07.30 am Sunday

Once again, all around them was clear evidence of how much no one seemed to care about this level.

Gravel and loose stones are scattered on the ground and there's a musty smell in the air. The walls are roughly plastered and not even painted, exposed brickwork in places. Above them, an open network of air conditioning vents and foil covered tubes wriggle like huge silverfish in this bizarrely humid floor.

It feels unfinished on purpose, as if whoever was in charge hadn't cared enough to complete the work.

They didn't have far to go before they came to a closed door, a locked one, with a window.

It was dark inside the room, and at first, Baoshan Sanren thought it might be empty. But then she narrowed her gaze, squinting into the darkness and then, she gasped. She turned around and looked for Xiao XingChen, yanking him forward and making him look inside too.

"What am I supposed to-" and then he bit off his words with a choked cry.

He pushed his way to the door and kicked it open, rushing inside.

"Who's in there?" Wei Ying whispered urgently to his grandmother.

She looked so sad.

"It's Song Lan...but something is wrong."

They all entered behind one another, and someone found a light switch.

There had been a low growling noise all the while, but when the lights flickered on, something threw themselves at the floor-to-ceiling bars, making the ground shake and there was the snapping of teeth with murderous intent. The reinforced steel bars held but shook ominously, releasing a cloud of dust, and as they got used to the dim light, they saw a man pressing his whole body against his barrier between them and himself, swiping at them through the gap.

His eyes were totally black, no white at all where normal people would have eyeballs, and saliva dripped from his fangs. He bared them now, showing off his weapons. He was perceiving a threat and his whole body was attuned to fighting it. He wore trousers but his torso, while bare, had black streaks of lightning, stark against his pale skin, all reaching up towards his neck.

He looked terrifying.

"Song Lan...what...w-what have they done to you?" Xiao XingChen said, moving forward blindly, but Baoshan Sanren stopped him.

"Don't." She gestured towards the creature behind the steel bars. "He's in no shape to be approached. He doesn't even recognise you." Then she turned to Wen Qing. "What do you know of his condition?"

Wen Qing studies him, her sharp eyes take in every detail that normal people would have overlooked.

"From his behaviour, it looks like something other than just the medication we test on patients. I don't know why he's like this, but there must be something blocking his neurological functions. Specifically targeting the part of the brain that remembers things, like past experiences, people, and such. This isn't just a case of him going feral," she answers, after observing Song Lan for a few minutes.

"Then what could it be?" Wei Ying asks, glancing at his Uncle's face.

Xiao XingChen looked devastated.

"And whatever they've done to him, can it be reversed?" He added, having just thought of it.

"Hard to say without doing a full medical check. But the question is, how? At the moment, we can't even get close to him." Wen Qing thinks for a second.

"What if we knock him out?" Lan Zhan asks her.

"That could work, but he's not likely to swallow anything. Not in this condition. Which means we will have to use other means," she sounds apologetic.

"Other means?" Wei Ying is bouncing on his heels, until Wen Qing gives him two finger guns.

"No way...?" That's A-Qing, pulling out a packet of blue M&M's.

She goes to sit in the corner to watch, like somebody going to attend a Broadway show. She tosses each one up in the air and catches it in her mouth, waiting for the action to start.

"Can I please be untied?" Wen Qing asks, looking around urgently.

Baoshan Sanren hesitates, and it's Wei Ying who comes to her defence.

"She's the best doctor I know, grandmother. She'll do her best for Uncle Lan," he promises. "What do you want to do, JieJie?"

The old familiar name brings tears to her eyes, and she blinks them away rapidly.

"All the recuperation therapy rooms used to hold emergency equipment, and I'm wondering if they would have adopted the same system here. If so, everything we need is in that cupboard over there." Her head jerks towards a cabinet hanging off the wall.

"I don't want him to suffer any more." Xiao XingChen says, brokenly.

Baoshan Sanren pats his back as she moves towards Wen Qing, releasing her hands.

No one answers him, because everyone knows this: he will have to be hurt one way or another, before he can be cured, or helped to lessen his pain.

Song Lan continues to growl at them as Wen Qing opens the cabinet and examines its contents.

Xiao XingChen cannot believe what he's seeing.

Never in a thousand years had he ever imagined that he would be looking into the deep, velvety eyes of his friend and not see even a flicker of recognition. This Song Lan, not only doesn't recognise him, but he's openly hostile. Xiao XingChen isn't afraid of him, more that he's afraid FOR him.

The dream of having something more than just a friendship with this beautiful man crumbles even more, but the relief is an underlying feeling. He would rather know that Song Lan was alive than...not knowing anything of what has become of him.

But this line of thought brings him to the realisation that for all these years, Song Lan has been trapped here.

Like this.

Xiao XingChen wasn't an angry person, but the tumultuous weight of these feelings make him want to find whoever is responsible for doing this to his friend and ripping their limbs off, one by one. Slowly.

Wen Qing grabs a tranquiliser gun and loads it with the syringe filled with enough medication to take down a horse. In this state, if they used anything less than that to sedate a volatile creature, the chances of Song Lan waking up mid-procedure was too high, and they risked injury to anyone in his proximity.

Before Xiao XingChen can see what she's doing and protest against it, Wen Qing aims and fires.

Her shot is precise and measured as if she's done this before, many times.

Conflicted expressions are visible on all who saw this, because they are all too aware that this, what has befallen Song Lan, could have happened to any one of them.

Xiao XingChen lets out a pained noise, as he watches Song Lan tear at his skin and the fast draining green liquid injecting itself into his neck. Feral snarls fill the air as he tries to fight it, but it is futile.

The animalistic noises he's making become quieter and quieter, until he slumps into a heap on the hay strewn ground.

Xiao XingChen is the first one to break out of the fugue enveloping them all. He moves with alarming speed towards the cell bars, rattling them once more, but all it releases is more dust.

"There's no door." Baoshan Sanren notices, and somehow, that's so much worse.

No door means that they did not want him escaping, but even more awful is the realisation that no one was going to go in there with him.

Were they even feeding him?

Perhaps it was possible that his captors could have thrown food into the enclosed space between the steel bars, but Song Lan looks far from a healthy weight.

So then, why were they keeping him?

Was it because they intended to do something even worse to him?

Xiao XingChen is trembling with helpless rage, even as Baoshan Sanren helps him away from the bars, so that A-Qing can use her spherical blades again.

She whips them out, twirling them simultaneously and muttering under her breath, and as they flame up, she releases them on the bars. The screech of metal giving up under something far more powerful than itself is deafening, as sparks fill the air and a sulphuric smell permeates the air. Like being too close to a hot spring.

The curved shape of an eye is carved out of the bars, some left hanging precariously above the opening, and rising up from the ground like newage steel seedlings.

Wen Qing strides across the small room, intending to walk straight into the previously confined area, and Baoshan Sanren grabs the top part of her arm.

"Be careful," she warns.

Wen Qing gives her an anxious single nod.

Her own success or failure depends on her skills as a doctor, to be able to figure out what on earth has been done to this man. Actions speak louder than words, and Wen Qing knows that no amount of protesting her innocence will win her any favours with this crowd. She's made enough mistakes until now, believing that one thing had to be sacrificed to save another.

But looking at Wei Ying now, she realises that she has a choice.

That she always had a choice.

So she resolves to do better, starting now.

Xiao XingChen is right next to her, helping her over the steel remnants of the bars holding his friend captive.

A-Qing has gone back to her corner, sitting cross-legged on the ground and amusing herself by catching the candy with her mouth once more.

He helps Wen Qing lay Song Lan out properly, on his back. Her hands are sure, confidently pressing and testing. She starts at Song Lan's bare feet and works her way up. Aside from some bruising on his torso, there's nothing which stands out in the way of injury, or anything that could explain his current condition. She thinks the bruises on his chest have come about by Song Lan flinging himself against the unmovable bars keeping him a prisoner.

But she thinks she'll have better luck higher up, since his symptoms suggest neurological damage.

Her pale fingers find something foreign embedded into his skull, and she's quietly horrified at the barbaric wounds, because there are two of them.

It's almost as if someone, unskilled and unqualified, hammered two impossibly long nails into his head. And when her fingers come away wet with red blood, she understands that these are fresh wounds. Meaning that they never healed.

In which case, the possibility of them being infected is much, much higher.

Meanwhile, Xiao XingChen is looking at Song Lan's arms.

The underside, soft and usually fleshy, is peppered with tiny dots...and then his gaze lands on the empty syringe on the ground, not far from where it fell when Song Lan hit the ground.

Could it be that Song Lan's captors were injecting him regularly? Why? Or worse, taking something out?

Were they harvesting his...blood? For what reason?

Xiao XingChen wants to throw up.

He looks away from the damage to his friend, eyes burning savagely.

"I need pliers." Wen Qing mutters under her breath, standing up.

She runs to the cabinet, the door left open because she was too distracted to close it earlier.

There's a little toolbox and she rummages through it, when suddenly, she hears a low rumbling growl.

Her fingers still, as she slowly turns around.

She takes in the scene with slowly mounting horror.

They have cut away at the steel prison which would have kept them safe from a Song Lan who most definitely just made that noise.

Which means he is likely beginning to wake up.

And if she doesn't hurry, she will have signed the death warrant on everyone standing in this small room, including herself, and possibly anyone else who encounters Song Lan.

She finds what she's looking for and races back to her patient, knowing that they're fast running out of time.

***********

Mo XuanYu is very happy.

He had made a bet on Wei WuXian and won, big time.

Right now, he had tapped into the main security feed of Wen Laboratories, and had access to EVERYTHING.

All their records, patient information, detailed categorised checklists, and data on every single experiment those sickos had ever done to anyone.

Mo XuanYu knew something which hardly anyone ever paid attention to; once they hit the delete button, they assumed that would be the end of the matter, but luckily for him, that was so far from the truth, it was like a blind man seeing colours.

Everything was backed up on the Cloud, and deleting meant only removing from direct line of sight. No one ever remembered the Hard Drive.

And a place like Wen Laboratories?

A treasure trove of blackmailable information at his fingertips.

While he downloaded everything on a separate platform, because it was probably encrypted and possibly protected by a triggered malware response, something to look at when he had time, his main concern was actually getting the data first.

It was going to take a long time, and idly waiting for that to happen in real time was like watching paint dry, so his restless mind decided to browse through the multiple cameras currently sending their footage to the security room.

That's when Mo XuanYu spots the big man himself, Wen Rouhan.

He'd heard a lot about him, how powerful he is, how commanding and fearsome, and nothing does him justice. Even on grainy black and white footage, he's impressively tall and foreboding.

There's a moment when Wen Rouhan looks directly into the video camera, and Mo XuanYu nearly spews out his coffee, so shocked he is at the sudden eye contact.

He has to tell himself that there's no way Wen Rouhan has figured out that his precious company has been infiltrated or that he's been hacked in a way that could be compared to gang rape.

He's only able to breathe after Wen Rouhan looks away, but then he's striding forth with such a singular purpose that Mo XuanYu is curious about where he might be going.

He has about ten tabs open, and while he's aware that this might be slowing down his applications, it cannot be helped.

The main one is downloading a sizable load of incriminating evidence, one that has already told him that it might take years to do all of it, but that's just a silly computer's estimate, and Mo XuanYu knows that could be vastly overestimated.

He once tried to download a film, legally of course, and it told him five days. Mo XuanYu had been so disgusted, he almost gave up. But perseverance paid off and he was able to watch it that night.

So he keeps that running, and checks on the red dots on Lan WangJi's computer which tell him that both wearers of the bunny tracking bracelets are together for now.

Another tab is keeping an eye on the security room, and yet another one is tracking Wen Rouhan as he moves through the different ranges of their extensive security cameras.

Mo XuanYu snickers at the thought: who would have thought that the day would come when the Wens would regret having such a vast and thorough security system, which for him, was as easy to crack as a walnut.

He flexed his fingers and moved along with Wen Rouhan, and was surprised to see him enter the security room, where the guards stood to immediate attention, and they began to chat.

Mo XuanYu watched them for a while, but it didn't look very interesting, and unless he could actually hear what they were talking about, there was no point in continuing to watch their interactions.

He thought about how to change that while wanting to find the cameras that would show him what was happening underground.

Another tab was open on the blueprints that showed him the building plans of the Laboratories and another one of the underground parking building.

He soon got bored scanning the very normal workings of daily life in a pharmaceutical company and looked for a way to find the cameras which would show him what was going on under the ground.

He checks the red dot tab and can see them and his people holed up in a room; they had been in that same spot for a while, and nothing was changed so he set about finding a camera that could show him what was really happening.

That's when he finds a room with a barred door on the inside.

There's a single prisoner lying on the floor, and Mo XuanYu wrinkles his nose at the obvious bad condition of the place. There's only straw for company and a weird vase or urn type thing in the corner, and only when he goes in closer, he realises it's a chamber pot.

An overflowing one, that hasn't been cleaned out for a long time, because he finds it hard to believe that a single human being can produce THAT much waste.

Curiosity piqued, he zooms in to find out the identity of the person they have kept in this hellhole.

It's his second shock of the morning.

No Fucking Way...

It's Jin GuanShan.

His Royal Bastard of a father.