Black Lantern Battery (Please Bookmark)

The institute's layout was exceedingly monotonous. The metal walls were coated in white paint, and hall after hall were strung together like candied hawthorns. It made Su Ming feel as if he were in an ancient tomb rather than a research facility.

Dull. Oppressive. If he had been one of the scientists here, he would definitely have gone mad too.

What kind of research institute was built like this? Did they think all those doors made it safer by separating everything?

Su Ming could not understand what they were thinking, but he had to keep moving forward.

Over the next several rooms, they encountered all kinds of monsters. All had been born from the experiments of those Mad Scientists, created through equally cruel methods and with equally unreliable results.

They had created Sponge Man, who could rapidly absorb water. They had probably intended for him to wipe Atlantis warriors dry in close combat, dehydrating them to death.

They had also made Convex Lens Man, who could gather light. Perhaps they had wanted to blind the eyes of deep-sea creatures and gain the upper hand.

There was even a monster whose front half was a fish and whose back half was human. What was that supposed to be? Did those scientists think Atlanteans looked like that?

Su Ming destroyed all the creatures in those tanks and other containers.

Rather than a biochemical research institute, this place was more like an Amazon toy factory.

Cindy did not know what expression she should wear. Indian Hill on Earth -11 was not as dangerous as Su Ming had said, which was a good thing. But seeing the Amazon Council kill people in such inventive ways, using war as an excuse to entertain themselves, made her feel somewhat ashamed.

In war, it was only natural to develop new weapons to kill the enemy. But how could these be called weapons?

"Were these people planning to make the Atlanteans laugh themselves to death with their creations? If so, I have to say, everything they made was a weapon of mass destruction."

Cindy sighed and propped her chin on the butt of her pistol while waiting for Barbara to open the next door. After several rooms, she had become immune to these bizarre creations. At the same time, she began wondering whether Jester's ancestors had worked in a place like this.

The scientists here were definitely all lunatics—and incompetent lunatics at that. Even Professor Pyg's products were more reliable than theirs. At least her pig-headed voodoo dolls were genuinely bloody.

Su Ming simply waited quietly, tilting his head at Cindy to signal that they should continue. The tech tree of this world was truly cursed. He had nothing to say.

Then the door opened once more, and this time, a familiar sight appeared before them.

"Zombies?" Cindy immediately opened fire. Since the cause of these zombies was unclear, ranged weapons were safer.

Su Ming fired almost at the same time, relying on experience to aim for the zombies' heads and pull the trigger.

Zombies rarely appeared in the DC Universe, but that did not mean they never did. After all, there were always people interested in researching the boundary between life and death, and such research always went wrong.

These zombies were fast, capable of sprinting with astonishing speed. But they were still mindless corpses. Once Su Ming and Cindy held the doorway together, their numbers rapidly dwindled.

"You're sure it isn't a virus?" Cindy asked as she removed her magazine and replaced it with a fresh one.

"I'm sure! If it were a virus, it would need to reproduce itself, and reproduction requires matter and energy. That means viral zombies would need to feed or decay faster." Su Ming knocked down several that had gotten too close. Seeing Cindy finish reloading, he began reloading as well and continued, "Look at these zombies. This place has been abandoned for thirty years, yet they're still intact. It was probably caused by magic or something similar."

"These lunatics actually made a weapon that still works. At least zombies don't need to breathe. They may be weak, but they can make up for it with numbers." Cindy quickly pulled the trigger, and another row of zombies fell.

"But ordinary corpses would move terribly slowly underwater. They forgot to consider the operating environment again."

Seeing only a few remained, Su Ming simply finished them off with his shotgun.

There had been over two hundred zombies in this room. Now every last one lay on the ground, and none could move again. Of course, the consequence was that the .45 ammunition for their pistols was nearly depleted.

The group entered the room. A stench filled it, unlike anything in the previous rooms, like the smell of a rotting coffin.

The walls were covered in dark brown, dried bloodstains, along with marks left by fingernails scratching at the walls. Yellowish-brown filthy water flowed freely across the floor, though no one knew what it was.

The zombies had been treated far worse than the previous monsters. They had merely been enclosed behind steel bars along the wall. But after so many years, the steel had corroded, allowing them to escape and run all over the room.

Cindy used her foot to turn over a corpse and examine it. Shriveled, tightened skin, grayish-white eyes, exposed yellow teeth—the classic appearance of a zombie.

"I can't tell what caused this. You'd better not touch them," she said, tossing the corpse aside and warning Barbara and the others, who had no protective uniforms.

At that moment, Su Ming's gaze was drawn to something in the room. It looked ordinary, enclosed in a small glass case. It was shaped like the kind of flashlight every household had.

Yet even without anyone touching it, black light continued to shine from its front end. No ordinary flashlight was like that.

"I know what this is now. These zombies are magical constructs. They aren't contagious."

As he spoke, he lifted the glass cover and slowly reached toward the small flashlight, gently grasping it in his hand.

In an instant, even through his tactical gloves, a bone-chilling cold flooded directly into his mind, as if searching for something.

But it found nothing and quickly retreated. Su Ming was unharmed.

He let out a breath, put the small flashlight into his bag, and said to the others, "This is Black Lantern energy. It comes from Nekron. I didn't expect these lunatics to mess around with this too."

Vicki had begun recording again, while Cindy said she did not understand and hoped he would explain.

"All light in the universe is made up of the emotional spectrum. The seven colors each represent an emotion, but we won't get into that. Beyond them, there is white light, which represents life, and black light, which represents death. They are pure manifestations of concepts, and they are extremely dangerous."

Su Ming looked around and found nothing similar, so the group continued onward toward the next area while he gave them a rough explanation.

"If white light represents life, it doesn't sound very dangerous?" Barbara pushed her wheelchair forward, an inexplicable expression on her face.

As far as she knew, everyone around her had always told her growing up that life was beautiful, death was terrifying, and life should be respected.

Yet Deathstroke was telling her that life was very dangerous.

"Because it can spread to anything alive. As long as the white light remains, that creature becomes immortal. When you want to eat chicken, you'll find that chickens cannot be killed. When you want to eat grain, you'll find that grain cannot be killed. When you want to drink water, you'll find that the microorganisms and bacteria in the water cannot be killed."

Su Ming explained the horror of white light to her. Although the white light in the comics was more or less controlled by the Guardians, a battery containing black light had appeared here, so there was no guarantee that white light would not appear as well.

And the energy contained within a battery could be used by anyone, completely without control.