At this time, Hu Bugui and Kou Tong had their heads buried in a big stack of materials. Fang Xiu and Qin Luo were limbering up, and Su Qing had gone out—Su Qing spent all day hanging around outside. His network had reached an unbelievable extent. 

In this aspect, Ji Pengcheng praised him unreservedly. The student had not only completed his apprenticeship, he had also rather surpassed his master—Su Qing had probably been born with a few more trickster cells than others. He had everything a professional swindler needed. Extremely powerful discernment, and the ability to change his identity in a short time—like a chameleon, he had “changed” into countless people. The roads he had walked and the things he had done added together surpassed what others had done in a whole lifetime. 

In very hardcore style, the three of them had taken Zheng Wan’s body apart and put it back together. Lu Qingbai pushed the mobile dissection table in, picked up a scalpel, and rapped on the dissection table’s stainless steel instruments. As though serving food in a dining hall, he yelled: “Ladies and fellow villagers, come quick, come quick, everyone over here!” 

Kou Tong glanced beside him. “Where’s Su Qing?” 

Hu Bugui pressed on a communicator on the table. At this time, the other side’s communicator would sound, notifying him that a request had been received. Almost at once, like a summoned creature, Su Qing linked up his communicator. His voice came: “I’m here. What is it?” 

“Lu Qingbai and the others have found something. Where are you now? Can you listen?” 

The communicator’s speaker was on. Where Su Qing was, there was a clamor of voices and all kinds of noises. Hu Bugui heard QQ beeps and a crowd of people who were doing something loudly crying out: “Chop!”, “Hurry, hurry, show me the blood!”, “Oh, fuck! Does it have to be so savage? Are there such psycho bosses?”, “Support me, brothers! Stop screwing around!” 

The sounds echoed throughout the room, instantly dissipating the atmosphere of cutting-edge science.

Fang Xiu couldn’t resist laughing. He picked up a towel to wipe away sweat. “Where are you?” 

“An internet cafe. I asked a friend to do something for me.” Su Qing seemed to have walked out. All the background noise of the internet cafe was gone. “What did they find?” 

“We found out the nature of this field,” Chang Dou said, his eyes glowing. He paused deliberately and looked expectantly at Hu Bugui, then turned his head and looked at Fang Xiu. From his pointed chin to his messy hair, from his round eyes to his little glasses, each cell was twinkling a blinding light of “Praise me, praise me now.” 

Fang Xiu said, “What’s so magical that it took you guys this long?” 

Hu Bugui said, “Pick out the important things to say. You can omit expounding on the process.” 

Su Qing wasn’t present, but he still couldn’t resist chipping in over the communicator: “Use language that humans can understand.” 

“Oh…” Chang Dou lowered his head like a frosted eggplant. Aggrieved, he looked helplessly at Zheng Wan’s headless body for a second. Then he pulled up a whiteboard beside the mobile dissection table. It was covered in all kinds of bizarre equations. 

“This field requires Zheng Wan’s energy crystal to be in an active state. She isn’t a grey seal in the ordinary sense. She must be another half-successful experiment,” Chang Dou explained. 

“Like me,” Cheng Weizhi picked up. Pointing at the complicated tattoo on Zheng Wan’s back, he said, “These channels were manmade, like the way I was made into an ‘energy hub.’ But Zheng Wan is an energy field activator. This thing is very complicated. Dr. Lu has already found that its energy source material is emotional energy. Su Qing mentioned that in the basement, he saw four lights. If I’ve reckoned correctly, those lights were four input channels for emotional energy.” 

“Four?” Su Qing reacted at once. “I can leverage two types of emotional energy at most.” 

“That’s why we only barely activated the field last time but couldn’t touch its true secret.” As Lu Qingbai spoke, he arranged four small instruments at the four corners of the dissection table. “Through our indefatigable efforts, we’ve assembled all four types of emotional energy. Su Qing supplied two, we went to Jiang Lan for one type, and for the remaining anger emotional energy, the corresponding frequencies are comparatively low, so Chang Dou and I tried to artificially synthesize it…” 

“This can be artificially synthesized?” Qin Luo couldn’t resist asking. 

“Do you remember when we captured the waveband that surpassed the frequency of ordinary emotional waves by dozens of times?” Chang Dou pushed up his glasses. At the time, he had still been Xu Ruchong’s assistant. “We guessed then that when the frequency of emotional waves was amplified by some means, they became energy in themselves. At the time, we raised the frequency by five times, leading to the instrument exploding. After that, we put in further efforts, and now we can raise the waveband by about fifteen times, so we can attain something like anger emotional energy.” 

“But it’s not stable. We can only use it briefly,” Cheng Weizhi added. “Even if this artificially synthesized thing is amplified another dozen times, it still won’t be as stable as emotional waves produced in the human body, able to be used for a long period by the energy crystal. So as far as Utopia and the blue seals are concerned, their nature can’t change.” 

“Are we ready?” Lu Qingbai asked. 

The three of them wore very solemn expressions, causing the others to involuntarily start feeling nervous as well. When four ends of wires met different points on Zheng Wan’s body, the headless corpse suddenly bounced, and the tattoo on its back began to move once more. Her deathly pale skin rapidly became fresh and lively, as though she could stand up off the dissection table at any moment—if only her head had still been in good condition. 

Their eyes were fixed unblinkingly on the dissection table. Next, that impression of time running backwards happened again. Everyone’s analog watches began to run backwards, while the digital ones went on the fritz. Su Qing was rather unlucky. He heard a sharp drone coming over the communicator. His ears were sensitive to start with. The unusually unpleasant noise shook him so much that it took him a while to come around. 

“What’s going on?” he asked. There was no answer. The signal had cut off. 

Even Jiang Lan, who hadn’t set foot outside her own door and had been focused on her pregnancy, felt the strange energy field and stuck her head out at the top of the stairs, watching what was happening downstairs.

Those present saw the dissection platform change in appearance. If Su Qing had been there, he would have recognized this. The simple, mobile dissection platform had taken on the appearance of the platform he had seen in the basement. 

Qin Luo was standing next to it. She couldn’t resist reaching out to touch it. She found to her astonishment that the platform wasn’t an illusion. It had really turned into a different “substance” under her very eyes. 

“What…is this?” Qin Luo couldn’t help asking. 

“It’s a spatial field.” Cheng Weizhi pushed up his glasses and sighed. “This is a very special spatial field. At first we thought it was a time field, but later Chang Dou inferred that a time field couldn’t exist, so we had to change our line of thinking. Finally, we discovered that when the four energies are activated, it actually opens a spatial field.” 

The three of them were talking, but their actions didn’t stop. The artificially synthesized energy was unstable and might malfunction at any time. Chang Dou carefully maintained contact between the energy supply lines and Zheng Wan. Some helping hands slowly reached over to the dissection table to lift Zheng Wan’s body thirty centimeters up. 

Cheng Weizhi’s fingers, as though playing a piano, quickly undid some screws on the altered dissection table. Lu Qingbai cooperated with him from the other side. Just then, one of the four lights flashed. Chang Dou said, “Hurry, the artificial frequency is unsteady, it’s about to go out.” 

Bang. Lu Qingbai and Cheng Weizhi opened up the dissection table Zheng Wan was lying on. “Take them out, take them out! Come and help!” 

Qin Luo was the first to react. She looked inside and saw that inside was a full layer of black boxes holding something unknown. 

Everyone got busy moving the black boxes out without touching the fragile wires on Zheng Wan’s body. When they had moved only half, there was a pop, and one light went out. The four energies were no longer balanced, which set off a chain reaction. There was a small-scale explosion among the three remaining lights. The four leads snapped simultaneously. There was a light, and then, before they could react, the platform under her body disappeared. Fortunately, Lu Qingbai drew his hand back quickly, or else half of his arm would have been left inside. 

In front of them, apart from some black boxes, there was only the original cold and crude mobile dissection table. 

They looked at each other in shock. Lu Qingbai breathed a sigh of relief. “Ah, forget it, at least we got this much out, and we had good luck with the Type 4 emotional energy. We don’t know when we’ll be able to produce this space again next time. We can talk when we’ve seen what they’ve hidden.” 

“Where did those things go?” Kou Tong couldn’t resist asking. 

“The spatial field has closed, and those things are sealed inside,” Chang Dou said. “The field is static. We have no record, because the dimension it exists in is different from the dimension of the space we live in. Simply put, it’s not in any point in this world, but each point can open it, as long as you have the appropriate key.” 

“Zheng Wan is that key.” 

“Four balanced emotional energies, plus Zheng Wan as an activator. We’ve found what’s been making Zheng Qinghua so wild.” Lu Qingbai carefully picked up a black box and ran a scan of the things inside it. After a moment, he frowned. “Hey…why does this seem so familiar? They seem like old-fashioned storage chips.” 

“Open it and read them. I need to know what’s on them at once,” Hu Bugui said. “Everyone work separately.” 

But Kou Tong approached Hu Bugui’s set-aside communicator. It had returned to normal. The faint noise from where Su Qing was came over it again. Dr. Kou laughed quietly. “In your view…what’s inside those things?” 

For some reason, Su Qing knew that these words were addressed to him. He turned and went back into the noisy internet cafe and quietly said, “I don’t know that. But I’m thinking, some people, why would they be so quick to acknowledge Utopia’s legitimacy?” 

Kou Tong raised his head and looked at the RZ Unit, whose members had all separately started busying themselves. He turned off the communicator’s speaker function and brought it to his mouth. He quietly said, “I’ve found that the two of us really make a good fit. Ah…what a pity that I was too slow. The early bird catches the worm. Oh, well!” 

Su Qing said, “You still have a chance.” 

“Really?” said Kou Tong. 

“Brother, don’t make trouble for me… I’m obviously joking,” said Su Qing. 

Kou Tong laughed. Then the two of them simultaneously cut off the communication in tacit understanding. 

Su Qing took turn after turn and walked into a private room. He patted the shoulder of a fat guy sitting in front of a computer and tossed a little bag in front of him. “I have to go. What I just said, investigate it, then send it to me.” 

The fat guy looked at him, opened the bag, found that it was full of cash, then immediately smiled so widely that his eyes vanished. He waved a hand at him. “Go on, go on. May the Party and the people trust in me. I pledge to fulfill my mission!” 

“If you do well, I’ll put the rest of the money into your account.”