Chapter 88: Professor Ethan

Rover frowned, staring at the metal door in front of him.

The door was rusted, smeared with bloody handprints and strange symbols. The clearest thing drawn at the center was an eye, but… it looked like a planet with a massive ring orbiting around it.

Beneath that eye was a horizontal line, like a boundary mark. Below that was another eye, only half-open, as if it were utterly exhausted.

Rover frowned at the door and searched for its info panel. Immediately, he saw one appear beside it.

[Requirement to Repair: 100 Omni Points.]

Seeing the panel, Rover couldn’t help feeling confused. Even Repairing the door to the next floor had only cost him 5 Omni Points.

Yet… this door wanted 100 Omni Points.

Rover frowned and muttered, “Could it be… what’s behind this door is something tied to the mission?”

At that moment, he ordered the System, “Accept Repair.”

[Ding! Repair successful.]

In the next instant, the lock snapped back into its original state, and then…

Crack!

The lock automatically clicked shut.

Rover pulled out the key with the circular emblem and slid it into the lock. Just as he expected, another “Crack” sounded as the lock opened.

Krit!

The iron door slowly swung inward, the long-forgotten sound of metal grinding against metal slicing through the still air like a knife.

Rover stepped inside. The [Eye of Truth] lit up the entire room for him.

A damp, moldy stench rushed into his nose, making him nauseous. Rover covered his nose with a hand and looked around.

“Where the hell… is this?”

All around him was a bizarre chamber. The center was completely empty, nothing there at all, but along both sides were containment cells with shattered glass, as if this place had once held terrifying creatures and… they’d broken out.

“This is kind of like a game…” Rover muttered. “Experiments carried out in a mental hospital, completely inhuman. One of the patients gets dragged into testing, accidentally Awakens a special ability, then takes revenge…”

In his past life, Rover had played plenty of AAA titles, so he knew this kind of plot wasn’t rare.

“Looks like… this mission is probably about finding that guy, or killing him, or using some other method to complete it.”

Tick! Tick!

Suddenly, the [Eye of Truth] flickered, making Rover jolt.

“Damn it! What the hell is that? Oy! Don’t scare me like that!”

He was genuinely afraid, because the only reason he’d been able to reach this place so easily was because of it. If it malfunctioned, then the one in danger would be him.

While he was panicking, the [Eye of Truth] suddenly fired out a beam of light, not to attack, but to scan a patch of space in front of him.

Those points of light began to gather, forming 3D images as if someone were truly standing here.

Rover frowned. The scene playing out before him was clearly a laboratory. There were many people inside, but the light-points converged on two of them.

Even though he couldn’t tell who they were, and he couldn’t see their faces clearly, he could make out that one was a man and the other a woman.

“The synchronization frequency doesn’t match.” The man shook his head and sighed. “How many is this now?”

The woman held a stack of files, flipping through them as she spoke. “Professor Ethan, this is the 139th. Looks like we may be heading in the wrong direction.”

Ethan shook his head. “No, we’re not heading in the wrong direction. It’s just… we still haven’t found the key to all of this.”

Hearing their voices, Rover frowned, thinking to himself, “Wait. Their voices… I’m not completely sure, but that woman’s voice sounds like the one from the soul that was smashing its head into the window in my room.”

“And that man’s voice sounds like the one I heard from that guy in the room downstairs.”

Rover kept watching and listening to their conversation.

“Professor Ethan, then… what do we do? The government definitely won’t keep funding us if we can’t produce any promising results.”

Ethan shook his head. He walked to a computer screen, typed rapidly for a moment, then said, “Aimee, do you believe in luck?”

“Huh?! Professor Ethan, what are you talking about?”

Ethan didn’t answer Aimee’s question and continued. “If life in this world is random, and if the emergence of humanity is also random, then how many random attempts would it take before you get one absolutely correct result?”

“That randomness would have to be so vast that… if you gave a monkey a pen, how long would it have to write randomly before it produced a complete work of art?”

Ethan took a deep breath, then continued, “Aimee, I believe… life, and those things as well, didn’t appear by random chance, but were created.”

“What?!” Aimee shouted in fear. “Professor Ethan, what are you talking about? If we and those creatures were created by someone, then… what purpose would they have in creating us?”

“Just like us.” Ethan smiled. “Turn us into lab rats, and build a gigantic experimental environment.”

“But…” Aimee was about to say something when Ethan spoke again.

“Aimee, bring Genome 812 here. I will… use the god’s flame to ignite humanity’s knowledge.”

Tick!

Right after that, the image vanished completely, but the [Eye of Truth] quickly fired another beam of light. This time, the light engulfed the entire room, forming an utterly chaotic scene.

Someone stood amid a heap of corpses. Countless octopus-like tentacles stretched out from his back. Beside him, Professor Ethan lay on the ground, writhing as a terrifying flame swallowed him whole.

That person lifted his head. His voice was hoarse, like many people speaking at once, twisted and distorted as it rang out, “Mission not complete, begin searching for a suitable candidate…”

“Hm?!” Rover frowned, feeling confused. But since this was a puzzle-type mission, if it were easy to understand, it wouldn’t have reached ’Nightmare’ difficulty.

Suddenly, he realized the man turned his head and looked straight at him.

Rover frowned and turned around, thinking the man was seeing something behind him.

After all, the man was reconstructed from light and 3D imagery. How could he possibly see Rover?

“You…” the man spoke, his voice trembling slightly.

Rover turned back. Not seeing anything behind him, he looked toward the mysterious man again.

The man pointed at him, his voice ecstatic to the extreme. “You… hahahaha… So that’s how it is… I get it now.”

“You bastards! You actually completed that mission… Hahahaha… But we’ll see each other again soon. Hahahaha…”

Rover frowned and muttered, “Did he see someone standing where I’m standing?”

The mysterious man laughed. “Very soon… we’ll meet again, Rover.”

“Huh?!”

Rover jolted, but before he could say anything, the entire image disappeared. The light of the [Eye of Truth] returned to normal, and the space fell into a terrifying silence.

Still, Rover felt that what was truly frightening wasn’t this mission, nor the monsters here, but… that mysterious man from just now.

“He saw me? That’s impossible!” Rover muttered. He stared hard at the [Eye of Truth], trying to find anything abnormal, but it was useless.

He checked its description again and still found nothing special.

“Strange…” Rover said. “Could it be that guy saw someone else with the same name as me?”

He figured that wasn’t impossible. After all, his name wasn’t rare. Some people even used it to name their dogs.

Rover took a deep breath, then looked around. Not sensing anything unusual, he shifted his gaze to the door in the distance.

He walked over and realized this door was special, completely different from any door he’d seen in this mental hospital.

It was cast from a solid block of metal, still very new, yet covered in horrifying dents.

Rover frowned. By his estimate, the door was over 5 cm thick. What kind of creature could punch dents into a slab of steel that thick?

He even saw claw marks gouged 1 to 2 cm deep into the surface.

Rover glanced to the side. Sure enough, an info panel hovered there.

[To Repair the door lock, please pay: 200 Omni Points.]

“Another door with an insanely high Omni Point Repair cost.” Rover muttered. “But I don’t have any other choice.”

“Agree to pay!”

[Ding! Repair successful.]

Immediately afterward, a strange lock appeared on the door’s surface, featuring two keyholes and a number pad for entering digits.

“This…” Rover grimaced. “Damn it, do you really have to make things this hard? You drain a ton of my Omni Points, and now you still want me to enter a passcode? Where the hell am I supposed to find it?”

He held his head, feeling exhausted to the bone, quietly regretting agreeing to Jonathan’s invitation to join this cursed mission.

Rover shook his head, forcing himself to calm down. Then he tried inserting the two keys he had into the lock.

The first key fit perfectly into its keyhole.

The second key also slid in easily.

He twisted both keys, and then…

Crack!

It sounded like a bolt snapping open, followed by gears beginning to turn.

At that moment, the electronic screen on the door displayed a line of text.

[Please enter the passcode.]

Rover: “…”

“I don’t have a passcode.” He sighed and muttered, “Don’t tell me… I have to go back out and search for it?”

Just then, the [Eye of Truth] suddenly activated again, firing out another beam of light that formed Professor Ethan.

Seeing the scene, Rover stepped aside and silently watched the professor’s image.

Ethan reached toward the keypad, then suddenly seemed to notice something. He looked at Rover, his voice trembling with excitement, carrying a sense of utter disbelief.

“You… you actually appeared…”

Rover: “??!!”

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