"I'd never met such a talkative shadow before. I'm glad I was sharp enough to be the first to discover you."
The hint had been seen through in an instant. It felt like the Behind-the-Gate People had dropped all pretense, and he continued, still amazed.
"You just got lucky..."
"You think I didn't notice?"
"And then you sent him straight to the back room? You know we can't see anything in there..."
Unfortunately, the others didn't seem willing to admit it. The scene had only just quieted down, but it was suddenly as noisy as a marketplace again.
And aside from not wanting to concede the point about being sharp, someone also sounded very unhappy with the Behind-the-Gate People's guidance.
"I told you he felt different. If we kept going around elsewhere, things might get out of control. We had no choice but to conduct the core test first."
The Behind-the-Gate People clearly didn't take kindly to the accusation, and practically shouted back.
So this was an experimental observation, then?
The conversation was a little abrupt, but as a theoretical colleague, Fu Qian easily picked out a few key phrases.
Core test?
He'd been wondering all along what the Behind-the-Gate People were trying to accomplish. It seemed he had his answer now.
In this erroneous space before him, the researchers had adopted a different strategy from the one they'd used previously. They weren't trying to eliminate the shadows; they were observing them.
They treated them as a special phenomenon, making contact, observing them, testing their properties, and even preparing a whole set of procedures for the purpose.
And the core of those procedures lay in the back room.
Nice. This was starting to feel more and more like forbidden research.
The Star Gazers had stopped watching the stars and