Chapter 351: The Ruthless Harvest

In the dead of night, the old academic building’s outer walls gleamed a pale gray under the moonlight, not a single light escaping its windows. It looked like a structure forgotten for decades.

But that was only the surface.

Pushing open the side door with its hidden mechanism, passing through the corridor that seemed ordinary but was riddled with monitoring devices, Pandora did not pause. She headed straight for the building’s depths.

The original Anomaly research laboratory was on the fourth floor. It had been established in the beginning to study Phoebe. The space was not large, the equipment not entirely comprehensive, but at the time, it had been enough.

As Pandora’s research into the nature of “Anomalies” deepened—especially once she began attempting to develop living Anomaly tissue as alchemical materials—that cramped laboratory could no longer meet her needs.

And so, the underground space was carved out.

The staircase descended. With every step, the air grew one degree colder.

This was a newly constructed, far larger Anomaly experimentation zone.

Despite being underground, it bore none of the cold, damp gloom one might expect from a dungeon. The air, in fact, carried a faint scent of disinfectant. It was colder than above ground, yes, but not humid.

The ventilation system operated day and night, pumping filtered, dry air continuously inward, maintaining constant temperature and humidity. The corridors were wide and brightly lit.

Spotless white walls, slip-resistant gray floor tiles, and every few meters, an elongated fluorescent tube lamp, bathing the entire hallway in uniform clarity.

Only on either side stood two rows of specially constructed partition walls.

Some were made of high-strength one-way glass. The emphasis on durability meant the transparency was lower than ordinary glass—slightly blurred—but clear enough to see the bizarre, otherworldly lifeforms confined within.

All of them were held rigidly within designated zones by a variety of restraining devices.

Pandora’s footsteps carried her unhurriedly past one compartment after another. Occasionally, her fingers glided lightly across a control interface, checking parameters, adjusting settings.

Phoebe stayed at her side, peering through the glass with curiosity at the things inside the compartments. Her expression was not one of fear—it was closer to the inquisitiveness of a child before a zoo exhibit.

Behind them, Crocodile’s face grew paler with every step.

The first compartment held a mass of gel, roughly one and a half meters tall.

The gel was a sickly gray-blue, semi-transparent, its consistency like solidified jelly. Irregular ripples flowed slowly across its surface.

Within this colloidal mass, thirty-seven eyeballs were suspended.

The eyeballs varied in size. The largest was about the size of a chicken egg, the smallest no bigger than a marble. Their irises were of different colors—some gray-blue, some deep brown, some a ghastly dark red.

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They drifted erratically, rotating and floating slowly within the gelatinous body, occasionally clustering together and turning in unison to stare outward through the glass.

That silent, collective gaze sent chills down the spine.

The gel’s surface also periodically formed the outlines of human faces, like drowning victims trapped beneath a layer of ice. Lips moved soundlessly, features twisted, yet they could never break through that semi-transparent gray-blue interface.

High-voltage shock devices were installed on either side of the compartment. Whenever the creature became too active, the current would buzz briefly.

On rare occasions, Pandora activated the devices herself. Such as right now.

Blue electrical arcs danced across the gel’s surface. Under the surge of powerful current, the eyeballs quaked madly. Those emerging faces twisted in an instant. Yet they could not mount any effective resistance.

Immediately afterward, automated instruments descended from the ceiling.

A whirring bone saw, without the slightest hesitation, cut into the gelatinous body, shearing away massive amounts of intertwined tissue.

The severed gel fragments dropped onto a conveyor belt, still twitching faintly, and were carried off to the next processing stage.

Simultaneously, a mechanical claw plunged in without mercy, gouging out the bloodshot eyeballs one by one. They tumbled into a collection dish below.

Tink. Tink. Tink.

The sound of eyeballs striking the metal dish was crisp and rhythmic.

In another compartment, the thing confined there appeared to be nothing more than a thoroughly antiquated lead sewer pipe.

About two meters long, half a meter thick. Its surface was pitted and scarred, covered in the marks of age and corrosion.

But over half its surface was coated in a mixture of filthy waste oil and boiling asphalt.

The asphalt bubbled ceaselessly. Glub. Glub. Every time a bubble burst, it released a yellow smoke tinged with the scent of sulfur.

The smoke swirled beneath the compartment’s ceiling, slowly drawn away by the exhaust system.

All manner of things were mixed inside the pipe itself: rotting rat bones, rags, coins, rusted keys, and countless withered, blackened hands.

Those hands thrashed outward continuously through gaps in the pipe, like a throng of drowning victims stretching their pleading hands through a breach in a ship’s hull. They opened and clenched, clenched and opened.

Nails broken, knuckles blackened, their movements mechanical and obstinate.

Its restraining device was a refrigeration system.

As the sluice gate opened, ice-cold coolant surged through the pipes. The entire lead pipe was submerged.

The liquid level rose slowly, engulfing those thrashing, desiccated hands. The asphalt on the surface hardened, ceasing its boiling. The bubbling faded, replaced by the rushing sound of flowing coolant.

And those withered hands could only twitch faintly at an agonizingly slow frequency, like the final shivers of someone frozen to the point of death.

Then, a cold-resistant impact drill roared to life.

The bit, thick as an arm, howled as it bored through the hardened filth on the surface, producing a friction sound that set teeth on edge.

Grraaaaakk—

During the process, the segment of pipe emitted a feeble, dying moan.

The sound did not resemble any living creature’s cry. It was more like the groan of an old pipeline straining under water pressure. Sporadic. Fading.

The scenes playing out before him made Crocodile’s scalp prickle with dread.

He was, after all, an Anomaly himself. He merely wore a human skin, having inherited the intellect of the person he had killed. And this allowed him to comprehend just how horrifying the sight before him truly was.

Those confined aberrations—they were the same kind of existence as him. But right now, they were being treated as raw materials. Dismantled. Coldly. Emotionlessly.

That visceral impact was more terrifying than any threat.

His expensive suit was soaked through with cold sweat. The fabric on his back clung to his skin, icy and clammy.

Yet the girl operating it all—her face betrayed not a single ripple of emotion.

As her fingers glided across the control interface, her movements even carried a kind of leisure, as if she were leafing through a magazine of little interest.

The entire experimentation zone covered a considerable area, but the actual number of Anomalies confined there was not large.

Fewer than ten, at most.

After all, every single containment consumed enormous resources and effort, and Pandora did not require many.

Quality mattered far more than quantity.