The Laboratory

"Watson!" Sherlock rushed toward the source of the voice. The smoke stung his eyes and throat. The anesthetic gas was taking effect, making him dizzy, only for his head to clear again for no apparent reason.

Amid the chaos, his foot struck something hard. He stumbled and looked down, spotting a phone with a shattered screen amid the billowing smoke and flickering, eerie green light.

It was Nana's!

He snatched it up. The GPS marker flashing on the cracked screen was moving wildly, its path crossing the streets of London before clearly heading toward the winding course of the River Thames.

They had come prepared, while he had been so engrossed in solving the case that he hadn't noticed a thing.

The flashing point traced a hasty but glaringly obvious letter C over the outline of the river. Then the phone shut off.

In the smoke, the golden pharaoh mask on one of the thugs suddenly cracked open, revealing a glimpse of Moriarty's deranged, smiling face. Sherlock stumbled after him.

But this time, the man's target didn't seem to be him. The black-robed figure swept away with two prizes and vanished without a trace.

[Nana, they added a neurotoxin to the anesthetic. The system's antidote is relatively broad in its effects and can't completely neutralize this targeted toxin, which disguises itself.]

"No wonder I kept going from clearheaded to dizzy. I thought your system store was selling fake medicine. By the way, who kidnapped me?" Half asleep, Sitangna was hauled into a helicopter. The roar of the propellers made her eardrums itch.

[Moriarty.]

"...What are the chances we can finish the mission and leave right this instant?" Whenever she faced this madman, she couldn't shake the illusion that she might die the very next second.

[Zero. We can't leave while a node event is underway. We can't exactly put on a disappearing act for everyone.]

"Then I'll just pass out first." She couldn't afford to joke around, actually. Candy had already removed the antidote's effect; it worked one moment and failed the next, and it might damage her brain.

"Boss, she's completely unconscious."

"Then take her straight to the laboratory."

The smoke gradually cleared, leaving Sherlock alone in the enormous exhibition hall. It was deathly silent, and the pungent chemical smell lingered.

The emergency lights came on, and the rescue team Mycroft had dispatched arrived. Incandescent lights feebly illuminated the wreckage strewn across the floor: scraps of bandages, shards of broken glass, and the trampled photograph of Victor.

The consulting detective, famous for his logic and reason, lay semiconscious on the cold floor tiles. Loose mummy bandages wound around his trembling fingers like the web of fate.

He stared fixedly at the place in the photograph where Victor had disappeared. His lips moved soundlessly, and the broken whispers he uttered could be understood only by Mycroft. Every word was steeped in pain and despair twenty years overdue.

It was a nursery rhyme that had lingered in his ears for years:

"Deep down below the old beech tree,

Deep below the old beech tree,

Help succour me now the east wind blow,

The east wind rises, I beg for help,

Sixteen by six,

Sixteen times six,

and under we go.

Downward we go."

"The patient's pupils are dilating and constricting normally. Nurse, put him on a ventilator..."

"Hiss-why does it hurt so much...?" Sitangna woke to a sea of white. She tried to shield her eyes from the glaring light, but her hands and feet seemed to be restrained, and her clothes had been changed.

[Don't panic or struggle. You're strapped to an operating table. A nurse changed you into a surgical gown. Get your bearings first; I'm clearing the neurotoxin from your body.]

Since she could communicate normally with the system, it seemed she was truly awake.

Things developed in derivative worlds weren't necessarily available in every world, so Candy, unable to neutralize the toxin, had reported it directly to the main system.

The expert sent from above was quite capable and quickly developed an antidote. The sample of the new neurotoxin also entered the system store's inventory, earning Sitangna a modest sum of points.

But the news did little to cheer her up. She was in a dangerous situation and could move only her head. She raised it and took a quick look around the operating room. Its layout and equipment were much the same as those she had seen in hospitals.

There was also an adjoining rest room, plain and cramped, apparently less than twenty square meters, with just a single bed.

Only the bedding here was made of cotton, along with the table beneath her, which was covered with a disposable surgical sheet. Everything else was made of stainless steel, glass, or ceramic. The place seemed designed to make traces easy to clean up.

The room had three walls and one wall made entirely of glass. She didn't need to guess to know it had to be one-way glass. Sitangna couldn't see outside, but the people outside could clearly observe her every move.

"Damn it, my hand!" As her senses returned, her arm began to throb. Sitangna had to strain to lift her head before she could see the two bruised needle marks on her arm.

The smaller one was probably from the museum. The other had likely been made not long ago; the pain was quite noticeable.

"What did they do to me? They didn't inject me with anything weird, did they?" Fortunately, Candy had already scanned her. Aside from the needle marks and her bruised knee, she had no other wounds anywhere on her body.

[While you were unconscious, someone from the lab came to draw your blood. There was a huge box full of blood collection tubes. They took nearly 400 ml, and if they hadn't seen how pale you were, they would have kept going.]

"What on earth does Moriarty want? Did he bring me here to donate blood, or is the big villain developing some heaven-defying drug again?"

No wonder Sitangna felt weaker and weaker. She had thought it was the lingering effect of the knockout drug, but it turned out she was anemic.

When she had donated blood at university, she had only dared give two hundred milliliters at a time. This bastard had taken four hundred in one go. How much beef and how many red dates would she have to eat to make up for it?

[We still don't know. But after the major node occurred, a new side mission appeared. The objective is: escape the laboratory!]

"...After the upgrade, can the system only detect useless nodes and issue pointless missions like these?!" Seeing how frantic Sitangna was, Candy sheepishly hugged her head.

[Calm down. We also have a high-scoring hidden side mission we can complete in this laboratory. Before we find a way to escape, let's try exploring and look for an exit.]

"I can't even move. How am I supposed to explore?" Sitangna glanced at the spotless white walls around her. She couldn't even find a crack around a door.

[The door is set into the glass on the far left. This is a room attached to a laboratory. Nana, you're being held in the private laboratory Professor Ashton provided for Moriarty. The staff are right outside the glass, testing your blood.]

Ignoring the laws of space, Candy transmitted her first-person view into Sitangna's mind. Unlike the quiet room, the laboratory next door was a hive of activity. Seven or eight staff members were working in an orderly fashion.

All kinds of laboratory equipment were running at high speed, and data such as her vital signs and hormone analyses flashed across electronic screens.