Book Synopsis
Book Tags
Donation Rankings
Comment
0 Comments
You May Also Like
墨書 Inktalez
Chapter 14: Love's Shadow
Medical alcohol ignited a small blue flame at the crack in my fingertip. As I counted the thirty-seventh equity agreement, the nib of my pen suddenly pierced the ballistic analysis diagram at the bottom of the page—Zhou Yi had drawn a parabolic curve in red ballpoint pen, which was now being consumed by black ink, twisting into a distorted worm. The ink crawled up the hasty annotation "Caution: Safety First," making a turn at the clause "Voluntary Renunciation of Inheritance Rights," resembling the trajectory of that 7.62mm bullet as it passed through his left lung.
Lin Yichen's mechanical fingers tapped against the marble surface, the titanium alloy joints clashing with it, producing a sound like hail hitting windows. The sound of a gurney rolling from the adjacent morgue mixed in, grinding out two parallel blood trails in the scent of disinfectant. The red rose he threw knocked over a mug, cold coffee spreading across the table like the final fluctuations of a fetal heart monitor. "Verify embryo data at twelve o'clock sharp." As the hem of his suit brushed against my hand, the alarm from the cold storage suddenly pierced my eardrum, causing my temples to throb.
Rainwater on the gravestone mingled with the rusty smell of the mortuary. I knelt and counted those bullet holes, my fingers gliding over the uneven surface of the stone as if tracing Zhou Yi's scar beneath his ribs. The thorns of a lily stem pricked my palm, droplets of blood rolling down from "Died in Service," pooling between his birth and death years. 1985-2023; that string of numbers suddenly cracked open, spilling forth the blood foam that had choked him in his final moments.
"Iris replication rate 72.3%, heart rate deviation..." I whispered to the bullet holes at the edge of the gravestone, and as my nails dug into the crevices of the bluestone, I recalled the moment when the incubator exploded. The suffocating sensation of amniotic fluid flooding my nostrils surged up my spine, my damp shirt clinging to a twenty-centimeter sutured scar on my back—Lin Yichen had stitched it up with a mechanical arm, leaving behind stitches that still bore traces of an 8.7 MPa pressure from a military suturing device.
Dark red liquid seeping from oak barrels in the wine cellar crawled across the floor tiles. When Lin Yichen shattered his eighth Burgundy glass, the alarm from the cold storage abruptly switched to a fetal heartbeat's rhythmic thump. "The liquid nitrogen chamber was set to minus 196 degrees Celsius back then..." He staggered over, tugging at his tie, his metallic knuckles fitting precisely into the groove of my collarbone suture like surgical clamps gripping an unhealed artery.
His thumb smeared with Cabernet Sauvignon brushed against my lower lip, disinfectant mixed with single malt whiskey spraying onto my carotid sinus. "Sadness index 83%, pheromone concentration within standard limits." His canine teeth grazed over an unhealed injection site on my gland; red light from his military prosthetic eye swept across my pupils. "Enough to awaken Experiment No. 003's instinct for slaughter."
As shards of glass cut into his wrist, three embryo monitoring screens suddenly lit up in the reflection of the wine cabinet mirror. Pale golden blood twisted into a double helix on the bar counter, perfectly overlapping with coded blueprints from Zhou Yi's tactical manual. "Push harder, darling!" He pressed my hand against an old bullet hole in his chest, where sutures began to reveal wrinkles reminiscent of Mother’s skirt when she fell—woven polyester fabric from 1998 showing its unique weave pattern.
In that moment when darkness engulfed the wine cellar, emergency lights illuminated his pupils like swirling DNA strands. "Hatred is the best pet to nurture." He licked at droplets of blood seeping from my palm; shards of broken bottles crumbled under his grip as they fell into a whirlpool of memories—the saline taste flooding over my retina when the incubator burst, mixed with frost flowers exploding from liquid nitrogen tubes.
Morning light pierced through bullet holes in bulletproof glass as I felt for a liquid nitrogen tube in Lin Yichen's suit pocket. The signature "Zhou Yi" on the label twisted and warped under ultraviolet light, merging into his newly stitched barcode reading "003" on his nape. When the cold storage alarm rang for the seventh time, fetal heartbeat sounds transformed into a long wail from a heart monitor, echoing with the same rhythm as gurney wheels rolling through the morgue.
"You are thirty-seven times more durable than third-generation incubators." I kicked away a red wine stain at my feet; shards of glass emitted a fragile sound akin to an infant's cry beneath my military boots. Lin Yichen slid down against the wine cabinet; pale golden liquid seeping from his chest was piecing together star maps from Mother's diary—on September 9th, 1999, she had sketched Orion's belt with her ballpoint pen.
As frost flowers crept up on bulletproof glass, an eighth alarm rang out from cold storage. Frosted glass reflected three pairs of swirling irises; cold air from a tactical dagger slithered along palm lines into an unsealed wound in my abdomen, where military absorbable sutures burned with a unique sting at 37 degrees Celsius.
.
Comment 0 Comment Count