Changes

"At the moment between life and death, intense pain can crush your will to survive. At times like that, you might try deep self-hypnosis, numbing the nerves that transmit pain. Focus, and think it through in the shortest time possible..."

Those were words Yuanye had once said to Xilin, but Xilin had never really put them into practice. Nothing had ever left him as helpless as he was now.

Hypnosis.

Self-hypnosis.

His whole body convulsed. Xilin struggled to draw a breath, then closed his eyes.

Watching the peak on the screen climb another notch, the Old Man's hand trembled. He took off his goggles and leaned toward the screen, his sunken eyes fixed on it as if trying to determine whether what he was seeing was real.

The spiral dial had already been turned 270 degrees. The chip had been activated to 75 percent.

The Old Man didn't look at Xilin on the experimental table. His smile twisted. The vital-sign line was still pulsing strongly enough. That meant he could turn it up further!

280 degrees...

290 degrees...

300 degrees...

The instruments had begun blaring warnings. Red warning symbols flashed, and piercing alarms rang out, but none of it fazed the Old Man.

His eyes were filled with madness.

Of the nearly thousand test subjects he'd used before, none had made it to 300 degrees. But today...

"Heh... hehehe... My name, Hou Lei Hansen... will appear in Glory and Cipher too!"

Xilin had no energy to pay attention to what the Old Man was saying. If he'd heard him, he would have thought the Old Man was insane! With resources like these, he actually thought he could make it into Glory and Cipher?!

Glory and Cipher were the names of the most famous electronic magazines on the Star System network. They were hailed as the "historical records" of the Star Alliance. Countless Star Alliance publications were mere background noise beside them, and they were the only two publications in the Alliance's hundred-point contribution system whose scores exceeded ninety. In other words, any person or achievement featured in either magazine earned a contribution score of at least ninety.

Anyone, any event, or any research featured in Glory or Cipher could make the entire Star Alliance tremble. Glory featured more military leaders and politicians, while Cipher featured more scholars and technicians.

Whether it was a person or an achievement recorded in these two behemoths of magazines, it took countless people, resources, money, and time to produce. On Brown Earth Star, the highest reported contribution score was only a little over twenty, enough to be recorded only in magazines with limited influence. In fact, anyone with a score above ten would be featured on the planet's television stations for more than ten days straight, let alone someone with a score above ninety.

That was why any sane person would have thought the Old Man was delusional.

The Old Man turned the dial again.

310 degrees...

320 degrees...

Beep—beep—beep—

The alarms grew more and more frantic, and the vital-sign curve began to fluctuate wildly. Several machines started smoking and vibrating with loud thumps. Some buttons blew off, and the situation seemed to be getting worse by the second. The tubes attached to Xilin began to shake too, as if they couldn't take the strain.

Bang!

One of the finger clamps holding Xilin's fingers in place was flung off by the enormous strain.

Bang!

Another followed.

The Old Man had no attention to spare for Xilin. His eyes were fixed entirely on the data on the screen, and his finger hovered over the dial, impatient to see the final results.

Buttons blown off the machines were scattered all around them.

There was no time. Xilin knew where his limit lay.

With the two fingers he'd freed, he pinched a button that had flown off some machine. It was a reflex brought on by the pain, the last sliver of consciousness he had left while hypnotizing himself—and Xilin's final chance.

Even that tiny sliver of consciousness analyzed with astonishing precision, more accurately than ever before, like a precision instrument calculating adjustments and margins of error. In barely a second, Xilin flicked the button from his hand.

Pfft—

The button ricocheted off the floor, a wall, and the baffle of a machine. After three bounces, it shot into the Old Man's left eye and severed the neural network in his brain's central nervous system. He died instantly. At that very moment, the "madman's" finger rested on the spiral dial, ready to make the final adjustment. The dial's display already read 350 degrees. It had been a close call, to say the least. If he'd turned it all the way to 360 degrees, Xilin would have been done for...

Thank goodness the Old Man was human. Thank goodness he hadn't undergone some grotesque modification of his entire body. The Old Man dropped dead beside the machines.

The moment the Old Man died, all the tubes restraining Xilin retracted. A warning appeared on the instrument panel, and an electronically synthesized voice announced, "Owner deceased. Initiating purge program."

Ignoring his still-numb body, Xilin rolled off the table. He couldn't stand, so he could only lift his head and watch the images and data flash across the screens.

Every piece of information about to be purged flashed across the screens. It was hard to imagine that the Old Man had set up such a purge protocol.

Even people with B- or A-Class Genotypes might not have been able to catch all that data and those images. Even if they could, they wouldn't necessarily remember everything—and that was on just one screen. But Xilin memorized everything on all of the more than ten screens. It would have been absolutely impossible for him before. His memory had been good, but he could never have processed the information fast enough, let alone memorized more than ten screens at once!

His body was rapidly adjusting. Xilin's eyes seemed unfocused, yet the information flashing across all those screens was etched deeply into his mind. If he didn't understand that information, he might never know what killed him. Whatever the Old Man had injected into him was like an unknown bomb.

Five minutes later, the purge was complete. Xilin had memorized everything related to the experiment that had flashed across the screens, including information about the Old Man, Hou Lei Hansen.

"Purge program complete. Destruction Program will execute in five minutes. Sandification countdown..."

Damn!

Xilin cursed inwardly. His body had regained some feeling. He struggled upright and staggered toward the exit.

All the doors in the underground laboratory had opened. The other rooms were storage areas for things like "specimens," food, equipment, and chemicals. The true heart of the facility was the room Xilin had been in. He had neither the inclination nor the time to worry about the contents of the other rooms, so he followed the route he remembered taking when he'd been brought in.

The doors were all open, leaving the way clear, as if it had been arranged on purpose. Five minutes was just enough.

When Xilin reached the Ventilation Shaft at the edge of the laboratory, the sandification program began. A quicksand-like hollow formed in the Central Laboratory and spread outward. The floor, all the laboratory equipment, and the dead Old Man turned to shifting sand as the sandification spread. By the time Xilin crawled out through the Ventilation Shaft and returned to the building, the sandification had just reached the shaft.

Xilin didn't have time to rest. He knew the Old Man's "Destruction Program" couldn't just mean sandification. To keep his research from leaking, the Old Man had tied his life to every program. Someone that ruthless would make sure the destruction was far more complete.

Thank goodness it was still dark and the streets were empty. Hidden by the darkness, Xilin kept close to the high awnings and eaves as he made his way along. If the Sky Eye spotted him, everything would be for nothing.

Sure enough, not long after Xilin left, a huge explosion woke the people still sleeping. A mushroom cloud billowed into the sky, blinding flames lit up the night, and a vast crater opened in the ground. The blast toppled the surrounding buildings, leaving broken walls and rubble everywhere. Children woke screaming and crying, while adults shouted and cursed.

Before the curious onlookers could get close to the blast site, white light descended from the sky, enclosing the area in a cage of light and cutting it off from the outside world. The Sky Eye had already reacted. It probably wouldn't be long before the Security Team patrol officers arrived to investigate.

But none of that concerned Xilin. He slipped back into his ten-square-meter room in the poor district, and only then did his taut nerves slowly relax. He fell into a deep sleep.