She stepped closer, eyes wide with horror; she was shocked that this was the Professor whom she highly revered and admired! What came over him all of a sudden? He has never been like this. "Who is that in the chamber? That's not one of the volunteers, and you know those volunteers were dead bodies; there were no approvals for this! You kidnapped someone alive?"
He didn't answer, and neither did he flinch; instead, he turned a dial slowly, and the subject's body convulsed, light flickering inside their veins like bioluminescent roots.
"I had to know if the serum would bind properly to living neural tissue," he said, almost reverently. "And it does. So beautifully. So magnificent! This is where we need it!" You could see his face grinning.
"You are mad, totally crazy!" she whispered shocked beyond words. "This isn't science. This is a butchery of lives. This isn't what you have been teaching us! How could you go against human rights in the name of science?" She was disgusted beyond resolution.
Professor Mo turned around, for the first time, looking at her not as a colleague or subordinate but as an obstacle; he felt like she wasn't behaving like a scientist. His voice was low and certain.
"You are either with me, Wan Ruyi… or you are expendable; you should know that you are replaceable, and so many talents want to learn from me."
Her heartbeat thundered in her ears. She backed away, fingers shaking, nearly dropping her clipboard. She could feel it then, the building pressure, the hum inside the walls that wasn't just from machines. Something was overloading.
Her skin grew with goosebumps all over... Her lips trembled speechless.
Her eyes darted to the containment readings, they were redlined. The subject's vitals were spiking erratically. He had pushed the system way too far and the results would only turn negative.
"You need to shut it down now! It's not stable! Shut it down...." she radically shouted at him.
Professor Mo only smiled and that smile was so eerily scary. "Great change never is. You don't understand these things Wan Ruyi."
Then everything happened at once, catching them by surprise.
You could hear alarms shrieking and wrecking the entire building, Red lights strobed violently.
A pipe burst overhead, showering sparks and smoke. A console exploded beside her, flinging her across the room.
The last thing she saw was Professor Mo turning his back, calmly walking through the smoke as the containment unit cracked open, and then came the blast.
Back to Present
Lu Wan Ruyi sat frozen on the edge of the bed, breathing shallowly. Her hands, which were clenched tightly in her lap, had gone cold.
"He walked away," she whispered to Zhi Hao, overwhelmed with the memories that always tormented her. "Left me to die, but he didn't die. He disappeared... and he took the 'experiment' with him. But those experiments were half done, there was a slight change in realized and wanted him to modify but it was so late..."
Lu Zhi Hao sat still, not speaking for a long moment, the weight of her words pressing on him like a slow, sinking tide. The soft hum of the laptop was the only sound, filling the space with a mechanical murmur that somehow made the silence feel more intense.
Lu Zhi Hao didn't know what to say. This was something he hadn't heard of, and for the explosion, the possibility of it being erased was high since she didn't get to stay in prison for more than a month before everything was brought back to normal.
This was a huge scandal and parents definitely wouldn't bring it up even if they knew.
Lu Wan Ruyi's eyes fluttered shut for a second as if she were gathering the shattered remnants of herself from that time.