A monk never told lies. If he said he would cleanse evil, then he would certainly do it.
Doctor Jack and the hostage led the way, while Tang Luo followed behind. The three of them headed to the hospital's underground laboratory.
Xiao Chu and Zhou Zhenguo left first.
They had no desire to be good people and eradicate evil.
They could only marvel inwardly that the master really was a master, with thunderous methods and a compassionate heart. He was a good person.
Tang Luo had no intention of making them come along, either.
After all, if they ran into danger and he saved them, that direct act of saving lives would earn him merit.
But Tang Luo wasn't so shameless as to go that far.
Besides, forcing people into danger and then rescuing them wouldn't earn any merit.
If it worked that way,
Tang Luo could set up a merit-generating release machine, lie down beside it, and simply accumulate merit.
Merit had its own "temper."
Accumulating merit wasn't difficult, but cheating and cutting corners wouldn't work.
They opened a concealed door.
Before the three of them was a staircase that spiraled downward, with walls on either side.
A few oil lamps hung on the walls, giving them enough light to see.
"How many people are inside?"
Tang Luo asked casually.
"Huh?"
Doctor Jack, limping, took a moment to collect himself before replying, "Nobody."
"You're telling me there's nobody in such an important laboratory?" Tang Luo asked.
"There really is nobody!"
Afraid the madman who claimed to be a detective would make him play "Death Roulette" again, Doctor Jack hurriedly said, "There are only the test subjects."
Tang Luo looked at the other man.
"I've only been here once. There were quite a few people then."
"We're not doing any experiments today. Why would we need people here? We only need someone guarding this sole entrance! You came last time as an assistant, you idiot!"
Doctor Jack roared.
Judging by his ferocious expression, if Tang Luo weren't there,
he probably would have strangled the bespectacled doctor to death already.
"Keep moving. Don't waste time." Tang Luo couldn't be bothered to watch them snap at each other.
The three continued down.
After a minute, they reached another door. Jack opened it with a key.
Beyond it was a five-meter-long passage, with another door at the far end. A faint smell of blood drifted toward them.
"There's a mechanism. We have to lock this door behind us before we can open the one ahead," Jack said, standing in front of the second door.
Tang Luo locked the door behind them.
A series of clicks sounded.
Some kind of mechanism had probably been triggered.
Doctor Jack opened the thick, heavy wooden door in front of him.
A pungent stench, nauseating enough to make them want to vomit, hit them in the face, as if they'd opened the door to a slaughterhouse.
"Urgh!"
The man with glasses immediately started retching.
Normally, they would have worn masks, which would have dulled the smell somewhat.
And the stench hadn't been this bad the last time.
Jack, however, looked unfazed as he went inside and turned on the lights.
It was a fairly spacious underground chamber.
It was about five meters high and covered more than three hundred square meters.
There were over ten stone operating tables, each just wide enough for an adult to lie on, like narrow beds.
They were splattered with blood, and a few were covered with white sheets stained red.
Beneath the sheets were "experimental specimens."
The ground beside the tables was lined with narrow drainage channels.
Some of the stench came from them.
Alongside the stone tables stood all sorts of horrifying medical equipment.
The wires were exposed, making the devices look crude.
It looked more like an interrogation room, a place for torture.
As Tang Luo and the others opened the door and entered,
several shouts rang out.
Then, as if answering them, hoarse cries rose up, one after another.
One wall of the room had been carved into a series of long, narrow spaces shaped like coffins.
Iron-barred doors sealed them off, forming cramped cells.
They were used to confine the test subjects.
Some of the cells had apparently been dug too close together and joined up, forming one large cell.
The laboratory lights weren't particularly bright.
The light only reached the front of the cells; farther in, everything was pitch-black.
A few figures moved about, seemingly disturbed by the light.
There were several more doors in the opposite wall.
Behind them were offices for researchers like Jack.
They kept a great deal of documentation there,
including records on some members of the organization.
They were all lower- and middle-ranking members.
As for the organization's hidden founders, the high-ranking officials and wealthy elites, they would never leave behind such obvious clues and evidence.
But Doctor Jack was an extremely important researcher.
They could keep things from others, but not from him.
Tang Luo had memorized the identities of those people. He could deal with them whenever the time was right.
"Going to get the documents?"
Jack limped toward a closed door.
Tang Luo followed at an unhurried pace.
The man with glasses stood at the entrance, his face filled with despair.
He wanted to run, but didn't dare.
That out-of-town detective did whatever he pleased. He was a madman, a monster.
If he stayed, he might survive when Scotland Yard got their hands on him—after all, he was only a small fry.
But if he ran, he'd probably lose his life.
Unlike Jack, the man with glasses had seen firsthand the terrible damage Tang Luo had caused when he flipped the table.
Crushing him would probably be as easy as crushing a chick.
Jack used a key to open one of the doors and headed to a cabinet in the room. "The documents are all inside."
"Take them out," Tang Luo said.
Jack didn't say anything more. He opened the cabinet and took out stack after stack of documents, along with a bottle of liquid.
"Can I stop the bleeding first?"
After setting the documents on the desk, Jack asked.
The wound on his leg was large, and the bleeding still hadn't stopped.
He wasn't losing much blood at once, but it had all added up. Jack's face had gone deathly pale, and he could barely stand.
He was leaning against the cabinet to keep himself from collapsing.
"Suit yourself."
Tang Luo didn't seem to care. He picked up the documents on the desk and began leafing through them.
As it turned out, not many core members knew the organization's true purpose or what it was doing.
There were only a little over twenty of them.
But plenty of others knew part of the truth, or only knew that they were working for some powerful force.
Tang Luo also came across a gang called the Crow Gang, which had kidnapped people for the organization.
They could barely be considered peripheral members.
People like the man with glasses, and Hodge, who could be turned into researchers,
would first be recruited, then gradually introduced to the truth and brought into the inner circle.
Hodge had "died before he could make his mark."
The man with glasses had only just "joined the trade," and now the entire "industry" had been destroyed.
Tang Luo had done it all!
"Beep, beep, beep!"
Just as Tang Luo was looking through the documents, a sound like an alarm suddenly rang out.
"Thud!"
Jack crashed into the cabinet, his face showing both shock and pain.
He fumbled the bottle in his hand. The pungent liquid, whatever it was made of, spilled all over him.
He looked utterly miserable.
"What's that noise?"
Tang Luo kept reading the documents, not even bothering to look up.
"The cell doors have been opened," Jack said angrily. "That idiot Scott! The patients are extremely aggressive!"
"Oh." Tang Luo casually replied and put away the documents. "Is this all of them?"
"If you're only asking about the members' records," Jack replied without hiding anything.
All the written records on members were here.
The other rooms held a large amount of material related to the immortality research.
"Then let's go." The member records were all Tang Luo needed.
"Ah!"
At that moment, Scott's horrifying scream came from beyond the ajar door.
It was mixed with the roars of the mentally ill.
Clearly, he was under attack.
"I'm not going out!"
Jack's face changed. He pulled back the foot he'd just stepped forward.
Then Tang Luo grabbed him, opened the door, and tossed him out like a doll.
Jack landed with a muffled grunt and struggled to lean against the side of a stone table.
Scott's cries grew faint, and the patients' roars died down as well.
Another sound began to grow louder.
Listening closely, it sounded like chewing and swallowing.
"What's that?"
Tang Luo asked.
A twisted monster had appeared in the underground laboratory.
It looked like a person, but was much larger—about three meters tall.
Its lower body was as thick as an elephant's legs. Its arms were long and thin, and its hands were enormous, with five fingers like the appendages of an arthropod.
It was easily big enough to lift an adult—and, in fact, that was exactly what it had done.
The mangled corpse of Scott hung in its grasp, held out sideways.
The creature's head, still vaguely human and covered in sparse hair, was buried in Scott's remains.
It looked as though it were eating a skewer.
As the sound of swallowing continued,
its enormous, ashen-gray belly rippled like a wave.
In stark contrast to its massive belly, its chest was shrunken and had a bloody hole in it.
Yellow, oily fluid and dark blood oozed from the wound, filling the air with a foul stench.
They could see
that as the monster ate,
the wound was healing at a speed visible to the naked eye.
Oily fluid poured out, the bleeding slowed, and the tiny wound soon sealed shut.
There were several other mangled corpses beside the monster.
"This is... our intermediate result." Jack began to laugh, his smile twisted. "We call it the 'Resurrected One.' I woke it up."
The monster called the Resurrected One must have been locked inside that large cell, where it had been asleep.
Not only had it been awakened, it had also been released.
Scott had nothing to do with it. The one who had released it was Jack.
Inside the cabinet from earlier, there was another special switch.
Once activated, it would open all the cells and, as a bonus, awaken the Resurrected One with excruciating pain.
"The Resurrected One? Like resurrecting the dead?" Tang Luo asked.
"Exactly. The next stage is immortality. I'm so close to success!" Jack's face suddenly twisted into a hideous scowl. "But you ruined everything!"
"So that's why you want us to die together?"
Tang Luo's expression didn't change in the slightest. The monster ten meters away seemed to have no effect on him at all.
His composure irritated Jack.
Everything he'd worked for, all his painstaking effort, had been destroyed by the man before him. How dare he?!
How dare this man act as if he'd done something trivial?!
How dare he look so casual, as if it hadn't mattered at all!
Even if his opponent had laughed arrogantly, that would have been easier for Jack to stomach than this expression.
"Die together?" Jack sneered and pointed at his clothes. "No. It'll only eat you."
The Resurrected One couldn't be controlled.
But as its creator, Jack had a way to protect himself.
For example, a special scent that made the Resurrected One hate him and want to stay away.
Jack was reeking of that scent now.
Please vote for me!
By the way, I caught a cold today and I'm feeling woozy. I ordered takeout for lunch, and to meet the minimum order, I got eleven pan-fried dumplings. I figured I'd just eat a few.
Then, before I knew it, I'd finished them all, and I couldn't help falling into deep thought.
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