365: Chapter 365 Father's Hands

Su Qingxue's fingers were hooked onto Chen Mo's forearm, feeling the faint spasms of the muscles beneath the fabric.

"What did you just see?"

Chen Mo didn't answer immediately. He flipped the brass key over, his thumb resting on the brand of three interlocking rings on the handle, slowly rubbing it with his thumb pad.

The hum of the liquid metal left arm gradually faded, Li Ke a cornered beast being soothed.

"I saw my father."

As soon as these words were spoken, the atmosphere in the club instantly became heavy.

Su Qingxue let go, taking half a step back to give him space.

404 stopped typing on the keyboard, and Li Ke poked his head out from behind the terminal.

Even Nightingale, who was on guard at the door, turned her head slightly.

"He was in a basement." Chen Mo clenched the key in his right palm, his gaze falling on his black metal left arm as if he were seeing it for the first time.

"He was building an arm."

Su Qingxue's heart tightened suddenly.

"You mean, the Shura-class Prosthetic Body was built by your father?"

Chen Mo's Adam's apple bobbed. The metal arm slowly rose, and his five fingers opened and closed under the light.

"More than just building it."

His voice was very low, as if ground out from the deepest part of his chest.

"He was using his own blood to feed it."

404 jumped up from behind the terminal, his chair falling onto the carpet with a dull thud.

"What do you mean? Feeding a mechanical arm with blood? That's not scientific, Brother Mo. The driving medium for liquid metal is..."

"It's carbon-based neural coupling fluid," Li Ke interrupted him, pushing up his glasses, his expression becoming extremely complex.

"If liquid metal is to achieve true neural-level response, it needs a medium that can carry both electrical and biological signals simultaneously."

He paused and looked at Chen Mo's left arm.

"Theoretically, the most perfect coupling fluid is the product of the creator's own blood after special treatment."

"So this arm was customized for you from the very beginning."

Li Ke's voice carried the tremor unique to technicians—an excitement found only when facing a creation that transcends known understanding.

"Not for me," Chen Mo corrected him.

"It was for this body."

These words were Li Ke a sharp blade, precisely slicing through the thin veil of reality that everyone had been deliberately avoiding.

Su Qingxue's nails dug into her palm.

She had always known there were too many unexplainable things about Chen Mo, but she never pried.

Now, long-suppressed questions surged forth, making her chest feel tight.

"How did your father know you would need this arm?" Her voice was steady, but the veins on the back of the hand gripping her sidearm bulged slightly.

Chen Mo stuffed the key into his pocket and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, pressing his liquid metal arm against the cold glass.

A layer of spiderweb-Li Ke frost patterns immediately spread across the glass surface; the metal was synchronizing with his emotions.

"Because he had met the scribe."

This answer caused The Banker to twitch violently on the ground, as if struck by an electric shock.

"Impossible!" The Banker's voice was so sharp it almost cracked.

"the scribe is a legend, a story used inside Tartarus to scare newcomers! My father followed the Emperor his whole life; how could he possibly..."

"Your father didn't follow the Emperor."

Chen Mo turned around, his gaze crushing down on The Banker.

"From beginning to end, his loyalty was to the scribe."

The Banker's mouth hung open, Li Ke a fish gasping on the shore.

He wanted to retort, but the memory fragments frantically surging in his mind were piecing together a truth he had never dared to face.

The manuscripts in his father's study that he was never allowed to touch, the papers filled with strange symbols and formulas, the metallic clanging sounds coming from the basement late at night.

"He wasn't working for the Emperor..." The Banker murmured, his pupils dilated.

"He was building a weapon for someone else."

Chen Mo didn't look at him again and walked toward Li Ke's terminal.

"Pull up the underground pipe network map of Jiangcheng from the seventies and overlay it with the current 3D model of the city."

Li Ke's fingers flew across the keyboard. A few seconds later, a 3D wireframe map so complex it made one's scalp tingle appeared on the screen.

"Where is the entrance to Sector 07?" Chen Mo asked The Banker.

The Banker, still reeling from the shock, was pulled back by Chen Mo's voice.

He scrambled up and pointed a trembling finger at a location on the map below Jiangcheng's Old City District, marked as an abandoned main sewage pipe.

"Here." His fingertip left a sweat stain on the screen.

"The entrance is disguised as an ordinary municipal maintenance well, but there's a vertical shaft below that goes straight down eighty meters."

"Eighty meters?" Jiang Hong's eyebrows shot up. She had stood by the terminal at some point.

"That's three times deeper than the deepest subway station."

"That's why I said it's a grave," The Banker's voice trembled.

"It's easy to go down, but hard to come up. Those Mimics will set ambushes in the shaft, waiting for the prey to deliver itself."

"Your three groups of mercenaries all went down through this entrance?" Chen Mo asked, staring at the map.

The Banker nodded.

"Have you ever considered that there might be more than one entrance?"

This sentence made The Banker freeze.

Li Ke was already performing a deeper data mining operation on the terminal, his fingers moving so fast they were almost a blur.

"Boss, I found an encrypted construction record in the municipal archives from the seventies."

He enlarged the screen, and a yellowed digital document appeared before everyone.

"The nuclear facility project in Sector 07 back then designed three independent evacuation routes, leading respectively to the quarry in the north, the old train tunnel in the east, and..."

Li Ke's finger hovered over the third marker. He looked back at Chen Mo.

"The west, the abandoned blast furnace of the Jiangcheng Steel Plant."

"Steel plant." Chen Mo repeated those words, his right hand unconsciously clutching the key in his pocket.

The images from the Thought Synchronization flashed through his mind again—the towering fire, the man in a police uniform carrying a child out of the inferno.

That fire was no accident.

That fire was at the steel plant.

"My father brought me out of Sector 07 once."

When Chen Mo said this, his voice was soft, but every word was Li Ke a stone dropped into water, creating massive ripples.

Su Qingxue placed her hand on his shoulder, her palm touching the edge of the wound wrapped in cloth. Warmth transferred through the blood-soaked fabric.

"Can you find that passage?" She didn't press him about the past, only asking about the present.

Chen Mo lowered his eyes, looking at his black liquid metal left arm.

Fine ripples appeared on the metal surface, as if responding to a call from the depths of his memory.

"No need to look for it."

He raised his left hand, palm up.

The liquid metal re-aggregated in his palm, slowly taking shape.

It wasn't a weapon or a tool, but a miniature 3D map, precise down to every pipe and every corner.

Everyone was stunned.

"It remembers the way."

Chen Mo looked at the maze constructed of liquid metal in his palm, a faint, complex smile pulling at the corner of his mouth that even he couldn't quite decipher.

"My father's hand made this arm, and he left the way home inside it."

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