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墨書 Inktalez
The news building was shrouded in the low pressure before the storm, and Jiang Ming's shirt collar was soaked with sweat. He looked up at the revolving glass door above the steps, the fragmented light reflecting off it reminding him of the pupils submerged in culture medium back in the lab—cold and inorganic, just like that.
"The temperature sensor shows your heart rate has reached 112 beats per minute," Xiao Ya suddenly spoke, her fingertips unconsciously rubbing the silver bracelet on her left wrist. It was a prototype they had salvaged from the Third Laboratory, now flickering with a ghostly blue light.
Jiang Ming loosened his tie with a bitter smile. "I thought removing the tracking chip would free me from this thing." His gaze swept over the pack of reporters circling like hyenas at the foot of the steps; a figure wearing a baseball cap made his pupils constrict sharply. Three days ago, in a warehouse by the docks, it was under that very brim that a poisoned bolt had been shot at him.
Xiao Ya noticed his stiffness and suddenly pressed her icy fingers into his palm. The joints that had been implanted with nano-chips glowed an unnatural pale blue, yet now they burst forth with incredible strength. "Do you remember the number we saw in the ventilation duct?" she whispered, "When the red indicator lights up to seven..."
"All data from Zone Seven will sync to the servers of twenty-seven national parliaments via the dark web." Jiang Ming completed her thought, swallowing hard on the last part—this was the ultimate insurance bought with the lives of twelve informants.
The revolving door suddenly emitted a mechanical roar as Xu Zhenlin, dressed in a dark gray three-piece suit, strode out. A peculiar white camellia pinned to his left chest reminded Jiang Ming of Lin Xue, an informant who had gone missing three weeks ago. The girl who always wore a camellia hairpin had last messaged him about discovering "the nightingales raised by the White Coats."
"Thank you all for coming," Xu Zhenlin's voice boomed through hidden microphones, startling a flock of pigeons resting on the building's dome. Jiang Ming noticed his fingers trembling as he held a document; a faint crimson mark peeked from its edge—Lin Xue's signature wax seal.
As terms like "Human Neural Interface Technology" and "Consciousness Cage Project" exploded in the conference hall, Xiao Ya's device on her wrist suddenly buzzed. A holographic projection automatically displayed a three-dimensional map, with seven crimson dots converging towards the news building. Jiang Ming reached for the electromagnetic pulse device disguised as a pen at his waist but heard a familiar cough behind him.
"You need to upgrade your anti-tracking program," Li Ming emerged from behind a stone pillar, leaning on an ornate cane. His eyes behind glasses glanced toward the southeast alleyway. "Target Three is equipped with a new brainwave disruptor that can induce collective hallucinations within ten seconds."
As if to validate his words, the crowd erupted into waves of panic. The laboratory footage playing on the big screen distorted grotesquely, and barcodes on subjects' necks began to reassemble into a logo of some multinational corporation. Jiang Ming felt an old injury on his neck start to burn; it was where branding iron had seared away what used to be "X-017."
"Now for a special announcement!" Xu Zhenlin suddenly raised his voice, and the screen behind him switched to an emergency room scene. An elderly man covered in tubes was convulsing; the name "Zhou Mingyuan" on his bedside card sent shockwaves through the audience—this was indeed the name of the chief scientist of that corporation.
Xiao Ya suddenly pulled Jiang Ming back three steps; her wrist projection displayed dense spectrograms. "Infrasound attack! Cover your ears!" Before she finished speaking, a nearby reporter threw down his camera and lunged at the podium with bloodshot eyes.
In the chaos, Jiang Ming saw Xu Zhenlin's white camellia fall to the ground, revealing a tiny storage device rolling out from its petals. He rolled away from a photographer who was madly biting his own arm but froze upon grasping the storage device—through blood-stained petals, he saw Lin Xue's emerald earrings embedded in Xu Zhenlin's lapel pin.
"B2 parking lot!" Li Ming smashed the glass of a fire hydrant with his cane; torrents of water temporarily shielded them from the frenzied crowd. As they rushed toward an emergency exit, Xiao Ya stumbled against a wall; blue fluorescent liquid was seeping from an old scar on her neck—this was an adverse reaction only triggered by exposure to the original virus strain.
In the underground garage, twenty-seven monitors flashed red lights. Each screen showed individuals adorned with camellias pressing play simultaneously in different cities. Jiang Ming finally understood Lin Xue's last message: "The nightingales will sing before dawn." These "nightingales," lying dormant for three years, were now pecking away at darkness across an entire continent.
As they burst out of the garage, rain finally poured down in torrents. Hundreds of drones formed an electronic curtain hovering over the city, looping altered corporate statements. Jiang Ming gripped the steering wheel tightly and caught sight of Xiao Ya injecting herself with a pale gold suppressant—extracted from cooling fluid used in Lab Seven’s mainframe; each use erased three days of her memory.
"To Old Port District," Li Ming wiped off jade dust from his cane's tip. "There's a fishing boat loaded with magnetic storm coils waiting there, along with..." He paused, "an old friend you met at Lab Seven."
As windshield wipers flailed wildly, Jiang Ming saw three green flares rise toward the coastline. This was their agreed signal with Team Crow Raven, indicating that the ultimate key to brain-machine interfaces had been cracked. The moment he pressed down on the accelerator, the car radio automatically began playing Chopin’s Prelude to Raindrops—a distress signal set by Lin Xue while she was alive.
In the passenger seat, Xiao Ya typed rapidly on a holographic keyboard. As her pupils adjusted due to her implanted chip, city grid maps overlapped dangerously with drone flight paths. When one coordinate finally locked onto their destination at the port warehouse, she suddenly wore a dazed smile. "Jiang Ming, do you remember when we first saw a real starry sky?"
As their SUV broke through the rain curtain, Jiang Ming recalled that night filled with formaldehyde scent. They had huddled in a lab ventilation duct, watching through blinds as projections of false starry skies flickered above them. Those simulated starlights created by neural currents were now being washed away into faded memories by real torrential rain.
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