Meanwhile, headquarters wasn’t especially chaotic. Though the whole core group had been absent, everything was still proceeding methodically. When each of them had hastily changed clothes and rushed to the conference room, they found that this was because General Xiong was there personally overseeing things. 

General Xiong sat on the little couch with one leg crossed over the other, a pot of tea at his hand, looking rather leisurely. Smiling, he greeted them: “You’re all back! Hey, you’re looking better. You were all looking wilting when you left. I’m telling you, our ST Training Course gives extreme VIP treatment. Ordinary people couldn’t get in.” 

The men remembered the big multi-person bed in the little dark room, the women remembered the ragged curtain, unwashed for years, that made your hand come away covered in dust when you touched it, and each inwardly thrashed around. 

Hu Bugui sat down, opened the report from the tech department, and scanned it. Fang Xiu asked, “General, what’s going on?” 

“A major event.” General Xiong slowly drank tea and smacked his lips, looking like an old dandy who had just strolled back from the opera. Nothing about him said that a major event had taken place. “We just detected a possible blue seal base. It’s located very close to a densely populated city. The reason it was found was that it suddenly displayed an unusual large-scale concentration of energy. If this continues, there may be a large explosion.” 

General Xiong put down his teacup, paused, then slowly added: “According to the conservative estimates of our comrades in the technological department, who have been working through the night, if the energy continues to amass like this, the destructive force of the base exploding may impact a hundred kilometers of the surrounding area.” 

The others were silent for a moment. Chang Dou looked at General Xiong’s expression, then looked down at the tech department’s report—if not for the astonishing data in it, he practically would have suspected that General Xiong was playing a joke to tease them. He asked, “General Xiong, why aren’t you worried at all?” 

General Xiong sighed. “Ah, however worried I ‘seemed,’ what use would it be? The more critical a situation is, the slower we should talk it over.” 

Hu Bugui looked at him and closed the tech department’s report. “Chang Dou, put in a little work on the technological front. Continue to monitor. Meanwhile, I want a plan for resolution ASAP.” 

Chang Dou was a reliable person where it counted. He gave an affirmative, stood up, and ran off at top speed. Hu Bugui paused, then continued: “Everyone split up and prepare. We’re setting out at once to the scene. Dr. Lu will accompany us. This thing is fishy. Everyone maintain an open channel of communication.” 

General Xiong said nothing. Hu Bugui was an old hand when it came to dealing with emergencies. What needed to be prepared, how to divide the work—he could issue the orders even with his eyes closed. Only when everyone had dispersed did Hu Bugui stand up and say to him, “Sir, you stay at headquarters and continue…” 

General Xiong finally put down his teacup. “Wait a moment. I have something to say to you.” 

Hu Bugui’s steps paused. General Xiong waved a hand, and the bodyguards next to him retreated. He nodded and said to Hu Bugui, “Sit.” 

So Hu Bugui sat across from General Xiong, waiting for him to speak. 

But General Xiong didn’t say a word for ages. He only slightly relaxed his back, leaning against the little couch. He took out a pack of cigarettes from his military jacket, which was a little pale from washing, put a cigarette in his mouth, and lowered his eyes to light it. The flame leaping up cast shadows on his face. The bridge of his nose was still straight, but there were faint age spots on his cheeks. Combined with the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and on his forehead and the grey hair at his temples, everything publicly declared the fact that he was already old. 

In that moment, Hu Bugui thought that the smile that always hung on his face as if it had grown that way disappeared. But it was only the blink of an eye. General Xiong was still General Xiong. Not even the curvature of the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes had changed. 

After a long time, General Xiong slowly breathed out a smoke ring and quietly said, “I may as well give you a heads-up. I have a bad feeling about this.” 

Hu Bugui’s eyebrows raised slightly. 

General Xiong said, “Xiao Hu, do you know what it means to always be prepared for the worst?” 

Hu Bugui paused, then asked, “How bad is the ‘worst’ you’re talking about, sir?” 

General Xiong raised his eyes and looked him. “What Xu Ruchong obscurely warned you about.” 

Hu Bugui was about to speak, but General Xiong raised a hand to stop him. “You don’t say it, but you know how things stand. I know that, but there are some things that even if you know how they stand, you still can’t do anything—I started preparing to build the RZ Unit many years ago, but it’s been hard. It’s hard to find suitable people, and it’s hard for the suitable people to be sufficiently loyal. It’s only just now taken shape, and before it’s had a chance to stabilize, it’s going to be pushed to the very front line.” 

For some reason, Hu Bugui faintly sensed something inauspicious in General Xiong’s words. 

The two of them fell silent. After a long moment, General Xiong raised his head. Hu Bugui didn’t make a sound, waiting to listen respectfully to his brilliant views. But when General Xiong changed subjects, it was like turning the page of a book. His eyes rotated, and his expression immediately became a little lewd. “Oh, right, how is your relationship with Su Qing now?” 

Hu Bugui’s expression turned blank. 

General Xiong laughed aloud. “Hey, I get it, I get it, we’ve all been young. I wasn’t always such a wrinkled piece of stuffing myself.” 

Hu Bugui’s expression was no longer blank. He frowned, looking closely at General Xiong’s smiling countenance, feeling that something was very off—though General Xiong had always been an old lech, he had stopped at the level of a beast in human clothes, and his speech had basically maintained the appearance of decency. He very rarely blabbed and used such terms to make jokes. 

But he couldn’t read any clues from General Xiong’s old face. Before he could ask anything, General Xiong waved a hand. “Go on, go on, see to your business. I think Su Qing is a pretty good kid, only he overthinks things and sometimes easily gets caught up bashing his head against a brick wall. Though he’s still much more reliable than I was as a young man.” 

Hu Bugui: “…” 

He really didn’t feel like this amounted to praise for Su Qing. 

General Xiong lowered his eyes and fixedly watched his cigarette slowly burning down. “You think further than he does, but he sees more clearly than you do. Perhaps one day…” 

What would happen one day, General Xiong didn’t say. He only waved a hand again to send Hu Bugui out. 

They quickly came to the scene of the energy concentration. The naked eye couldn’t see anything unusual about this area, but the screen displayed the enormous power constantly sweeping in like a vortex, absorbing more and more energy, and the vortex was like a black hole, constantly expanding. 

As soon as Su Qing got out of the car, he subconsciously made a gesture of covering his ears. But after keeping his hands raised for a while, he frowned and lowered them again. 

Lu Qingbai pushed up his glasses. “What, can you sense something else?” 

“Yeah.” Su Qing stuck his hands in his pockets and stared around the area that the others couldn’t see any clues in. “There’s a lot of noise over there. If I ‘listen’ closely, most of it is people screaming and crying. It’s…how should I explain it? It’s a lot like hearing it with your ears, but when you cover your ears, you find that it’s actually digging directly into your brain.” 

Lu Qingbai nodded wildly. “I know, I know, it’s the double core’s distinctive ‘fellow feeling’ phenomenon. Your brain automatically concretizes the unusual emotional waves your energy crystal receives. For example, fear automatically creates a ‘screaming’ reaction when it comes to your brain. Well, how strong is the feeling? Will it impact your hearing?” 

Su Qing sensed attentively. “The ‘voices’ are getting louder and louder, but there shouldn’t be an impact on my hearing. It’s like…” 

“Like tinnitus. I think it must be a little irritating,” Lu Qingbai picked up. 

Fang Xiu stared at the vortex on the screen growing larger and larger and cut in: “The voices are getting louder and louder—so is the energy getting sucked in emotional energy?” 

The communicator was switched over to the technological department, and Chang Dou’s face appeared on video. He quickly said, “It’s not emotional energy. We’ve been monitoring the emotional wave frequencies for a hundred kilometers around. There are currently no unusual fluctuations. There must be something at the center of the vortex that’s madly consuming energy.” 

“Does the tech department have a rough plan of action?” Hu Bugui asked. 

“We do.” Chang Dou pushed up his glasses and scrambled to pick up a laptop computer from beside him. “Captain Hu, this thing is rather problematic. No matter what measures we adopt, we must find out what’s at the center of this energy vortex. I’ve already urgently dispatched the monitor projection. It must have passed the ionosphere of the energy vortex by now, heading towards the central location. The video function isn’t ideal, but you can still make something out. I can send it to you in a while. When we find what’s at the center, we may be faced with two types of circumstances. One is the type that can be quickly resolved. That would of course be better. The other is the type that we can’t resolve before the explosion. With such a large base, if energy increasing exponentially like this really does explode, I’m afraid that we’ll have to find a way to isolate it.” 

Chang Dou normally seemed like he had a head full of paste, but when he got to work, his thoughts were clear, not muddled at all. Fang Xiu thoughtfully looked at his face and stroked his chin, lowered his eyes, then raised them again, as if lightly nodding his head. After Chang Dou finished speaking, he quickly added, “It will be hard to isolate an explosion of such great intensity. I’m afraid headquarters’ installations aren’t…” 

Hu Bugui interrupted: “Write up a list of everything necessary and hand it over to General Xiong. He’ll take care of it.” 

“Yes, sir!” 

As Chang Dou finished speaking, the image came over from the probe that had penetrated the center of the energy vortex. Everyone gathered around the screen at once. Perhaps because of influence from the unknown energy, the picture wasn’t very clear. There was frequent faint interference flashing over it. The camera lens shook slightly as the probe moved. The whole base seemed like a depopulated area, without the shadow of a single human being. 

Chang Dou said, “It’ll be at the heart of the vortex soon.” 

Then a white building appeared on the screen. It was round and seemed to have only one floor, but it was very large. They noticed that the frequency of the flashing red light on top of the probe became higher and higher. 

The probe entered the lobby. The screen dimmed. Then the picture gradually began to clear. Everyone watching sucked in a breath. 

There was a very high chair in the center of the hall, with a small, skinny man sitting in it, dead or alive. At any rate, his eyes were closed, and they couldn’t see any undulation in his chest at first. The upper half of the man’s body was bare, with a clear blue seal mark on the collarbone. Countless clear wires were linked to his body. These wires spread out, covering the whole hall, connected to over a hundred brains. 

Human ones.