Chapter 321

Wanting to find Duotuo lei's evil eye factory is not an easy task.

The desert is too big.

Luo De previously said the evil eye factory might be near A Ru Cun, but that was just his personal guess.

In fact.

He simply cannot confirm whether there is an evil eye factory in the desert.

After all, producing evil eyes requires a huge amount of Archon remnants.

And Sumeru, back when the Scarlet King cleansed the land, did so very thoroughly; at least, as far as Luo De knows, there have been no destructive events caused by Archon remnants.

So, in terms of raw materials.

Building an evil eye factory in Sumeru requires far higher costs than in Inazuma, and it's also less convenient than in Inazuma.

Those who support Luo De's idea.

It's just because Duotuo lei once used Archon remnants to conduct human experiments in Sumeru; having that foundation, he is fully capable of building another evil eye factory.

Otherwise, the number of evil eyes he gave away for free is not small, and their quality is also good; they are not the ordinary evil eyes from Inazuma that backfire and kill the user upon use. If there were no factory backing him, even as the Second Seat Executant, he would hardly be able to easily produce that many evil eyes for personal matters.

"As long as it's not in the ruins, it's fine."

With that in mind, Luo De first informed Nadixa and the Great Merciful Tree King, asking them to also send personnel to help search.

Still the same problem.

The desert is too big.

So big that relying only on those few people from A Ru Cun, nobody knows how much time it would take to find that evil eye factory that exists only in theory.

When Nadixa was in charge of the rainforest region and the Great Merciful Tree King of the area north of the desert, Luo De and Ying came to the Vitality House near A Ru Cun.

This place was once the laboratory used to produce medicine for the magic scale disease.

Later, after Luo De's report, Cyno personally led people to seal this place.

However, hearing Cyno say.

Before he brought people over, the folks in the Vitality House had already fled on their own, leaving only a pile of patients tormented to the point of wishing they were dead.

After that, Luo De never came here in person, so he doesn't know exactly what it has become.

But upon actually seeing the Vitality House.

This place has become the encampment of a group of the Gilded Troop.

"They look like bad people at a glance."

Watching that group either patrolling, eating, or resting, Paimon pursed her lips and said this.

"Of course."

"Hope City and A Ru Cun are both recruiting now."

"If proper mercenary groups had already gone to those two places to earn a meal, how could they still be living this dirt-eating lifestyle."

Luo De, who has experienced much in the desert, understands mercenary habits all the more.

Mercenaries are just such a pragmatic profession.

If there were good food and drink provided, mercenary groups like the Blazing Light Hunters would rush to cooperate with the Academy to secure a stable life for themselves.

Only mercenaries burdened with blood debts would dare not accept recruitment, continuing to stay in the desert despite the risk of going hungry and unclothed.

Back when Hope City was being built.

Dixiya and Tadela once cleared the desert once.

But clearing mercenary groups like that.

Only useful at first; afterwards they basically fled at the wind, making it impossible to even find where people are.

This group of mercenaries at the Vitality House is obviously the fish that slipped through the net back then.

Originally adhering to humanitarian principles, Luo De usually interrogated first then killed.

Now there is Nadixa's mind-reading permission.

A single glance from the Thousand Night Floating Dream.

Luo De's attack then showed no mercy; he directly hung all the mercenaries here on the flagpole outside the Vitality House, making them an example for later mercenaries who come here.

Judging by outward appearance.

The Vitality House is a standard Sumeru-style medical building.

After all, it was funded by the Academy, so that's perfectly fine.

The desert's wind and dust carried away the bloody smell from the slaughter, yet made the pitch-black Vitality House look even more gloomy.

Not yet having entered it.

The ever-timid Paimon shrank behind Luo De and Ying, her body even slightly trembling: "Ying~~~ this, this place is so scary."

What Paimon said is correct.

The atmosphere of the Vitality House is indeed overly gloomy; to Luo De it feels comparable to Liyue's Mishap Ridge, which is full of ghosts.

"Maybe there are too many resentful spirits here."

Luo De spoke up to scare Paimon.

Resentful spirits like that might exist, but for Luo De and them they can't cause any harm.

They're just some ghostly things.

The greatest ability they can exert, aside from cooling the Vitality House, is at most using mental power to intimidate people.

But facing the two otherworldly descendents.

These means basically pose no threat.

"Waaah—"

Being scared by Luo De like that, Paimon immediately screamed, clinging to Ying's clothes and refusing to let go.

But even so.

She also didn't say she wouldn't enter the Vitality House, and she still persisted in following behind.

Seeing Paimon like this.

Luo De smiled, stopped scaring her, shook his head and said: "It's a pity I don't know the Hall of Rebirth's crossing-over method; otherwise, if I performed it, this place wouldn't be so gloomy."

Crossing over souls is the Hall of Rebirth's secret technique.

Not only the souls within Liyue's borders, but also the souls of other countries can be crossed over using this technique.

After going some distance down the entrance corridor.

Luo De was somewhat disappointed.

This place was indeed once an experimental site for the Archon's residue potion.

But now it has indeed been completely abandoned, nothing left, so there is no possibility of using its resources to open a new Evil Eye Factory.

"Meal Arrangement."

"Duty Roster"

"Huh?"

"Why is there a person's name erased here?"

After getting past the initial panic, Paimon was still a little scared, but being beside Ying, she could also muster the courage to look around.

At this moment she was looking at a notice posted on the wall, curiously reading its contents.

Luo De came over.

Indeed.

Just as Paimon said.

Below the notice of the meal list, it wrote the names of the duty personnel for Monday and Tuesday; the name for Tuesday's duty personnel was erased, seemingly to hide his identity, and from Wednesday onward, no duty personnel names were recorded anymore.

"This must have been left when they fled."

Luo De roughly guessed the answer.

When Sai Nuo first came here, everyone had already evacuated.

Judging by the speed at which Sai Nuo handles cases.

The Vitality House people retreated rather hastily, leaving some unusual clues, which is normal.

Indeed, the facts prove this.

Sai Nuo once carefully searched for evidence in the Vitality House, taking away anything that could possibly be used as evidence.

What remains now are just things he considers irrelevant.

Such as scattered bowls and utensils, ornaments, etc.; walking inward, everywhere are things covered in dust and spiderwebs.

However, even though Sai Nuo had searched here once, Luo De and the others still found some of his oversights.

"What is this?"

After Luo De violently opened a hidden compartment in the wall, they found inside a notebook resembling a case file.

This thing was hidden very well.

If it weren't for the Vitality House's long-term disrepair, with the walls worm-eaten into a large hole, they probably wouldn't have discovered this hidden compartment.

Opening the case file.

Its contents can be described as shocking.

The patient's name is Abas.

A farmer from A Ru Cun.

He chose to enter the Vitality House due to the scale plague.

Upon initial admission.

His condition was already extremely severe, with scaly scabs covering his body, ulcers all over his back and chest, weak limbs, mental fatigue, and extremely poor sleep and appetite.

This was far more severe than the conditions of Dina Ze Dai and Ke Lai initially.

According to the symptoms of the scale plague, it belongs to the late stage, where only waiting for death remains.

Upon initial admission.

Abas's symptoms were not alleviated; they even became worse than before.

By the third week of admission.

He fell into a coma, with ulcers and scaly scabs spreading over his entire body and large areas necrotizing.

From this point onward.

The Vitality House used the Archon's residue potion on him.

The attending physician also changed.

Changed to the physician whose name had been erased, 'Duotuo Lei'.

Luo De naturally immediately thought of that attending physician's name.

Continue reading.

Originally comatose Abas, after changing doctors and medicine, although he never woke up, his bodily malignant symptoms showed relief in the fifth week and were subsequently brought under effective control.

Until the tenth week.

Due to prolonged coma.

The physician whose name had been erased used a new treatment called Replacement Therapy.

And this Replacement Therapy.

It meant replacing all of Abas's necrotic limbs with new ones to control the spread of the condition.

Upon seeing this.

Clearly just a few simple lines of text, yet reading them made Ying and Paimon both feel a sudden chill.

"Replace a living person's limbs as if swapping parts."

Ying swallowed a mouthful of saliva, gritted her teeth, and said: "This, this is simply too cruel."

"Yeah, yeah."

Paimon, listening nearby, also kept nodding: "You guys are really going to look for such a terrifying guy?"

Originally, Paimon didn't really know just how evil this person Duo Tuolei was.

She simply knew that this guy was very strong, and Ying might not necessarily be able to beat him.

Now that she knew Duo Tuolei's methods of completely not treating people as humans, even someone as big-hearted as her couldn't help but feel dry-mouthed and tongue-tied, and her mind wandered to what would happen if she were caught by him.

The more Paimon thought about it, the more scared she became, unconsciously burying her head in Ying's embrace, not daring to continue looking.

However, her not daring to look doesn't mean Ying doesn't dare to look anymore.

At the time point of the fifteenth week recorded in this report.

Abasi exhibited an extremely severe rejection reaction to the new limbs.

Although the symptoms of Magic Scale Disease were suppressed and he woke up, his body continued to deteriorate day by day, and a new problem emerged: wounds could not heal.

Thus the second replacement therapy began.

All of Abasi's diseased organs, including his skin, were replaced with new ones.

It can be said that, aside from his brain, he basically had no original parts left.

And this time the treatment effect was very good.

Abasi's new skin and arms grew out, except that his body became more fragile, prone to coughing blood and fainting, and overall he basically returned to normal levels.

This seemed to have yielded a wonderful result.

However, when Luo De saw that Abasi, after being injected with the Archon residue potion, was bewitched by the lingering resentment of the Archon inside, causing hallucinations and attempts to escape, and thus had his frontal lobes removed, becoming completely an idiot thereafter, he too couldn't help but be startled by the content recorded above.

Nothing else.

Really.

Unimaginable.

How could a human so calmly carry out so many cruel experiments, and even personally record them, with the text revealing his satisfaction and pride in the experimental results?

Especially, this report also mentions.

The new limbs on Abasi's body were taken from the patients who died in the experiments.

"What a terrifying person."

Ying couldn't bear to watch anymore.

She pushed the report over to Luo De.

Paimon refused to look any further, directly pulling Ying out of the Vitality House to go outside for fresh air.

Luo De, who remained here.

continued reading.

The subsequent content of this experiment report wrote about Duo Tuolei's deductions on Magic Scale Disease and some conclusions drawn from the experimental results.

In this, he repeatedly mentioned that the elemental energy levels inside the bodies of Magic Scale Disease patients were abnormally high.

The higher the internal elemental amount, the more severe the symptoms; the lower the amount, the milder the symptoms, a completely proportional relationship.

Based on this experimental result.

Duo Tuolei, through removing the frontal lobes, replacing limbs, injecting the Archon residue potion, and other means, obtained a method to stably control the internal elemental content of the test subjects.

Using this method, he wrote down a highly distinctive use.

"Can be used for weaponization."

Seeing this, Luo De let out a sigh of relief.

Through cruel means, turning humans into weapons without independent thought.

Truly terrifying to the extreme.

Aside from this record about weaponization.

The content on the last page of this experiment report is called "Weaponization Test Site Construction Plan".

This is truly a pleasant surprise.

Originally, seeing this place in ruins everywhere, Luo De had prepared himself to come away empty-handed.

But he never expected that he would actually find the location of that evil eye factory he had guessed at here.

More importantly.

After looking over this plan.

Luo De couldn't help but twitch the corner of his mouth.

This so-called evil eye factory doesn't actually produce evil eyes at all! Rather, it's a new type of device made from the Archon residue potion that weaponizes humans.

This thing looks like it can store and absorb elemental energy just like an evil eye, a false Vision.

Actually, it injects elemental energy into the holder's body without triggering Magic Scale Disease symptoms; once the elemental energy concentration reaches a certain level, it can transform the holder into a soldier-like new evil eye.

This thing is quite sinister.

Externally, there's no visible difference between it and a Vision or an evil eye.

Furthermore, as far as we can see, the 'Vision' distributed to A Ru Cun is very likely this thing!

(End of chapter)