14: Chapter 14 Blue Star Anomaly Warning - Memorandum Zero

Sirens tore in from outside the Third Ring Road of the Chengdong Industrial Zone.

The first vehicle to arrive was the local patrol car, with the report stating "Suspected explosion at Yongchang Steel Structure Factory".

The on-duty officer took this as just another workplace safety incident caused by improper operation; his partner in the driver's seat was still complaining about how it was the middle of the night and the reports weren't finished yet.

But the second the headlights swept across the factory grounds, both the accelerator and the complaining stopped.

A four-meter-diameter hole had been torn through the factory's corrugated metal ceiling.

The edges of the hole were curled outward, as if something had punched through from the sky.

It wasn't an explosion—explosions burst from the inside out, but this hole had been smashed from the outside in.

A crack had split the floor.

It extended from the center of the workshop to the base of the wall, half a meter wide, with a solidified black substance remaining in the crevice.

Two scents drifted in the air.

One was the scorched smell of high-temperature metal cooling down—normal.

The other was abnormal; it smelled like rotting fruit soaked in sulfur water—sweet, cloying, enough to make one's stomach churn at a single whiff.

Then they saw the people.

Over twenty workers were scattered throughout the workshop. Leaning against the wall, lying on the floor, kneeling.

Not a single person was standing.

It wasn't that they couldn't stand up. It was that they had forgotten to.

—

Four ambulances arrived, along with two fire trucks and a criminal investigation unit.

The injured were carried out in batches.

Zhang Tiezhu had three broken ribs and a bruised lung, but no perforation.

When he was lifted onto the stretcher, he was still muttering, though not a single word could be understood.

Old Liu had a comminuted fracture in his left leg and had lost over eight hundred milliliters of blood; he was hooked up to an IV bag and rushed into the ambulance.

Xiao Sun's injuries were the most chilling.

The paramedic cut open the rag used to bandage his right arm.

When the flashlight shone on it, the paramedic froze.

It wasn't a burn, nor was it a chemical burn.

The skin looked intact, but the subcutaneous tissue seemed to have been eaten away from the inside by something.

On the X-ray, the muscle fibers showed honeycomb-like cavities.

Layer upon layer, so regular that it didn't look like natural damage, but rather like tooth marks left behind by some kind of creature.

The accompanying emergency doctor held the X-ray up to the light and examined it three times.

"This is not damage that could be caused by any known chemical."

He glanced back at Xiao Sun, who was shivering on the stretcher wrapped in a blanket, and lowered his voice.

"Contact the burn unit and the toxicology department. Contact both."

Samples of the black residue in the floor crack were taken.

The lead criminal investigator crouched by the crack, used tweezers to pick up a small piece, and placed it into an evidence bag.

The edge of his glove touched the black substance.

Half a second.

The contact area of the latex glove turned brittle.

It wasn't melting, and it wasn't corrosion; it was aging.

It was as if that piece of latex had been artificially aged thirty years in half a second—the fibers snapped, turned yellow, and crumbled at the slightest touch.

The investigator flung the glove off.

He stared at the evidence bag for five seconds.

His cheekbones tightened, his lips pressed into a thin line, and he didn't even blink.

—

The questioning was conducted in a temporarily erected military-green inflatable tent.

The pallid fluorescent lights drained the color from everyone's faces.

Plastic emergency packaging, torn scraps of clothing, and bloody footprints were scattered on the ground.

The smell of disinfectant mixed with the roar of the generators outside, trapped by the nylon fabric of the tent, creating an oppressive atmosphere that made people irritable.

Twenty-three workers were registered and questioned one by one.

Everyone's testimony was consistent.

So consistent that the young officer taking the statements began to doubt his own ears by the fifth person.

"A crack opened on the floor. Black mist came out. Then that thing crawled out."

"Four legs, with backward joints. It was wrapped in black mist, and whatever it touched rotted."

"Uncle Tie hit it with a steel rod, and it flew away instantly. Xiao Sun's welding torch melted the moment it touched the black mist, and even his arm started to rot."

Everyone stopped when they reached this point.

Some gritted their teeth.

Some had red eyes. Some stared blankly at the folding table in front of them.

Then the next sentence.

"The ceiling burst open. A person came down from above."

"Black clothes, a half-mask."

"He could vanish into thin air."

"He controlled the molten iron with his hands, turning it into spears—six of them, stabbing into that thing from different directions."

"Then it exploded."

"The fire was huge, but it didn't burn us. Not a single person was hurt."

"That thing was destroyed. He left, and the fire went out with him."

The young officer's pen tip poked a hole through the paper.

He looked up at the middle-aged worker in front of him, face covered in gray dust and dried sweat, eyes too clear for someone who had just been traumatized.

"Sir, let me confirm one more time—"

"There's nothing wrong with my head! You can ask everyone here a hundred more times, and it will still be the same story."

The officer taking the statements didn't respond.

He looked down at the three pages of A4 paper he had already filled, set his pen on the table, stood up, and walked out of the tent.

—

In another corner of the tent.

Chen Xiaohui was lying on a stretcher, a military-green blanket covering her chest, her swollen abdomen rising and falling slightly beneath the blanket.

Her hand was clutching Wang Hao's sleeve, her fingers digging into the texture of the fabric.

"You're crazy."

Her voice was very soft, and she began to cry as soon as she finished speaking, tears streaming down her cheeks into her hairline.

"You drove the car into that wall… you didn't care about your life…"

"As long as you and the baby are both fine."

Wang Hao crouched beside the stretcher.

It was hard to tell if it was sweat or blood on his face, and snot was smeared across half his chin.

He grinned, a very ugly smile.

Of his ten fingers, only three fingernails remained; the other seven had been simply bandaged, with dark red blood seeping through the white gauze.

He hid that hand behind his back, not letting Chen Xiaohui see.

"I'm telling you, Huzi was right; his dad is Ultraman…"

Chen Xiaohui laughed and cried at the same time, hitting his shoulder.

It wasn't a hard hit, but Wang Hao exaggeratedly let out a "Hiss."

A plainclothes officer walked over and crouched down.

"Wang Hao? You were the first to enter the factory grounds from the outside. Your car is still inside, the front completely wrecked. Tell me, what did you see after you went in?"

Wang Hao's smile vanished.

He looked down at Chen Xiaohui, then up at the plainclothes officer.

In that second, his mind raced.

The person who came down from the ceiling, who used fire to shatter the monster, and who glanced at him before leaving, was the young man who had been sitting in his backseat.

Wang Hao opened his mouth.

Then closed it.

"When I drove in, the airbag hit me in the face. I was out for a while. When I woke up, the fire was already out, and I didn't see anything."

The plainclothes officer's gaze remained fixed on his face.

Three seconds.

"Really?"

"Really."

Wang Hao's gaze met the officer's steadily, without a flicker of hesitation.

He said to himself, Although I don't know who you are, you saved my wife and my baby. Who you are, where you live, what your name is—I will take those secrets to my grave.

In this life, I owe you a life—no, three.

—

1:47 AM.

The factory grounds were already cordoned off with three layers of caution tape.

The outermost layer was regular police, the middle was criminal investigation, and the innermost circle of people in white hazmat suits were moving around the crack.

The badges on their chests did not belong to the police, the fire department, or any regular publicly organized department.

The man leading the team was named Section Chief Han Zheng.

In his early forties, with a square face, very short hair, deep eye sockets, and high cheekbones, he stood there without saying a word, making people instinctively steer clear.

He held a military-grade detector in his hand.

It wasn't for radiation detection—the instrument had been modified, and its model could not be found in any public procurement catalog.

The needle on the dashboard was twitching.

It wasn't radiation.

Nor was it electromagnetic. The values themselves were meaningless because, when this instrument was designed, it had never been defined to measure something like what it had detected tonight.

Section Chief Han Zheng crouched beside the crack.

He reached out and touched the cross-section of the rock at the edge of the crack.

The cross-section showed a solidified molten structure—but the temperature had already dropped to room temperature.

The arrangement of the mineral particles was wrong; it wasn't a crystal lattice that could be produced by high temperature and pressure.

It was more like some kind of force had directly rewritten the rules between the molecules.

He stood up.

He walked out of the tent, stood in the night wind, and dialed a number on an encrypted frequency.

The other party answered quickly.

"Old Chen, this is Section Chief Han Zheng."

"Chengdong Industrial Zone, Yongchang Steel Structure Factory. The situation exceeds conventional understanding."

"Twenty-three witnesses, highly consistent testimonies—an unidentified individual appeared at the scene and used means beyond the scope of physics to kill an… unidentified creature."

He paused.

"It's not high-tech. You'll understand once you see the residue analysis report. Our instruments can't identify the substance in that crack. It's not that the data is insufficient; it's that this category doesn't exist in the instrument's cognitive system."

"I need forty-eight hours. It's not about covering it up—it's about confirmation."

The person on the other end of the line said something.

Section Chief Han Zheng's mouth tightened.

"If what those twenty-three people said is true, the problem we are facing is far more complex than just a monster."

He hung up.

He stood in the cold wind, looking up at the large hole in the factory ceiling.

Moonlight poured down through the hole, and ash and iron filings floated in the silver-white beam of light, spinning silently.

Section Chief Han Zheng lowered his head and looked at the readings still jumping on the instrument in his hand.

The needle twitched one last time and returned to zero.

The energy traces dissipated.

But the black residue in the crack was still there.

The twenty-three testimonies were still there.

Section Chief Han Zheng clipped the instrument back to his waist and walked toward his car.

In the trunk was a locked silver briefcase containing a compilation of files on seventy-two "inexplicable events" reported around the world over the past decade.

He had always treated those as noise data.

After tonight, they were no longer.

The car door closed, and the dome light turned on.

Section Chief Han Zheng opened the briefcase and pulled a yellowed document from the very bottom.

On the cover was only one line of printed text—

"Blue Star Anomaly Warning · Memorandum Zero"