IABI – Chapter 93 The Truth of the Jungle (6)

As the main door shut, the entire room was left with only one living person standing—Chi Xin. The emergency light above her head continued to flicker nonstop, casting the whole space into a dim and unsettling gloom.

Chi Xin slowed her breathing. Logically, she knew the only heartbeat in the room was her own, yet she kept feeling as though the clones sealed in the cryo-pods were alive too. The faint, indistinct breaths she seemed to hear were enough to drive any sane person mad.

Given the circumstances, it was difficult for Chi Xin to convince herself the other side hadn’t already taken action. She forced herself to steady her mind as she slowly backed up until she reached the wall. All her weapons hovered, ready in the air, prepared for battle.

With a sharp beep, the flickering red light above finally went out.

The room plunged into absolute darkness. Only the tiny blue indicators on the cryo-pods—signifying active operation—remained lit, glowing faintly through the thin mist of cold air.

Swish. Chi Xin drew her long blade an inch from its sheath.

Just then, a crackling burst of static echoed through the room. Chi Xin followed the sound and discovered an old television placed in the corner.

The TV was currently displaying rolling static, its white flicker casting her face into a deathly pale shade.

Chi Xin paused, then temporarily sheathed her blade.

If the enemy had already taken action but didn’t want to confront her directly, using some kind of medium was undoubtedly their best choice.

Sure enough, moments later, from the static-filled screen of the ancient TV—whose era of manufacture was impossible to guess—a wrinkled face finally emerged.

His hair was completely white. The collar of the white lab coat he wore was stained with some unknown fluid, a mix of yellow and green. His eyes held both calmness and madness. The moment his face appeared, he lunged close to the screen, staring straight at Chi Xin.

His entire face filled the screen.

Chi Xin gazed back coolly.

The old man stared at her for a while before speaking first: “I know who you are.”

“Oh?” Chi Xin replied. “Well, I know I’m pretty famous.”

Considering how many people they had sent after her, it wasn’t strange at all that he recognized her. Chi Xin sneered inwardly.

Before he could continue, Chi Xin cut him off: “Where’s Raphael? Weren’t you all always searching for me? Now that I’m right here, why keep hiding?”

“Raphael?” the old man repeated the name, and his expression suddenly turned odd.

Chi Xin narrowed her eyes. The vague sense of wrongness she’d felt earlier when overhearing Dr. Sero resurfaced. She steadied her mood and spoke evenly: “You searched for me for so long—why are you acting like cowards now? Bring him here. The rest of you don’t qualify to talk to me.”

The old man opened his mouth, his face twisting into an expression that hovered between crying and laughing. He looked almost short of breath, taking several rough gasps. “Where did you learn that name?”

“What, you’re allowed to observe me, but I’m not allowed to observe you?” Chi Xin retorted.

The old man’s gaze shifted downward, landing on the cryo-pod nearest to him. His eyes instantly brightened. “Number 1, is that it? So Number 1 really escaped.” He paused, muttering, “No, that can’t be right. Number 1 didn’t destroy the world? Instead, he got involved with you?”

As Chi Xin listened, her expression grew increasingly sharp.

She stepped forward, one step at a time, passing by rows of faces identical to someone she once knew, until she stood directly before the TV, looking down at the man inside it with icy contempt.

“He’s not called Number 1,” Chi Xin said, her voice like frost. “He has a name. It’s Lou Chen.”

The old man met her gaze. Something in her tone seemed to shake him. After a moment of thought, he said, “Yes… yes, he is Lou Chen. When he arrived here, he was only a few months old. Then he was assigned the designation ‘Number 1.’ From then on, that became his entire identity. As for his original name—no one remembered it.”

Hearing this, and seeing the frozen face of the boy in the cryo-pod—the face of his childhood—Chi Xin felt waves of anger and sorrow rise inside her.

He had worked so hard to escape this place, so hard to make others acknowledge his name, yet these demons who stripped him of his identity—who stole his life—still spoke about him with detached superiority, as though discussing livestock in a farm. After all, if everything ends at slaughter, what difference does a name make?

And who gave them the right?

Chi Xin lowered her head. The old man didn’t perceive her fury and instead asked:

“Number 1… Lou Chen… where is he now? Is he with you?”

His voice was filled with thick anticipation and manic excitement.

Chi Xin’s lips curled coldly. “What’s wrong? One of your pigs escaped, so now you’re anxious?” She glanced around mockingly. “Don’t you have plenty of replacements? Isn’t that enough for your experiments?”

“A replica is still just a replica. None are as useful as the original.” The old man said this without hesitation. “I heard that besides you, we captured quite a lot of others this time?”

At that moment, a woman with pale skin and neat short hair leaned in from the side and whispered something into his ear.

Chi Xin immediately sensed this must be Dr. Sero—the one who inspected her earlier.

The old man frowned. “Only you resisted the ys-c1? Impossible. Someone in there must be pretending. Take me to see for myself.”

As he spoke, the two of them actually turned around to leave.

“Wait.”

How could Chi Xin possibly allow them to slip past her and go bother her companion alone? Han Zimo wasn’t a researcher and might not recognize Jing Xiubai—if she let this old man go over there, wouldn’t he immediately recognize him?

None of them had expected that after so many years, this laboratory not only hadn’t let them go, but had even created a whole batch of clones from their teenage years. If they discovered their decades-later selves, the consequences would be unimaginable.

Hearing Chi Xin’s voice, the old man finally reacted as if suddenly remembering her existence. He waved impatiently at the screen. “Don’t rush. I’m going to check if Number 1 is among them. I’ll deal with you when I come back.”

“Deal with me? You’re awfully arrogant—do you think everyone is just livestock waiting for you to slaughter?”

Chi Xin let out a cold laugh and slowly drew her long knife under the old man’s startled gaze on the screen.

Her wrist tilted, and with a crisp crack, she cleaved open the cryo-chamber labeled “1–23” right in front of her.

Then she thrust the tip of the blade straight at the screen. “If you want to talk, fine—have Raphael come here himself. Otherwise I’ll smash all your precious little treasures one by one so you won’t even have your replicas left to use.”

The old man froze in place. Dr. Sero, standing behind him, opened her mouth to speak but ended up closing it again.

Through the screen, her gaze rested on Chi Xin. Something deep flickered in those green eyes.

With that move, Chi Xin successfully kept the old man from leaving.

“You know Raphael, but you don’t know me?” The old man’s expression twisted oddly. “You’re so fixated on finding Raphael—what exactly do you know?”

The question stumped Chi Xin. She revealed a trace of confusion. “Why should I know you?”

“My father is Dr. Norton Hughes—before the apocalypse, he was a world-renowned biochemist and biophysicist, his name written into textbooks of various countries. In your country, he’s even part of the required curriculum for middle-schoolers.” Dr. Sero quickly prevented the situation from growing more awkward. She glanced at her father, lowering her voice. “He was also Arthur Raphael’s mentor.”

Chi Xin was stunned.

The amount of information packed into that sentence was overwhelming. It took her a few seconds to recover. She stared at the old man on the screen, whose expression was equally complicated, and then recalled the golden-haired man who had appeared so many times in her dreams. The two faces overlapped in her mind, making her dizzy.

As for the famous scientist written into textbooks… she wasn’t from this world at all—there was no way for her to know.

Between the two pieces of information, the latter shook her far more.

After a moment of silence, she said, “So the master and disciple were cut from the same cloth, working hand-in-hand to mess up the world this badly. Truly worthy of being teacher and student.”

The old man—Dr. Hughes—let out a strange laugh. “So that’s what you think?”

That faint sense of wrongness returned. Chi Xin frowned, saying nothing.

Dr. Hughes turned his body and walked toward the camera, step by step. “You think Raphael and I joined forces, wanting to destroy—or rule—the world? And that the reason you all worked so hard to find this place was to kill us and end the apocalypse, right? Let me guess—you probably also harbor the delusion of finding a vaccine or serum to cure the infected.”

He had guessed every one of Chi Xin’s intentions, wearing the superior expression of someone in full control. “Am I right?”

“Very right.”

But to his surprise, Chi Xin wasn’t flustered at all. Instead, she lazily hooked the corner of her lips. “You can begin stating your crimes, or defending yourself—oh, and everything you say will be used as evidence in court, and you do not have the right to remain silent.”

As she spoke, she pulled out a small camcorder from nowhere, switched it on, and aimed it at the screen. “Go on.”

On the small display, Dr. Hughes’s face twisted.

“How dare you!” he finally exploded, unable to suppress his rage. “You ungrateful brat benefiting from my research—how dare you stand there and shout at me? Do you take me for that reputation-seeking fool Raphael? Go ahead and record! Show the footage to those pathetic survivors! Let’s see if they dare judge me—if they dare judge their only savior!”

He looked thoroughly infuriated, his white hair practically bristling. If Dr. Sero hadn’t held him back, he probably would have tried to punch through the screen at Chi Xin.

Tilting her head from behind the camcorder, Chi Xin asked in puzzlement, “Savior? Is that the title you’ve given yourself? Fine. I’ll admit that in terms of shamelessness, no one can surpass you.”

Dr. Hughes glared at the screen as if he wanted to burn a hole through it.

After the exchange of barbs, Chi Xin’s expression became serious as she pressed on the earlier inconsistency. “You and Raphael are at odds, even fell out with each other. So what exactly is going on? How did the zombie virus appear? And those beast-transformation drugs—are they related to you?”

She was so focused on the camcorder that she didn’t notice Dr. Sero, standing behind her father, visibly pale the moment she mentioned “beast-transformation.” But she quickly looked away, not letting anyone see her reaction—not even her father.

“Hah. You want the truth, don’t you?” Dr. Hughes grinned viciously. “Fine. I’d love to see your faces when you realize you’ve come to the wrong place and wasted all your effort.”

Chi Xin was silent for a moment. “So the ones who created the zombie virus weren’t you—but the organization led by Raphael, Tobyra.”

The moment she said it, a clarity washed over her.

So that was it.

She finally understood the source of the constant sense of wrongness.

This entire hidden storyline never appeared in the movie. All of them—including Jing Xiubai—instinctively assumed the laboratory and Tobyra were the same. After all, it was hard to imagine that an apocalyptic organization with world-ending ambitions would have two separate branches—

And that the two originated from a master–disciple split.

Dr. Hughes didn’t reply, but his silence was already an answer.

Chi Xin was still a little dazed. She looked again at the surrounding cryo-pods, and the moment her eyes touched the faces inside—faces so similar to her friends—she immediately averted her gaze.

She looked back at the screen. “Since you and Raphael aren’t together, and even want to restrain them, then why are you capturing innocent people? According to what you just said, Lou Chen wouldn’t have come here to sell himself to you. And Jing Xiubai, and… me.” She pressed her lips together. “You were looking for me. I doubt it was to invite me over as a guest.”

“You’re very smart,” Dr. Hughes said. “What’s your name?”

She hadn’t expected that someone who had been looking for her for so long didn’t even know her name. Chi Xin was stunned for a moment—after all, Raphael’s people, the moment they saw her, could call out her name without fail.

Of course, there was nothing to hide. She answered directly, “Chi Xin.”

“Chi Xin,” Dr. Hughes said, his expression softening slightly. “You’re different from what I imagined. If you know anything about ability-enhancing serums, you should know that all of them have more or less side effects. The only difference is how obvious they are.”

Chi Xin thought of what Louis once told her, and it matched perfectly with what Hughes was saying. She nodded, then shook her head. “Isn’t there a perfect ability serum?”

Dr. Hughes let out a cold laugh. “Perfect? As long as a drug is used on humans, how can there be something absolutely perfect, without any side effects? Is that the banner Raphael waves around? Claiming his serum is flawless, then using it to extort money? Only fools who don’t know any better would believe that.”

Chi Xin froze for a moment, and then her expression changed. “You’re saying… every ability serum has side effects, and there’s no such thing as a perfect one?!”

She thought of Jing Xiubai’s calm, gentle expression, then of Jiang Congyun’s warm, affectionate smile. Urgency bloomed in her heart.

“The so-called ability serums are nothing more than the precursor to the zombie virus that broke out at the end of the world,” Dr. Hughes said. “Or maybe Raphael still refused to give up and continued modifying it. God knows what kind of dish he cooked up to create this situation.”

Chi Xin was still thinking about the side-effects and didn’t respond.

Dr. Hughes continued, “Different views on the serum—that was the beginning of my break with them. I believe these serums are garbage. They trade away the users’ lifespan to give them a few years—or even months—of strength. It violates biological ethics and should be abandoned. But they believe it’s the key to human evolution and refuse to stop researching it.”

Chi Xin looked up. “Everything—the virus outbreak, the zombies, the appearance of all kinds of monsters—it all comes from the ability serums?”

“Yes.” Dr. Hughes nodded. “The mistake has already been made. All we can do is fix it—we can’t undo it.”

“Then you’ve been hiding here, using zombies as guards… researching what?” Chi Xin felt a bad premonition rising. “Don’t tell me you’re researching a vaccine.”

Dr. Hughes didn’t speak. After a moment of silence, he looked at Chi Xin with a complicated expression. “You really are smart. You’re nothing like the people who’ve used ability serums.”

He mentioned it again, and Chi Xin’s heart began to pound.

“What side effects do users have?” she asked softly. “Lou Chen and Jing Xiubai are such important subjects—you wouldn’t forget, right?”

Dr. Hughes suddenly looked enlightened, his eyes brightening. “Of course! The tracking signal on the Perfect-Number subject has always moved with you. Have they come too? Sero! Did you hear that? We have the world’s three most important research subjects in our hands. We’ve won!”

Sero frowned. “Father.”

“What, are you not happy, Sero?” Dr. Hughes looked almost manic. “After so long, we’ve finally seen the light of victory. Aren’t you happy?”

Sero lifted her complicated gaze and gave Chi Xin a look but did not speak.

Chi Xin’s mind raced, and a thought formed instantly.

“Dr. Hughes.” It was the first time she addressed him formally. She put away the camera, showing her stance. “Since we have a common enemy and a shared goal, we don’t have to end up like this. You continue researching the vaccine, and we’ll deal with Raphael. This can be a pleasant cooperation.”

A sigh flashed across Sero’s face.

“That’s your idea?” Dr. Hughes asked. “You want to cooperate with me?”

“Yes.” Chi Xin’s tone did not fluctuate. “You’re the one most likely to develop a vaccine and end the apocalypse. Since that’s the case, there’s no need for us to stand on opposite sides. If we divide the work, Raphael won’t stand a chance.”

“You’re smart, but naïve,” Dr. Hughes sighed.

Chi Xin looked at him.

“You think a vaccine is produced by what—me sitting in a lab and daydreaming?” Dr. Hughes swept his hand outward. “Do you know how those world-renowned research results are made? Without a mountain of test subjects, why should I be able to surpass other researchers? Research without clinical trials is worthless!” His face twisted with the same madness she had seen earlier. “But we’re running out. The people and zombies we captured are all useless. No matter how many we stack up, they’re just worthless corpses.”

His utter disregard for life chilled Chi Xin to the bone. She watched silently as he continued, intoxicated by his own words.

“I’ve been comparing results for a long time. Only you, Chi Xin. Only you three. You’re the perfect trump card. With you, I can surpass thousands—tens of thousands—of others.” Dr. Hughes leaned so close to the camera it was as if he were pressing against it. “That’s why I want you. What use are clones compared to the real thing? Did you really think you could leave after coming here? I’ve waited far too long for this moment.”

A powerful sense of danger washed over her. Chi Xin’s entire body tensed.

Suddenly, the TV signal began flickering wildly. Dr. Hughes’s twisted face warped further as static snow filled the screen. The normal image and static alternated rapidly, and his voice became drawn-out and distorted, as if echoing from another world.

“You… will never… escape my hand…”

With a sharp pop, the screen went black.

The room plunged into darkness again.

From all around came the sounds of scratching. Chi Xin held her breath, gripped her blade, and slowly turned around.

All the cryo-pods had opened.

Every “Jing Xiubai” and “Lou Chen” sat up together. They all turned their heads toward her at the same time, their eyes glowing with inorganic light.

“That old fox really isn’t afraid of his clones getting damaged,” she muttered. She picked out one “Jing Xiubai,” stared at him, and asked, “Do you have consciousness?”

The clone gave no reaction—not even a flicker in his eyes. Like a puppet, he moved mechanically, executing commands.

When they began climbing out, Chi Xin made a split-second decision. She swung her blade sideways, slicing the nearest “Lou Chen” cleanly in half!

The blood splashed onto her skin—shockingly warm, like that of a living person.

Chi Xin’s heart jolted. As the clones closed in on her from all sides, she squeezed her eyes shut and mentally prepared herself.

They are not human.

Not human.

Not human.

These are not the real Jing Xiubai or Lou Chen. Their very existence is a mistake.

After repeating that to herself twice, she opened her eyes and slashed heavily at the clone reaching for her.

At the same time, she pressed the earpiece at her ear, switching to full-channel broadcast. “Is anyone there?!”

Several voices answered instantly. Jing Xiubai’s voice cut through the others—clear and distinct. “I’m here.”

“Someone’s heading your way,” Chi Xin said while fighting. “No time to explain. Jing Xiubai, get everyone out now. Things aren’t what we thought—they absolutely want to harm you all—don’t hurt the old man!”

She didn’t care about her chaotic sentence structure. After conveying what mattered, she added, “Don’t get caught. I’ll come find you after I finish here!”

“Understood.” Jing Xiubai must have sensed the urgency—he didn’t waste a single word. She could hear the sound of lock-picking on his end. “Be careful.”

Chi Xin cut the connection and looked up at the endless tide of clones.

Their strength and speed were no different from ordinary people. For her, cutting through them was like slicing vegetables. After taking down several in quick succession, she felt a creeping suspicion—and a growing alertness.

If Hughes wanted her so badly, he wouldn’t send such useless “subordinates.”

While she was puzzling over it, a sudden heavy blow struck her mind, making her head ring with a loud buzz. Her vision instantly blurred.

This was… Lou Chen’s mental attack—the only ability that could harm her.

These clones… could copy the originals’ abilities?!