Chapter 797: Echoes of the Red Moon
by xennovelHuff… huff…
Wha- what is going on?
…
Dr. Zhang and Dr. Wang hurried over with Lu Xin, all lightly panting from exhaustion.
They had no idea how Lu Xin managed to travel so far without a lamp or the guidance of electronic flies, but following Dr. An’s advice, they dared not relax and quickened their pace until they caught up, only to see Lu Xin walking through an open door.
Since the door was left ajar, they could, by the faint beam of a flashlight, see Lu Xin standing before a corpse.
The flashlight couldn’t be directed at his face, so most of his body was swallowed by darkness.
They couldn’t discern his expression—he merely stood there silently, as though an eternity had passed.
……
……
“Indeed, this is it…”
He had been here long ago, buried deep in his subconscious.
It took Lu Xin ages to be sure. Then, he carefully clipped the ID from the corpse back onto his white coat. Slowly, he rose and stepped into the corridor, one cautious step at a time.
On the left side, a series of room doors lined the wall.
Some were thrown wide open, others only half-closed, while a few gently shut as if nudged by an unseen breeze.
Inside, many doors bore scratch marks, as though clawed by desperate hands.
As Lu Xin moved forward, his memories began to merge with his present reality.
It felt not like a three-decade-later return to a desolate, dark complex but rather as if he had walked this corridor when the institute was bustling with staff and the ceiling lamps still burned overhead.
He saw several individuals in white-blue striped uniforms seated in the adjacent holding cell.
Some huddled in the corner, trembling uncontrollably.
Others pounded at the door, gripping the bars and shaking them vigorously.
Some repeatedly banged their heads against the wall.
And others crawled along the wall like wild animals, punctuating their movement with sharp, anguished wails.
……
……
Amidst the chaos, Lu Xin reached the innermost area where two closed doors stood.
He scanned one of them. In his nightmare, he remembered his sister undergoing surgery behind that door, but now it was just an empty holding cell.
So, he slowly made his way to the penultimate cell.
In reality, he too had arrived at the penultimate holding cell.
Then, both his remembered self and his present self halted, turning slowly to peer into the cell.
At that moment, Lu Xin’s eyes suddenly blurred.
A buzzing noise swelled around him, chaotic to the extreme, only to fall silent in an instant.
Everything around him faded away like a receding tide.
All that remained in his view was the penultimate cell—a dark room where a man danced in confused abandon.
The man wore a patient gown and was completely barefoot.
His limbs moved erratically, without rhythm or music, as if driven purely by impulse—a silent, impromptu dance.
Meanwhile, as Lu Xin pushed open the cell door in reality, he was startled to see that the four walls and even the ceiling were smeared with twisted, distorted symbols, densely covering every inch of space.
In that instant, Lu Xin’s mind was thrown into utter chaos.
……
……
It was as if the abandoned Red Moon Institute building itself had suddenly come alive.
Lu Xin felt his mental power darting through the structure like something tangible.
His own energy intertwined with the innate power of the institute.
As if a switch had been flipped, hidden secrets were instantly activated…
Fragments of disjointed scenes from different times and places began to flash through his mind.
He saw himself, handcuffed, sitting in a pristine office, opposite a young doctor in a white coat who smiled and said, “Mr. Lu, your seventeen scams totaling over ten million have been confirmed. We hope you’ll confess exactly how you deceived these people—and by what means.”
“Got evidence, huh?”
Lu Xin replied lazily with a smile, “Watch it, or I’ll sue you for defamation…”
The other man smiled politely, and Lu Xin noted the name on his badge: Bi Zaizhi.
“We don’t need evidence because we are seeking it,” he said.
He continued, “If you cooperate with us, your records can be completely wiped clean. Otherwise…”
……
……
The scene flashed again: Lu Xin found himself strapped into a chair laden with cables, even wearing a metal helmet lined with a damp sponge atop his head. In front, a glass wall separated him from several white-coated figures standing by a switch.
“So you have mind-reading abilities?”
“Or perhaps telepathy…”
……
One of them clenched his fist, raised it, and said, “Then guess what I’m holding.”
“If you can correctly name it, you won’t have to endure this pain any longer.”
……
……
“Heh, there’s no such thing as a curse or no curse,” came the remark.
Once again, the scene flashed: Lu Xin now sat in a spacious office dressed in clean, normal clothes.
Before him stood a glass of golden liquor alongside a thick cigar.
Opposite him was a slightly overweight man whose hair was combed to one side to cover a reddened scalp.
Yet, as he spoke, his confidence was unmistakable:
“The so-called projections of higher-dimensional beings, humanity’s curse, even genetic defects—they’re not problems at all.”
He chuckled and recounted, “There was an experiment where lab rats were placed in an environment with plentiful food and water and no predators. They were expected to thrive limitlessly, but instead, the rats exhibited a strong self-destructive tendency. In 25 experiments, every single trial ended in extinction.”
“Humans are, in a way, just another type of lab rat.”
“For tens of thousands of years, humanity has struggled for survival and reproduction, achieving what we have today.”
“But once we surmount those basic challenges, life’s curse begins to haunt us…”
“Do you think this signals humanity’s downfall?”
“Not at all!”
“In fact, this is an opportunity—a chance for humanity to ascend to a higher dimension.”
“Can you imagine a day when we can rewind time and change the past, achieving true equality and fulfillment, free from death, war, hunger, desire, or emotion? A world without conflict, without tough choices, where every want is instantly satisfied without hindering our collective progress—and even launching us into the age of the stars?”
“We have already been granted that opportunity…”
……
……
Hahaha…
Hahaha…
In another flash, Lu Xin saw himself imprisoned, his body marked by scars from countless experiments, clutching the iron bars and laughing maniacally, “You really intend to upgrade this world like a computer?”
“Madmen—you are the true crazies.”
“All you do is destroy this world, and nothing else…”
“Yet, I couldn’t be happier…”
“Haha, I no longer need to destroy it—because you did it for me…”
……
“Swish, swish, swish…”
One image after another flashed before his eyes.
Lu Xin’s mind was nearly overwhelmed by the barrage of dense information, nearing unbearable pain.
Blood began to seep from his nostrils as his brain throbbed in relentless agony.
The images before him started to blur.
Finally, he found himself stumbling back to his cell, watching the man who continued to dance slowly in the darkness.
He even heard the man’s murmurs.
“Everyone is but a mirror.”
“They only reflect the world’s original state…”
……
The man danced lightly, biting his finger and using his blood to scrawl a series of symbols on the wall.
The symbols defied logic and bore no concrete meaning.
They twisted and warped, marking the wall.
When one wall was filled, he simply moved on to the next.
One finger’s worth of blood wasn’t enough, so he bit another.
Until the dancing man had covered every wall of the cell with bizarre symbols drawn in blood.
……
……
“So what exactly is that?”
Dr. Zhang and Dr. Wang clutched each other in disbelief, trembling as they asked.
They saw Lu Xin standing before the abandoned cell, with the long-dead lights of the institute beginning to flicker, and the thick, dust-covered lamps pulsing as if the entire building were gasping for breath.
Everything exceeded their expectations; they couldn’t comprehend it.
“This is the key to our investigation mission…”
At that moment, Dr. An, unusually calm, swiftly produced a sketching pen.
“Here lies information left behind by someone from the past—unreadable by outsiders.”
“We hired him primarily to decipher these messages himself.”
……
As she spoke, her pupils began flashing with intricate rune patterns, like the inner workings of a finely tuned machine, meticulously recording every fluctuation of the energy emanating from Lu Xin without error.
Dr. Zhang and Dr. Wang recognized that she had deployed her own ability.
Profiling.
A mental profiling and decoding.
By analyzing the variations and frequency of a person’s mental wavelength, she captured the flow of information inside his mind.
“We must record every image he’s seeing right now.”
“This is what will determine whether we can resolve the Red Moon incident.”