Chapter 520
Inside of Josephine Wong’s office in a secret building owned by the Division, which was located inside of a realm that was close to an undersea volcano in the middle of the pacific ocean, Josephine Wong and all the core members of her team, along with Jianmen, gathered around as they gently floated the two pieces of relic in the air and pushed them gradually together.
The relics shone in gentle but increasingly bright blue light as they got closer and closer to each other. Though their shape did not exactly match, when they got close to each other, they shifted in shapes and sizes and fitted with each other like two pieces of a puzzle. When they merged into each other, the gaps between them disappeared completely - the two pieces of relic had become one. But from the external shape of it, it looked like there was still one piece missing.
“Well, at least we’re right, they indeed belonged to the same person.” Pei sighed and put down her half-knitted scarf: “But looks like we have one more piece left, which means, unfortunately for everybody, that we have one more of those horrible sites waiting for us.”
“Yeah, I don’t recommend we take another trip any day soon.” Vivian shook her head: “And I'm not saying this because I’m scared from our last visit - it just doesn’t feel right to me. We’ll need more preparation.”
“This monk agrees with Ms. Vivian.” Nameless said: “Last time was dangerous - too dangerous, actually, and with Tze Cha going into rest, this monk senses that greater danger awaits us should we proceed to find the next piece. Last time, the statues of the evil Buddhas gave this monk a really bad feeling, and deep in the archives and ancient libraries did this monk dive. If this monk is not mistaken - they were the creation of a group of fanatic, crazed and deranged zealots of old, who were also the believers of some dark creed and the creatures of some of the darkest scriptures in the past centuries. The statues were presumed lost a long time ago and had no records or traces of appearance for almost a century, and never has this monk imagined that I would see them there in an underground lab that was conducting experiments about malice.”
“Which brings up a question - who is this mysterious mage?” Blue asked with a confused frown on his face: “Really curiously, even the records stored inside our highest clearance archives and are missing a lot of what I presume to be pretty critical information on the operations undergoing in Clearwater Municipal Hospital. That kind of clustered malice would not survive naturally so there must have been a maintainer, and the maintainer would have to be a really, really powerful wielder with almost unmatched levels of willpower. Yet, we have almost nothing on this individual or their records. Yes, it would be possible for someone that was - well, unorthodox and unethical and discreet to take over a civilian hospital to run experiments without almost anyone in positions of power noticing. But to pull off two sites like this and similar levels of clustered malice? It’s quite unimaginable to have that kind of cover up.”
“I’d try to go and check on some non-human records, but that’s gonna take me some time.” Alexander yawned and said: “Now, can someone light this relic up and see what can be read? That 3D hologram we had with no tell on how to read is just too tiring for me.”
“Patience, the code patterns might have changed.” Blue took out a round lens with some patterns carved on the surface and a metal ring around, then he placed it onto the probe of a giant machine behind everyone.
All individuals in the room stepped to the side as Blue and Alexander pulled the machine forward with its probe facing the newly merged together relic. Then, Nameless and Pei put two refined energy stones into the machine, and several beams of light with different and shifting colors were released onto the relic. Then shortly after the relic were shone upon, a hologram appeared in the air, not that dissimilar to the hologram discovered by the team prior, but only bigger in scale, complexity and had more details.
“A map.” Jianmen, Blue and Josephine Wong spoke at the same time.
“Map? What kind of map?” Vivian asked.
“They are Maykor’s Coordinates.” Blue explained: “Similar informational matrix used in the Maykor’s Sights. This is still a part of the information, but I think we can still narrow it down to a rough area.”
“Yeah, what Master Blue said.” Jianmen chuckled and pointed at one lower corner of the hologram: “Also, there’s literally a ‘You are here’ symbol right here.”
“Interesting - does this mean this very thing can perform dimensional location?” Pei focused on the symbol with a frown on her face: “A little unsafe to have around, don’t you think?”
“No worries, all the dimensional location signals of this realm are routed and masked, this location would be that of a completely barren and empty realm nearby.” Blue said: “But - if I’m reading this correctly, the destination to which it’s pointing doesn’t need us narrowing down - it’s clearly marked already.”
“Okay. Find out what this place is.” Josephine Wong nodded and said: “And as usual, keep this information in this room. I don’t want to share any of it with other departments, not even the security council. Not until they have the whole security issue fixed.”
“Security issue?” Jianmen immediately asked: “What happened?”
“That, um - this is not exactly the kind of information we can share - ” Pei hesitated.
“A fucking Stone of Negation was stolen.” Josephine Wong shook her head: “They just told us that before we came in. Believe it or not, they narrowed down the time of the crime to a window of two days. Two, fucking, days.”
“That’s really, really bad. Do they have an idea who did it?” Jianmen asked with a heavy frown.