Chapter 275: Maniac
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
The fire in the New York Medical Research a.s.sociation Affiliated Hospital had caused a total of 78 deaths, 21 missing people and 127 seriously injured casualties. Most of the dead were patients who could not escape from the fire by themselves.
Opinions varied on the cause of the fire. The most common guess was that the hospital’s electricity circuit had been too old so it had ignited the fabrics in the stockroom, causing the fire to happen.
The most bizarre argument was this — several casualties of the fire claimed to have seen a grim reaper, who could turn cement into magma when it stepped on the floor, das.h.i.+ng and running out of a ward on the second floor and lit the hospital with the raging fire.
Other than terrorist attacks, the ‘conspiracy theory’ of Karlado people making their strike back after the US had made an official declaration of war also appeared one after another.
In such a situation, it took nearly a week to investigate the cause of the fire but it still ended up being futile. The New York Fire Department’s investigation center, that made the official conclusion, became a target of public criticism and suffered tremendous pressure.
At noon today, when the sun was s.h.i.+ning brightly, in the original site where the ‘New York Medical Research a.s.sociation Affiliated Hospital’, which had been turned into ruins, lied a tall middle-aged black man, who looked thin and pallid but whose eyes were still sparkling brightly, who walked for umpteenth times on the rubble.
Suddenly, he stopped in front of an open seam of a collapsed slab and shoved a few rocks up using the shovel in his hand. Crouching down, he picked up a black cement block that had hardened together and observed it carefully before muttering with his chapped lips, “This doesn’t make sense! How can ordinary oxygen combustion turn the cement into magma?”
“Wayne, stop digging your rocks! Come and take a look, this is another trace of explosion from the oxygen valves. Judging from the current evidence, I think we can conclude that the fire was caused by a large amount of oxygen leakage from the oxygen supply system in the hospital. It was just unfortunate that the computer control system was out of control and in the end, the excess oxygen was ignited by the aged electrical circuit. With just a ‘bang’, the ignition took place and the entire hospital became a sea of fire in a very short period of time, which led to heavy casualties!” Standing on the other side of the ruins was a white man who looked greatly exhausted. He was holding a valve that had been burnt to become sc.r.a.p iron as he looked at his colleague and shouted.
The black man held the black cement block in his hand and walked up and down as he stepped on the ruins to walk up to his companion. Without warning, he threw the black cement block into his arms. “Still the same old question, Joseph. How are you going to explain these magma rock-like cements?”
“Deflagration, Wayne! deflagration! At the instant when the oxygen detonates, it can produce thousands of degrees of Fahrenheit in an instant, it’s entirely possible to burn cement into magma!”
“If that kind of deflagration really took place, the hospital should have been turned into ruin in less than one second! Everyone would have been buried in it!”
“Maybe because the internal structure of the hospital coincided with the direction of the detonation’s shock wave so it was not destroyed immediately, or perhaps the scale of deflagration was under control. It just so happened that it took place one by one in the ward separately so it did not destroy the overall structure of the building…”
“Joseph, the possibilities you said do exist but we all know that the chances of that happening are smaller than Mars cras.h.i.+ng into Earth!”
The white man choked and the anger in his heart finally exploded. Irritated, he yelled loudly, “Then tell me what other possibilities it could be other than what I’ve just said? There’s no trace of substance that can help the combustion take place at all in the hospital’s ruins! Don’t tell me that you really think that it’s the Karlado people who did this? Or perhaps the grim reaper who can turn the ground into magma when he walks on the concrete floor has really come here? If that’s really the case, it’d be swell! We can immediately pa.s.s this investigation to the FBI or the Homeland Security Bureau…”
“Of course I don’t think so, Joseph! I can’t give a reasonable explanation either, so that’s why we have to continue to investigate!” the black man stared at his colleague and said calmly.
It was apparent that such an argument had taken place for more than once between these two as the other investigators around them turned a blind eye to the arguments of the two ‘heads’. However, by the side of the employees of the New York Fire Department’s investigation center, an uninvited guest that ordinary people could not see with their naked eyes was staring at the two senior investigative directors who were in the midst of their dispute as all sorts of emotions stirred up in his heart.
After listening to it for a while and feeling that he already had a conclusion summed up in his heart, the uninvited guest turned and sprinted away. His slender toes leaped lightly on the ground, and soon, he came to a luxurious Mercedes-Benz SUV and entered the car with his invisible body.
After that, Zhang Lisheng began to solidate his body again in the car. He hastily put on his clothes and let out a sigh of relief. He crawled through the front crevice to the driver’s seat and started his SUV, before driving straight to the new port on the outskirts of New York.
On the way, the car phone of the SUV suddenly rang. The young man glanced at the central control screen and connected the phone.
Immediately, the meticulous voice of the LS Group’s Chief Legal Officer could be heard in the car. “Boss, I’ve verified through with the internal relations.h.i.+p of the New York Fire Department already. The name of Professor Effiny Pigros from Cornell University has already been added on the list of missing people of the New York Medical Research a.s.sociation Affiliated Hospital. In fact, Professor Effiny is the only missing person in the five wards near her. All of the others have been confirmed dead so at first, her name was also originally written on the death list but after the DNA identification of the corpses was carried out, there’s no evidence that she’s already dead. Of course, this may only be a technical issue. You know, it’s impossible for the so-called missing people to be found in such a disaster. As for your supervisor, Professor Steven, due to the reason that the surveillance video was damaged on the day of the fire, adding on to the fact that he had not been to the hospital for quite a while, he was not on the list of casualties or missing people.”
Zhang Lisheng became silent for a while. “Alright, Edward. Thank you!”
“My job is to serve you, boss!” Edward said with a smile on the phone. “Oh yeah, just a reminder, you’re one of the main characters in Mr. Houg’s estate banquet that will take place this Sat.u.r.day. Please don’t forget about it.”
“There are three more days, right? Don’t worry, I won’t forget.”
“Okay, if you don’t have any other instructions, I won’t bother you anymore. See you, boss!”
“See you, Edward!” After Zhang Lisheng said the word ‘goodbye’, the car phone automatically shut down after three seconds.
Looking at the bustling crowd on both sides of the road outside the car windows, Zhang Lisheng muttered to himself with a strange expression, “My dear professor, don’t tell me that you’ve really succeeded? Succeeding in turning yourself into a monster alive and has rescued Professor Effiny’s life on top of that?! Stabilizers, stabilizers… As long as I test the effect of the stabilizer you left behind, the answers will come to me naturally…”
With all sorts of thoughts jumbled up in his mind, the young man stepped on the accelerator pedal and drove the car to the new New York port. After parking his car at the parking lot outside the port, he walked out of the car and followed the crowds that always seemed to be congested all the time and gushed into the new port.
Due to the reason that he already had a record of entry and exit, he smoothly bought a ticket with his pa.s.sport on the berth of the civil s.h.i.+p leading to Shrimp B1 Island. Riding on the waves and wind, it only took him two to three hours to reach the land of the foreign world’s island.
After a span of several months, there was not much change on the human gathering place of Shrimp B1 Island other than being much more prosperous. Zhang Lisheng eagerly rushed into the cement house that had a white bald eagle flag hanging on top of it and entered the bunker after having his face scanned. After shuttling through the ramp, he walked up to the door of the Stanford lab.
The pa.s.sword of the door lock had been changed to the former one when his supervisor left. He opened the door and entered the lab. The first thing that entered his eyes was a scene as messy as a garbage heap. Unable to stop himself from frowning, he walked up to the automatic rat incubating instrument and clicked on the control computer a few times. To his surprise, it actually showed a myriad of formulas.
This was a small trick Steven and Zhang Lisheng had jointly agreed to after Effiny was attacked. They turned the rat incubating instrument, that n.o.body would have ever thought that there would be data stored inside, into the so-called laboratory hard disk ‘X’ folder.
When the young man saw the formula data constantly flas.h.i.+ng on the screen of the four-inch display, he took a tablet out from the special inner bag in his s.h.i.+rt and ‘cut’ all of the data into it directly through Bluetooth.
After linking this information to the inexplicable text message he received in the phone, a complete chemical preparation and derivation process suddenly appeared.
Looking at the seemingly scattered but actually logically intensive derivation process, and the pool of bloodstains on the ground beside the experimental platform that had already turned dark brown, all sorts of doubts vanished from Zhang Lisheng’s heart.
A clear image of how Steven was lying on the experimental platform, groping and cutting open the muscles next to his own spine using a scalpel, before operating the auto-injector to inject a sufficient amount of stabilizer into himself and pus.h.i.+ng away his spine to place the Gold Core’s shards on the white spinal cord appeared in his mind, prompting him to mutter, “Oh my dear supervisor! You’re completely a maniac…”
As he was speaking, Zhang Lisheng walked quickly to the cabinet filled with experimental materials and ransacked the cylindrical silver metal container containing the Gold Core shards.
After carefully carrying the container and placing it in the groove of the test bench, he fixed its position and tapped his finger on the fingerprint reader. The metal container opened right away with a ‘pop’ and gave off a burst of milky white fog.
After the fog dispersed, the silver container had already opened like a petal, but unfortunately, it had already been completely empty.
“Sh*t! The more I wish for such a thing to not happen, the more it’ll happen…” Zhang Lisheng calculated in his mind in annoyance. He still needed to return to New York to attend the manor banquet of Senator Houg so it was impossible for him to kill a spiritual monster in such a short period of time.
With no other choice, he could only give up his intention of experimenting immediately and began to study the formula derivation process of the stabilizer left behind by Steven seriously. After he had tried to configure the stabilizers at different stages and properly labelling them, he put them in the metal container one by one and locked them in the suitcase.
After completing all of the stabilizers, Zhang Lisheng realized that more than twenty hours had somehow pa.s.sed. He stretched his body lazily and found a piece of rag to wipe off the bloodstain on the ground with detergent, before informing the few familiar personnel in the base to clean up the lab. Then, he embarked on a ferry and returned to New York.