The corridor ended at a door unlike the others.

  It wasn’t one of the typical doors made of an unknown alloy.

  It was a heavy metal gate, covered in cold mechanical structures and complex locking mechanisms.

  It gave the impression that it wasn’t designed to keep outsiders out, but rather to… keep whatever was inside, from getting out.

  Pandora stopped before the door.

  She could feel that behind this door lay the most core secret of the entire research facility.

  “Elsa, can you sense anything behind the door?”

  “…My apologies, My Lady. I cannot.”

  “No matter.”

  The door was very thick and solid. Neither she nor Elsa could perceive what lay behind it.

  But she had already come this far. She couldn’t just stop here.

  Taking a deep breath, Pandora began to carefully dismantle the security measures.

  Just as she had predicted, these measures weren’t meant to keep intruders out, but to prevent whatever was inside from escaping.

  So, the dismantling process went unexpectedly smoothly. The more troublesome locks gave way after a few extra tries, and no unexpected accidents occurred.

  Click… click-clack…

  When the last heavy locking cylinder was disengaged, Pandora put her strength into both hands and slowly pushed the heavy gate forward.

  No terrifying creatures lunged out. No strange gases sprayed forth.

  Everything was as normal.

  Beyond the door was a space of bottomless, pure blackness.

  Pandora tightened her grip on the sword of Elsa and took a step into the darkness.

  The moment she stepped inside—

  BUZZ—

  Rows of unknown lighting devices installed in the dome ceiling suddenly flared to life!

  Cold, pale light instantly banished all the darkness, illuminating the scene before her… a soul-shaking, shocking sight!

  It was an unexpectedly vast, cathedral-like circular space.

  Inside, row after row of cylindrical, semi-transparent cultivation tanks, several meters high, were arranged in neat order. A golden, slightly viscous culture medium filled the tanks. The place looked like a series of massive, twisted aquariums, fixed to the floor.

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  And inside the “aquariums,” soaking, one after another, were…

  “Humans.”

  Pandora’s breath hitched.

  Her gaze instinctively swept over the nearest row of tanks, and then, her pupils contracted to the size of pinpoints.

  She saw… a familiar face.

  He might have been just an ordinary, insignificant person. Before that night, he was just one of the many servants in the manor. A groom. Betty’s father.

  But after that night, like everyone else, he had become… a zombie.

  And now, here he was.

  He was still wearing the faded, coarse clothes of a groom, his eyes closed, his expression peaceful, as if he were merely lost in a deep sleep.

  And beside him, dozens of needles of varying sizes, glinting with a metallic coldness, extended down from the top of the tank, plunged deep into various parts of his body. Those needles were, at an extremely slow and steady frequency, injecting culture fluids of different colors into him…

  Pandora suddenly remembered something. She quickly looked down at the ground beneath her feet.

  Sure enough, on the smooth floor, she saw a series of extremely faint, almost invisible, zombie… tracks.

  The tracks began at the entrance to the corridor and continued all the way to this massive “cultivation tank.”

  The zombies from the manor. From the village. They hadn’t disappeared. They had come here!

  A storm raged in Pandora’s heart.

  She forced herself to calm down, taking deep breath after deep breath, until a slight dizziness made her barely regain her composure.

  One “person” might not be enough to explain anything…

  Pandora carefully, step-by-step, ventured deeper into this forest made of “people.”

  As she walked, she saw more familiar faces. The vast majority were servants or guards from the manor. She also saw faces she didn’t recognize at all.

  Among them, some, like Betty’s father, wore clothing that indicated their status; they were clearly “recalled products.”

  But more were in a state of nakedness. They weren’t like the “recalled products.” They were more like… “original stock” that had never left the cultivation tanks.

  Regardless, they all shared a shocking commonality.

  They were all adults.

  Not a single child.

  And the physiological age of almost all these “humanoid creatures” was far beyond the normal adult standard. Around forty years old was the norm for these “people” soaking in the culture medium.

  Suddenly, the old hypothesis about the “switch” flashed through Pandora’s mind like a bolt of lightning.

  The children were the “anchors” for the zombies. When the “anchors” left or disappeared, the zombies would also “disappear,” or more accurately, be “recalled.”

  The scene before her seemed to confirm this hypothesis.

  One clue after another, as if pulled by an invisible thread, surfaced rapidly in Pandora’s mind. Those seemingly unrelated things were being connected at an astonishing speed, gradually piecing together a… truth so absurd and terrifying that it could subvert her entire fourteen years of cognition…

  ………………

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  The sound of fingers tapping on a desktop rang out rhythmically in the gloom.

  Dulles sat in a large armchair, his entire figure shrouded in darkness, with only a vague silhouette discernible.

  In his hand, he held a classically shaped glass bottle.

  Inside the bottle was a small amount of a blood-like, scarlet liquid. The liquid was emitting a hazy, pure fluorescence like that of a red moon, radiating an endless temptation, as if whispering, promising, luring all living things nearby to drink it in one gulp.

  But Dulles didn’t move.

  He just sat in the darkness, waiting patiently.

  For today, for this opportunity, he had waited for a year. He didn’t mind waiting a little longer. Patience was the most basic training for a demon-hunting apprentice.

  Finally—

  BEEP.

  A soft, almost inaudible electronic tone sounded.

  On the corner of the desk, on a monitor screen that had been completely dark, a small, red indicator light, representing “anomaly,” suddenly lit up!

  The light was faint, but in this extreme darkness, it was exceptionally glaring.

  The corner of Dulles’s mouth slowly curved into a cold, long-repressed arc.

  In his heart, a surge of ecstasy he couldn’t contain gushed out, but on his face, he remained as calm as a stagnant pond.

  The “Sacrifice,” had entered the “Warden Base.”

  This meant that his long-plotted, all-in plan, could finally, begin.