70: Su Mu's actions and the "unexpected" discovery

The Polytechnic University campus was still bathed in seemingly eternal, gentle, and calm sunlight, but Su Mu's state of mind was completely different. Excellence's total loss of contact weighed on her heart day and night like a heavy, cold boulder. That lingering anxiety and unease, like a spreading haze, eroded her once calm and focused academic life. The "Consultant Chen," who had appeared suddenly with a refined but inexplicably eerie air, and his questions—seemingly concerned but actually prying everywhere—were like two sharp thorns driven deep into her suspicions, making it impossible for her to sit peacefully in the library anymore as an oblivious bystander.

She decided not to sit and wait for death. Excellence's disappearance was by no means ordinary; a huge secret must be hidden behind it. And she might be the only person left outside the school who had keenly sensed the abnormality and truly cared about his safety. She had to do something.

Utilizing the connections, permissions, and resources she had accumulated as the Academic Minister of the Student Union and a core technical member of the Innovation Center, Su Mu began an extremely cautious, walking-on-thin-ice independent investigation. She knew well that she might be facing an unimaginably massive force; any slight negligence could lead to unpredictable consequences and might even endanger Excellence, who was still in distress. Every action of hers had to be carefully considered, like walking through darkness filled with infrared alarm lines.

She started with that "International Youth Science Exploration Foundation" and Consultant Chen's business card. Through the top academic databases subscribed to by the school library (IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink) and the private networks of several seniors studying in top overseas laboratories, she attempted to cross-reference the background, registration information, public sponsored projects, and core member list of this foundation.

The search results showed that this foundation did indeed exist, registered in a Pacific island nation known for financial secrecy and loose regulation. There was very little public information, but on the surface, it seemed to have no obvious blemishes. It had sponsored some extremely obscure, cutting-edge, and even somewhat "sci-fi" research projects, such as the application of high-dimensional topology in information compression, theoretical models of super-distance communication based on Quantum Entanglement, and discussions on the possibility of non-carbon-based life forms. The sponsorship amounts were huge, but most of the project results had never been publicly published or were only presented in highly abstract mathematical forms. This "high investment, low exposure, singularity-focused" model was less like pure academic funding and more like a... wide-net investment targeting specific "future possibilities," or rather... a hunt. This seemingly "clean" yet deliberately mysterious aura raised Su Mu's intuitive alarm to the highest level. Why would a truly pure academic foundation need to hide its tracks so much?

Immediately after, using the legitimate excuse of needing to coordinate venues and security for an upcoming high-end inter-school academic forum, she applied to the school's Security Department for limited, time-specific access to campus surveillance footage. She locked the time range to the critical 48 hours before and after Excellence "left," focusing on all camera footage around his dormitory building.

Carefully watching these massive, dull surveillance videos frame by frame was an extremely mentally and visually exhausting task. Su Mu worked almost without sleep, supported by large amounts of black coffee and a strong will, her eyes bloodshot. Hard work pays off; she indeed unearthed heart-stopping, unusual details from those seemingly ordinary images:

On the eve and the day of Excellence's "departure," in addition to that cold-tempered, hurried young man (Xiao Zhang) appearing abnormally near the dormitory building multiple times, there were also several black sedans with uniform models and extremely dark window glass that had never appeared in the campus registration system. They had quietly driven in and out in the dead of night when there were few people around, bearing some kind of non-civilian special license plates (the serial number format was different from all government and military plates she knew). What made her spine chill even more was that in a piece of surveillance footage from a tricky angle at a distant parking lot entrance/exit, she clearly saw—on the day of his so-called "departure," Excellence did not walk out on his own at all! He was being half-carried out of the hallway by two men wearing seemingly ordinary casual clothes but with exceptionally robust physiques, one on his left and one on his right! His head was lowered, his steps were weak and unsteady, and he relied almost entirely on the support of the two people beside him to move. That state was definitely not how an exchange student about to embark on a bright future should look; it was more like a... patient with blurred consciousness and no autonomy, or even... a prisoner!

These discoveries were like a cold chisel, instantly shattering the official lie of an "overseas exchange," exposing a corner of the bloody, terrifying truth to Su Mu. Excellence indeed did not leave voluntarily! He was in an extremely abnormal state at the time, and might even have been forcibly taken away! His so-called "exchange program" was simply a carefully woven deception used to cover up the truth!

Huge shock and bone-deep fear instantly seized Su Mu, making her almost unable to breathe. She suppressed the raging waves and shivers in her heart, forcing herself to calm down. The evidence was far from enough; she needed to know more, needed to know where Excellence had been taken, and how he was doing now!

An extremely bold, perhaps even crazy, idea formed in her mind. She decided to use all the computer and cybersecurity knowledge she had mastered as a top student in electronic engineering to risk doing something that walked the gray area of the law and was extremely dangerous: she quietly wrote an extremely complex, highly anonymous web crawler program.

She implanted this program with multiple disguised proxy Nodes and dynamic stepping stones, setting extremely harsh trigger conditions and self-destruct protocols. The core task of the program was to perform fuzzy keyword matching and information scraping within the historical archives of certain hidden forums and encrypted chat groups on the vast Dark Web, where geeks, intelligence peddlers, and cutting-edge technology discussions took place. The keyword combinations she set were carefully designed to be specific enough while avoiding being too direct to trigger high-level alarms: "Excellence" (name), "International Youth Science Exploration Foundation" (full English name of The Foundation), "Applied Physics Singularity Event," "Undisclosed Energy Experiment," "Neural Interface Accident," "Ninth Department" (a term she caught from the previous fragment of information), "seed Project," "Abnormal Bio-electric Signal," "Forced Containment"...

This process was truly like deep-sea salvage in the vast Pacific Ocean, not only with a slim chance of success but also full of unknown risks. Every time the program ran, she felt her heart was about to jump out of her chest, as if she could hear invisible alarms screeching in her ears, fearing that in the next second, cyber police or even more terrifying mysterious forces would trace her along the network cable. Her spirit was highly tense; every operation was like walking a tightrope over an abyss.

However, perhaps her persistence moved the heavens, or perhaps it was destined. A few days later, in the early hours of the morning, her crawler program's monitoring interface suddenly flashed with red alarm signs frantically! The program successfully captured a fragment of an anonymous forum post published months ago, which existed for a very short time (perhaps only a few seconds) and was almost instantly deleted! The post came from a private section that required multi-layer encryption verification to access, where "non-traditional scientific events" were discussed.

Because the deletion speed was too fast, the crawler only managed to scrape a few incomplete segments of text and was quickly reverse-tracked and attacked by the source server's powerful erasure program, forcing Su Mu to immediately activate the preset self-destruct program, cut all connections, and clear all local caches and logs, disappearing into the deep sea like a startled octopus spraying ink.

But that fleeting glimpse of the fragments was enough to make Su Mu's blood freeze!

The remaining text was as follows:

"... [Data Deleted] ... University Town area ... detected brief but extremely strong abnormal energy fluctuations ... spectral characteristics cannot be classified ... suspected leakage of an undeclared high-risk energy or information field experiment ... student involved ... tentatively codenamed 'seed' before condition stabilizes ... scene has been fully taken over by the 'Ninth Department' ** ... information blockade level: Deep Crimson ... all those in the know signed an indefinite confidentiality agreement ... [Data Deleted] ..."

"Ninth Department"! "seed"! "Taken over"! "Energy fluctuations"! "Information blockade level: Deep Crimson"!

These fragmented but heavy-as-a-thousand-pounds words were like bolts of pale lightning tearing through the night sky, instantly connecting all the scattered, vague clues in Su Mu's mind—Excellence's mysterious and dangerous "hand-crafted" experiments, the sudden "Education Bureau" inspection, the cold young official, the black cars with special license plates, his state of being half-forcibly taken away, Consultant Chen's eerie prying, the mysterious background of The Foundation—all strung together, outlining a terrifying silhouette that made one shudder!

Excellence's "hand-crafted" experiments might not have been small-scale tinkering at all! It was highly likely that they triggered some extremely serious abnormal event that exceeded current scientific understanding! He might not have gone for an exchange at all, but was regarded as an extremely special, extremely dangerous "case," and was forcibly taken away by a mysterious "Ninth Department" with immense power that she had never heard of! He might even... be in a state of strict supervision, isolation, or even... research! The so-called foundation was very likely another force that smelled the scent and rushed over, trying to get a share of the pie from this incident, or even wanting to snatch the "research results"!

The fear brought by this deduction submerged her like a cold tide, leaving her hands and feet icy cold, almost unable to hold the mouse. She felt as if she had inadvertently glimpsed the hideous, hidden tip of a huge iceberg under the water, and Excellence was frozen in the deepest part of that iceberg, isolated and helpless.

A huge sense of powerlessness and panic instantly seized her. What should she do? Go directly to look for that ethereal "Ninth Department"? She didn't even know if this department really existed, which system it belonged to, or where its door opened! Call the police? The "evidence" in her hands was so weak and indirect, more like the delusions of a paranoid patient; not only might it be ignored, but it might also alert the enemy, bringing disaster to Excellence! She didn't even dare to discuss it with anyone around her, fearing that she would drag them into this terrible whirlpool too.

Just as she was burning with anxiety, restless, and feeling like she was about to be crushed by this huge pressure and unknown fear, her private mobile phone on the desk suddenly lit up without warning, emitting a notification sound that was extremely faint yet exploded in her ears like a thunderclap!

It was a text message! From a completely strange source that had been multi-encrypted and number-masked! The content was extremely brief, without any salutation or pleasantries, only a cold sentence and a latitude and longitude coordinate precise to six decimal places:

"Want to find the truth you are looking for? Come to this location alone tomorrow at 3 PM. Remember, absolutely do not carry any communication devices, electronic products, or recording equipment."

Ten seconds after the message was displayed and read, it automatically disappeared like a ghost, leaving no trace, as if it had never appeared.

Su Mu's heart almost stopped beating at that moment, then began to pound wildly, hitting her ribs and making a thumping sound that seemed particularly deafening in the silent room. Her breathing tightened suddenly, and her palms were instantly soaked with cold sweat.

Is it a trap?! This must be a trap! Did The Foundation behind that "Consultant Chen" discover her investigation? Or is that mysterious "Ninth Department" testing her? What do they want to do? Kill her to silence her? Eliminate a threat? Or... want to get more information about Excellence's past from her?

But... what if it's a turning point? What if it's someone who is also investigating this matter, knows the inside story, but cannot appear publicly? What if it's the only opportunity to reach Excellence and understand his true situation?

The huge, unknown risks and her deep, inseparable worry for Excellence unfolded a fierce, almost cruel tug-of-war in her heart. Her fingertips trembled slightly from tension, and her face was as pale as paper.

After a long few minutes of silence and struggle, her concern for Excellence's situation and a kind of do-or-die courage finally overcame her fear for her own safety. She took a deep breath, her eyes gradually becoming firm, sharp, and even carrying a hint of determination. No matter if what lay ahead was a dragon's den or an abyss, for Excellence, she had to go and face it! She could no longer wait passively like this, watching time slip away while knowing nothing about Excellence's plight.

She began to prepare silently and extremely cautiously. She recited the latitude and longitude coordinates repeatedly until they were firmly imprinted in her mind, then completely cleared all relevant caches and call logs on her phone. She found the sports bracelet she usually used for running, which did not have internet or calling functions, to use for timing, put a small but powerful self-defense spray into her pocket, and changed into a set of dark-colored sportswear convenient for movement and a pair of comfortable, durable sports shoes.

Finally, she opened her laptop, connected to a multi-encrypted overseas proxy server, and wrote a scheduled email. The recipient was her most trusted mentor, a person of integrity who had a certain influence within the school. The content of the email was extremely concise, without any unnecessary explanations, only writing: "If I do not contact you to report safety before 18:00 tomorrow evening, please immediately submit these coordinates to the police and the highest-level security department you deem trustworthy, and inform them that it may be related to the 'Excellence Disappearance Case' and the 'International Youth Science Exploration Foundation.' Do not call back." She set the sending time to 5:30 PM the next day, then disconnected from the internet and closed the computer.

After doing all this, she walked to the window and watched the setting sun sinking heavily outside, dyeing the horizon a desolate, brilliant orange-red, like congealed blood. Night was approaching, and the air was filled with a sense of oppression and silence, as if a storm were coming. Her heart was filled with anxiety about the unknown, but more than that, it was a kind of resolute courage to rush into a dangerous place.

Tomorrow, she would go alone to that unknown, dangerous location to face the unfathomable layers of mist shrouding Excellence, regardless of whether what awaited her was the dawn of truth or complete destruction.