CHAPTER 89: CHAPTER 89: THE WOMAN BY THE WALL

Gradually pushing the door open, a beam of white light shot through the crack, glaring in the darkness, with many fluorescent tubes inside.

Su Changxing was stunned; the scene inside was completely different from what he imagined. There were no bloodstains on the floor, nor were there any corpses on the dissection table as he remembered.

Everything was spotlessly clean, and all items were arranged neatly.

"The spacing between the three pairs of scissors is exactly the same. Is this extreme compulsive order?"

Noticing the extremely orderly arrangement of tools on the shelf, Su Changxing couldn’t help but comment.

The place was excessively clean and tidy.

He couldn’t find anything useful. If it weren’t for the memories of the little boy, he would even think this was just an ordinary laboratory.

"Where did everyone here end up? Turned into zombies or just dead?"

Su Changxing muttered, lost in thought.

The hall was spacious and quiet, yet it felt eerie. It was a feeling akin to standing alone in a brightly lit, but completely empty hospital at night.

Through these survivors, he learned that the Lady of the House was not currently in Shield Company, but that did not mean this place was safe.

After all, the world itself was not safe.

Holding a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, Su Changxing walked inside. Through a semi-circular passage, he could see an even larger space ahead.

The arched corridor stretched about seven to eight meters, dividing the hall into two separate areas.

Entering the hall, Su Changxing noticed that there were still quite a few dissection tables — except now, they held human or zombie corpses.

One living zombie was tied to a dissection table, struggling silently.

About seventy percent of this zombie’s body had been dissected, revealing the white bones. Due to its zombie nature, it hadn’t died.

Beside it was a white clipboard with a note: "No need to eat, rest, extremely hard to die. This is not a principle at the biological level, but a reflection of an ability.

Conclusion: Zombies are pure power users."

Power user?

Su Changxing knew that these survivors’ term for power user was synonymous with Extraordinary, just called differently.

According to the clipboard, these zombie traits couldn’t be explained biologically but were akin to the abilities of the Extraordinary.

"This hypothesis is very reasonable, quite similar to what I thought. But are these things the work of the Lady of the House?"

Placing the clipboard down, Su Changxing looked up and his heart suddenly stopped.

In the dim white light, a woman with a severely pale, keratinized face, hair down and head slightly lowered, stood quietly against the wall facing him.

The woman was dressed in a loose dark brown outfit, one pant leg hanging loose, standing on one leg, yet she stood firmly, without any wobble.

She just stood there, motionless.

As if frozen, giving Su Changxing the illusion that she didn’t exist.

Sweating from his palms, Su Changxing gripped his gun tighter, his heart racing wildly.

He hadn’t noticed when this figure appeared and was sure she hadn’t been there when he’d entered.

For nearly half a minute, neither side made any motion, didn’t even emit the slightest sound, just staring at each other silently.

"Bang, bang, bang~"

Gunshots echoed through the vast hall.

Su Changxing fired three shots in a row, feeling his mouth dry, clearly seeing the bullets disappear the instant they touched her.

Bullets were ineffective against her?

The handgun was Su Changxing’s most powerful attack means; if bullets couldn’t affect her, then other attack methods were likely useless.

Feeling his skin crawl, Su Changxing attempted to retreat, and as soon as he moved, he noticed the other also began to move.

This left him frozen.

He didn’t understand what she meant, standing there just looking at him.

After more than ten seconds, Su Changxing steadied himself and calmly said, "Staring at others like that is very impolite, and it makes me quite uncomfortable."

"······"

"······"

No response.

Is this idiot?

Narrowing his eyes to scrutinize her, Su Changxing’s courage gradually grew as he lifted a leg to move forward, and sure enough, she also began to move.

But she retreated as he advanced.

"This thing keeps a certain distance from me?"

Su Changxing tested by advancing two steps, and she stepped back two steps.

Su Changxing retreated two steps, she advanced two steps.

"So, if I turn around, will she turn around?"

Getting intrigued, Su Changxing turned around to test.

But as he turned, he immediately felt a chill behind him. His intuition kicked in, pulling his heart to his throat, and he spun back quickly, seeing the woman standing about two meters away.

Pupils dilated, Su Changxing nearly suffocated in that split second, feeling the approach of death, instinctively knowing that being touched by this woman would not result in anything good.

The two remained motionless in the room, and Su Changxing could clearly see the texture of her skin, with similar thick keratin as a zombie, lips gray, and unable to see her eyes beneath her hair.

Does she not have eyes, or just can’t see them?

Through a short chaos, Su Changxing started retreating step by step, trying to see if she would continuously follow him.

Retreating through the passageway to the end, the woman moved in sync, like a marionette.

When he exited the passage into the outer hall, Su Changxing felt the space around him suddenly open up, and the chill in his heart dissipated. The disheveled woman abruptly vanished from the space.

"What is this? A spirit? A ghost?"

Su Changxing shook his head; he distinctly felt that she was something real, something with a tangible body.

Sorting his thoughts, he crossed the passageway again, entering the hall, scanning around, and the woman did not reappear.

Cautiously moving forward, when he approached one of the dissection tables, the woman reappeared by the wall, like two different frames of a movie, without any warning, quite abruptly.

Thinking for a moment, Su Changxing roughly concluded, "As long as I don’t turn my back on this thing, it should be fine."

Maintaining an orientation facing the woman against the wall, Su Changxing walked around the room, discovering she consistently kept a fixed distance from him.

"This method seems feasible, just looks a bit odd with this posture."

Su Changxing moved sideways across the hall, like a crab, albeit peculiar, it was the only way he could operate here.

Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to calm down, ignoring the woman by the wall, and picked up another clipboard on the dissection table, reading:

"Power user, affects mental state.

Because of their ability, their brains undergo corresponding changes, the cerebellum exceedingly developed, cerebral cortex more than twice as thick as ordinary humans.

Conclusion: Abilities impact the bodies of the power users, but it’s not the bodily changes that give rise to abilities."

Su Changxing casually set it down; though useful, it wasn’t what he was looking for.

Then he noticed five or six bottles of unknown potions on the counter with a label, "Failures, incapable of resisting transformation."

Resisting transformation?

Su Changxing suspected that the transformation here referred to infection, mystical influence; the experimenter seemed to be researching ways to resist this infection.