“But…” Xuan Mo paused before saying, “you’ll need to be here sooner or later.”
“…Aye, alright then.” Rustling noises sounded from his end of the call, “thank goodness I’m in school, if not I’ll probably need to… y’know what, you go ahead with what you need to do first.”
Xuan Mo handed her phone to the soldier. The soldier replied before he went over to the communication room and pressed on a phone-like device, shouting: “Xiao Zhao! Open the door, someone wants to see the stone.”
There was no reply.
“He can’t possibly be asleep can it, it’s the first day.” The soldier complained before he shouted again. “The person has security clearance! Xiao Zhao! Open the door!”
“Open the door! Wake up!”
“Hurry open the door!”
The soldier finally felt that something was off after receiving no replies despite his persistent calls. He ran over and started banging on the basement door in a rush. Despite smashing at the door with force, the door remained closed; only the faint, muffled smashing sound of his slamming sounded.
He ran back to the intercom to shout. Even after consecutive calls, he received no replies.
He finally panicked. Unsure what to do, he continued shouting as he dialled for Yi Fei: “Chief! Xiao Zhao’s inside the basement but he isn’t replying me! I’m not sure if it’s the connection or if anything happen to him…” He suddenly looked at Xuan Mo, his gaze suspicious.
Xuan Mo crossed her arms as she stood. It was close to ten at night. The night breeze that swept past was chilly. When the night quietened down, she felt the fluctuations again, it was slow at times and fast at times, and it shook her mental net. The closer she was to the basement, the more evident it felt.
Zhao Jing Lei was the first to reach approximately ten minutes later; he’d driven over. He’d received the update with regards to the situation en route from the soldier. He walked over with an expression of gravity. He pressed his finger onto the discreet door lock. A beep sounded and the blue light blinked from the peephole; he placed his eye against the hole. Another beep sounded and the a crevice appeared at the door handle. He produced a card from his wallet and stuck it in.
The door to the basement slowly opened. Lights from within spilled out. Zhao Jing Lei was the only one that came face to face with the scene within the basement.
The lights within the basements were regular fluorescent lights, yet even the whitest of them paled in comparison to his bloodless face.
“This…” He started lowly, asking, “this… exactly what happened!?”
Xuan Mo didn’t move, she knew what had happened without even looking inside. What she was the most concerned about was the gushing energy fluctuation that spilled out when the door opened. Though the frequency remained the same, the vibration was much more significant, and it was to the point that even her body felt like trembling along with it.
She closed her eyes, memorising the frequency silently. One fast beat, two slow beats, two more slow beats, followed by three fast beats…
On the other end, the soldier was pressed against the door outside, yelling his lungs out: “Xiao Zhao! Xiao Zhao!” Without Zhao Jing Lei’s command, he didn’t dare enter.
Zhao Jing Lei didn’t take any further steps into the basement. Trembling, he looked at the horrifying dried corpse, before he turned to stare at the blinking gold stone.
The gold stone continued to blink, its light gradually dimming. Despite so, just that in itself felt piercing, as though it was provoking them, mocking them.
Yi Fei reached as well. Very soon, many other researchers arrived.
All of them got the scare of their lives by Xiao Zhao’s state of death. As a result of this incident, they seemed to have gathered a more updated understanding of the stone’s origins and purpose; they became more cautious and fearful of it too.
According to the Mass Identity Theorem, Xiao Zhao’s blood must still exist in some other form, but the golden stone didn’t become larger in size, neither did it become smoother. Apparently it had only blinked a few times… did that mean all the blood of a living human was only sufficient to generate this few blinks of light in this stone? Why did the stone light up? What could it mean?
“This student ran over at night and insisted that I open the door.” The soldier revealed that Xuan Mo was the source of this finding.
As expected, Xuan Mo soon got surrounded and flooded with questions. Her answer was simple though: “I felt that something was off so I came over. As for how I knew that, I don’t know.”
Those that didn’t know her didn’t know whether to believe her or not. Zhao Jing Lei on the other hand didn’t believe her at all. He pulled Xuan Mo to a corner and spoke gravely: “Xuan Mo, this is not the time to keep anything to yourself, I mean look at it, someone died, what if in future…”
“As long as you don’t feed the stone blood, this won’t happen.” Xuan Mo was sure. “What I don’t understand is, why would this soldier cut his palm to feed the stone his blood?”
Zhao Jing Lei was confused as well. Was this perhaps suggested by some of the researchers in the day?
After asking all the researchers however, they shared that none of them had come up with such an absurd idea. Just as he was puzzling over this, Xiao Zhao’s good friend, a soldier on duty upstairs, found this paragraph from a novel from Xiao Zhao’s browser history… the main character came across a stone that had been inscripted with mantra, and he made a pact with the stone with his blood in order to possess the powers within the stone.
“Goddamn!” Zhao Jing Lei cursed. He looked like he’d really wanted to smash that phone, but he held himself back in the end.
It was a dark night, but the Golden Stone building was lit throughout the entire night. The researchers brought the golden stone back into the research zone. Not a single trace of blood was found on the golden stone, it was almost as though it hadn’t sucked any.
Zhao Jing Lei arranged for some people to sort out Xiao Zhao’s funeral and related matters. His expression was incredibly poor. It’d never crossed his mind that such an innocent and simple research would result in casualties one day. He couldn’t help but regret intervening.
Yi Fei and the other researchers were sombre and grim as well. They looked at the golden stone, but this time, it was not with interest or enquiry, but with fear, hate and disgust.
This bloodsucking stone was like the evil incarnation in fictional stories; it seemed malevolent no matter how they looked at it.
“Xuan Mo. You said something felt off, what was it?” Kang Qiao asked softly. The shock from Xiao Zhao’s death had left him with a pale face. His voice couldn’t help but peak in volume owing to his anxiety.
The surrounding people staring at the stone perked their ears.
Xuan Mo looked down to arrange her thoughts, before she started hesitantly: “There seems to be a frequency, it comes in waves, and it seems to surge, enh, feels very uncomfortable.”
“Frequency… in waves… is it fast at times and slow at times?” Yi Fei asked.
“Yes.”
“Could it be morse code?” Someone immediately asked.
“The stone is transmitting some sort of signal?”
“What message could it be sending?”
“But the stone doesn’t have any precision metal structure within it, how is it able to transmit signal or frequency waves?”
Guesses popped up one after another, and the more the questions emerged, the more confused the researchers became. Xuan Mo on the other hand widened her eyes.
She had once been placed in charge of a large-scale campaign against the Elde Civilisation. While she was the major battle commander of the troops, she still had to obey instructions from her superior — wherever the higher ups said to go, she went, whatever the higher ups wanted annihilated, she removed. She had never once wondered how it was that Elge could remain in hiding for so long, undiscovered.
She’d gotten used to commands that come in without rhyme or reason; she was also used to their omnipotent intelligence department.
She’d heard before that once the space warp technology through particle separation was activated, it would generate huge energy fluctuations. The door between the two galaxies would be able to echo each other’s energy instantly. The one thing she’d never once considered was how this happened, how would such an echo be generated.
If the front-liner anti-Elge battalion used this kind of energy fluctuations during its activation to track down the Elge, then the fluctuations she felt earlier…
She suddenly walked out the room and looked up at the sky.
Void of stars and moon, the neon lights and the reflective sky appeared murky and harmless, as though beyond them didn’t exist vast galaxies…
But she knew, she knew what it was like outside — it was a much bigger world, of galaxies, of space; there existed all kinds of creatures, and there existed endless possibilities, for anything to happen!
“Xuan Mo, what’s wrong?” Kang Qiao couldn’t stand the noise from the discussions and followed Xuan Mo out. He asked softly, “what did you think the signal or fluctuation is, you experienced it personally, you’d know better.”
“I don’t know.” Xuan Mo looked at the sky, her gaze piercing. “I’m more curious about what the fluctuations might attract…”
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