Su Qing, full of curiosity, stole a glance at the light blue bracelet in the evidence bag. He thought that Hu Bugui was concentrating on driving, so he stealthily reached out a paw to try touching it, to see what would happen this time. But before he could touch it, Hu Bugui slapped his hand away. 

A very faint redness instantly rose on the back of Su Qing’s hand. Seeing that Hu Bugui was still concentrating completely on the road ahead, he rubbed his nose and awkwardly drew his hand back. 

A flat voice came from the speaker on the car’s ceiling: “Captain Hu, I’m in position.” 

Hu Bugui said, “Copy.” 

Su Qing blinked. “You sent someone to keep an eye on Dong Jing’s house?” 

Hu Bugui confirmed it. Su Qing recalled the mysterious sniper he had encountered the other day and swallowed a question—if that sniper was still there, how many people would you have to send to keep them from killing someone? 

He thought that this whole thing was bewildering. He had a faint strange feeling, as though a pair of eyes was constantly watching him from the shadows with menace. 

Dong Jianguo’s family were all ordinary people. Why would such people be watching his home? Why would there be such an important item on Dong Jing’s arm without these people caring about it? Could they be continuing their human experimentation, and could there be something special about it, targeted against the RZ Unit? 

Returning to the starting point of the question, Utopia was awesome enough to block any signal, like an unrivaled little magic turtle hiding in its shell and acting without scruple. How could they reveal such an important and peculiar signal and let them “just happen” to receive it? 

And those white coats had always been insufferably full of themselves, with keeping out of sight as their unwavering first principle. Even during a hasty escape, they hadn’t forgotten to make sure they weren’t leaving their enemy a scrap. Why hadn’t they dealt with the bodies? 

Human bodies weren’t some hard to deal with non-recyclable waste. And anyway, even if they didn’t deal with the bodies, couldn’t they at least have taken the bracelets off those unlucky “lab mice” and tossed them? 

This case had simply been delivered into their hands. 

No, Su Qing thought—if he himself hadn’t come along that day, Hu Bugui and the others wouldn’t have noticed anything special about that thing. The old model energy detector wouldn’t have reacted to it, and the bracelet would have been sealed along with the body’s cigarettes and wallet and passed on to public security later. 

So this case had simply been delivered into his hands. 

Then there were those emotions that had been communicated to his mind. The previous two times, it had all been fear. Maybe these had been the violent emotional fluctuations of the victims before their deaths. But this time, the bracelet had been worn on the arm of a healthy and active little girl. What would there be in it?

Su Qing stared at the light blue bracelet, his heart practically itching. 

But before parking the car, Hu Bugui very uncooperatively picked up the evidence bag with the blue bracelet and tucked it into an inside pocket of his coat. 

Su Qing: “…” 

Hu Bugui calmly said, “Get out. Call everyone in. We’re holding a meeting.” 

Su Qing said, “Captain Hu, you’re actually trying to get me to take your clothes off, right?” 

Without another word, Hu Bugui stiffly got out of the car, then turned and left, trying once again to ignore him. 

There was a body lying in the middle of the conference room—Dong Liang. Dong Liang’s arm had been dissected, revealing tissues that still made a person slightly sick to look at despite knowing that they had all the same things. Lu Qingbai raised tweezers and pulled out a long, thin thread. It was clear and looked a little like fishing line. He placed it into a basin Xue Xiaolu was holding. 

“This is a particular substance. According to the tech department’s people, it’s a kind of solid-state MTC medium.” Looking exhausted, Lu Qingbai said, “Su Qing must have seen it.” 

Su Qing stared fixedly at the fishing line. After a moment, he nodded. “The blue seals used it during their ‘feasts’, with ends attached to the blue seal and the grey seal, to aid in absorbing emotion. The texture was about the same, but it was much thicker than this.” 

“Like brick phones turning into pocket-sized cellphones,” Xu Ruchong picked up. “Let me explain it. We currently have no way to deduce the direct relationship between this solid-state medium and a body that had been dead for over forty-eight hours getting up and walking around, but we roughly know what it’s for…” 

At this point, he suddenly turned his face away and gave a huge sneeze. He sniffed hard. “Captain Hu, HQ’s heating isn’t doing its job. I was freezing to death in the lab last night.” 

Fang Xiu, who was sitting next to him, took off his coat and tossed it to him. “Of course someone with a big brain and skinny legs can’t help freezing.” 

The person with a big brain and skinny legs looked at him, opened his mouth to speak, then was interrupted by another sneeze. Hu Bugui waved a hand and said, “Enough, let’s discuss proper business first, and then Xu Ruchong will go rest in the afternoon. No going to the lab.” 

“OK.” Xu Ruchong wiped his nose. “This solid-state medium ties the external energy crystal and the human body together, creating a path for one type of emotion. It can block other emotions, only collecting one category. But it can’t block energy. In other words, after the bracelet on the outside has collected a small quantity of emotion from his body and turned it into energy, the energy will be like water. A part will be stored in the energy crystal, while another part will return to this duct."

“Dong Liang’s body doesn’t have the basic organ of the energy crystal system, so it can’t use that energy, so they have to stuff it into the solid-state medium,” Lu Qingbai picked up. Then he held the bracelet Hu Bugui and Su Qing had brought back up against the light as though determining whether a bill was counterfeit. Narrowing his eyes, he looked at it closely—there seemed to be some liquid in that bracelet, faintly twinkling in strange patterns. The patterns looked like the ones on a blue seal, slowly flowing through the liquid. 

Su Qing frowned, beginning to feel uneasy—these flowing lines were too familiar. There was just such a constantly flowing “tattoo” on his own shoulder. He hadn’t been born with it, but he would carry it to his death, like a stamped experimental pig. 

He heard Lu Qingbai continue: “As for this, I have a guess. Xiao Xu, do you think it could be something like an energy hub?”

“Like a remote control that’s doesn’t obey commands. It can remotely control an external energy crystal that has a particular link to it from a long distance. When the body lost the external energy storage, the leftover solid-state medium inside it became another energy crystal and formed a circuit with the remote. The energy in this circuit caused the body to stand up.” 

Su Qing said, “So it’s like when I was already dead, and the leftover energy in my energy crystal linked up to something for some reason and was still active, but it could only use the energy to repair my body when the double core was activated?” 

He frowned, suddenly feeling that this business sounded a little problematic. He couldn’t resist asking, “I came back from the dead then. According to the traditional definitions of medical science, am I living, or the living dead?” 

Hu Bugui’s hand paused lifting his cup. Suddenly he raised a hand and bluntly slapped Su Qing on the back of the head. 

This slap came too unexpectedly. Everyone turned into Spartans. Then Hu Bugui asked in a dull voice, “Did that hurt?” 

Su Qing held the back of his head. 

Hu Bugui lowered his head and put yet another unlit cigarette in his mouth. “You bet it hurt. If that isn’t living, then what is?” 

Su Qing stared for a moment, then smiled. “Captain Hu, you truly are a gentle and considerate universal good wife. It would be such a pity not to bring you home.” 

“…” 

The others had yet to exit the Spartan state when they became Trojan alpacas. 

Hu Bugui glanced at him and found that Su Qing still had that falsely smiling, untruthful appearance; he knew that while the words had sounded rather genuine, he was actually still joking. So he irritably delivered a brief comment: “Bullshit.” 

Xu Ruchong could only give a dry cough and drag the increasingly libidinous subject back kicking and screaming. “Yes…I also suspect that Utopia’s experiments may be for the purpose of imitating the double core process. An energy crystal that can block other emotions, as well as an externally stimulated circuit… But it currently doesn’t seem to be in an ideal state, because each of the bodies delivered to us here contains a solid-state medium, but none of them managed in the end to stand up and dance in a circle.” 

Lu Qingbai gave Su Qing a burning gaze, as though he very much wanted to strip him, put him on a dissection table, and dismember him. He faintly said, “That’s right. Even though this one managed to stand up for some reason, the energy obtained was only enough to repair one leg. It couldn’t repair his already dead brain and other organs.” 

He opened up Dong Liang’s arm bare-handed and pushed up his glasses. “The human body has four tissues—epithelial tissue, connective tissue, muscle tissue, and nerve tissue. Epithelial tissue ought to be the easiest to repair. Next are the connectives tissue and muscle tissue. The nerve tissue is the most difficult. It requires an enormous energy that up to the present we have no way to assess, as well some other mechanism.” 

“Though it currently seems that the other side has already succeeded in three out of four,” Xu Ruchong summed up sorrowfully. “Sure enough, before the final light comes, the side of right will usually be in a slightly less advantageous place than the side of evil…aaachoo!” 

Hu Bugui muttered to himself for a while, then said to Fang Xiu, “In the RZ Unit’s name, request the assistance of the public security department. Get them to help investigate who Dong Jianguo, Dong Liang, and Dong Jing have come in contact with. I want a list of all the names. Our comrades in the tech department and at the treatment center will need to put in some more hard work—not you, Xiao Xu. I’m giving you half a day off. Your health takes priority. Su Qing, stay and hold down the fort at headquarters. Follow the information coming in about Dong Jing.” 

So after the meeting broke up, Su Qing sat in front of some communication and projection systems, idly glancing from time to time at the images on the screens, toying with a pack of cigarettes. A long time ago, when he had been trapped in the grey house wearing a communicator, he had felt that the voices coming from the communicator had come and gone like shadows. But when he was the one really sitting here himself, he found that this work was very boring. 

Hu Bugui, remembering his hangover from the night before, must have deliberately set aside some time for him to catch up on sleep. 

When he was already drifting off to sleep, the door creaked. Su Qing started awake at once. As soon as he turned his head, he saw Tu Tutu tiptoe in. He was holding a paintbrush—when Su Qing noticed him, he quickly put his hand behind his back, his eyes rolling nonstop, looking like he was up to no good. 

Su Qing beckoned irritably to him. “Come here, what are you up to now? Why aren’t you studying?” 

“Today’s class ended. I was playing with Uncle Cheng Ge.” Tu Tutu shamelessly climbed into his lap. His butt immediately suffered an attack, so he twisted it around, not caring. He even got out a cellphone. “Here, I’ll show you some of Uncle Cheng Ge’s drawings.” 

Su Qing absent-mindedly looked where Tu Tutu’s pudgy little paw indicated, thinking that while Cheng Ge wasn’t an easy person to communicate with, his drawings were quite dependable. He innovated where he needed to innovate but didn’t go overboard. Even a layman like Su Qing could tell what he was drawing. 

Cheng Ge drew everything—people, scenery, even an ashtray with an apple peel in it. Suddenly, Su Qing gave a start and grabbed Tu Tutu’s wrist. “Wait, don’t move!” 

The screen had scrolled to a scenery drawing. In the picture was a little old house and a narrow alley. There was also a chimney. The background was grey, making the viewer feel a little oppressed… No, none of that was important. The important thing was, the things in this drawing were familiar to Su Qing. He had just come back from there—this was Dong Jianguo’s home. 

“Have you shown these pictures to anyone else?” 

Su Qing’s expression must have been too serious. Tu Tutu was a little frightened. He blinked. “N…no.” 

Su Qing hesitated. “Go, bring me back the original of this drawing. Don’t alert anyone.” 

Tu Tutu obediently slid off his knees and was about to go when Su Qing held him back—Cheng Ge hadn’t left the RZ Unit headquarters recently, so how had he drawn this? Was the problem with him, or was it with some person very close to him? 

Su Qing held Tu Tutu’s arm, bent down, and quietly said, “Don’t go, actually. Delete the photo and don’t mention this to anyone.” 

Tu Tutu was young, but he had encountered more danger than the vast majority of people on earth. He had a sort of instinctive caution when it came to danger that transcended his age. He immediately deleted the picture on the phone and eagerly chattered, “Imperial Uncle, don’t you worry. Our Imperial Presence’s lips are sealed.” 

Su Qing’s expression was a little grave. Patting Tu Tutu on the head, he said, “Then may Your Majesty not forget to keep worthy subjects close and shun vile characters. Apart from this subject, don’t trust any other person.” 

Tu Tutu’s eyes spun. “Prince Regent, not even General Hu?” 

There was no smile on Su Qing’s face. His straight nose cast a shadow on his face. His beautiful eyes were almost sharp. He lowered his voice to the utmost; it was as though his words would be blown away by a slightly deep breath. “No one but me.”