Chapter 387: Device

The elevator has no buttons.

To be precise, it does have buttons, but they are all black, with no numbers, no floor indicators, not even an arrow.

Wei Gong stood in the corner, fished a magnetic card from the pocket of his Zhongshan suit, and waved it over the panel.

The elevator began to descend.

Jiang Yuan counted—after passing the publicly disclosed thirty underground levels of the Investigation Bureau, the elevator did not stop. It kept going down at a moderate speed, but the continuous sense of weightlessness made his stomach churn.

Thirty‑four. Thirty‑five. Thirty‑six.

Jiang Yuan and Wei Gong stood there in silence, the incandescent lamp above bleaching their faces white. The screech of steel cables rubbing echoed in the shaft, pouring into their ears ring after ring.

When it reached the thirty‑eighth level, the elevator stopped.

The moment the doors opened, a smell mixing ozone, solder and cold coffee hit them. The corridor was far narrower than upstairs, bundles of piping clung to the ceiling like arteries. Every three meters a red emergency light stained the whole passage deep red.

Wei Gong walked ahead, his steps neither hurried nor slow.

Jiang Yuan followed, his eyes scanning the airtight doors on both sides. Each door was welded with a number, from B38‑001 to B38‑017, and various sounds leaked through the cracks—continuous humming, metallic clanking, liquid flowing.

At the end of the corridor stood an airtight door twice as thick as the others. It bore no number, only a palm‑sized LED screen displaying a line of red text:

"Current personnel on duty: 1"

Wei Gong slapped the magnetic card onto it. The airtight lock clicked open, the doors slid aside, revealing the scene inside.

Jiang Yuan's first reaction was—this is not a lab, it's a junkyard.

As far as the eye could see, at least six display screens were fully on, showing everything from satellite heat maps to gene sequences. The desk was piled with empty energy‑drink cans, at least twenty, some crushed and used as ashtrays.

The floor was scattered with data cables, chip boards, half‑disassembled containment device parts, and three unfinished boxed meals, chopsticks still stuck in them.

In the exact center of this chaos, an ergonomic chair cradled a person.

No, "cradled" is already polite. The person was curled up in the chair, legs draped over the desk edge, cradling a keyboard, ten fingers dancing on it like a piano.

He wore a gray hoodie that hadn't been changed in at least three days, the hood pulled over his head, revealing half a face pale to a translucent blue and two dark circles deep enough to hold fish.

Hair, a chaotic explosion, stuck out from the hat.

Wei Gong knocked on the door frame.

No response.

The keyboard clacking never stopped.

Wei Gong knocked twice more, with greater force.

"Busy." The person finally spoke, voice hoarse with a sandpaper‑rough texture, "Appointments should be scheduled for next Wednesday. Those without appointments, go out the left turn; the elevator is at the end of the corridor."

Jiang Yuan glanced at Wei Gong.

Wei Gong's face was expressionless, but the corner of his mouth twitched, uncertain whether to smile or scold.

Xu Shangdong.

The keyboard clacking paused for 0.3 seconds.

Then it continued.

"Oh, it's you, Wei Gong." The person didn't even turn his head, speaking rapidly without a breath between words, "Was the superconducting quantum chip you applied for last month approved? If not, any talk today is a waste of my time; I say this in advance, not out of disrespect, just that I truly have no spare time—"

"Approved."

The keyboard clacking this time paused for a full two seconds.

The person, or rather Xu Shangdong, codename "Youling", finally lifted his eyes from the screen.

They were eyes streaked with blood vessels from years of blue‑light exposure, the area around the pupils a sickly pale gray. Yet when his gaze swept over Jiang Yuan behind Wei Gong, the dead‑fish eyes flickered.

"Jiang Team, so you're also here."

Jiang Yuan had once been a frontline operative, having undertaken missions against Fake Persons together with Youling.

But now Youling remains a technician, while Jiang Yuan has become a Core Captain.

Youling felt a twinge of melancholy, but showed no sign of it.

Wei Gong asked:

"How's the thing I asked for?"

Youling shrugged, "It's done."

He opened the safe, which was packed with assorted prototype devices. Youling rummaged for a while, set three half‑finished pieces aside, and retrieved a small titanium‑alloy box from the bottom.

When he stood, his knee cracked, he gritted his teeth, and limped back in a posture that would drive the attending physician mad.

The box was placed on the table.

Opened.

What was inside looked—how to put it—extremely inconspicuous. A black curved device, its size and shape almost identical to the bone‑conduction Bluetooth earphones on the market. Matte material, no markings, not even an indicator light.

"Cognitive Signal Shield."

Youling—Xu Shangdong placed it in front of Jiang Yuan, tapping the tabletop with his index finger.

"Explain the principle once."

He pulled over a whiteboard, covered densely with formulas and topology diagrams; with a large hand he erased most of them, then drew two circles with a marker.

Fake Persons' counter‑reconnaissance doesn't use the five senses; it operates on a cognitive band. You can think of it as a Wi‑Fi exclusive to them, with frequencies beyond human perceptual thresholds. When you look at them, if you know the target is a Fake Person, your brain generates a specific cognitive feedback signal—'I see through you'—which is captured by the Fake Person's receiver. It then knows you've seen through it.

He drew a bidirectional arrow between the two circles.

"This earphone does something simple." Xu Shangdong bit the pen cap in his mouth, speaking vaguely, "a one‑way valve. Your cognitive signals can't get out, but external cognitive signals can still come in. Wearing it, you look at Fake Persons with true sight, but the Fake Person receives zero cognitive feedback from you. In its perception, you aren't looking at it at all; you're looking at a wall, at air, at water stains on the ceiling—anything."

He spat out the pen cap, slapping it onto the table.

"One‑sided perspective. You can see its underside, while it doesn't even know you're looking at it."

Jiang Yuan lowered his head, looking at the inconspicuous black curved device, something in his throat moved.

He lifted his head, intending to say something.

Wei Gong spoke first.

"Jiang Yuan, what you need to do now——" The old man stepped forward, the shadow pressed forward, blocking the light above his head, "Put this on, hold the True Sight Eye, go back upstairs. Walk normally, speak normally, greet each colleague normally. When you pass each person, sweep with the True Sight Eye."

He paused.

Don't stop, don't stare, don't show any unusual expression.

Wei Gong's voice was not heavy, but each word felt as if carved into the air with a chisel.

Record everything that is not human. Name, ID, floor, what they were doing at the time. Write it down.

Then hand them to me. We want to catch them all in one net.

Jiang Yuan's hand rested on the device. The metal casing was cold, the feel fine, so light it hardly felt present.

Suddenly, the sound of a chair sliding came from behind.

Wait a moment.

Xu Shangdong's voice came from behind the pile of energy drink cans. Jiang Yuan turned his head, seeing him curled back into the chair again, but this time he wasn't typing. His arms were crossed over his chest, the dead fish eyes beneath his dark circles fixed on Jiang Yuan, containing something hard to discern.

I have something I need to make clear.

His speech slowed down. Compared to his previous rapid-fire machine-gun style, they were like two different people.

The shielding field of this device is not unconditional. Maintaining the shield requires a precondition.

He raised a finger.

Your emotions must be flat.

Jiang Yuan furrowed his brow slightly.

Heart rate, adrenaline, brainwave beta band—if any of these three indicators shows violent fluctuation, the shielding field will collapse within 0.4 seconds. 0.4 seconds, not even enough for a reaction.

Xu Shangdong rose straight from the chair, hands on the armrests, unusually meeting Jiang Yuan's gaze.

You understand what I'm saying, right?

It's not a question, it's a confirmation.

You walk down the corridor wearing this thing, and when you see the first Fake Person—maybe a colleague you've known for five years, maybe a brother who fought side by side with you, maybe the front desk girl who greets you with a smile each morning—you see through its face, to the blank whiteboard underneath lacking features.

At that moment, your heartbeat cannot quicken even a beat.

Cannot feel nauseous, cannot be afraid, cannot be angry, cannot sigh, cannot have any ripple of emotion.

Because if you panic for even a few tenths of a second, the shielding field disappears. Once the shielding field is gone, that Fake Person will instantly know you've seen through it, and then all its kind nearby will also know.

Among several thousand people.

Xu Shangdong enunciated the last three words very clearly.

You only have one chance. If you mess up, there won't be a second.

"Jiang Team, Wei Gong didn't entrust this matter to you; rather, only you can accomplish it."

"Because only you can freely control your heart rate and all your body's biological signals through the Shadow Ghost."

The laboratory fell silent for about ten seconds.

The exhaust fan's hum filled the whole space.

Jiang Yuan's fingers still rested on the black device. The cool sensation had been warmed a little by his body heat.

He picked it up.

The arc-shaped contour fit snugly against the outer side of the ear bone, neither loose nor tight, like a real Bluetooth earpiece. No power-on chime, no vibration feedback, nothing at all. The only change was a faint tingling near the temple, lasting less than two seconds before fading.

He again took out the True Sight Eye from his pocket.

The bead lay peacefully in his palm, its surface flowing with an elusive glimmer.

Wei Gong and Xu Shangdong said nothing more.

The heavy airtight door slid open to both sides. The red emergency lights in the corridor stretched his shadow long, like a black tongue, licking from the doorway all the way to the elevator at the corridor's end.

Jiang Yuan clenched the bead in his hand.

Then he stepped out.

Behind him, the airtight door closed behind his back.

The elevator rose.

With each floor climbed, the numbers jumped once, bringing him closer to the Investigation Bureau's regular floors.

With each number jump, the sweat in his palm increased a bit.

Finally.

The elevator doors opened.