The death certificate plastered to the wall had been handled many times; it was creased all over and the corners were torn, yet someone had smoothed it out and stuck it back up.

“Stellar Corporation…” Xu Huo opened the game interface and clicked on the White Bills, where the note read:

[There is no doubt that the chairman of Stellar Corporation is the most popular man.]

The portrait on the White Bill was of that company’s chairman. At first he had assumed Stellar Corporation was just a game developer or a fictional company within the game, but now it was clear the game existed within the real world. If Stellar Corporation could print a person’s face onto currency, then it was very likely the developer or at least a participant in the Dimensional Rift, and its affiliated pharmaceutical research group was obviously involved in human medical work.

He rummaged through a cabinet and found academic certificates and medals for Logan Nise and Marjorie Ye. Both held doctoral degrees and had been employed by Stellar Pharmaceutical Research Group. They had won several medical contribution awards and published prize-winning papers that mentioned the harms of genetic improvement drugs.

He read those papers carefully. They listed at least a dozen drugs he had never heard of before, but they were all aimed at congenital genetic defects — medicines used during gestation to reduce the likelihood of hereditary diseases or prevent certain physiological defects in fetuses.

However, the couple had been skeptical of genetic improvement drugs. Their paper cataloged over sixty suspected new sequelae linked to the drugs, and their findings had received authoritative recognition.

There was no information about evolution agents.

Xu Huo put the documents back and took a couple steps back to survey the room’s layout.

After Master Nise’s death, many of his personal possessions had been taken. If it had been done merely for money, the clocks Master Nise made in life would have been far more valuable — yet even the clocks in his residence had been left untouched. Clearly something else was involved.

If something was left out in the open, it was almost certainly unimportant.

Finding no clues in this room, he moved on to the adjacent children’s room.

He frowned the instant he stepped inside; this was not a room made for ordinary living.

Every window had been fitted with grilles identical to those on the Pit Cage. The roomy space contained toy train tracks, a cart piled with plush toys, a little art hut for painting, picture books scattered on the bed and floor, and graffiti stuck on the walls, ceiling, and even the mirror… In short, wherever there was space, it was jam-packed and cluttered.

Staring at the chaotic graffiti covering the wall, Xu Huo automatically peeled one piece off — and a scrap of paper fell from behind it.

He picked it up. It was a bulletin: Stellar Pharmaceutical Research Group had frequent accidents, and higher-ups had made public clarifications.

He tore off a second doodle. Behind it was another bulletin, also an accident report about Stellar Pharmaceutical Research Group.

Then a third and a fourth — each doodle hid a paper. Some were clippings, some were scraps of notes. Most recorded addresses of suspected victims of the pharmaceutical incidents; others described post-drug symptoms, including but not limited to pustules all over the body, muscle atrophy, and organ failure.

Pustules, atrophy, failure — Xu Huo knew those words all too well. They had shown up in the leftover player he’d encountered in the Headhunter Demon dungeon, and in Professor Han, who was still undergoing treatment.

The difference was that the leftover player had developed symptoms after stopping the drug, while Professor Han had been scratched by a Mutant outside the train.

Mutants had once been Evolvers. Ordinarily, without taking evolution agent they should have shown organ failure too, but instead they carried a toxin that could push ordinary Evolvers into the state of missing their agent prematurely.

Mutants might be specially mutated, but the symptoms seen in ordinary Evolvers appeared common. From these clippings and notes, despite the drugs varying, the sequelae shared overlapping characteristics.

“This isn’t that the drugs are defective — it’s that Evolvers themselves have flaws.”

“Evolution itself is a scam!”

“Is there really no drug that can halt evolution?”

“I will kill those people at Stellar Corporation!”

The notes grew increasingly vehement, but then Xu Huo unexpectedly found a single paper tucked among them that read:

“I was wrong. Real evolution does exist — but it’s too late.”

He snapped to his feet, hardly able to hide his excitement, pacing back and forth a few times before forcing himself to calm down.

From the room’s arrangement and the town’s facilities, it was not hard to deduce that Master Nise’s granddaughter had been affected. His son and daughter-in-law had once worked for Stellar Pharmaceutical Research Group and died in an accident — perhaps not an accident. Master Nise’s investigation had progressed from believing evolution itself was flawed to concluding that true evolution did, in fact, exist. That meant he had to have discovered a method of perfect evolution!

The town residents were neither Nise’s personal friends nor precise-noise hobbyists; they had come to watch over Master Nise, and after his death they had removed his personal belongings.

That explained why Mutants prowled the town and why strict travel conditions had been imposed.

The question now was whether the town still held the answers Master Nise sought.

Glancing down at the intact papers on the floor, Xu Huo slipped the final sheet into his pocket and went downstairs.

Clocks were the most common items in Master Nise’s residence; if he could hide things behind graffiti, he could do the same inside clocks.

He didn’t leave the building after that. He almost tore apart every clock, even the broken ones in the junk room, but found nothing.

He checked his phone: it was almost time to meet back at their agreed rendezvous.

Xu Huo put the Dual-color Magic Cube away, and began placing the clocks back on their shelves one by one. Suddenly, a stopwatch dial fell from a grandfather clock. He reached out and caught it, and the game interface popped up:

[Three Seconds of a Life: Legend has it a person sees a carousel of memories in the last instant before death — the deepest recollections of the dying. How long does this moment last? According to experimental authorities, it ranges from one second to ten seconds.]

[Clock Master Nise believed it was only three seconds, and thus this super item, born of an artisan’s toil and a master’s soul, came into being.]

[Although it has sixty second-slots, only the final three seconds can be used. When worn, the user’s life automatically rewinds to the third second before death. Each rewind consumes three second-slots. When the pointer completes a full cycle, it will lose its soul.]

He hadn’t found evolution-related information while using the Dual-color Magic Cube, but unexpectedly came into possession of a super item: a dial that could rewind time. Although it only went back three seconds, the stopwatch dial effectively granted him twenty chances to resurrect after death!

Time rewinding — a concept beyond three dimensions — could actually be realized through a dial. A super item like the Painting Woman was already stunning, but this kind of artifact that seemed to manipulate space-time order and could be manufactured by humans was even more astonishing; it seemed to have come into being almost unconsciously.

“Could hyperspatial zones create items with special properties?” Xu Huo murmured to himself. He found a watch case, set the dial inside, and placed it into another identical case before leaving the junk room.

As he headed for the door, he glanced at the wall clock’s time. He pulled the door open — and a black arrow, flying in from somewhere unknown, pierced his heart!

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep