Chapter 56: I’m Here, Don’t Be Afraid
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At this point, An Lan’s case had entered its fifth day. They seemed to have obtained many astonishing pieces of information, yet they were still hovering outside the secrecy of “Eden” and had not touched its core.
An Lan had slept for a long time. His eyelids trembled slightly, and there seemed to be shadows moving around him, more than one.
Were they talking?
A sharp pain in his arm startled An Lan awake. He struggled desperately, realizing that three people in white coats were around him. Two of them were focused on instruments, and the third had injected something into him!
“Let me go! What is this?” An Lan struggled forcefully.
Feeling a stabbing sensation in his arm, An Lan could only watch as the pale pink liquid entered his body, helpless to resist.
It carried a certain force, unable to merge with An Lan’s blood, constantly colliding. Red blood cells ruptured repeatedly, but another force in An Lan’s body resisted the invasion, repairing and providing new blood cells.
It was like a battle of destruction and rebirth, countless ruptures followed by countless healings. An Lan’s entire body trembled violently, his mouth wide open, unable to breathe.
The monitors around him sounded one alarm after another.
The blood vessels in An Lan’s neck tightened, his chin tilted upward, and his brain turned pale. His body was hot, internal organs twisted together as if about to combust.
The entire space distorted intensely.
Only the people in white coats were extremely anxious.
“His body is showing rejection reactions! What should we do?”
“His temperature is already thirty-nine degrees! We must cool him down!”
“The alpha pheromones in his body have reached two hundred percent of the normal level!”
“How is this possible? Wasn’t it said that the aplus of a high-quality alpha would cause him to differentiate into an omega?”
“Immediate physical cooling!”
The restraints on An Lan’s limbs were removed, and they carried An Lan into the bathroom, placing him in the bathtub and pouring buckets of ice.
But An Lan’s consciousness did not return at all. He couldn’t even feel the cold on his body.
This extreme heat sensation… so familiar.
Time reversed, and space folded. An Lan found himself back in the restroom of the KTV. He was injected with the highest concentration of Eve’s Apple for the first time, his consciousness muddled, deeply desiring liberation.
The air became heavy from all directions, and his body felt like it was about to disappear.
“An Lan…”
Someone was calling his name, opening the door in front of him.
The scent of the clear ocean spread, and An Lan, trapped in a confined body, instantly stretched out. He entered an immense, vast place.
His gaze focused, finally seeing the eyes of that person. They seemed sharp and stern, restraining desire, yet the gaze was warm and soft. All memories lost their color, his thoughts had long withered away, but in an instant, they seemed to sketch a sunlit ephemeral flower for the person before his eyes.
An Lan had never known that madness was brewing in the depths of his heart. It erupted in an instant, and the gaze exchanged with that person was like a slow-motion white horse passing through a vast landscape. The magnificent torrent rushed through his heart.
He kissed, grinded, flipped, pulling the other’s collar tightly, using everything to complete that kiss.
…Allowing himself to sink in that profound ocean.
At this moment, Xu Xingran was receiving an infusion. He closed his eyes to rest, but someone forcefully shook his shoulder.
Looking up, it was a tall alpha who pressed a walkie-talkie to Xu Xingran’s ear.
“You deceived me,” K’s voice rang out.
Cold and gloomy, one could imagine him sitting in a small room, watching countless screens, resentfully biting his finger.
“Wasn’t it you who deceived me first?” Xu Xingran chuckled lightly.
“An Lan has a high fever that won’t subside. If we continue, your precious treasure might lose his life.” K said coldly, “The alpha who bit him in the KTV, was it you?”
“Of course, it was me.” Xu Xingran replied. “Did you inject him with my aplus?”
“Do you know that he is showing a clear rejection reaction to your aplus? His immune system is forcing him to release more alpha pheromones to maintain the body’s balance! This means…”
“It means he is one step closer to differentiating into a complete alpha.” Xu Xingran answered.
K’s voice immediately filled with anger, “This is your true purpose.”
“Who asked you not to follow the agreement?” Xu Xingran raised his head, looking at the surveillance in the room, “Cooperate, cooperate, mutual fulfillment is cooperation. I promised to give you my aplus, but you won’t let An Lan go.”
“Xu Xingran, do you really think you have the capital to negotiate with me? Let me tell you now—if An Lan differentiates into an alpha, it will be the biggest irony to me. I will let him die in front of you.”
Xu Xingran’s brows furrowed.
“Maybe I don’t even need to take action; he’ll experience a breakdown of bodily functions due to high fever, and the outcome will be death.”
“Are you insane?” Xu Xingran’s expression changed. “How much concentration of aplus did you give him? He can tolerate up to three times!”
“What if it’s five times?”
Xu Xingran tried to sit up from the chair with a roar, but the restraints made him fall back. He resembled a young lion full of spirit, but now he lowered his head in despair.
“Besides aplus, a binding agent is needed.”
“Binding agent? What’s that? An Lan doesn’t have much time left, Xu Xingran, you better not play tricks.”
“Aplus carries my genes, which is foreign to An Lan. When I bit him before, his reaction to my aplus wasn’t so strong because, firstly, the concentration wasn’t that high, and secondly, he needed my pheromones to resist the influence of Eve’s Apple. But you purified the aplus, still at a normal concentration but five times… without a binding agent… it’s impossible to merge…”
“Where is the binding agent?” K asked.
“The research institute where Gu Qingchuan is located,” Xu Xingran replied.
“Do you think I’ll send someone to the research institute just because you said so? It’s heavily guarded, and someone is probably waiting there to trap us,” K sneered.
Xu Xingran closed his eyes, and after a second or two of silence, he spoke, “The Alpha Management Committee has people there. But… you have to send An Lan back to the hospital. Their binding agent is only effective for An Lan.”
“Xu Xingran, you really are a naughty child. All possibilities have been calculated by you, haven’t they?” K laughed.
Xu Xingran slowly raised his head and smiled too. “Oh? What did I calculate?”
“You have only one purpose—to have us send An Lan back. You use yourself as a bargaining chip to provide us with aplus. If we let An Lan leave, it’s a win-win for you. If we refuse and lack the binding agent, we can’t transform An Lan into an omega. To prevent this experiment from failing, you think I will send An Lan to the hospital, right?” K asked.
Xu Xingran did not answer.
“But we may not necessarily need to send An Lan back to get the binding agent.” K smiled.
Surprise finally appeared on Xu Xingran’s face. “Could it be… you’ve also arranged people in the Alpha Management Committee?”
“Top secret.”
With that, the conversation between Xu Xingran and K ended.
Xu Xingran leaned back on the chair, tightly closed his eyes, bit his lip because of his miscalculation. After two or three seconds, he wanted to kick out in frustration, but he was immobilized in the chair.
Despair and regret enveloped him.
The young alpha tasted the bitterness of failure for the first time.
At this moment, the emergency department of the Third Hospital received a young student, his whole body feverish, sweating profusely, and showing symptoms of respiratory failure.
Moreover, he was dropped off at the hospital entrance, and the person who brought him immediately left.
The doctor who treated him took out his ID from his pocket, which read “An Lan.”
In addition to the ID, there was a note with a printed line: “He has been injected with aplus at a concentration of 5 times and needs a binding agent.”
The doctor holding this small note was dumbfounded: “What? Concentration of 5 times… aplus?”
Another doctor was equally puzzled: “What is a binding agent?”
“Quick—quickly inform Dr. Cheng!”
“Why should we inform Dr. Cheng?”
“The system shows that Dr. Cheng is his attending physician! And Dr. Cheng is an expert in pheromones!”
Dr. Cheng, who was on vacation, received a call and quickly got up from bed.
“What did you say? An Lan? Are you sure it’s An Lan?”
“His ID is An Lan!”
“I’m coming right away!”
Dr. Cheng immediately drove back to the hospital, guiding the rescue work all the way.
“Be sure to lower the child’s blood pressure!”
“Does physical cooling work?”
“Immediately contact the Alpha Management Committee and inform them of the situation!”
After a few more minutes, the hospital called again, “Dr. Cheng! The Alpha Management Committee said they would send someone with emergency medicine!”
“What emergency medicine?” Dr. Cheng asked.
“I don’t know! They just want us to confirm with An Lan if he knows whose aplus is in his body!”
“What did An Lan say?”
“I only heard him mention something about stars… and the Alpha Management Committee said they understood.”
“Okay, before I and the people from the Alpha Management Committee arrive, you must stabilize An Lan’s condition!”
“We’ll do our best!”
After the call ended, Dr. Cheng parked his car on the side of the road, hands gripping the steering wheel tightly. His head was lowered, and another car came from the opposite direction, the headlights flashing across his face. The cold smile on his lips sent shivers down one’s spine.
The Alpha Management Committee’s transport vehicle urgently set out. The streets at two in the morning were deserted, and they almost reached the hospital at the same time as Dr. Cheng.
As Dr. Cheng entered the resuscitation room after changing into a white coat, he received the medicine sent by the Alpha Management Committee.
When he lowered his head to administer the injection to An Lan, he froze. “This is not An Lan!”
“Dr. Cheng? What are you saying? Who is it if not him?”
At this moment, the entire hospital suddenly lost power.
The resuscitation room plunged into darkness.
“Quickly activate the backup power! Hurry!”
When the light returned, Dr. Cheng looked at the low-temperature storage box in his hand in astonishment. “The binding agent is gone! The binding agent is gone!”
“How could it be gone? Did it fall on the ground?”
Everyone in the resuscitation room searched, but the medicine in the box was nowhere to be found.
“Someone… stole the medicine?”
“Oh my God, what the heck is going on?”
“And An Lan is gone too!”
It was then that everyone realized that the person who had been lying on the hospital bed with a high fever, supposedly “An Lan,” had disappeared.
“Call the police!”
The doctors in the emergency room frantically dialed the emergency number.
The captain in charge of the case shouted, “You should have called the police when you received An Lan! Why are you telling us now?”
The doctor reporting to the police looked bewildered, “But we didn’t know this student named An Lan had been kidnapped before! And Dr. Cheng said… he’s not the real An Lan!”
By the time the police arrived, the place was already empty.
The captain looked at the ID and sighed heavily, “This is a fake ID. The chip inside may have copied the information from the original ID, but… the photo is fake.”
The doctors were dumbfounded.
“Why go through all this trouble?”
The captain furrowed his brow and immediately directed others to check the hospital’s surveillance.
“To trick the Alpha Management Committee into sending emergency medicine!”
At this moment, the imposter who had posed as An Lan had already arrived at the hospital’s back door, where a black SUV was waiting for him.
The young man got into the car and handed the vial of medicine to his accomplice, who immediately placed it in a low-temperature storage box.
The car raced through the dark night, leaving the city, getting on the highway. The headlights pierced the black night, becoming increasingly desolate, until they entered a factory.
The sign on the factory read “XYZ Garment Factory.”
The factory gate slowly opened, and the security guard glanced at the people in the car, then gestured for them to enter.
A few minutes later, a worried Xu Xingran finally heard K’s voice again.
“Guess what I have in my hands now?”
Xu Xingran’s pupils trembled as he raised his head.
On the screen was a refrigerated box used for medicines, and inside was a vial.
“You… actually got the binding agent?” Xu Xingran showed an expression of disbelief.
“Although it’s challenging to insert an undercover agent into the Alpha Management Committee, getting them to send something out is quite easy. Thank me; otherwise, your little sweetheart would be waiting for death.”
On the screen, An Lan lay in a bathtub filled with ice, his face crimson, his gaze vacant.
A doctor in a white coat stood beside him, lifting his wrist and injecting the medicine into his arm.
The originally heavy breathing gradually eased, and An Lan, who was muttering in a hallucination, began to relax.
K said, “Indeed, a binding agent is needed.”
“With your skills, you can’t create a binding agent,” Xu Xingran retorted.
“If we can’t create it, then let’s use the two of you to exchange with the Alpha Management Committee,” K’s voice carried an unmistakable smirk.
Just then, several white-coated researchers standing next to An Lan suddenly collapsed.
Then the alphas guarding the corridor swayed and fell one by one.
K realized that something was wrong and immediately gave the command, “Close the ventilation system! Shut it down now!”
But their system had been hacked; all communication was cut off.
In the underground of the factory, guarded by a few alphas at the entrance, they hadn’t even had a chance to notice that something was wrong when they were hit by the special forces.
The entrance exploded with a loud “bang,” and the team quickly entered.
When they saw that the basement of this factory turned out to be an illegal research institute, everyone couldn’t help but be amazed.
They searched room by room, and the first one they found was Xiao Chen, sitting on a chair, hands and feet bound, still unconscious.
Next was Xu Xingran. When the special forces burst in and sprayed a reviving drug on Xu Xingran’s face, he coughed a few times and finally woke up.
“You guys are too slow! Where’s An Lan? Where’s Gu Liyu?”
The moment his restraints were removed, Xu Xingran tried to stand up, but after a long period of inactivity, he swayed and almost fell.
“Easy, handsome! Gu Liyu is on his way; he went to look for An Lan!”
In front of a room at the end of the underground research institute, the team used the guardian’s identification card to open the door. There was no one in the room, but when they opened the bathroom, they saw researchers in white coats lying all over the floor.
And An Lan was lying with his head tilted in the bathtub, half of the ice on his body melted, and his body was slipping down little by little, with his chin and mouth submerged in the water.
Seeing this scene, Gu Liyu pushed away the team members blocking his way, stepped over the researchers, and picked up An Lan from the bathtub.
Water gushed back into the tub.
He tilted his head back, completely unaware, with a steady breath through his nose.
Gu Liyu lowered his head, tightly holding An Lan in his arms.
Just a bit more, just a bit more. If An Lan had slipped a little further, he might have drowned.
An Lan felt a familiar embrace and a refreshing scent.
As if a sea breeze was coming, propelling waves, carrying seaweed and fish, flowing towards the distant horizon.
“Gu Liyu…”
An Lan softly pronounced the name.
“I’m here, don’t be afraid.”
Gu Liyu kissed his forehead, took off his own coat, and wrapped An Lan in it.
The author has something to say:
Praying mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind.
Gu Liyu has finally come out.
(Speaking as if he had been inside before~)
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