno said grimly: “Thanks.”
Viktor was actually quite tolerant of him: “You’re welcome. Any other requests? As long as you cooperate, we’ll accommodate you as best we can.”
Eno thought for a moment and said obliquely: “This place of yours reminds me of a prison. I don’t want to stay here all the time, can I go out for a walk?”
Viktor pondered for a long moment and nodded: “Sure. But I don’t suppose you’d mind if we implanted you with a control chip?”
Eno smiled indifferently and allowed Victor to use the injector to implant a chip in the back of his neck next to the gland. Victor wiped the blood spattered from his neck and said kindly: “Behave yourself or I’ll make sure you’ll turn out just like those little cuties out there.”
“I just want to go out and look for fun, what can I do?” Eno looked at him in amazement, “You’ve already made me a wanted man on the federal escape list, so I will have a way out if I run out?”
Viktor said thoughtfully: “That’s right.” Then he let go of the soft back of Eno’s neck and forced a personal terminal on his wrist that did little more than locate and tell the time, “Go on, be back here by 6pm or don’t blame me for being rude.”
Eno snorted, got out of bed and headed out the door. He walked along the long corridors of the lab area and then strolled over to the activity area, walking around seemingly casually, but was actually giving the electronic eye a full view of the base.
The electronic eye was just a small ball less than half the size of a button, and worked just fine with Eno pinching it between his fingers and blocked by his cuffs. Eno had been drawn with too much blood and his feet were really weak. He didn’t have to walk long in the activity area before he got tired and found an artificial fountain separating the east and west areas and sat down next to it for a while to rest.
He felt chills all over due to blood loss, and vaguely remembered Martin, and missed those warm hugs very much. The warmth of a human body suddenly flooded his chest, and Eno was in a trance, thinking that Martin was really here, when he woke up to find a dishevelled Inhuman girl buried in his arms, staring at him with innocent eyes.
The girl was dressed in the same white robe as he was, her eyes were watery and lovely, and she didn’t look too old, but was similar to Julia’s age. Eno couldn’t help but smile and rubbed her head: “Is something wrong?”
“Are you Eno Ge Ge?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
Uncle Viktor introduced Ge Ge to us before, is Ge Ge an Omega from outside?”
“……En.”
The girl’s big eyes were full of curiosity: “Is it really fun out there? The foster mums always say there are really tall, tall buildings, fast flying spaceships, and delicious meat……”
“Pretty much.” Eno didn’t want to be angry with a child, and said softly, “Don’t you have any?”
“No.” The girl, who had been in a somewhat low mood, said and laughed, “But I’ve seen it in a book!”
A little bitter inside, Eno patted the stone railing beside him and asked the girl to sit up: “What’s your name?”
“588.” the girl said quite naturally, “We don’t have names, mum says we’re useless and don’t need to have names.”
Eno frowned slightly: “What do you mean useless? Aren’t you all born with psychic powers?”
“But there are useful and useless psychic powers.” Thinking he was from the outside and didn’t understand, the girl explained to him seriously, “The psychic analysts say my psychic ability is to make flowers bloom, but there are no flowers in our land.”
The girl’s uplifted eyebrows dropped in frustration and she said very despondently: “I haven’t seen flowers except in picture books.”
“So you all were sent here?”
“En en.” The girl smiled sweetly, “Uncle Viktor said if I behaved well, I could live where flowers bloomed later.”
Eno stroked her furry little head in silence.
He thought: But your flowers bloom on the corpses of Alphas and the blood and tears of Omegas.
