The Beast Experiment

As they passed a laboratory, they found quite a crowd gathered outside.

The people stood in front of the observation window. Beside them, an experimenter in protective clothing was giving an explanation in Japanese.

Yu Youhan had not intended to stop.

But one sentence from the experimenter pinned his feet to the floor.

“Our newly developed enhancement agent has entered the first phase. We can use these logs to demonstrate its effects.”

Xiao Xian stopped as well, but he could not understand Japanese and could only look at Yu Youhan.

Still, one did not need to understand Japanese to see what was happening inside the laboratory.

One entire wall of the laboratory was a one-way mirror, allowing those outside to see everything within. Inside stood a metal cage containing a mother and child.

The child was very young, huddled in a corner.

The mother stood in front of him with her back to the outside world. One hand held the child’s, while the other rested against his shoulder. She could not see the people outside, but she could hear the airflow coming through the pipes overhead.

Soon, green smoke poured from an opening in the wall.

The mother reacted quickly. She covered the child’s mouth and nose first, then her own.

Her movements were clumsy, even awkward, but that was all she could do.

Someone outside laughed.

“Look. Even a mother’s instinct can be recorded as data.”

The experimenter beside him nodded and seriously wrote a line in his notebook.

Although Xiao Xian had no idea what kind of experiment this was, his hand reached beneath the stretcher cart.

Yu Youhan caught him by the wrist and said in an extremely low voice, “Don’t move.”

Xiao Xian stared at the glass, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I really want to kill them right now.”

“So do I.”

“Then why are you stopping me?”

“If you attack, a dozen or so military police will turn us into sieves. And if the explosives don’t go off, no one will be left to detonate them. Then our mission will fail. We paid a heavy price just to get in here.”

Xiao Xian said nothing more.

The smoke inside the laboratory grew thicker and thicker.

The child was the first to succumb. His body convulsed several times before he suddenly lunged at his mother.

He bit down on her arm. His eyes were bloodshot, and his movements were savage, almost primitively animalistic.

The mother did not push him away.

She bent over in pain, yet still tried to hold him.

The arm caught in his jaws trembled violently, while her other hand continued to protect the back of his head, as though she were afraid he might strike it against the cage bars.

Several officers outside the observation window cried out in amazement.

“Subarashii. Hoshino’s experiment is progressing wonderfully. Even a child can display such powerful aggression.”

“Record it. Sample Five’s reaction time: two minutes and forty-two seconds.”

“Sample Four is an adult. It has a higher tolerance and can be retained for the next control test.”

The words scraped against their ears like a dull knife.

Yu Youhan stared at the scene inside, the fire in his chest growing denser and hotter the more he forced it down. He had seen corpses. He had witnessed villages being slaughtered and entire lines of civilians kneeling before gun barrels. But this laboratory was different.

There was no smoke from a battlefield, no bugle calling a charge, no clash of blades or guns.

The people here had knowledge and manners. Yet they held pens in their hands and calmly recorded a mother and child tearing each other apart as “a favorable reaction.”

That was what disgusted him most.

The green smoke did not stop.

The mother’s body gradually began to lose control as well. She desperately backed away until her back struck the cage. Then she lowered her head and looked at the child in her arms.

She wanted to hide. She wanted to endure. She wanted to force the reaction back down.

But her body no longer obeyed her.

At last, she raised her hand and grabbed the child.

Then she opened her mouth.

Blood splattered everywhere.

The crowd outside the glass fell silent for a breath.

Then cheers erupted. There was no fear in them, only excitement.

Yu Youhan watched through the glass, the veins on the back of his hand standing out one by one.

He wanted to charge inside.

But all he could do was stand there.

The mother and child remained trapped in the cage. The child collapsed in a corner and stopped moving. The woman had lost her mind entirely; she could no longer distinguish anything around her.

Xiao Xian stood beside him, his chest heaving and his fists clenched.

Neither of them spoke.

Yu Youhan clenched his fists as he watched. There was nothing he could do. He could not save the mother and child, nor could he stop these people.

They could not afford a mistake here.

They had infiltrated the facility not to indulge in a moment of reckless heroics. The explosives had already been planted. When the time came, the entire laboratory would be blown apart.

The drugs, the records, the test subjects—and every last one of these beasts wearing human skin—would all be left here.

But the scene before him was almost impossible to endure.

The time was nearly up. Xiao Xian hurriedly shook Yu Youhan’s arm, signaling that they had to prepare to withdraw.

But Yu Youhan’s heart was burning with hatred.

Just as the two of them were about to leave, the woman in the cage seemed to hear something outside.

She raised her head.

Her blood-red eyes swept across the rows of experimenters, her gaze vicious.

The next second, she lunged at the cage bars and gripped them with both hands, beginning to wrench them apart.

The cage was made entirely of iron, its welds as thick as an adult’s thumb.

Yet in her hands, the bars slowly bent. The groan of moving metal rang through the laboratory.

The experimenters froze for a moment before someone shouted, “Anesthetic! Anesthetize her, quickly!”

The anesthetic rifles were raised.

One shot. Two. Three.

The needles struck the woman’s body, but she did not fall. Instead, she tore the cage door open another inch.

“The dose isn’t enough! Double it!”

“Baka! That’s already a dose meant for military horses!”

“Fire again! Don’t let her out!”

An entire magazine of anesthetic darts was emptied. The woman’s body bristled with syringes, blood running down her clothes.

She lifted her foot and kicked the cage door. The entire iron cage shook, sending the child’s corpse rolling to her feet.

She glanced down at the child, then kicked the body away.

“Open fire!” someone shouted.

The experimenters, fully aware that the situation had spiraled out of control, did not hesitate. One of them seized the light machine gun from the table and opened fire directly at the woman inside the cage.

The gunshots slammed into the glass, dull enough to make their eardrums ache.

The woman staggered backward under the barrage, her back crashing into the bars as bullets tore through her flesh. She held on for several seconds before finally sinking to her knees, her head drooping beside the child.

Carbon-based life-forms could never withstand bullets.

Acute copper poisoning soon claimed her life.

The laboratory fell silent for a moment.

Then someone began to applaud.

“Excellent! That reaction was perfect!”

“If we continue refining it, the Empire will possess a superhuman army!”

“We could deploy them behind enemy lines as well. Biological weapons are cheaper. We have plenty of logs—and plenty of test material.”

Another officer slapped him across the face.

“Baka! Stop thinking only in terms of accounting! We need soldiers who can fight on the battlefield, not mad dogs that only know how to bite. Once the agent is stabilized, every soldier in the Imperial Army will be able to become a super-soldier. Then all of East Asia—all of the world—will kneel before the feet of the Emperor!”

Yu Youhan stared at those people.

His anger had burned past its limit and turned cold instead.

This was not a laboratory.

It was a nightmare that had not yet fully grown.

If they were allowed to continue their research today, tomorrow it would not be just this mother and child who were locked inside cages.