Anomaly Containment File No. E212937
Codename: Amalgam.
Infection symptoms: Limbs fused together; extremely aggressive.
Case details: Wang Haitao, a cashier in the clothing section on the third floor of Guangming Mall at 42 Guangming Road, was the root infectee. After the anomaly erupted, he fused with two customers who were checking out, Wang Cuie and Gao Zixuan. The infected attacked indiscriminately inside the mall, leaving 7 dead and 32 seriously injured.
Disposition: The Anomaly Bureau's Southwest Bureau dispatched the Second Squad of the Third Brigade. The root infectee was killed, rendering the Amalgam immobile, and all constituent bodies lost vital signs. The corpse showed a faint psychic radiation response, and an anomalous object was suspected to be inside. After preliminary decontamination, it was transferred to the Support Center's Dissection Room.
Psychic radiation level: 73–121.
Anomaly infection rating: E.
In the Dissection Room, Li Fan stood beside the dissection table in protective gear. He casually tossed the containment file aside and handed Zhang Hongbing a tool.
The main body of the corpse belonged to a chubby man with a round face. But where his arms should have been, they had fused with the legs of two other people.
On the left was a middle-aged woman; on the right, a young man in his twenties.
Their flesh looked as though it had melted together under an electric welding torch. The result was grotesque.
A layer of something like hard armor covered the chubby man's body. There were also vertical openings in the middle of his forehead and chest, both of which went all the way through.
Those were obviously what had killed him.
The infected corpse had been sent here only after undergoing harmlessness treatment.
After examining the bizarre corpse, Zhang Hongbing, his stubble unkempt, held out his hand.
"Hand saw and large pliers."
Li Fan, his assistant, immediately picked up the heavy hand saw and pliers and passed them over.
Before joining the Anomaly Bureau, Zhang Hongbing had worked as a fitter at an auto repair shop. He always wanted people to call him Engineer Zhang, not Doctor Zhang.
What Li Fan admired most about Zhang Hongbing was his knack for smoking inside his protective suit. As he put it, smoking that way wasted less tobacco.
Engineer Zhang clamped the corpse's neck with the pliers, then planted a foot on the dissection table and switched on the saw. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he opened the corpse's skull and chatted as he worked.
"Fan, I know you wanted to join the frontline Investigation Department. You probably think you're wasting your talents here at our Support Center, especially since you got assigned to the Dissection Department. But that sort of thing comes down to fate. Most of your classmates from training went to the Investigation Department, where they get promoted faster and earn more, but they die faster too... Catch this piece of brain for me."
Thick blood sprayed everywhere, staining both their protective suits and face shields a deep red.
After more than a month of training, Li Fan was already used to such gruesome sights. He caught the falling piece in a tray and chuckled.
"Don't worry, Engineer Zhang. I think our department is great. It suits me. I'm planning to stay here until retirement."
"If you really mean that, good. You can learn plenty here, you know. Liu Dalong's butcher shop is doing great these days."
Squish. The skull was open.
"Make a note of it." Zhang tossed the hand saw onto the table, picked up a screwdriver-like tool, and poked around inside the skull. "Slight blood clots in the brain. Nothing else unusual. Hand me the radiation counter."
Li Fan quickly recorded the findings on his tablet, leaving a string of bloody fingerprints across the screen. At the same time, he handed Zhang a yellow device about the size of a cigarette pack.
It looked like a miniature Geiger counter, but it measured the psychic radiation emitted by anomalous objects, not nuclear radiation.
As Zhang scanned the corpse, he muttered, "This doesn't make sense. The reading's over 70, at least seven times a normal person's. It should be in the brain, so why isn't it here? There's nothing in this guy's head. Just like our bureau chief."
Li Fan teased him.
"Engineer Zhang, did you work too roughly and grind it to pieces? Besides, isn't our bureau chief a leading expert in anomaly research? How could there be nothing in his head?"
"Bullshit. When I worked at the auto repair shop, they called me the attending physician of the auto repair world. That was because I did precise work—fixing cars was like performing surgery!" Zhang Hongbing scowled. "And if our bureau chief were any good, would the bureau's workload keep piling up?"
Li Fan clicked his tongue. "This infected guy looks like he'd eat anything. Could it be in his mouth?"
As he spoke, he grabbed a pair of pliers and prepared to pry open the infected man's mouth.
Zhang waved him off. Taking the pliers, he probed inside the infected man's mouth, feeling around before frowning. "There's something in there. Get ready. Goggles and a containment box."
Li Fan quickly pulled on his goggles and took out a square box made of special material.
The next second, Engineer Zhang pulled the pliers out of the corpse's mouth, revealing a shell stained reddish brown!
The shell was covered in rust and gleamed like metal. Fine patterns were engraved across it: the image of a beautiful woman being torn apart.
The image was so clear and lifelike that the moment they saw it, they seemed to hear a heart-rending, mournful wail!
It was a beauty steeped in sorrow, a beauty from hell. Like an evil flower, it instantly stirred the strongest desires deep in a person's heart!
Li Fan and Zhang were both captivated by the coin. A desire to possess the shell rose quickly within them. It wasn't strong, but it still sent a chill through them.
They exchanged a glance. Zhang promptly dropped the shell into the containment box, and Li Fan swiftly snapped the lid shut with a click, sealing it inside.
Then they both let out a long breath.
Though their goggles and protective suits blocked most of the psychic radiation from the coin, they had still felt its influence.
Only after it was inside the containment box were they truly safe.
Otherwise, if either of them had been infected and the automatic detection system had raised the alarm, the Dissection Room would have sprayed powerful anesthetic. Anyone who breathed it in would be unlikely to wake up.
"Engineer Zhang, this shell's no ordinary thing. I saw the radiation reading spike over 100 just now," Li Fan said with a frown. "From the look of it, it's finely polished, an ancient shell currency. How did it end up inside this infected man?"
"Those irresponsible bastards in the Investigation Department didn't clear the body properly," Zhang Hongbing said with a frown. "Whatever. We'll hand it over to the Research Department tomorrow."
Engineer Zhang helped Li Fan push the bizarre corpse underground and into a specially made extra-large morgue drawer. Then he tossed the pliers aside, waved, and walked out of the Dissection Room.
"I'm heading out. My back's killing me. Xiao Li, sorry for the trouble, but you'll have to take the night shift."
Li Fan grinned and replied, "Sure thing, Engineer Zhang. Leave it to me."
After disinfecting and washing up in the decontamination room, the two of them changed out of their protective suits and into their regular clothes.
"I'm going home to help my daughter with her homework," Zhang Hongbing said with a grin, waving as he headed out. His voice drifted back from a distance. "Don't forget to write up the inspection report tomorrow. I'm counting on you."
"Got it!" Li Fan called back. He closed the break room door and went to the duty room.
It was already past seven in the evening, and all the investigators in the testing building had gone home for the day.
He and Engineer Zhang had only ended up working late because they'd taken on the dissection job to search for anomalous objects just before the end of their shift.
As Zhang Hongbing put it, they hardly ever worked overtime anymore, so doing it once in a while made him feel rather accomplished.
The duty room was quite well-equipped. It was a suite, with bulletproof glass and a bulletproof door, plus a bed, table, chairs, computer, and television.
The duty officer's job was to watch the hundreds of surveillance screens covering one wall and monitor the psychic radiation alarm system.
Of course, all these systems had artificial intelligence. The duty officer was simply the second line of defense.
If anything anomalous happened, the officer had to notify the Special Action Team of the Investigation Department immediately, then decide whether to assist with containment or retreat into the inner room.
The inner room even had a small kitchen and a large fridge stocked with all kinds of food for the duty officer's late-night snacks.
It was practically the civil servant life of Li Fan's dreams.
He felt completely suited to this kind of work and wanted nothing more than to coast along until retirement.
Thinking that it would take at least another year just to become a full employee, and that the Cleaning Association's damned Cuckoo Project was nowhere in sight, Li Fan couldn't help smiling at the thought of how peaceful things would stay.
Having just finished dissecting an infectee, Li Fan wasn't hungry. He poured himself a cup of coffee, plopped down in front of the monitoring console, and took the Bronze Key hanging around his neck out to fiddle with it.
As a former antiques dealer, he could tell from its patterns that the key dated to the Warring States period or the Han dynasty, and was probably no older than the pre-Qin era.
It was shaped like a dagger.
He had copied the few seal-script characters on it onto a sheet of paper and looked them up on his phone, but he still couldn't make heads or tails of them.
The key read, "The Abyss has no limits; the prison has no master. Only the rootless may enter."
What did that mean?
Was it like the Sunflower Manual, usable only by eunuchs who had lost their manhood?
Still, even though he had no idea what was going on, the fact that the Collector had kept only this one item in his dormitory made Li Fan suspect there was more to it.
He had fiddled with the key until it was almost polished smooth, but still hadn't figured out what it meant.
He tossed it aside, got up, and cooked himself a bowl of shredded pork noodles. After slurping them down, he leisurely munched on an apple and watched television.
After a long day's work, weariness washed over him. As he watched, his eyelids grew heavier and heavier.
Li Fan didn't know how long he'd been asleep when the sound of knocking on the window woke him.
The television had turned to static, and the clock on the wall showed a little past two in the morning.
Who was that?
Li Fan turned to look. A man and a woman stood outside the duty room window: a middle-aged woman and a young man. They were smiling and politely knocking on the glass, gesturing for Li Fan to open the door.
Colleagues coming in to work late because of an emergency? They looked a little familiar. How had they gotten into the testing building?
Still groggy, Li Fan got up and started toward the door. The next second, a jolt seemed to shoot through him. Every hair on his body stood on end, and he froze in place.
He spun around and stared at the two smiling figures outside.
Those were the corpses they had dissected today!
Before you continue