Task 4
Thinking of the crooked line of bloody words, Korra's vision began to blur again.
"Brother Lin." He sniffed, "Trust me, I won't hurt her."
Lin Zhouze clenched his back teeth and couldn't utter a suitable curse word for a long time.
He suspected that Korra had finally reached her rebellious phase, and that she was the smart-aleck type, so he said, "If you really don't want to tell me, you should have denied it outright and said you knew nothing about it."
Even though she knew Lin Zhouze couldn't see, Korra didn't want to cry in front of him, so she stared up with her eyes wide open.
He had finally stopped crying, but when he heard these words that sounded like words used to teach a child, his eyes immediately became sore again.
Lin Zhouze persuaded himself for a long time, and finally suppressed the urge to take action. He said, "You want me to trust you, but I have evidence."
Korra is a simple and straightforward person who can't hide things most of the time. Lin Zhouze and Lan are very clear about this.
So when Lin Zhouze heard the words "I'm going back to the research center now, can you trust me, Brother Lin?", he just felt funny and helpless.
Korra didn't understand what he meant as usual, but this at least proved one thing - he really didn't mean to harm Satsuki.
But at the same time, this also means that starting from Korra is doomed to get no useful information.
Lin Zhouze realized that there must be someone behind this matter, and Xiaoyue was most likely in that person's hands.
The female clerk's voice came: "Hello, the same coffee you ordered is ready, please be careful with your hands." As she said that, she carefully placed the cup just right away from Lin Zhouze.
Lin Zhouze came back to his senses from deep thought, reached out and pushed the cup forward, and said to Korra: "After you finish drinking, you can go back. Without my permission, don't leave the research center for the time being."
...
After Korra walked out of the door, looking back every three steps, Lin Zhouze once again retrieved the memories of the past nine days from the brain chip.
But this time he shifted his focus to the city of Nigra itself.
=
On December 1st, he and Lan conducted a transformation experiment on Xiaoyue. Soon after, something unexpected happened to Ying Yungui. In addition, Lan sent a message that night: "I have abnormal symptoms, some of them are serious. Don't return to the research center for the next few days."
So he basically spent the next few days at Ying Yungui's place cleaning up the mess.
Lin Zhouze thought that Lan became ill because he was accidentally contaminated by the chimera's energy during the few seconds of exposure during the transformation process, so he would never go back and cause trouble at that time.
But on the other hand, he also neglected Korra and Satsuki in his busyness.
On December 8, that is, yesterday morning, when he walked into the research center again, he immediately found something wrong.
After multiple checks, Lin Zhouze confirmed that Korra and Xiaoyue were indeed not inside, and their energy had disappeared for several days.
He tracked Korra to Area 5, but strangely, he couldn't find any trace of Xiaoyue - someone deliberately deleted all the information related to her in the experimental subject database.
So Lin Zhouze immediately retrieved all the traces of Korra's whereabouts in Nigra City, and finally locked his target on a cafe.
The cafe is the most obvious abnormal point among Korra's few activities in Nigra City.
Lin Zhouze rushed to Nigra overnight and found this cafe...
"Hello, we're closed. Sorry." When the girl's voice, which was obviously a little tired, came, Lin Zhouze was standing at the door of the cafe in a daze.
"Oh, oh." He couldn't find the source of the sound at first, and looked around. "Okay."
The female clerk immediately noticed his visual impairment and spoke in a softer tone: "If you need, you can come in and rest first."
Lin Zhouze finished scanning the data for this area and recorded the girl's information. He said, "Thank you, but I won't need you. I'll come back tomorrow."
Then he came here again before noon today, chose a corner by the wall and the window and sat there for most of the afternoon, waiting for Korra to appear.
He knew Korra would come today.
=
"Hello?" After noticing that Korra had left, the female clerk observed Lin Zhouze with a bit of confusion for a while, then came up and asked in a low voice, "Excuse me...are you and Korra friends?"
Lin Zhouze looked up: "Yes, what's wrong?"
The female clerk breathed a sigh of relief and said, "Well, the store ran into some trouble a while ago, and thanks to him passing by and helping me out, I haven't formally thanked him yet."
"If possible, could you please tell him I'd like to invite him to dinner? Of course, the place and time are up to him."
Lin Zhouze thought for a moment and agreed: "I can help you convey it, but why don't you talk to him in person? Doesn't he come here often?"
Where he couldn't see, the girl's face was hot.
"Every time he came before, the store was always busy, so I was always unable to get away."
"Everyone must have been at the auction these past couple of days, so it's rare to have some free time." She suddenly felt a little embarrassed. "But just now, I saw that you seemed to have something important to discuss, so..."
Lin Zhouze caught some information and asked, "Auction? Can you tell me more about it?"
"Oh, wait a moment." The girl glanced outside, then walked over, flipped over the "Open" sign, closed the door, and came back to sit opposite Lin Zhouze.
"At the end of every quarter, Nigra City holds an auction, but it might be a little different from other places..."
Lin Zhouze curled his fingers under the table and asked, "Why is it different?"
“It’s more like a charity than an auction. Many of the items are given away for free to residents of the old town, so everyone loves to go.”
Lin Zhouze listened to her story, his fingers loosening and then tightening.
An hour later, he declined the girl's offer to accompany him and came to the so-called "auction" alone.
The crowd in the central square had dispersed. Lin Zhouze stood downwind and tried to extract some special information during the scanning process, but failed.
All the data showed him that the auction was normal.
The thin layer of sweat on Lin Zhouze's back had dried up almost completely, just enough to feel the coolness.
He thought for a moment and dialed an internal contact number.
"It's me, where are you?"
"I have something to discuss with you. Can you come to District 5?"
"Well, don't tell her."
——
On the way back to the research center, Korra was uneasy.
He didn't expect to meet Lin Zhouze in the cafe.
"Although Brother Lin let me go, did he guess something? What should I do next?" Korra nervously grabbed her trouser legs and didn't notice someone sitting down next to her.
"Your pants are dirty, would you like to wipe them?" A pack of wet wipes was handed to him. Korra turned around and saw the man wearing sunglasses sitting next to him waving at him. "Do you want some?"
He took it in a daze, said "thank you" in a daze, then lowered his head to open the wet wipes.
Don't worry, she's gone safely. Just forget about it and go back to your normal life.
There was another line of small words below: "Thank you Korra, goodbye." It was written by Xiaoyue.
Korra turned around in surprise, only to find that the man in sunglasses had disappeared at some point.
The coffee and milk stains that had been spilled on the pants adhered to the wet wipes, and the words on them gradually disappeared.
Korra clutched the wipes tightly, thinking back to the day she first met that man.
——
After becoming an experimental subject, Xiaoyue did not show any anger or sadness. Instead, Korra was depressed for several days.
Lin Zhouze has not returned to the research center since he left on the 1st, and Lan has not appeared for several days, as if they have all forgotten about Xiaoyue.
Korra walked around the base to relax, something on her mind, and before she knew it, she was in an unfamiliar place.
"This is..." There was a wilderness all around, and the setting sun in the distance was shining on the mountaintops, which made the place even more desolate.
"This is the 'garbage dump'." Suddenly a voice appeared. Korra turned around and saw a strange man standing behind her.
"Garbage dump?" Korra squatted down, grabbed a handful of dirt, rubbed it in her palm for a few times, and then looked at the man suspiciously, "The soil here doesn't look like a garbage dump. Besides, who are you?"
The man glanced toward the top of the hill and said calmly, "Me? Same as you. But the garbage dump I'm talking about isn't the kind you think it is."
"Want to go over and take a look?"
Korra shook off the remaining dirt in her hand and said, "I'm not interested. What's so interesting about a garbage dump?" Then she turned around and wanted to leave.
At this time, the man chuckled and said, "Aren't you worried about her? Are you really not going to go and see her?"
Korra paused in her movement, turning her head stiffly to examine the man's face. He looked ordinary, the kind you'd miss if you tossed him into a crowd.
But Korra felt strangely familiar.
"What do you know? Who are you?" Logically, he should have been hostile to this person, but he didn't.
The man didn't seem to care about the slight unkindness in Korra's tone. He shook his head and said, "I said, I am a mutant like you. As for what I know..."
He suddenly took two steps forward and stood closer to Korra: "I heard that the research center urgently received a new experimental subject a few days ago. The person in charge personally made the transformation. I guess it must be you."
"You may not understand, but once a test subject enters here, unless there's a major malfunction or permission is granted from above, they can never leave."
Korra frowned, took two steps back and said, "Why are you telling me this?"
The man pointed in the direction of the setting sun. "Your experimental subject's energy source is a defective one, the lowest quality here. The average lifespan of someone like her at the research center is no more than three years, and their ultimate fate is..."
He raised his eyebrows and said, "That's it."
Korra's already low mood was made even darker by these words.
He squeezed his palm, where the touch of sand still remained.
"You just said it was a garbage dump. Does that mean she is garbage to this place too?"
The man remained silent, but seemed to have guessed Korra's reaction.
"Then I'd like to see what this garbage dump you mentioned looks like."
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