Chapter 265

Xia Xue stared through the bulletproof glass at the growth capsule, the floating long hair in the pale blue nutrient fluid reminding her of jellyfish in the sea.

Suddenly, the girl’s eyelashes trembled, and violent eye movements appeared beneath her closed lids—she was dreaming.

“The EEG spectrum shows abnormally active beta waves,” the technician adjusted the oscilloscope. “These girls are being forced into high-intensity thinking.”

The screen flickered violently; the monitor’s waveform perfectly matched the voiceprint analysis curve from the interrogation room next door.

Luo Fei pushed open the lab door, letting in a salty, briny sea breeze; the tablet in his hand streamed live footage from Interpol: thirty growth capsules aboard a container seized by Malaysian police at Port Klang were uploading data packets over the internet.

“They’re living servers,” Xia Xue projected the spectral analysis onto the glass—beta wave peaks synchronized perfectly with data packet transmission times. “The criminal organization is using human brains to mine cryptocurrency while processing real-time livestream data from the dark web.”

Forensic pathologist Lin Xiaoman entered wearing double gloves, tweezers clamping a metal ring still dripping blood: “Each neck ring contains 192 microelectrodes piercing directly into the medulla. We found three girls with old puncture wounds at the back of their necks,” she pulled up autopsy photos. “The earliest surgical scars are over seven years old.”

No sooner had she finished than the lab plunged into darkness; the instant the emergency lights flared in the corner, all growth capsules’ warning lights turned red.

Xia Xue lunged for the control console and discovered a remote command was formatting the storage units. She yanked the main power plug—then heard a chorus of mechanical locks disengaging.

“Watch out!” Luo Fei shouted, yanking her backward.

At that moment, the girl in Capsule #1 sat up abruptly, her pupils dilated to nearly fill the entire iris; her right hand snatched Lin Xiaoman’s scalpel, the tip halting precisely two millimeters from her own carotid artery.

“Kill… kill me…” The girl’s voice emitted a synthetic tone, yet her hand reversed direction and stabbed toward Lin Xiaoman.

Xia Xue grabbed the fire extinguisher beside her and swung it hard—striking the girl’s elbow joint. The sound of metal snapping mixed with bone dislocation exploded in the sealed space.

Other capsules opened one after another; the girls crawled out with unnatural postures.

Xia Xue noticed fresh sutures on their temples; she tore off the gauze to reveal coin-sized brain-machine interfaces beneath.

The girl at the front suddenly convulsed and collapsed—then a wisp of gray smoke rose from her nape: Luo Fei had hit the charging contact on her neck ring with a Taser.

“Attack the metal rings!” Xia Xue shouted, overturning the console and tossing a spare power cable to Lin Xiaoman. “Reverse-charge them!”

Amid the chaos, she caught sight of the main computer’s destruction progress bar stuck at 97%; among the remaining files was an encrypted folder named “Rose Garden.”

Just as she was about to insert the decryption key, the entire glass wall shattered—commandos wearing night-vision goggles rappelled in.

“Interpol Special Operations Unit,” the lead woman flashed her credentials; Xia Xue noticed a blood-red rose tattooed on her neck—exactly seventeen petals.

———

At four a.m., the temporary command center reeked of instant coffee’s burnt bitterness.

Xia Xue imported the decrypted EEG data into a map: seven red dots were moving across the East Sea. When she cross-referenced the coordinates with ship identification systems, cold sweat broke out along her spine—they were warships participating in the Rim of the Pacific exercise.

“They’re eavesdropping on military frequencies,” the communications technician’s voice trembled. “One girl’s brainwave pattern decoded as ‘Aegis system fault code.’”

Luo Fei adjusted his holster for a quicker draw: “Three hours ago, a destroyer at Yokosuka Base suddenly rebooted its radar system.” He pulled up satellite imagery; the warships’ trajectories showed a 17-degree anomalous deviation at a specific moment.

Xia Xue suddenly remembered something and pulled up the rescued girls’ medical records. When she saw the 3D reconstruction of the third girl’s brain CT scan, her breath stopped—the hippocampus contained a microchip whose composition matched the pigment found in Mao Wei’s neck tattoo.

“This isn’t trafficking,” she zoomed the chip to pixel resolution. “They’re manufacturing biological antennas.” The screen showed a nanoscale helical structure on the chip’s surface, perfectly resonant with 5G millimeter-wave frequencies.

Lin Xiaoman burst through the door, her lab coat smeared with cerebrospinal fluid: “We found a prion virus variant in the girls’ thalamus—it maintains high metabolic brain activity…” She held up a petri dish; gray-white tissue was crawling across the glass. “It’s consuming neurons while constructing new neural synapses.”

At that moment, a shrill alarm cut her off—the command center’s main screen flashed a dark web livestream: seventeen girls wearing miniature warship models were chained inside a virtual chamber, the chat flooded with coordinates of global naval ports. The top donor ID was “17_Annihilator,” its avatar a fusion of a blood-red rose and an atomic symbol.

“Tokyo Bay, Pearl Harbor, Busan…” Xia Xue recorded the locations mentioned in the chat. “They’re planning to cripple the Pacific early-warning system.”

The nautical chart suddenly flashed red; Interpol sent an urgent alert: the seized growth capsules were emitting high-power microwave pulses. Luo Fei froze mid-reach for the satellite phone—the EEG monitor showed Xia Xue’s beta wave frequency synchronizing with the criminal organization’s control band.

“When did you get injured on the back of your neck?” Lin Xiaoman’s tweezers hovered above Xia Xue’s collar, where a scabbed abrasion was visible.