"Then where is she? Can I see her?"
Hearing Bruno's words, I got so excited that I sat up from the examination table, nearly bumping my head against the machine above.
"NONONO." Bruno waved his hand at me, then pointed at the table beneath me and said, "Lie down. I need to examine your condition."
Hearing that, I froze for a moment before realizing and quickly apologized, then lay back down on the table.
Seeing this, Bruno smiled, glanced again at the control screen, and said to me, "You'll have the chance to see her, but… don't you find everything here strange?"
"Huh?" I looked at Bruno in confusion.
Only after a while did I respond: "Here? Of course I find it strange. Isn't the very existence of all of you already abnormal?"
Hearing my answer, Bruno waved his hand to signal that I could get down.
He then dragged out two chairs and placed them in front of the console.
"Sit. What I'm about to say will be long, so you may need some patience."
I glanced at him, then walked over and sat on one of the stools.
From Bruno's demeanor, it seemed he had something he wanted to tell me.
After pouring me a glass of water, Bruno sat across from me.
He stared at me for a long time before finally speaking: "What I'm going to tell you next may be hard for you to accept. But please believe me—it's all true."
I furrowed my brows tightly. "Hard to accept?"
"Yes." Bruno nodded very seriously.
I stared at him for a while, then took a slight breath and nodded.
"Go on. I have a pretty strong capacity for handling things."
Bruno didn't joke with me.
After thinking for a long while, he pointed at the ground beneath our feet and asked, "Do you know what this place is?"
"A pivot point. One of the headquarters' pivot points. That's what Suo Tian told me."
"You know of the headquarters?" Bruno sounded somewhat surprised.
"I've only heard it referred to like that. I don't know the details. Even the term 'pivot point,' we only learned on the day we came in. So aside from the name, I practically know nothing."
"Suo Tian never told you anything?"
"No. He's never spoken to me about his matters."
Hearing this, Bruno sighed and replied, "Makes sense. He's always been like that for more than ten years now."
"More than ten years?" I looked at Bruno in confusion.
Suo Tian had never told me his age, but from appearance alone he looked like he was only in his twenties.
If Bruno said "more than ten years"… did that mean he had known Suo Tian since he was a child?
"Mm." Bruno didn't realize what I was suspicious about.
He just nodded along and said, "More than ten years ago, we were on the same team. But back then, he had only just joined. You know, he was the only recruit the boss personally met with."
"Wait a second…" I interrupted Bruno, staring at him in disbelief.
Right now, he sounded completely absurd to me.
"What nonsense are you spouting? More than ten years ago Suo Tian was still just a child! What team, what recruits—you're insane, aren't you?"
Hearing that, Bruno froze, his expression stiffening as if he had just realized something.
He suddenly turned to look at me, falling silent for a long time.
After a while, I asked, "Why aren't you saying anything?"
Only then did Bruno seem to snap out of his daze.
He waved his hand and said, "Forget it. Let's not talk about that. At this point, knowing these things won't help you anyway."
I stared at him for a couple of seconds, increasingly feeling that Bruno's mind wasn't quite right.
After a moment's thought, I finally spoke:
"Fine, if you don't want to talk about that, then at least tell me—what exactly does Suo Tian mean by 'headquarters' and 'pivot points'? And… what is this place really for? I don't believe ordinary people would have the ability to build something like this out of nowhere."
Bruno thought for a while, cleared his throat, and shifted his posture before speaking:
"Then let's first talk about headquarters. Do you usually follow military news?"
"Not really. I only know that the Japanese were causing trouble over the Diaoyu Islands some time ago, making a big fuss. Other than that, I don't know much."
"Let me put it this way: in recent years, China's military power has developed very rapidly. You have to know, a little over ten years ago, China was still considered a poor country in the Asia-Pacific region. But in just over a decade, it made leaps and bounds, intimidating neighboring countries. Aside from the reasons of economic development, the most important factor was exactly what I just mentioned—the rise of military power."
Bruno's grammar was full of mistakes.
It took me a long time to sort through his long speech, but I eventually pieced together that this was what he meant.
"I guess that's about right. But why are you telling me this? It has nothing to do with what we were talking about earlier."
"No, on the contrary, it's directly related. That's exactly what I'm getting to."
Bruno thought for a bit—maybe he had gotten confused from saying too much earlier—then reorganized his words:
"As for the government, it's hard to say much. But have you ever heard of something called… Black-market?"
"Not really."
"Black-market means the government relies on unofficial personnel to carry out a series of private arms trade activities. Back when the Soviet Union was still around, China was isolated by the West. It was through this method that China obtained weapons from abroad. You could say those Black-market operatives did the government a huge favor. Even now, the system has been preserved and gradually expanded—until… society collapsed, and everything fell into chaos."
I looked at Bruno, and suddenly a bold guess flashed through my mind.
"You're saying… headquarters is basically an organization engaged in black-market deals? In other words, a kind of mafia?"
"Yes. You're very smart. That's more or less what it means."
Hearing that, I wasn't all that shocked.
Instead, I felt dazed, as if it were unreal.
Something I'd only ever read about in novels or seen in movies was now somehow connected to me.
What's more, I never imagined I'd one day be so close to those two letters—G and Z (government).
A sudden thought hit me: I remembered a doomsday movie I'd seen before.
In the film, the original cause of the virus outbreak came from the world's most powerful corporation.
On the surface, they were a legitimate company, but in reality, they made money through bioweapons and firepower.
Thinking of this, I turned to Bruno and asked:
"There's something I can't figure out."
"You may ask."
I licked my lips and pointed toward the door. "If that's the case, then what exactly is this pivot point for?"
Hearing this, Bruno spread his hands and said:
"This isn't really a proper pivot point. It's just a relatively safe place the headquarters cleared out after the chaos, so we could conduct virus research."
"Virus research? You're researching viruses here?"
"Yes."
"And… have you found any results?"
"That… no comment."
When I heard that, I fixed my gaze on Bruno, watching him for a moment.
Seeing his expression suddenly turn serious, I gave a laugh instead and said,
"Why would the headquarters have you research this? Isn't this something the government should be doing?"
"Of course, the Chinese government is far stronger than you imagine. But since headquarters gave the order, we can only obey. After all, the organization can't just sit and wait for death. Headquarters doesn't raise us for nothing."
"Speaking of which—aside from the girl we brought with us, wasn't there another girl brought here?"
While Bruno was speaking, I suddenly recalled what that person holding the stool had said back in that room.
It seemed Xiao Hu had an older sister who had been brought here when she first entered the valley.
At this, Bruno's expression flickered slightly.
I immediately latched onto that change, my brows knitting together as I pressed,
"What is it? You can't tell me about this either?"
"That little girl… she's already dead."
"What?!" I cried out.
"How is that possible? Didn't you bring her here for observation, isolation, and research? How could you let her die? Was it you who killed her?"
"No, no, no, of course not. We research, we don't slaughter. Although Dr. Yang, who leads us, is… a bit cruel, in the end we are just a research team. He wouldn't carry out meaningless killings."
Dr. Yang—that must be the man in the white coat.
Just hearing his name made me feel a wave of revulsion.
Shifting uncomfortably, I asked,
"Then what happened to her?"
"Infection."
"She was bitten?"
"No. You know infection doesn't only spread in one way. At the very beginning of the chaos, the first people to fall definitely weren't bitten."
I nodded to show I understood.
"Then what exactly happened to her?"
"Persistent fever, diarrhea, malaria, her body's antibodies failing almost all at once. Those seemingly simple viruses easily took her life."
Hearing that, I suddenly thought of the corpses I had seen in Zhang Hongsheng's village—the ones that hadn't rotted.
I quickly asked,
"Speaking of that, earlier in a village we ran into a few walkers that hadn't decayed. I heard they had also died of malaria, very similar to that little girl's case. Could there be some connection? Did the girl's body rot?"
At that, Bruno's expression didn't change much.
He nodded toward me and said,
"Yes. Suo Tian told me about it. Same situation. Even after these past few months, the girl… she still looks like a living person. She hasn't decayed."
"How could that be?"
"The exact cause, we don't know. The facilities here aren't advanced enough to study this kind of case. But we're compiling all the data, and it will be sent back to headquarters."
"Are there research teams like yours at headquarters too?"
"Of course. But they coordinate with the government. We, on the other hand, are completely detached. To put it bluntly, we're just the poor wretches headquarters tossed out here."
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