Colección Hiromi

Capítulo 30

Something must have happened to He Xi, but it doesn't seem like an easy task for that man to move a beautiful, uncooperative woman out of the village without alerting the other villagers. That's why I didn't chase after him; I think He Xi should still be in this house.

It can't be... it can't be that she's already...

Since even her phone is now in someone else's hands, all possibilities must be considered.

It's much easier to hide the dead than the living.

The Luo family's yard was very large. I walked around the house, looking for signs that the soil had been turned over.

I carefully examined every inch of land, praying in my heart that I wouldn't actually see anything. Then... I looked up and saw a small mound of earth.

I was startled, but then immediately relaxed. Burying someone isn't about digging a hole; only digging a cellar involves piling the soil outside.

A cellar? My eyes lit up; farmhouses in Northeast China usually have cellars.

But after walking around the house, I still couldn't see the entrance to the cellar. So what was this pile of dirt for?

It wasn't actually a pile of soil, but rather two piles of soil, one large and one small, leaning against each other, with a shovel next to them.

Something felt off, so I slowly examined every plant and tree in the yard, eventually fixing my gaze on the mound of earth.

Why are there two piles? Why aren't they piled together?

I bent down to pick up the shovel and shoveled the soil from the small mound to one side. On the third shovel stroke, the shovel head hit hard metal and made a clanging sound.

I quickly shoveled and swept the small mound of dirt to level it, revealing a round iron cellar lid underneath.

I couldn't help but feel a surge of joy. The iron lid was secured with a bolt, so why pile dirt on top of it? Nobody usually comes here, and they wouldn't use such a clumsy method to hide it. There's only one reason for doing this—to prevent any sound from getting out.

If I'm not mistaken, He Xi was down there. When she was first trapped, she must have tried to smash the iron cover with something. Although she couldn't break it open, it made a sound, which is why that guy piled dirt on top of it.

I pulled open the latch, grabbed the handle, moved the iron cover aside, and shouted down, "He Xi!" "Na Duo!" A familiar voice came from below, full of surprise and joy.

A surge of ecstasy gripped me in an instant. I glanced briefly at the location of the ladder, then plunged in headfirst, sliding down a meter or so before jumping down without a care how deep it was.

As my excitement gradually subsided, I realized that I was holding He Xi tightly in my arms.

She lowered her head, her hair brushing against my nose. This brush with death instantly brought us closer.

Even through her thickest winter clothes, I could still feel her heart beating. I tightened my grip on her, then moved my arms up to support her shoulders.

She looked up, her eyes still red.

"Oh dear, your face is all smeared." I laughed and reached out to wipe her face.

He Xi chuckled, stepped back to escape my grasp, and wiped her face with the back of her hand.

"Didn't expect me to show up, did you?" "Tch, what's so surprising? Did you see my phone?" Her voice was slightly hoarse, after all, she hadn't been in water for a long time.

I took out my phone and handed it to her.

"I threw it out on purpose. That guy must have used this phone. I guessed you'd find this place, so I left it to warn you. I just didn't expect you to get here so quickly." I was so anxious, how could I not fly over right away? I knew you wouldn't cut off communication for so long for no reason. You haven't had any food or water for over a day, have you? Let's go out.

"Wait a minute, you're already starving, but you can still hold on. Let me show you something."

The cellar was about twenty square meters in size and rectangular. The place I came down from was higher, about two and a half meters above the ground, and the ground sloped downwards further in. There were earthen walls on all sides, and a wooden plank was laid on the top, with a bare light bulb hanging from it, emitting a yellow light that illuminated the entire cellar.

He Xi, holding a large flashlight, led me to the deepest part of this cellar. It turned out that He Xi had arrived in Qian Gou Village yesterday morning, asked about Luo Er's residence, and then came to knock on the door.

The man was captivated by her stunning beauty and took her to the cellar to assault her. However, He Xi had studied Taekwondo, and I had just had a minor fight with the man, so I knew he was quite mediocre. As a result, when the two of us started wrestling, He Xi actually gained the upper hand.

The man, after being hit several times, realized he couldn't win and fled to the surface. By the time He Xi realized something was wrong, it was too late. Finding no foothold on the ladder in the cellar, she was kicked several times by the man, who then slammed the iron lid shut, sealing the exit. It seemed the man planned to starve He Xi for a few days until she was too weak to resist before opening the lid.

Fortunately, He Xi had a clever idea. Seeing that she couldn't rush out, she had a flash of inspiration and threw her phone up through the gap before the metal cover closed. Sure enough, the person was eager to use it, changed the SIM card, and used it for himself, but I... recognized it immediately.

In fact, the man who was temporarily looking after the house had never met Zhao Ziqiang before, but the cellar he took He Xi to was really strange.

Before Luo Er died suddenly, he planned to dig his cellar bigger. Unexpectedly, after digging for a short while, he discovered that there was another world under his house.

He Xi took me to see the cave entrance, which Luo Er had dug out. It was the entrance to this mysterious place. "I suspect Zhao Ziqiang has been down here." He Xi and I walked to the cave entrance, where there was a bamboo ladder.

"What's down there?" I stared at the gaping, dark maw, like the menacing mouth of a monster.

“A secret experimental base of Unit 731,” He Xi replied in a low voice.

"Unit 731?!" I exclaimed, "The infamous Unit 731, the Japanese germ warfare unit during their invasion of China?" He Xi was already climbing down the ladder. She beckoned to me: "Come down, you won't believe what I found here."

During the Japanese occupation, the Kwantung Army built a large number of underground fortifications, which crisscrossed the entire Northeast Plain. Most of these underground structures still lie quietly underground to this day, undiscovered.

The headquarters of Unit 73L was located in Harbin. At the time, their reach extended throughout the puppet state of Manchukuo, where they established numerous laboratories, captured large numbers of Chinese people, and used human subjects to experiment on which bacteria and viruses were most suitable for biological weapons. Their inhumane human experiments ultimately yielded a wealth of experimental data, to the point that even after the war, the United States wanted to purchase these experimental results from Japan.

Unit 731 remains a source of eternal pain for the Chinese people, and the Japanese also shunned this unit after the war.

Much about this unit has not been revealed, including many secret experiments. Because the retreat order was issued too hastily, only the researchers could be evacuated, and some experimental equipment and important data could not be destroyed, and were left forever under this black soil.

The place where He Xi and I are now groping around in the dim light of a flashlight is such an experimental base.

Below the collapsed cave entrance was an extremely messy workshop. He Xi had come down several times, but the flashlight battery was running low. If it weren't for the lamp in the cellar above that could still shine some light through the cave entrance, the flashlight alone wouldn't have been enough.

A faint halo of light slowly swept around, passing over collapsed earth and rocks, overturned cabinets and wooden shelves, shards of glass containers, crooked tables and half-open drawers, and papers and notebooks scattered everywhere.

All of this slowly emerged from the dark yellow halo, only to fade back into the darkness once more. One can imagine the haste and panic of the Japanese researchers who evacuated from this place, and how that sense of despair, separated by more than sixty years, slowly resurfaced in this eerie underground.

I picked up a piece of paper, wanting to see what was written on it, and gestured for Ke Xi to shine the flashlight over.

"Do you understand Japanese?" she asked.

"I don't understand." I said, throwing the paper back on the ground.

He Xi's flashlight beam stopped in one place.

“Look over there,” she said.

In the corner she was looking at, there was a row of more than ten wooden crates.

I walked over and found that all the wooden crates were open. He Xi walked beside me and shone her flashlight on one of the crates.

“This…” I squatted down and took the things out of the box.

"Tai Sui?" I turned to look at He Xi, and she nodded.

"The environment here is almost completely enclosed. These Tai Sui have not grown since they were born. They may have even shrunk slightly, but they are definitely still alive."

In the dim light of the flashlight, the Tai Sui in my hand was a dark brownish-black color, and its texture was similar to the Tai Sui found in Xinjingyuan. It weighed about four or five pounds, but its appearance was different from the previous two.

Looking at the other boxes, except for one that was empty, each of the other boxes contained a Tai Sui, the strangest of which was shaped like a curved, thin stick.

The Tai Sui is like living internal organs! I thought of He Xi's theory about the Tai Sui. After the internal organs undergo genetic changes, they are activated one by one, like carp leaping over the Dragon Gate, vying to squeeze out of their body cavities, causing the host that originally depended on them to explode and die.

So where do these Tai Sui come from?

Isn't this the experimental base of Unit 73L? Could it be that they were conducting such experiments back then?

When He Xi noticed that I had noticed the slender Tai Sui, she said to me, "This Tai Sui was originally a woman's large intestine."

I immediately felt an urge to vomit.

"Large intestine? Can the large intestine become a Tai Sui?"

"Intestines are also internal organs; there's a Japanese label on the wooden box. Not only intestines, but also things you wouldn't expect."

"What?"

"brain."

"The brain? How could even the brain become a supernatural being? Where is that thing?"

He Xi pointed her flashlight at a wooden box.

It was that one and only empty box.

"Why is it empty?"

"I think it was taken by Zhao Ziqiang."

"Zhao Ziqiang, he's been here? Are you sure?" My heart clenched as soon as I heard that name.

"It's almost certainly true. I found some work diaries..."

"Wait, you understand spoken language?"

"Yeah, so what?" He Xi looked at me, puzzled. "Is that so strange?"

"Uh, it's nothing, you can continue," I said, waving my hand sheepishly.

I wonder how many foreign languages she knows; it's really putting some pressure on me...

"At the time, Unit 731 conducted experiments that could almost be described as insane, releasing all sorts of bacteria and viruses into the human body to observe the human's reactions, trying to identify the most ferocious ones for use as biological weapons. In these experiments, new types of bacteria and viruses were constantly being cultivated, and in this experimental base, a research team accidentally cultivated a virus that could kill people in a short time, and the manner of death was extremely horrific. Considering that such a method of death could be extremely effective against the enemy on the battlefield, the entire experimental base quickly turned to researching this virus."

“Fanciers virus!” I blurted out.

Unexpectedly, He Xi shook his head: "I've looked at some scattered information and think it's somewhat different from the Fanovirus. But they arrive at the same goal through different methods, yet both modify that small segment of the gene, so the symptoms of those infected are quite similar to the Fanovirus. The first viruses cultivated all had to be injected into the experimental subjects to be effective, and they were not contagious between people. This research base spent two years cultivating hundreds of variants, and finally cultivated a highly infectious virus variant. They conducted an infectious experiment, placing one patient among a hundred people. They only had general contact with each other, and within three days, all the participants in the experiment died, without exception."

"Unit 731..." I murmured. It was terrifying. This was even more contagious than the Fanzi virus outbreak at Xinjingyuan. I wonder how many Chinese people died because of this experiment.

"Fortunately, just as the research institute successfully developed the virus and was about to report it to 73L headquarters, Japan was defeated." He Xi seemed to breathe a sigh of relief as she said this. Such a thing, if used on the battlefield, would be ten thousand times more terrifying than sarin gas.

"So these Tai Sui?"

"Among the hundreds of variants they created, a few variants would turn the test subjects' internal organs into Tai Sui, with a fairly high probability. One test subject even slammed his head against the wall in agony as he died, shattering his skull, and then it was discovered that his brain had also turned into Tai Sui. Of course, the researchers didn't know what this was; all their energy was focused on studying infectious viruses, and they simply preserved these Tai Sui for future research when they had time."

“Look at those test tubes,” He Xi said, pointing with her flashlight.

On a fallen wooden shelf were numerous round holes, specifically for inserting glass test tubes. Although it was overturned, some test tubes were still inserted, but many more were scattered around, many broken.

“Those test tubes contain viruses, and different test tubes contain different variants. The dead Luo Er must have broken one of the test tubes. It was summer, and he wasn’t wearing many clothes, so he must have been cut by glass shards.”

"How can you be so sure he even had a cut?" I asked, puzzled.

"If the test tube he broke contained the institute's final research result—a highly contagious virus—do you think China would still be so peaceful now?" "Thank God," I said thankfully. "So, what about Zhao Ziqiang?" "Yesterday I learned from that guy that someone had been in this house while it was empty, but nothing was missing. Considering Zhao Ziqiang had come here to investigate, it must be him. He's annoying, but he's definitely intelligent and meticulous, so it's impossible he didn't notice this place. More importantly, there are several cabinets here containing extremely complete experimental records, with specific records for each variant, but the record for the last highly contagious variant is missing." I was about to speak when He Xi gestured for me to continue listening to her.

"You think the researchers might have taken it with them when they left? But I learned from one of the researchers' work logs that after the experiment was successful, they made a copy and submitted it to Unit 731 when they reported to headquarters. And it's not just the record of that one variant that's missing; records about several variants that are highly prone to producing Tai Sui are also gone. Think about it, if they didn't even take those Tai Sui with them when they left, why would they only take this fortress's written materials?" "So, it can only be Zhao Ziqiang." I nodded.

"I just can't understand why he didn't take any of the other Tai Sui, but only took the one that turned into a brain."

“What’s so hard to guess?” I said. “Actually, he probably wants to take them all, but the written materials are already quite heavy, and each of these Tai Sui has some weight. If he could only take one, which Tai Sui would you choose?” “The brain.” He Xi answered without hesitation. “After all, the structure of the brain is much more complex than other organs, and the Tai Sui formed from the brain has much greater research value than other Tai Sui.” “That settles it?” I said. “But why do they value Tai Sui so much?” He Xi shook his head.

“I bet their research on Tai Sui is far more in-depth than that of your Heller International lab that specializes in studying Tai Sui.” “Perhaps I know too little about that lab,” He Xi said, her voice tinged with sadness.

She has discovered that there is still much she doesn't know about Heller International.

I didn't want to continue this topic that would upset her, so I glanced around the studio again and said, "I think I see a passage over there. Where does it lead?" "Do you want to go take a look?" I followed He Xi, carefully avoiding the area surrounded by test tube fragments. Although I was dressed warmly, it was still best to avoid it if possible.

This is a narrow and low passageway, and we can only move forward by bending over.

After walking about ten meters, there was a space much larger than the previous studio, easily over a hundred square meters in size. It was divided in two by an iron fence, and behind the fence lay more than a dozen skeletons.

"This is an observation room. The test subjects, who were injected with a virus that posed little risk of infection, were kept behind iron bars. Further ahead should have been some enclosed experimental areas, but the passageway has collapsed, and we can't get there," He Xi said.