Hu Bugui sat unmoving. Quietly, he said to General Xiong, “The first step is triggering the fire alarm.” 

General Xiong laughed silently. “Your equipment has been swapped out time after time, but your methods are still the same old stuff, the same things your old ancestors used, without a bit of innovation. If this continues, your work will have no vitality. How can you consider making progress?” 

Hu Bugui closed his mouth, thinking that General Xiong was being truly overanxious in considering how to innovate in their work at a time like this. 

Thickly massed steps sounded in the corridor. The RZ Unit’s strict emergency response system had been set in motion. Hu Bugui couldn’t resist glancing out, turning his sitting posture slightly askew. 

But General Xiong sat calmly in the midst of the crisis, entirely unhurried. He took out a cigarette and lit it, narrowing his eyes, then blew out a leisurely smoke ring. Speaking almost to himself, he said, “If you’re fretful, it shows that you haven’t adequately prepared, don’t trust yourself enough, aren’t strong enough.” 

Hu Bugui couldn’t understand the old leader’s lofty words. He turned to look at him. 

Wreathed in smoke, General Xiong said, “It’s possible to judge others using yourself as a standard, but you can only judge those similar to you. You can’t apply your way of thinking to everyone.” 

Hu Bugui frowned. “But he… Su Qing, he isn’t an RZ Unit insider. He doesn’t know the procedures for an emergency situation. I’m afraid he…” 

He remembered Su Qing covered in blood in the ruins of the grey house, and his voice vanished in his throat. 

Actually, he hadn’t only thought of it this moment. In three years, this scene had always been in his mind, impossible to escape in his dreams, like a lingering spirit, making him unable to resist feeling shaken whenever he thought of this name. 

General Xiong looked at him silently, then hit the nail right on the head: “Given the same level of ability, I prefer to use a person like you, with your comparatively stronger sentiments, as opposed to a cold-hearted person. But I hope that your personal feelings won’t excessively interfere with your judgment.” 

Hu Bugui insincerely said, “Yes, sir.” 

General Xiong sighed. “Is it so easy to sneak into the RZ Unit headquarters? There’s no saying how long that little friend of yours lay dormant, how much time he spent preparing his plans. But while this was an audacious act, you still haven’t been able to catch him up to this point, right? Then that shows he succeeded. Could he succeed if he was only foolishly bold, not cautious?” 

There were faint gunshots outside. Over his earpiece, Hu Bugui heard Fang Xiu’s well-trained voice issuing orders. He knew that the first target, a personage roughly equivalent to bait, had appeared. So he became even more absent-minded, blurting out another “Yes, sir.” 

General Xiong then closed his mouth and didn’t speak again, feeling that Hu Bugui was planted there in front of him like a huge lump of rotten wood. So he quietly smoked, no longer attempting to perform alchemy on him. 

Just then, Xue Xiaolu hurriedly charged in. “Captain Hu, Cheng Ge is gone.” 

Hu Bugui looked up at her, his gaze slashing over her face like a knife. “When was it discovered?” 

“Before the alarm sounded. Just as I was getting people to help me look for him, the alarm rang.” Xue Xiaolu’s words were extremely fast but orderly. “I’ve already told Professor Cheng that no matter who this is, they would get no benefit from harming Cheng Ge, and that nothing would happen to him for now. I told Professor Cheng not to act rashly.” 

“What about the guard unit with Cheng Weizhi?” 

Xue Xiaolu said, “The daily guard unit has been withdrawn, and response groups one and two have been brought in. Apart from the door guard, there are twenty bodyguards who can act as necessary. No one is permitted to leave their posts, or else they’ll be punished for the crime of spying. We’re waiting on instructions to move on to the next step.” 

Though this young lady appeared very unreliable and her work in normal times was logistics, she still demonstrated her exceptional quality in an emergency. 

Hu Bugui was silent for a moment. “Who was the last person to see Cheng Ge?” 

Xue Xiaolu froze. “It…it was me.” 

Cheng Weizhi and his son’s daily life at headquarters was basically managed by Xue Xiaolu alone. She looked at Hu Bugui. “Captain Hu, I know there’s that… Should I temporarily isolate myself…” 

Hu Bugui waved a hand. “No need. If I can’t even trust you, who can I trust? Think back carefully, who was the first person to notice that Cheng Ge was missing?” 

Xue Xiaolu’s long, thin brows drew together slightly. “Xiao He from the treatment center. He Yongkang.” 

“Where is he?” 

“We split up to search…” Xue Xiaolu wanted to say that even though He Yongkang wasn’t a core member, he had already been at headquarters for several years. But Hu Bugui didn’t wait for her to finish. He stood up off the couch and briefly instructed, “Lead the way.” 

Xue Xiaolu wasn’t a mere pretty vase. In that instant, her mind spun through several turns. She couldn’t resist turning her head to look at the carefree General Xiong, leaning back against the couch and smoking. She thought there was something a little strange here. 

Why had General Xiong suddenly come to the RZ Unit? And why had something gone wrong today of all days? 

She understood Hu Bugui’s misgivings—Cheng Ge wasn’t the type that spared people worry. Sometimes if you didn’t keep an eye on him, he would run around in the corridors. But each door had a strict guard on it, so there was no need to worry that he would get out. Before the alarm had sounded, how would an ordinary treatment center worker notice that Cheng Ge had gone missing? 

But if he really was…

Xue Xiaolu felt as though someone had poured a pail ice-cold water into her head—if he really was one of Utopia’s people, hidden for so many years, how could he expose himself so easily? Because of Cheng Ge, who had no value to them? Also…even Cheng Weizhi himself—was he worth such major movement on their part? 

Wasn’t there something else concealed here? 

As soon as Hu Bugui left the conference room, a division of the RZ Unit’s most elite guards ran up to keep watch at the conference room door—like the panda bear that was his distant relative, the bearish General Xiong was also a rare and precious national asset; there couldn’t be any mishaps¹.

Meanwhile, Cheng Ge, whom everyone was looking for everywhere, was in fact right now inside a restroom in a corner of the second floor—it was a women’s toilet, but there were few women at headquarters, and they were concentrated mostly in the medical and research departments. Practically no one used the second floor women’s toilet all day. 

Behind the wooden door of one of the stalls, Cheng Ge was peacefully putting together a jigsaw puzzle. This was a very special puzzle; it was made up of broken up colorful little blocks embedded in the wall. There was a rotating axis in the center of the little blocks. The only way they could move around on the wall was by rotating around this axis. 

You not only had to consider where to put each block. You also had to consider its path of rotation, how to avoid the other blocks, and so on. 

This deliberately original puzzle on the wall at last succeeded in giving pause to the little puzzle superhero Cheng Ge. He couldn’t reach the highest place, so he stood on the toilet seat, staring unblinkingly. From outside, it looked as though there was no one there. 

The three open wooden stall doors in the restroom had been opened to a particular angle. When someone came in from outside, they would push aside the first door, which would touch the ones behind it, half-screening the stall in the corner, creating an unusual blind spot and blocking off Cheng Ge, who was entirely immersed in his own world. 

After a group of searchers went by, some time passed, and then a man wearing a milky white uniform the same as Xue Xiaolu’s walked back in, stroked Cheng Ge on the head, and put a handful of candy in his pocket. Then he took off his uniform and tossed it aside. Underneath, he was wearing an ordinary RZ Unit guard unit member uniform. There was a gun stuck into his pant leg. He turned and left. 

The moment he waked out the door, the drainage hole under the bathroom sink suddenly moved. A floor tile was pushed up, and a reeking man climbed out. He was covered in a layer of something unknown and looked like an ET. Then he took off his layer of “skin,” wrinkled his nose, then shoved back the skin and the floor tile. 

This was “Lu Dacheng,” who had “shrunk” by half within two short weeks—Comrade Su Qing, who had become a sewer-dwelling mermaid. 

His steps were absolutely silent. He lightly pulled the half-blocked door open a crack and took a look at Cheng Ge, a thoughtful expression appearing on his face. He picked up the milky white uniform on the floor and wrapped it around himself. Then he very shamelessly took the handful of candy from Cheng Ge’s pocket, sniffed to make sure there was nothing unusual about it, then unwrapped one and tossed it into his mouth, chewing it with a crack. The rest he put in his pocket. 

Next, Su Qing didn’t go directly to Cheng Weizhi’s room. He had spent two full weeks concealed in the RZ Unit headquarters. He had basically worked out the circumstances of the room where Cheng Weizhi was staying. 

Now Su Qing, like Xue Xiaolu, had realized the instant the alarm rang that something was wrong. 

Utopia was currently still performing experiments, and it seemed that they hadn’t succeeded in creating a “perfect blue seal.” So why did they absolutely have to kill Cheng Weizhi? If his own circumstances had leaked out by some channel, then Utopia had to know that his double core system had been single-handedly accomplished by Cheng Weizhi. If they killed him, what benefit would Utopia get? 

Also…killing Zhao Yifei and the other surviving grey seals, what benefit did they get from that? 

Su Qing paused in his tracks—there really was a benefit. If they killed Zhao Yifei, they could make them take for granted that Cheng Weizhi was the next target. 

General Xiong finished smoking a fleet of cigarettes, picked up a cup of tea, put one hand behind his back, and stood, bored out of his mind, under a calligraphy painting on the conference room wall, his head tilted up to look at it. Just then, a member of the urgently deployed response groups who had the look of a captain quickly stepped up and rapidly knocked twice on the conference room door. “General Xiong, it isn’t safe here. Captain Hu requests that you relocate.” 

General Xiong raised his eyebrows and looked at him, remaining unmoved as a steelyard weight. “Why didn’t Xiao Hu come to tell me in person?” 

This captain seemed a little anxious. He took a step forward. “General…” 

General Xiong’s expression chilled. Two guards at the door immediately stepped forward, blocking the man’s path. General Xiong sternly said, “Get out your credentials!” 

He had just said this when there was a whoosh in the air. A bullet hole noiselessly appeared in the captain’s forehead. He felt straight down. 

The guard unit immediately charged into the conference room, tightly encircling General Xiong, forming a human shield. Closest to General Xiong was a guard group leader with a little mustache. He made a crisp salute towards General Xiong. “General, please remove to a safe location, sir!” 

General Xiong looked gravely at the corpse on the floor, then quietly instructed, “Go.” 

The little mustache very naturally reached out a hand to support him. Just then, a slightly peculiar smile suddenly appeared on General Xiong’s face. In a flash, before the little mustache could react, several guns that had been facing outward suddenly turned towards his head. 

The little mustache froze. General Xiong slowly drank some tea, then let out a sigh that could reverberate around the rafters for three days. “It’s been a long time since I last made a public appearance, so now everyone believes I’m a moldering old codger. What’s to be done?” 

At General Xiong’s direction, a guard removed a tiny syringe from the little mustache’s sleeve.