Paintings of Terror

Chapter 120: Test Subject No. 282

Breathing a sigh of relief, Ke Xun looked at his watch. With only a few minutes to midnight left, he walked over to Mu Yiran’s side, sat down, and leaned against his shoulder.

“Big Boss,” Ke Xun said. “You are really such a tsundere. I gave you a chance to say what’s in your heart, but you refused to say anything. Don’t be like me. If you miss the chance to speak from the heart, it might never come again…Forget it. I’ll leave you with a smile and you’ll realize it yourself.”

After he spoke, he turned Mu Yiran’s phone camera to selfie mode and tilted his head so that his head was touching Mu Yiran’s head. Then, raising a big smile at the camera, he pinched a heart between their cheeks.

The time on the phone jumped to 12 o’clock.

In the corridor outside the room came the sounds of footsteps.

Ke Xun quickly adjusted Zhu Haowen’s phone to the camera function and turned on the lighting. Then he walked to the phone holder a few steps away, put the phone on the holder, adjusted the angle, and walked back to his position. Positioning his neck to the mop handle, he held Mu Yiran’s mobile phone in his hand and pulled up the camera.

He wasn’t in a hurry to make himself unconscious. He wanted to look through the camera lens first and see what kind of “people” would come through the door, hoping to find an important clue that might lead to the signature.

The sounds of footsteps reached the door. A scratching sound rang out, and the door was pushed open.

The camera showed a few gray figures. When they walked in, they made sounds of surprise. Then, two figures went and turned off the flashlights Ke Xun had left on in the room.

The flashlights were something found in the research institute, so naturally they would be recognized by these figures, while the mobile phone confirmed Ke Xun and Mu Yiran’s guess—it was a modern technological product that was not recognized by the “people” here. Therefore, it was left alone.

The room without the illuminations from the flashlights was almost completely dark, and Ke Xun could no longer see anything in the lens of the phone in his hand.

The light of the mobile phone was too weak and could only shine right in front of him.

Fortunately, Zhu Haowen’s phone, which was fixed near the desk, should be able to record something.

Ke Xun turned off Mu Yiran’s phone and used the mop handle to locate the acupuncture points on his neck.

Perhaps as Qin Ci had said, he was born with sensitivity to strength and precision control. The pressure he felt on his neck was just right. It didn’t take long for him to lose consciousness. His body leaned to the side and fell to the ground.

Since entering the painting a few days ago, Ke Xun had never “slept” so well.

When he felt someone calling him, he opened his eyes in a daze.

“You succeeded.” Zhu Haowen stood beside him, looking at him from above. “However, my phone has run out of battery, and I can’t call up the video you made last night.”

Ke Xun lay on the ground and took a moment to stretch his waist before finally sitting up. He raised his face and smiled at him. Winking, he said, “Brother Loud, I’ll tell you my brilliant plan.”

Zhu Haowen felt that this person was like a husky, happily squatting in front of him. Suddenly, he had the urge to pat his person’s dog head.

“You’d better solve it immediately,” Mu Yiran’s voice suddenly came coldly from the side. “Otherwise, it may be you who will be resolved.”

Ke Xun felt that the boss might want to get revenge for making him lose consciousness last night, so he hurriedly got up. Taking Zhu Haowen’s phone that had shut down due to lack of power, he took the SD card out from it. “I changed the storage path.”

Zhu Haowen: “…”

Why did this person always have a lot of…ideas that were actually normal but often was unexpected to others?

Ke Xun handed the SD card to Mu Yiran, who immediately switched it out with the SD card in his own phone and pulled up the photo album.

The first thing he saw was the photo in his mobile phone. His and Ke Xun’s faces occupied the entire cover of the folder.

Mu Yiran: “…”

Zhu Haowen, watching from the side: “…”

“…Don’t care about the details, just click on the video from last night and take a look,” Ke Xun said.

When the recording started, it was shaking due to Ke Xun rushing to the desk with the phone. The images stabilized and soon after, a muffled sound was heard nearby.

“That was me on the ground, unconscious,” Ke Xun explained.

The screen was frozen on a dark background. Under the weak light, the only thing they could see was tiny specks of dust. From the speaker came the sounds of footsteps ambling back and forth, accompanied by chaotic and unclear voices talking, intermixed with the slight sounds of clothes rubbing and of paper turning, as if work had just started.

Suddenly, a gray human face appeared on the screen. He was too close to the phone’s light, and so the bright light was reflected in his hollow eyes. His lips were dry and gray, and they opened stiffly, revealing a black hole-like mouth.

Ke Xun and Zhu Haowen were caught off guard and subconsciously jerked back. Mu Yiran, who was holding the phone, was calm as usual. He paused the recording.

After carefully looking at this face, he brought up the photo Ke Xun had copied last night to compare. There was no similarity so he continued to play the video.

The face flashed to the side after only a few seconds in front of the camera, and the picture returned to the original static scene. After a few minutes, six to seven gray figures appeared among the dancing dust motes in their field of vision.

These figures kept wandering around the desks and the experimental equipment, but they never made any substantial actions. It seemed that the lack of a test product meant that they couldn’t do anything, and they could only wander aimlessly around the laboratory.

Mu Yiran kept tapping the screen to pause the video, carefully observing the faces of these wandering figures and comparing them to the photo. However, the lighting wasn’t ideal. Because the light was too dim, they couldn’t see the faces well enough unless these faces were very close to the camera lens.

As they were stopping and playing the video, they heard Wei Dong shouting outside the laboratory door. “Ke’er! Ke’er! How are you? Open the door! Open the door!”

Ke Xun went over and opened the door. Wei Dong was relieved when he saw that he was still “alive”, and then he sighed again. “Even if you’re lucky enough to not die, the anxiety you suffer every day will shorten your life significantly—Hey, what are you doing?”

Ke Xun grabbed Wei Dong’s neck, pulled him through the door, and threw him to Mu Yiran’s side. “Yiran, let Dongzi take a look. These art designers are very sharp-eyed.”

Wei Dong didn’t know what was going on, so when Mu Yiran stretched the screen of his phone out to where he could see, he saw a big gray face on the screen. A pair of black eyes that almost entirely occupied the eye sockets stared coldly at the camera with deadly stillness.

“—Fuck!” Wei Dong jerked back instinctively. Clutching his heart, he looked at the expressionless Mu Yiran. “…Big brother, at least tell me in advance. You don’t have to make mischief.”

“Look to see if there’s a face similar to the one in the photo,” Boss Mu said lightly, not wanting to make mischief with him.

Wei Dong took the phone with trembling hands. He spent a long time preparing mentally before finally mustering up the courage to take a look.

The other three people in the room didn’t bother him, but stood beside him and waited.

Wei Dong watched very carefully. Although his heart took a hit at first, he soon became immune after looking at it for a long time. His professional habit as an artist slowly emerged and his expression became more focused.

After observing the video for a long time, Wei Dong suddenly raised his head. “It’s this person! The picture of the half face in the photo belongs to him!”

Ke Xun, Mu Yiran, and Zhu Haowen walked around to look at the phone. The face on the screen was still blurred, and so to them, it was difficult to tell whether it was really the same person as the one in the photo.

Zhu Haowen looked at Wei Dong cautiously. “Are you sure it’s this person?”

“Yes, yes, trust me!” Wei Dong gestured to the face on the screen with great certainty. “This person’s face and ears are at least 95% similar to the one in the photo.”

Ke Xun took the phone and clicked the play button. The video continued, and the face on the screen slowly slid past the camera. After a while, it appeared a little further away, swaying slowly and aimlessly toward the desk at one end and then toward the experimental equipment at the other end, and finally stopped there.

“He’s experiment test subject No. 282,” Ke Xun suddenly said.

When Mu Yiran heard these words, he turned to stare at the place Ke Xun was pointing to, which was at the figure’s chest. The gray shirt had three digits on it, but the numbers were too small and vague, looking like three tiny star-like mosaics, making it difficult to identify them.

“How can you be sure?” Zhu Haowen said from nearby.

“First of all,” Ke Xun said, pointing to the three numbers that were as small as a few pixels, “the numbers on both ends are similar in shape. Second, the shape of the 8 in the middle is very familiar to me. I have a photo of a game, and my number was 384. The photo was taken long ago by a handicapped person in the team so it was very blurry. The shape of the 8 was similar to this. However, this is just my subjective judgment. The most important point is, my instinct tells me that he’s number 282.”

Zhu Haowen: “…”

“…Your special intuition is the most subjective, okay,” Wei Dong said.

Ke Xun’s finger lightly brushed across the face of the presumed test object No. 282 on the screen. “I think the look in his eyes when standing next to these devices is different from that of the other ‘people’.”

Wei Dong studied the screen. “…Dare to ask, where do you see his eyes?”

“Believe me or not.” Ke Xun raised his gaze to look at Mu Yiran. “I think so anyway.”

Mu Yiran looked at him and nodded slightly.

“This number 282 seems to be the only person in the experimental log record who successfully underwent frontal lobotomy and survived normally,” said Zhu Haowen. “He also went through ET exams, the content and the results of which were unknown.”

“He may be the key to finding the signature,” Mu Yiran said in a somewhat muted voice. “I want to stay in Lab D tonight and stay awake.”

As he said these last four words, he stared coldly at Ke Xun.

Ke Xun put his two front paws together like a New Year greeting and fired puppy eyes at Mu Yiran. “Big brother, I was wrong. Please bring me along tonight.”

“We’d better check on the number of people who survived today,” Zhu Haowen said quietly next to him. “If only six people survived, maybe Lab D will be closed, thus preventing us from being able to find a way to the signature.”

Wei Dong was startled and counted with his fingers: “Lab C requires at least four people, then one in Lab A and one in B…We won’t get the entrance card for Lab D! I’ll see how Dr. Qin is!”

After speaking, he ran out of Lab D.

Ke Xun looked at Wei Dong’s back and shook his head. Then he turned and looked at Zhu Haowen. “Haowen’er, was I too careless last night when I pinched you out, thus causing you to suffer some aftereffects? If you want to continue to enter Lab D tonight, there is a fairly simple way.”

“…What way?” Zhu Haowen asked.

Ke Xun raised his eyebrows. “Let’s not leave the underground laboratories for the whole day today. Is that alright?”