123: Chapter 123 Hell is on the Third Floor

The night wind of Midland carried a burnt smell.

It was the smell given off by the sand and stones after being baked by the sun during the day—dry and pungent.

The moon was half-blocked by thick clouds, leaving the light dim, with only the pilot lights on the distant oil wells flickering like scarlet eyes.

At the entrance of the abandoned copper mine, two massive iron gates were rusted shut together, the "DANGER" warning sign on them peeling, leaving only the outline of a skull.

The wind blew through the mine vents, making a strange sound like someone whimpering in their throat.

"According to the geological map, the ore veins here dried up fifty years ago."

Elizabeth's voice came through the earpiece.

She was currently lying prone on a high point two hundred meters away, staring at this dead zone through a thermal imager.

"There's no heat signature on the surface, but the gas venting from the ventilation shaft is four degrees higher than the ambient temperature."

"Then we've found the right place."

Chen Mo crouched in the shadow beneath the iron gate.

He reached out and felt the padlock. The lock body was large, but the cylinder was very new, with even the smell of lubricating oil still lingering on it.

"This place is still operating."

Chen Mo pulled an extremely thin tungsten wire out of his tactical vest pocket and inserted it into the keyhole.

With a soft click, the lock opened. He didn't push the door open directly, but instead fed a fiber-optic probe through the gap in the door.

The screen strapped to his wrist lit up.

Behind the gate was not an overgrown wasteland, but an asphalt-paved road.

Two guards in black uniforms were smoking with their backs to the gate. In their hands, they held not batons, but MP5 submachine guns equipped with suppressors.

"Two sentries," Chen Mo whispered. "Nightingale, you have five seconds."

"Copy that."

Pfft. Pfft.

Two extremely faint, muffled thuds sounded, like ripe watermelons being cracked open.

That was the sound of sniper rifle bullets, fitted with custom suppressors, boring into skulls.

The two guards slumped to the ground almost simultaneously.

Chen Mo pushed the gate open, his figure slipping into the mining area like a wisp of black smoke.

He ignored the two corpses and headed straight for the massive main headframe.

Beneath the headframe, where the minecart tracks should have been, it had now been converted into a massive freight elevator. The control panel required biometric identification.

"Jack, get to work," Chen Mo said into the microphone on his collar.

Far away in the New York safehouse, Jack Martin had already connected to Chen Mo's portable terminal.

In less than ten seconds, the red light on the control panel turned green.

"Their firewall is a five-year-old military version, riddled with holes like a sieve," Jack's voice sounded a bit excited. "Boss, the elevator is coming up."

With a low hum of interlocking gears, the elevator car stopped at the surface. Chen Mo slipped inside and pressed the button for the third basement level.

The elevator descended rapidly.

The burnt smell in the air vanished, replaced by a stench that was a mixture of highly concentrated disinfectant, moldy food, and some kind of rotting meat.

Chen Mo was very familiar with this smell; he had often encountered it in New York when dealing with junkies who had died suddenly in rented apartments.

The elevator doors opened with a ding.

Before him was a long white corridor.

The incandescent light tubes overhead flickered, emitting a buzzing electrical sound.

"Enable recording mode," Chen Mo said, adjusting the micro-camera on his collar.

He kept close to the base of the wall, his footsteps making no sound on the floor. Footsteps came from the corner ahead.

[Auditory filtering enabled... Three-man patrol... Distance: twelve meters... Heart rate: stable...]

Chen Mo stopped, his back against the wall, a black dagger appearing in his hand.

The footsteps drew closer.

The moment the shadow of the first man in black was projected onto the floor, Chen Mo moved.

He clamped his left hand around the man's neck and twisted hard, muffling the crisp snap of the neck bone with the palm he used to cover the man's mouth.

With his right hand reverse-gripping the dagger, he stabbed it precisely under the second man's armpit, straight into the heart.

Just as the third man was about to raise his gun, Chen Mo was already in front of him.

His knee slammed violently into the man's groin, followed by a swift swipe of the dagger across the throat.

Three seconds.

Three corpses lay on the floor.

Chen Mo dragged the corpses, stuffed them into a nearby ventilation duct, and blocked it with the grate.

He wiped the blood from his gloves and continued forward.

At the end of the corridor was a heavy blast-resistant glass door. Through the glass, the scene inside was visible.

At that moment, the sound of Ava Rockefeller drawing in a sharp breath came through the earpiece.

"My God..."

It was a massive underground hall.

Dense rows of iron cages were stacked on top of each other, reaching all the way to the ceiling. Each cage held a person.

The clothes they wore were in tatters, and their skin was an unnatural, sickly grey. Many of them were covered in pustules, and their veins bulged on the surface of their skin like green earthworms.

Most of these people were Latino, with some Asians.

Their eyes were hollow, as if their souls had been completely drained, leaving only empty shells struggling for breath.

Several personnel in white hazmat suits were pushing a cart past, casually dumping food that looked like slops into the troughs in front of the cages.

The people in the cages lunged forward like wild beasts, grabbing the mush and stuffing it into their mouths while making indistinct growls.

"Are those... people?" Ava's voice trembled, a clear sob in her throat. "Are they experimenting on illegal immigrants?"

"Unit-734," Chen Mo's voice was as cold as ice. "This is McLean's waste recycling station."

He aimed the camera at a researcher who was injecting a green drug into a test subject.

The injected man began to twitch violently, his muscles swelling at a visible rate, his bones making cracking sounds as they broke, before he suddenly spat out a mouthful of black blood and collapsed motionless in the cage.

Two guards walked over, practiced in their routine, opened the cage, dragged the corpse out, and tossed it into the incinerator chute nearby.

"Chen, we have to save them," Ava said urgently. "We have weapons, we have Nightingale, we can..."

"No," Chen Mo interrupted her.

"What did you say?"

"I said no," Chen Mo said, looking at the cages, his eyes completely devoid of emotion.

"There are at least two hundred armed guards here, as well as heavy machine gun turrets. Once a firefight breaks out, these people will be executed first."

"So we just watch them die?"

"Anger is cheap, Ava," Chen Mo said, turning toward the server room on the side.

"To turn these people into bullets shot at McLean, we don't rely on guns; we rely on evidence."

He arrived in front of the server room door and once again swiped through the access control using the cracking program Jack had provided.

Inside were rows of server cabinets blinking with blue light. This was the nerve center of the entire base.

Chen Mo pulled out a data cable and plugged it into the main console.

"Jack, package everything."

"It's a huge amount of data, Boss. It's all biological experiment data, and... what the hell, is this the clinical record of a human enhancement drug?"

Jack exclaimed, "The mortality rate here is as high as ninety-eight percent!"

"Cut the crap, download it."

The progress bar began to move slowly.

10%... 45%... 80%...

Chen Mo stared at the screen, his hand resting on the grip of the gun at his waist.

Just as the progress bar jumped to 99%, a piercing alarm suddenly blared.

Woo— Woo— Woo—

The lights throughout the entire base instantly turned a scarlet warning red.

"Have we been spotted?" Nightingale asked through the earpiece, the sound of a bolt being racked clearly audible.

Chen Mo glanced at the screen; the firewall had not triggered an alarm.

"No," he said, turning his head to look out the glass window at the hall. "It's not us."

The hall was in total chaos.

The corpse that had just been declared "dead" and thrown into the incinerator chute suddenly sat up.

No, it could no longer be called a corpse.

The man's body had doubled in size, the hazmat suit on him torn open, revealing skin that had turned dark green, with muscles piled on his body like blocks of hard granite.

His eyes were completely blood-red, with no pupils.

Letting out a roar that did not sound human at all, he grabbed the iron railing at the edge of the chute with one hand.

The solid steel pipe, as thick as a wrist, was twisted like a noodle into a pretzel in his hand.

"Roar!!!"

The monster leaped out of the chute and smashed the head of the nearest guard with a single punch.

Just like smashing a tomato.

"Data download complete," Jack shouted.

Chen Mo pulled out the data cable and watched the monster going on a wild killing spree in the hall.

"It seems McLean's experiment wasn't a complete failure," Chen Mo said, stuffing the hard drive into his tactical pocket. "At least, in terms of creating a killing machine, he succeeded."