The door opened.
The shadows on the floor moved.
Ye Mo went no farther. He grabbed Emma Frost's wrist and pulled her half a step back. That sense that something was wrong had grown clearer-there were two of them standing in the doorway, but three shadows on the floor. The extra one was taller than theirs, broader in the shoulders, its head tilted slightly as though looking at something.
"Don't touch the floor," he said.
Emma Frost nodded, keeping her breathing very quiet. The people soaking in those containers had stunned her earlier. Now that she had recovered, she immediately noticed something strange in the air. It wasn't a sound or a smell, but a kind of... echo of thought. Like many people whispering at once, their words indistinct.
Ye Mo raised his left arm. Silver-gray patterns still flowed slowly beneath his skin. His Neural Shield was still on. That sudden psychic assault earlier had almost pierced the shield and slammed straight into his brain. Now he could feel the disturbance rising from the floor, crawling up through the soles of his feet.
"This shadow wasn't cast by light," he said. "It's a manifestation of residual consciousness."
Emma Frost frowned. "Have you seen this before?"
"No, but the system once gave me a warning about 'high concentrations of X-Gene residue.' This sort of thing is usually left behind after Mutants die en masse or have their consciousness forcibly extracted. What we're standing on might be the collective echoes of hundreds of people who were drained dry."
He took the vibranium fragment from his pocket and pressed it to his temple. The moment it touched his skin, it began heating up, as though sensing some frequency. The oppressive feeling in the air immediately eased a little.
"I'll scan it for you," Emma Frost said. "But I can't probe deep. Last time, I almost got dragged in."
"Just scan the outline." Ye Mo handed her the fragment. "Use the lowest frequency, like barely skimming the surface of water."
Emma Frost took the fragment, closed her eyes, and pressed her fingers lightly to her forehead. A few seconds later, her body stiffened. Her eyes flew open, and a short, muffled grunt escaped her throat.
Ye Mo immediately steadied her.
"What did you see?"
"A researcher... a white coat, gloves, entering a password. His cuff turned back for a moment, revealing an inscription on the inside of his badge-W.R."
"W.R.?" Ye Mo repeated. "Did you remember it? Can you recreate the image?"
"I can only remember the details." Emma Frost caught her breath. "That badge is a high-level access insignia from the Hellfire Club. Only core members have one. W.R... I haven't heard that code name, but it feels familiar."
Ye Mo said nothing and turned toward the main console. The terminal was still lit, its screen displaying a global coordinate map. Four red dots marked Siberia, the edge of Antarctica, the Congo rainforest, and the seabed of the North Sea. Connected, they formed a perfect tetrahedron, with nothing at its center.
"A tetrahedral structure." He stared at the screen. "An energy field would generally focus at the geometric center, but there's nothing here."
"Unless the center isn't a physical object," Emma Frost said, walking over beside him. "But a receiving point. Like a Wi-Fi signal-the routers are at the four corners, and the middle is the coverage area."
Ye Mo's eyes lit up. "A consciousness transmission matrix."
He pulled up the base's floor plan and discovered that the metal framework throughout the building had a very strange arrangement-it wasn't designed to bear weight. It looked more like some kind of antenna array. The alloy beams inside the walls formed spirals, and large amounts of conductive coating lay beneath the floors.
"This whole place is a transmitter," he said. "It packages the Mutants' consciousness signals and projects them toward the central point."
"But where is the center?" Emma Frost asked.
"Not on Earth," Ye Mo said quietly. "Possibly in another dimension, or some encrypted space. Project Lazarus was never meant to resurrect anyone. They're building an interdimensional consciousness server."
He glanced back at the people soaking in the containers. Their eyeballs were still moving slightly, as though they were watching something. But their bodies remained completely still.
"They're being transmitted," Emma Frost suddenly said. "I didn't dare read deeply, but the images in their minds... were all snowy plains. At Siberia Station 07, there was a bound Mutant with a brand on their forehead identical to Hydra's old totem. Then the image jumped here, like remote synchronization."
"Linked facilities." Ye Mo worked quickly at the terminal. "Four nodes running simultaneously, with the data streams converging at the center. The base in front of us is only one of the relay stations."
He tried to retrieve the logs, only for an access warning to pop up. Encryption level Ω. Conventional cracking methods were ineffective.
"Fuck." He struck the keyboard. "Even Tony couldn't crack encryption at this level."
The moment he finished speaking, the shadows on the floor moved. The previously motionless third shadow began slowly turning toward them.
Ye Mo immediately realized what was happening. "Every time we try to crack it, it gets a little closer. This damn thing is alive. Our operations activate it."
"Then don't force it." Emma Frost watched the shadow. "Try another way."
Ye Mo thought for a moment, then reached behind the terminal. He activated Regenerative Phasing, passing his hand straight into the circuitry, bypassing the firewall and accessing the low-level cache.
A few seconds later, a deleted record popped up:
"W.R. - White Raven - Access level: Ω."
Ye Mo read it aloud. "White Raven? That name sounds unlucky."
Emma Frost's expression changed. "White Raven... I've heard of him. When I was little, at the Hellfire training camp, an instructor mentioned him once. He was supposedly a purge officer who specialized in dealing with defectors, responsible for formatting the consciousness of anyone who disobeyed. No one had seen his real face. All anyone knew was that his code name was W.R."
"So this isn't a Hydra project." Ye Mo sneered. "Someone inside Hellfire has set up their own operation and is using Hydra to carry it out. Project Lazarus is nominally under Hydra's management, but White Raven holds the actual control."
"Then why choose Mutants?" Emma Frost asked.
"Because their genes are unstable?" Ye Mo replied offhandedly.
"No." Emma Frost shook her head. "It's because our brains have a unique structure. High synaptic density, large information capacity-suitable for use as server nodes. They aren't creating immortals. They're building a supercomputer that can operate across dimensions."
Ye Mo fell silent for two seconds, then suddenly laughed. "Got it. Lazarus isn't a name. It's a model designation. This thing is called the 'Lazarus System.' Its goal is to keep some consciousness online forever, free of physical limitations."
He looked at the phantom tetrahedron formed by those four points in the air, and a thought flashed through his mind: If the center is the receiving end, where does the uploaded data ultimately go?
As he was thinking, the vibranium fragment suddenly grew fiercely hot.
Emma Frost noticed it too. "A signal is responding."
She closed her eyes and released an extremely faint wave of Telepathy, mimicking the frequency of a Mutant's brain. A slight resonance immediately filled the air, as though some device was starting up.
"The entire building is an antenna," Ye Mo confirmed. "It receives instructions and sends data."
"White Raven is controlling it remotely." Emma Frost opened her eyes. "But he isn't just controlling this site. I caught a fragment of information just now. It mentioned 'node calibration' and 'consciousness aggregation progress: 78%.'"
"There are other bases running." Ye Mo quickly brought up the map. "The tetrahedral structure has already taken shape. Now all that's left is the final step-activating the center."
"How do they activate it?"
"They need a sufficiently powerful consciousness source." Ye Mo looked at the containers. "Maybe they have to upload a large number of Mutant consciousnesses at once to reach a critical threshold."
Emma Frost suddenly pressed her temples. "Wait... I think something just scanned me. It wasn't an attack. More like... registration."
"Registration?" Ye Mo frowned.
"Like a system verifying an identity." Emma Frost's face paled. "It knows I'm a Mutant, and... there's a resonance response."
Ye Mo understood immediately. "Your genes have been tagged. You've been exposed to Hellfire technology before, and now the system has identified you as a potential node."
He grabbed her hand. "Get out of this area."
They hurried backward. They had taken only three steps when the shadows on the floor abruptly stretched out. The third shadow raised its arm and pointed at them.
Ye Mo didn't look back. He pulled Emma Frost around to the other side of the console. He stuffed the vibranium fragment back into his pocket. The silver-gray patterns on his left arm were still flashing, his Neural Shield running continuously.
"We can't try the terminal again," he said. "Every operation feeds them data."
"Then what do we do?" Emma Frost stood against the wall, her breathing still unsteady.
"Use reverse logic." Ye Mo stared at the screen. "Since it's an antenna array, let it receive a false signal. We won't crack it. We'll fake an upload."
"How?"
"You release a fake stream of consciousness, and I'll use Regenerative Phasing to interfere with the circuits, creating the illusion that data packets are being sent. It'll think we're transmitting people, but we won't actually send anything."
Emma Frost nodded. "I can do that, but I can only hold it for ten seconds."
"That's enough." Ye Mo walked over to the wiring shaft. "Tell me when you're ready."
Emma Frost closed her eyes and began mobilizing her ability. Resonance appeared in the air again, but this time it was an artificially generated frequency fluctuation.
Ye Mo activated his ability and passed his hand into the main control box, locating the signal transmission module. He deliberately disrupted the current, creating the illusion of an intensive data upload.
Five seconds later, the shadows on the floor stopped.
The third shadow slowly lowered its head, as though "looking" at them. Then it faded little by little.
Ye Mo let out a breath. "We fooled it."
Emma Frost opened her eyes, her face pale. "But it remembered us. During those ten seconds, it scanned my complete genetic sequence."
"Nothing we can do about that." Ye Mo withdrew his hand. "From now on, we're wanted targets."
He looked toward the central platform. In the previously empty air above it, an extremely faint lattice of light suddenly emerged, forming that same tetrahedral structure. Each vertex flickered, and a blurry mass of light slowly rotated at the center.
Emma Frost stared at that mass of light. "Who do you think... the consciousness inside belongs to?"
Ye Mo didn't answer.
All he knew was that he already had the key.
The truth behind the door lay within that mass of light.