Sheng An's voice remained calm. "Doesn't he want us to hand over the fragments ourselves? Then I'll go deliver them."
More Otherkind in Capital City, lower temperatures, less oxygen... all of it was meant to leave them helpless with the fragments in their possession.
Until, in the end, they personally returned every fragment they had painstakingly collected to the Otherkind.
When the cold wave arrived and Capital City's temperature fell even further, they had refused to let Hao Jingye have his way.
But after resolving the cold wave crisis, they discovered an even greater crisis coming right on its heels. They had reached the limit of what they could handle by countering each move as it came.
Hao Jingye had succeeded.
Sheng An was prepared to leave Capital City with the fragments. If he wanted them, then they would meet again.
Jiang Yu clutched her chest and stared blankly at Sheng An, unable to say a word.
She wanted to say that the fragments couldn't fall into the Otherkind's hands. She wanted to say that Hao Jingye was extremely dangerous, that they would probably never return alive. She also wanted to say...
But when she thought of their current predicament, she swallowed every word.
Doctor Yan lowered his head.
After a long time, he said softly-
"After you discovered that Hao Jingye was M, you kept the fragments with you and gave us the information you'd compiled...
"After repeated analysis, the Research Institute could only identify two completely different paths leading in opposite directions. Both led to a dead end.
"The first was to counter each move as it came, to work against Hao Jingye and the Otherkind's intentions and deny him what he wanted. That's what we're doing now. And our conclusion was that this amounts to slow suicide.