EM CH12

Chapter 12: A Reliable Helper

It had to be him.

Only, he wasn’t wearing gloves. His fingers were warm, slender, and long, possessing the exact softness and firmness Yu An had imagined.

Held by the hand, Yu An sprinted through the boundless, pitch-black corridor, the lingering light behind casting reflections against the white doors lining the wall.

He constantly looked back over his shoulder. The brass handles on the white doors were twisting frantically, and consultants inside the beauty rooms burst through the doorways one after another, their lips curled upward in fixed smiles.

Each smiling consultant paused for two seconds the instant she surged out, as the smart sensors within their plastic bodies required reaction time; once they detected the vibrations from Yu An running, their necks snapped abruptly toward his escape route before their mechanical drives propelled them in pursuit.

Because they moved too quickly, the programming inevitably glitched. The consultants’ limb movements became wildly uncoordinated, the swing of their arms out of sync with the cadence of their steps. Moreover, the mannequins wore high heels, making it easy for them to lose their balance and tumble.

Yet they were endowed with a tenacious vitality by some unknown force; even with snapped shins and fractured fingers, they twisted their bodies to crawl forward.

A sudden chase signaled the beginning of a life-and-death night.

Back in the washroom, Yu An had already inspected the consultant whose internal machinery he wrecked with a blade strike. Unlike the Eagle Bureau’s mechanical eagles, they were not Aberrant-powered weapons driven internally by an Aberrant Core.

This meant they wouldn’t cease functioning due to depleted energy; as long as Yu An remained in their line of sight, he would be relentlessly hunted down.

After circling the square-loop office building three times, Yu An’s lungs felt ready to burst. Panting violently, he asked, “Interviewer, do you even know the way…?”

In the darkness, the hand holding Yu An’s quietly broke out in a bead of sweat.

No answer came. Yu An had a sudden revelation: an internship mission had to be completed alone, without accepting hints or assistance from the interviewer.

Yet simply knowing he was there allowed Yu An to stay calm.

Yu An sprinted past the final dark corner. Light shone at the corridor opening ahead, where the plastic limbs of the smiling consultants scraped against the walls and floor; Yu An was drawing closer and closer to that noise.

The most dangerous place was often the safest. Setting his resolve, Yu An took the lead, pulling the interviewer’s hand behind him as he ran.

Finally, they returned to their starting point. The white door to Room 704 was still wide open. A smiling consultant had her back turned to Yu An, but upon sensing the motion, her neck and torso twisted around together, her arms wrenching 360 degrees in the air to behind her back as she sprinted toward him on her heels.

Yu An released his grip on the interviewer’s hand and charged into the light. Clenching his fists in front of him in a defensive stance, he swung his left leg and spun his body in midair, kicking away the sterile tray held before the consultant, immediately following up with a swift, powerful double kick with his right leg.

The Pure Black Hood suit automatically triggered its effect when he leaped: steel claws flickered from the front soles of his mid-calf boots, cleanly decapitating the consultant’s plastic head on the spot. Upon landing, the claws retracted automatically, rendering his steps silent.

Looking at the swarm of consultants ahead, Yu An could only roll across the floor into Room 704, quickly slamming the door shut and locking it.

The consultants outside swarmed the door at once, clawing at it with their fingernails.

Drained of strength, Yu An collapsed onto the floor, every muscle in his body trembling.

Looking around, the interviewer was nowhere to be seen. Yu An scrambled up in a flurry: “Could I have locked the interviewer outside?”

He pressed his ear to the door, but the commotion outside was drowned out by the grating noise of fingernails scratching the wood. Frowning, he fished his phone from his backpack and sent a message to the interviewer.

Yu An: “Where are you?”

But there was no reception in the building. The message loading spinner circled endlessly, unable to send.

“Stay calm.” Yu An patted his cheeks, pocketed the phone for now, and searched the salon room for another exit. Although the smiling consultants were unsettling, his brief clash revealed they lacked substantial offensive methods; as long as he wasn’t grabbed by their plastic fingers, he wouldn’t suffer severe injuries.

A tablet sat on the consultation counter, the one the consultant had used earlier to help Yu An choose a beauty treatment.

Yu An opened the tablet and studied it. The layout looked very much like a shopping app, allowing searches for body parts like eyes, noses, and other features.

He casually flicked through a few pages of eye listings. The entire screen was filled with close-up shots of pupils, varying in color and pattern to satisfy the demands of different clients.

“Do they really have this much inventory…?” That was until he turned to a page where one image displayed pale plum-colored eyes, clear and strikingly beautiful.

An eye color so distinctive was impossible to forget once seen.

Rubbing the cold sweat from his fingertips, Yu An tapped on the detailed description. As expected, Zhao Ran’s photo and workplace were displayed right there.

It was the interviewer’s eyes.

The data on the tablet wasn’t the salon’s inventory at all, but information collected on living people. Whichever one a client fancied, someone would go and “procure” it for them.

But where did the private data of these living people come from?

Yu An couldn’t help touching his left eye. In a world this chaotic, his eyeball had likely been plundered by bandits like them as well.

Perhaps he had misjudged the interviewer from the very beginning.

Yet having the interviewer show him such care only made Yu An uneasy. Growing up with so little kindness, he couldn’t help suspecting ulterior motives in others.

The reception parlor of the salon room had flesh-pink, cozy wallpaper covering its four walls, with a bar counter and sink on the left, a soft leather couch in the center, and white doors to the right and straight ahead.

The door to the right bore a sign reading “Consultation Room.” Without overthinking, Yu An walked briskly toward the door straight ahead.

His phone showed the time was 1:50 AM, nearly two hours since setting out, yet Yu An had not seen so much as a shadow of the hostage. He needed to find the area leading to body sculpting as soon as possible.

As for the interviewer, someone that strong didn’t need Yu An worrying about him.

The white door ahead opened onto a longitudinal corridor, its walls also covered in thick pink wallpaper, with ceiling fixtures casting warm light across the floor.

The floor looked freshly mopped, yet gleamed with an oily sheen like polished wax, causing his footing to slip occasionally. The scent of lemon detergent drifted through the air.

Having learned his lesson, Yu An didn’t charge in recklessly, instead hugging one wall and creeping forward slowly.

Cross-referencing the mental map in his head, the corridor underfoot should be a covered skybridge connecting two buildings.

Near a corner not far off, faint sloshing sounds echoed, accompanied by the slight squeak of a wet rag wiping across tiles.

Yu An quickly pressed against the side opposite the source of the noise, picking up his pace and focusing his mind.

When he stepped out of the corridor, his peripheral vision caught someone standing to his left.

Dressed in a janitor’s dark blue uniform, he stood by an iron bucket holding a mop, dipping it into the bucket, shaking it off, and pulling it out to mop the floor.

Although Yu An was fully mentally prepared, when the janitor raised his head, he was still startled by the eight-tooth grin, his heart jolting.

“Good evening,” the janitor said, his mouth pulled into a stiff, broad smile.

Seeing no hostile intent, Yu An licked his lips: “Hello. Which way to body sculpting?”

The janitor’s gaze fell upon Yu An’s feet instead. Bending over, he picked up the bucket and mop, hobbling toward Yu An with a hunched back.

Yu An backed up several steps in succession, but the janitor didn’t close in further; he simply set the bucket down where Yu An had stood and mopped the floor with diligent care.

It was because Yu An had left footprints on the floor, and he needed to clean them.

Perhaps the staff in this salon had very distinct divisions of labor, doing solely what fell under their duty.

Yu An had no desire to waste time on him either. With only left and right paths available, he would check the right first.

However, there was little on the right side of the corridor, mostly utility rooms like storage and maintenance closets. It dead-ended after thirty meters or so. Having found nothing, Yu An turned around and headed in the opposite direction.

Yet upon reaching the junction where he had come from, the janitor had vanished.

Intuition made Yu An’s nerves tighten, a chill crawling up his spine to the nape of his neck.

He turned around on the spot, glancing behind him.

Silently, a silhouette stood glued right behind him.

Holding his bucket and mop, staring straight ahead with teeth bared in a grin, the janitor said: “Good evening.”

Yu An nearly leaped out of his skin, the zipper on his Pure Black Hood letting out the yowl of an alarmed cat.

The man had been mopping the floor while sticking right behind him the entire way.

“Stay away from me.” Without looking back, Yu An bolted forward. Carrying the bucket in one hand and dragging the mop behind him with the other, the janitor gave relentless chase.

Reaching into his shoulder bag as he ran, Yu An retrieved the small bottle of gasoline he had brought from home, bit the cap off, and hurled it behind him.

The bottle shattered against the ground, gasoline spilling and spreading across the tiles as a pungent smell drifted out. The janitor halted his pursuit, drawn to the mess on the floor, and set down his bucket to mop diligently once more.

Having finally shaken off the janitor’s pursuit, Yu An looked up to see a directional sign overhead reading “Body Sculpting.”

Both sides of the corridor were still lined with shut white doors. Yu An pressed his ear to each one in turn until the third locked door from the end, where he could hear heavy, labored breathing from within.

The white door next to it, however, was left ajar. Lightening his footsteps, Yu An edged against the crack and peered inside.

The room’s layout closely matched the video Officer Ye had provided: a salon bed in the center and beauty apparatus along the walls, except the floor was covered in grease and the walls were splattered with blood foam and filth erupted from diseased cysts, the stench of rancid fat nauseating to the extreme.

Two smiling janitors were cleaning inside.

Using small scrapers, they chipped away debris from the wall, then lifted a wrinkled, flesh-colored sheet of skin from a plastic bucket. Shaking off the soaking fluid, each took two corners, pulling it taut and smoothing it flat against the wall to cover the gouges left by the scraper.

Once the “wallpaper” was pasted, the janitors opened a paint can and used a roller to coat the wall in cozy pink paint.

Yu An had no desire to dwell on where the skin on the wall had come from. Taking the precision tool case from his bag, he picked out a long, slender pin, slipped it into the keyhole of the locked door next door, and twisted it carefully.

The more tense one is, the harder it is to do delicate work. Sweaty fingertips and the thudding of his heart occasionally drowned out the tiny clicks inside the keyhole.

The more he probed, the more intricate it felt; the lock on the white door seemed to be a custom security lock.

Shoot, this is going to fail.

Having finished painting, the janitor gathered his supplies and headed toward the door with a fixed smile.

One of them heard a disturbance next door; his smiling face twitched slightly as he pushed the door open, carrying his greasy bucket.

The corridor was empty.

The janitor scratched his head and walked off with the plastic bucket.

The split second the janitor pushed the door open, Yu An abandoned picking the lock and ducked behind the swinging door.

Once the janitor left, Yu An slipped into the freshly cleaned room and slowly shut the door behind him.

Using a screwdriver, he unscrewed the peephole lens, pushed his mechanical eyepiece through the opening, and angled it slightly so he had a clear view of the other white doors to the right.

After waiting a few minutes, someone seemed to approach from the end of the corridor.

A male doctor wearing black-rimmed glasses walked unhurriedly to the locked door next door, unlocked it with a key, and stepped inside.

Yu An quietly counted his blessings; had he managed to pick the lock and slip inside earlier, he would have been caught red-handed.

He retrieved his eyepiece and slotted the peephole lens back into place to avoid tipping off the doctor. He couldn’t be impatient; Yu An planned to wait patiently for an opening.

Turning around to sit and rest, his eyes swept across the mirror facing the salon bed. He froze on the spot, his vision trembling violently.

Clinging to the shoulder bag on his back was a slender, fair hand.

And it wasn’t attached to anyone; it was a severed right hand cut cleanly from mid-forearm.

When had it latched onto him?

Yu An practically forgot how to breathe.

A few seconds later, an even more terrifying realization dawned on him.

Could it be that the one leading him by the hand during the sprint wasn’t the interviewer, but this severed hand?

The right hand remained blissfully unaware of having been spotted, cheerfully clinging to the bag and pretending to be a charm.

At the same time, at Underground Railway, Team Leader’s Office.

The aria The Pouch of Five Pleasures played softly from the speakers. Still gloved, Zhao Ran rested his chin in his left hand, sipping from a small wine cup, humming along with the melodious traditional opera, a tipsy flush spreading across the corners of his eyes.

Subordinate Xiao Qi stood by holding files, chiming in with a reminder: “Team Leader, Yu An has been inside Xiliu Beauty Salon for two hours already. Aren’t you worried at all about letting a newcomer tackle an A-rank hazard mission alone?”

“I sent a little helper to guide him,” Zhao Ran said confidently. “Kaopu won’t let me down.”

He raised his empty cup, and a slender left hand emerged from the desk drawer, picking up the bottle to refill Zhao Ran’s cup.

Zhao Ran narrowed his eyes, examining the left hand pouring the wine with drunken, blurry eyes.

Suddenly, Zhao Ran spat out a mouthful of wine: “Kaopu? If you’re here, who went to help me… help Yu An?”

Subordinate Xiao Qi remarked flatly: “The one who went is probably Lipu.”