Chapter 320: Investigating Memory

In the deep autumn rain of November, the cold downpour soaked Indiana's pine forest into ink black, Oleg's military rain boots trampled over the half‑buried warning sign in the mud, and the faded words "Hawkins National Laboratory" flickered dimly in the lightning.

The Soviet Union deployed numerous covert moves, even leveraging contacts left in Cuba, to get him and those energy‑weapon components into the United States.

Yegorova and he split up; Yegorova was tasked with tracking the dragon's trail and laying coils, while he took the chance to probe the United States' "Rainbow Project".

As for the origin of the Reverse World, the KGB intelligence department had already investigated it thoroughly; the United States' flamboyant abduction of many children for psychic experiments could not be hidden from those elite agents.

As the world's most powerful spy organization, the KGB even maintains deep‑rooted influence within the United States.

The girl named Shi Yi, who was also the experimental subject used to open the Reverse World gate, had long been one of the KGB's capture targets. Before arriving, Oleg had already dispatched three of his own KGB agents to locate the girl, and they should have secured her by now.

Oleg inhaled deeply, and through the iron gate he gazed at the desolate plaza inside the test base, feeling an inexplicable chill at the back of his neck.

The government building, which should have been heavily fortified, now resembled a skeleton gnawed by a giant beast; the blast‑proof glass shattered into a spider‑web pattern, and the dangling wires from the surveillance cameras swayed in the wind like the tentacles of some bizarre creature.

He stepped cautiously into the base, entered the laboratory building, which was likewise empty and in a state of ruin.

"It seems the intel was correct; the Americans have already abandoned this base," Oleg muttered to himself.

According to KGB intelligence, the original overseer of this test base was a Doctor named Martin Brunner. A few months earlier, an accident in the laboratory caused several Experiment Subjects to escape and triggered supernatural phenomena that affected nearly half of Indiana.

The entire supernatural experiment was subsequently terminated by the military.

However, Doctor Brunner does not appear to have been dismissed; instead he launched a new experiment, though for unknown reasons the other side abandoned the laboratory and moved the entire research team to Greenland.

That is why Oleg feels bold enough to infiltrate the laboratory now.

He reached the end of the first floor, where an elevator appeared before him. Although the site had been abandoned, the Energy Department seemed to keep power flowing, and the elevator still operated smoothly.

He stepped into the elevator; the metallic scraping as it descended made his teeth ache, and when the doors opened on the B4 level, Oleg's gas‑mask filter instantly fogged with moisture.

"Damn it, what is this!" he exclaimed, shocked at everything before him.

A carpet of black vines covered the titanium‑alloy walls, their fluorescent spores pulsing rhythmically like countless sleeping eyelids. Deeper down, a sticky liquid dripped, and the safes that should have held top‑secret files swirled with a translucent gelatinous substance, within which faint outlines of human skeletons bobbed.

"Crimson Traveler, this is Nightingale," Oleg pressed the intercom to his blood‑stained lips; his Russian echoed oddly down the empty corridor, "The Reverse World passage is showing parasitic expansion, repeat, no dragon‑type creature detected."

A sudden, explosive chill in his neck froze him in place, and frost formed on the tip of his defensive TT‑33 pistol.

A silver‑haired man emerged gracefully from the shadows behind him, the laboratory's emergency lights casting a grid of spots on his pallid skin.

Naimi Xisi ran a fingernail across the frosted barrel, his Russian carrying the cadence of an ancient Slavic church: "A Soviet? What are you doing here?"

When his dark‑purple vertical pupils contracted, Oleg felt his temples pierced by countless ice shards: "Fine, let me just look directly."

At the instant his consciousness was torn, Oleg saw the spherical lightning of the 1979 Niebro Test Site flicker within a KGB general's pupils, the massive Tesla coil's central energy wave oscillating back and forth, scorching a burn mark onto his retina. Naimi Xisi suddenly let out a snide laugh that echoed oddly through the empty laboratory: "Interesting, trying to use radio waves to affect the frequency of my Mana when I cast?"

"Not a bad idea," Juan Ce Long said appreciatively, looking at the human before him; human ingenuity always enables them to devise a last‑ditch counterattack even against unbeatable foes: "But now I already know."

The so‑called Tesla coil can indeed stir up an energy upheaval within a limited radius, but the Magic Net is a vastly greater entity. To vibrate the Magic Net and warp the Spell Model it constructs requires energy far beyond what current human technology can provide.

Nevertheless, it opened Naimi Xisi's eyes; these humans have unwittingly created something akin to an Anti‑Magic Stance.

Crazy Magic Stance.

Within the Multiverse, there are many regions where Mana does not exist; in such places, a mage who draws power from the Magic Net is as fragile as a mortal, making these zones strictly forbidden to mages.

Beyond that, there is another natural condition that greatly troubles mages: the Wild Magic Zone.

In such places, Mana and various elemental energies rage like colossal beasts in a chaotic sea, uncontainable by mages. Here, spells become extremely unstable.

Within a Wild Magic Zone, a mage's Nine‑ring spell 'Meteor Burst' may turn into a harmless breeze, while a casually cast trick could become a legendary spell that kills the caster instantly.

If one truly operates in such a zone, Naimi Xisi would suffer greatly without Mana.

!

Unfortunately, Naimi Xisi not only wields formidable Mana, but also possesses enough Mana to crush an aircraft at will. Moreover, a Tesla coil of that scale could never trigger a Crazy Magic Stance.

A dragon‑bone‑clear finger plunged into the white light manifesting in the void, the surging Mana rippling in a realm Oleg cannot see: "Let me see, where is that wondrous creation?"

Eight‑ring Divination spell — 'Sense Location'.

A blinding white light shot from Naimi Xisi's eyes; through the endless strings of the Magic Net, his sight pierced the crystal‑wall system and reached an unknown void.

"Hm?" Naimi Xisi furrowed his brow, realizing the Tesla coil was actually inside the Reverse World.

The shadow energy of the Reverse World coalesced in his palm into a hologram: the core of a gigantic Tesla coil on a road outside Hawkins Town was entwined by purplish‑black vines, its surface pulsing with intense electrical arcs before being devoured into invisible shadow.

"Interesting, who moved it?" Naimi Xisi mused; the massive Tesla coil was clearly taken by a creature from the Reverse World, yet during his last foray into the Reverse World, he had not encountered any sentient beings.

"Wait." Naimi Xisi suddenly recalled the massive flesh monster that appeared just before death, and the black‑white shadows that froze the world in that instant.

"Could that thing be the infected, mad essence of Vickna?" Naimi Xisi awoke with a start; if so, as a demi‑god of divine essence, that monster's power would be unimaginably great.

"No, I must first find Shi Yi; I need to ask exactly what happened then—why that monster didn't kill them."

(End of Chapter)