Chapter 217: In the Shadow of the Tower
The night was fading, and the sky was turning a sickly gray. Su Wanqing was lying on the edge of the ruined top floor of an office building, with broken cement pieces poking her elbows.
She raised the telescope and aimed the lens at the tall signal tower in the distance.
The base of the tower was a heavily fortified military restricted area. At least two teams were conducting cross-patrol missions around the tower base. The soldiers were wrapped in heavy biochemical protective suits, and the thermal imagers mounted on their rifles flashed red in the morning light.
Their movements were precise and mechanical, and any living creature that tried to get close could not escape their scanning.
More troublesome than the military were another group of people. Outside the military defense line, in the shadows of collapsed buildings and abandoned vehicles, there were figures in black uniforms lurking.
They were members of the Dawn Organization. They had no fixed patrol routes, but like wild animals hunting for food, they occupied key observation points, quietly monitoring the movements of the military and any possible intruders.
The two forces do not interfere with each other, but together they form an invisible network.
Su Wanqing put down the telescope and spread out the hand-drawn map she found at the pharmacy.
The safe route marked on the map has become a joke under the double blockade.
How is she going to get in?
Just as she lowered her head to think, trying to plan a new path for breakthrough in her mind, the core container in her arms suddenly vibrated violently.
A burning sensation came from the core, and the lavender light shone through the clothes, becoming extremely bright in an instant.
She felt a strong dizziness, and the air around her was twisting and fluctuating like boiling water.
The scene in front of me blurred, and then reassembled again. The world did not change, but this office building and the signal tower in the distance were all still at this moment.
The patrolling soldiers maintained their legs raised in the posture. In the distance, a flying bird froze in mid-air. Even the dust floating in the air stopped.
Everything was frozen in time.
Her gaze was uncontrollably drawn to the top of the signal tower, where an entrance that was impossible to see normally appeared out of nowhere.
It was a circular opening with a blue halo around the edge. The flowing pattern on the halo was exactly the same as the jade bracelet on her wrist.
This state of stillness only lasted about thirty seconds, and then the world returned to normal.
The soldiers continued their patrols and birds flew across the sky as if nothing had happened.
The entrance at the top of the tower also disappeared without a trace.
Su Wanqing understood that this was the real entrance.
She put away the map, turned around and prepared to leave the rooftop, but stopped at the stairs.
In the shadows below, there stood a man, also wearing the black uniform of the Dawn Organization.
It was a young woman. She didn't raise her gun or sound any alarm.
The woman saw Su Wanqing stop, raised her hand, and gestured quickly with a simple sign language.
Su Wanqing understood the general meaning: “Ta is not who you think he is.
He is using you to open the door to reincarnation."
After the gesture, the woman untied a black storage device the size of a matchbox from her waist and threw it forcefully towards Su Wanqing's feet.
The device bounced twice on the ground, making a slight sound. When Su Wanqing looked up again, the woman codenamed "Que" had disappeared into the shadow of the building like a ghost.
She picked up the storage device but didn't check it immediately. Instead, she followed the instructions for another alternate route on the map and found an inconspicuous sewer entrance.
There are disagreements within the Dawn organization, which may be an opportunity for her, but for now, she must first get rid of the surveillance outside.
Unscrewing the heavy manhole cover, a foul smell hit her face. Without hesitation, she climbed down the rusty iron ladder.
In the dark, she connected the storage device to the interface of the jade bracelet.
An encrypted video was forcibly cracked and the picture popped out.
The scene is a blurry laboratory. A voice sounds, very similar to that in "Night", but younger and less emotional: "S-7 prototype connected successfully, memory transfer begins, this will be the perfect carrier... The next stage requires the activation of the time anchor..." The picture is interrupted after shaking violently, and the last frame is a clear Orion project logo.
Night, or Venn, had a much deeper connection to the Orion Project than she had imagined.
She closed the video and continued to move forward in the sewer. The waist-deep sewage was freezing cold, and every step was extremely difficult.
After walking for an unknown amount of time, she stopped. On the wall in front of her, there were densely packed strange mutants.
They have no eyes or limbs, and are like living, flesh-colored Braille reliefs, quietly attached to the wall, swaying slightly with the water flow.
Su Wanqing remembered the description of this creature in the information: they are extremely sensitive to sound.
She accidentally kicked a stone under the water, making a slight noise.
In an instant, all the "reliefs" on the wall stopped shaking and turned towards her.
She immediately held her breath and dared not move. She could feel countless invisible senses scanning her, and any unnecessary movement could lead to a fatal attack.
Time passed minute by minute, the cold sewage continued to consume her physical strength, and her muscles began to ache and tremble due to long-term stiffness.
She felt several times that she could not hold on any longer and was about to faint in the foul-smelling sewage.
She could only grit her teeth and focus all her attention on maintaining her body balance.
I don’t know how long it took, maybe an hour, maybe longer.
The mutants on the wall seemed to confirm that the threat had disappeared and resumed their slow, rhythmic shaking.
Their activity cycle was over. Su Wanqing dared to move slowly, little by little, and slipped past them.
Following the instructions on the map, she climbed out from an upward exit.
This is already the basement area of the signal tower. However, the joy was short-lived.
She found that all the doors leading to the upper floors were sealed from the outside with heavy alloy, leaving no gaps at all.
Was it another dead end? Just when she felt desperate, an inconspicuous maintenance panel in the corner caught her attention.
The metal plate was almost the same color as the surrounding walls, but there was a tiny symbol carved into it with some sharp object.
The moment she saw the symbol, Su Wanqing's breathing paused. It was a corner of a seven-pointed star pattern, exactly the same as the mark she had seen in her broken dream before.
She walked forward and pressed the panel hard based on her instinct. There was no password, no lock, and the metal plate popped open with a click.
There was no complicated circuit inside, but a dark, narrow passage that went vertically upwards and could only barely accommodate one person.
An old manual elevator shaft, a secret passage deliberately left.
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