The person who made contact was Su Qing. Contacting the others had gone pretty smoothly, but when it came to Chang Dou, his reaction was truly major. He hugged the communicator and wept with joy, like a poor motherless child at last finding a home. 

Su Qing’s repeated attempts to speak were all cut off by the unceasing torrent and sobbing declarations of longing. So he passed the communicator to Hu Bugui. “Here.” 

Hu Bugui looked perplexed. 

“Hurry up and tell him a story to calm him down.” 

Hu Bugui looked at him in some exasperation. Then he accepted the communicator. Stiffly and sternly, he said, “Chang Dou, shut up.” 

The unlucky child didn’t dare to say another word. He even held back his hiccups. 

Hu Bugui brought the communicator to Su Qing’s ear. Su Qing was awed by their captain’s “domineering air” and didn’t dare to go on disrespecting his superior. With no nonsense, he quickly told Chang Dou what he was supposed to do, the next means of communication, and points for attention. Before he could take a breath, Hu Bugui broke off the connection without so much as a by-your-leave, not letting Chang Dou of the overabundant emotions say another word. 

It was a very…resolute and effective approach. 

Kou Tong laughed and stroked his chin. “That technician of yours—he’s such an interesting person.” 

Hu Bugui nodded. “His work ability is good.” 

Kou Tong said, “I don’t know about his work ability, but his character is very interesting. Ordinarily speaking, a person, especially a man who has reached adulthood, owing to something like self-respect, as well as our country’s societal characteristics, will tend to have reserved feelings and not display his own emotions very warmly, and especially not be very willing to cry in front of others. But crying is itself a release of psychological stress. Psychological stress is sometimes like water in a dyke. You either siphon it off or release it. Otherwise, there will always be stress. It won’t disappear on its own with time.” 

Lu Qingbai laughed and rather cuttingly said, “That’s right, Chang Dou definitely isn’t stressed.” 

Kou Tong looked at him with a broad smile. “Dr. Lu, you actually aren’t stressed, either. Sometimes taking digs at people is also a way of letting off emotion.” 

Lu Qingbai glared at him, but the smile on Dr. Kou’s face truly was too likable. You simply couldn’t say a bad word about him. So Dr. Lu silently turned his face away and earnestly went to dance cheek-to-cheek with the female corpse. 

But Hu Bugui frowned. He thought that there was some subtext in Kou Tong’s words. He couldn’t resist asking, “What do you mean, Dr. Kou?” 

What did he mean by stressing that Chang Dou frequently used this kind of rather “shameful” means to relieve his stress? Did it mean that Chang Dou was normally under some kind of unspeakable stress? 

“No, no, no.” Kou Tong quickly waved a hand. “I didn’t say anything, really. That’s not what I meant. I was purely moved. I meant to say, Captain Hu, that you can also occasionally relax a little. You don’t have to keep yourself so strained and maintain such a high level of vigilance all the time.” 

Hu Bugui looked at this itinerant doctor who was all skin and bones and from the bottom of his heart felt that he was unreliable. 

That evening’s meeting turned into a general session. All the communicators were turned on. The meeting wasn’t held at the orphanage. Instead, they drove a vehicle to a suburb on the outskirts of a neighboring city. 

Director Sun and Cheng Weizhi weren’t present. There was no noise at the scene of the meeting. Kou Tong also wasn’t planning to make an appearance. He withdrew into a corner that the communicator couldn’t catch and hid himself in the shadows, holding a notebook and beginning to take notes—even though as high-tech a thing as the mirror image projector had been developed by him, Dr. Kou himself was unusually old-fashioned. He didn’t like to use electronic equipment. 

Lu Qingbai, Su Qing, and Hu Bugui stood around a dissection table with Zheng Wan’s body on it. Her back was facing up and her face was turned aside. The communicator’s camera precisely caught her deathly pale profile and the tattoo covering her whole back. Chang Dou was the first to react. He couldn’t resist crying out in alarm: “What is that? Her back… There’s a circuit on her back!” 

“Yes, you’ve seen right.” Lu Qingbai pushed up his glasses. “All the fuss that’s suddenly started up outside is mainly because of her.” 

“Who is she?” Fang Xiu couldn’t resist asking. 

“Zheng Qinghua’s little sister, Zheng Wan.” Lu Qingbai cut into the skin of Zheng Wan’s back with a scalpel. His movements were extremely cautious, not daring to cut the energy channel on Zheng Wan’s back the least bit. “This energy channel pattern ultimately reaches her energy crystal. Look.” 

Then even Su Qing for the first time saw an energy crystal in the human body. In fact, it was only the size of a soybean. For some reason, its projection on the skin seemed to be magnified twice. There were unspeakably complicated channels linked to it—very thin, neither blood vessels nor lymphatic vessels. They were transport passageways of emotional neurotransmitters. 

It was this system that transformed a human body into an entirely different miraculous thing. 

“Su Qing, help me out,” Lu Qingbai said. 

Su Qing picked up white gloves and put them on. Lu Qingbai brought over a little basin with an inch-long silvery-white little hook in it. Lu Qingbai attached one end of the hook to the energy crystal taken from Zheng Wan’s body. He raised an energy detector next to it, as well as one of Chang Dou’s pocket watches. 

“This hook was made to imitate the seized ‘energy hub.’ I added a current limiter to it. Zheng Wan’s energy crystal is no longer alive now. We need to stimulate it and have to rely on this ‘energy hub’ to ‘short circuit’ Su Qing’s energy crystal system. Only by simulating the energy field Zheng Wan’s energy crystal produces with micro-stimulation will we know what happened to her in that basement.” 

Su Qing’s face made a somewhat convoluted expression. “Why is it me again?” 

Lu Qingbai said, “Hurry up, less nonsense. I’ve limited the current. Last time you basically touched an electric switch, this time you’re going to be a battery. Anyway, Captain Hu will catch you. I guarantee it won’t kill you.” 

Hu Bugui, who had at some point also stood up, fixed a very stern look on Lu Qingbai. 

“Get ready. Three, two, one!” 

Su Qing’s fingers touched the energy hub hook. A faint electric current flowed up his arm. It was only numb for a moment, but Hu Bugui, seeming more nervous than the interested party, had already grabbed his arm and pulled him away. Just that moment was enough. 

As the stagnant channels on Zheng Wan’s back began to flow once more, the needle on the energy indicator traveled a wide arc towards zero. Everyone’s digital watches simultaneously went black, and the pocket watch hanging next to the energy indicator began to run backwards. An energy field no one had seen before appeared on the communicator’s screen. 

Apart from Su Qing, everyone present was dumbfounded. 

After a long moment, Xue Xiaolu falteringly said, “Time… Is time going backwards?” 

Could the unusual channels on Zheng Wan’s back increase energy to the point that it could tear through space, move the chronological coordinates backwards? 

“That’s not possible,” Chang Dou burst out. 

No one answered him. Chang Dou instantly stood up. His face disappeared from the communicator screen, leaving only his violently heaving chest. “Time can’t go backwards, that’s a paradox! If time went backwards, all the laws of space would be broken. It’s a unidirectional coordinate axis. If this point on the axis changed, all points would change correspondingly because of it… In that moment, you wouldn’t be able to act for yourselves, the laws…the laws would restrict your speech, your actions, make you step for a second time into that river¹. Right, right, there’s also the communicators. Waves are the same… Emotions can adhere to waves. Waves would also return to their original coordinates. That’s illogical, it’s self-contradictory!” 

Chang Dou was obviously babbling. 

“What is that energy field?” Qin Luo brought up the heart of the matter. 

Lu Qingbai shook his head. Chang Dou shook his head, too. 

“Zheng Wan’s body was in that basement for over twenty years.” Su Qing picked up the subject. “When I found Zheng Wan’s body, she was like someone who had just died. Obviously, she was already dead then, but the system in her body was still living. There was external energy input, keeping her body fresh—and now, look, the body is already showing signs of rotting.” 

“So you mean that Zheng Wan’s body was ‘operating’ for over twenty years?” Fang Xiu asked. 

“Until not long ago, when I stole her.” Su Qing laughed. “Right, my guess is that the energy system must have been maintaining something, something of vital importance to Zheng Qinghua. He’s turning over heaven and earth now to dig up Zheng Wan’s body.” 

“Just now we attempted to reactivate Zheng Wan’s system.” Chang Dou caught up at once to things within his area of expertise. “There’s no way to judge this field’s scope of radiation, nor whether it can be detected by some instrument. Leave that place at once.” 

Without Su Qing’s energy support, Zheng Wan’s energy crystal went deathly still once more. The energy indicator gradually stopped reacting. 

“We’re in a vehicle,” Hu Bugui said, tapping a few times on a keyboard. A picture of an ordinary truck was sent over. At this time, Su Qing had left the scope of the communicator’s camera. The people on the screen and Zheng Wan’s body began to move. It seemed that the truck had been started. 

Hu Bugui typed out another string. Coordinates and a place name appeared on the screen. “I need each of you to get in position as quickly as possible. Go to this place and meet up with us.” 

“Yes, sir!” 

At this moment, someone was inwardly becoming nervous. They had just received a phone call from “that person,” telling them that no matter what, they had to get Zheng Wan’s body back quickly. Zheng Wan’s body was crucial. The RZ Unit’s technician hadn’t gotten into position yet. They were relying only on a medical worker. While he would be able to tell some things, it would still be very hard to touch on the real secret of Zheng Wan’s body. 

This had to be taken care of before they assembled, or else the consequences didn’t bear thinking about. 

The RZ Unit’s general meeting communication system dimmed. On the face of the pocket watch were only an address and coordinates traced in fluorescence. The person clutched the other communication device in their hand—should they report at once and request support? No, that was no good, too sloppy. It would be easy for that idiot to disturb their operations and alert the enemy. 

They hesitated for a moment, then dialed a number. A man’s voice answered: “Hello. Speak.” 

“It’s me.” They paused for a moment. “I currently have some clues that Dr. Zheng wants.” 

“What aid do you need?” 

“I need that gun.” 

There was silence on the other side for a moment. “11235’s regulations are very strict. He only accepts assignments from him and me.” 

“It’s an emergency. You know the outcome of losing Zheng Wan!” Their tone irresistibly became heavy. “Without a core support point, that energy system can only operate for a week. What then? As soon as this business is revealed, those… You understand?” 

“Watch your tone.” 

“I’m sorry, dad.” 

“…Fine, I’ll tell 11235 to contact you.” He paused for a moment. “You had better not disappoint me.”