Chapter 128 - Invisible man ~

Fu Wenduo checks his surroundings and returns to the abandoned building. By now Tang Mo and Fu Wensheng had already packed up their things and were waiting for him to go with them. Fu Wenduo looked at Tang Mo and then at his stupid brother and said, "No problem, let's go."

The trio moved to leave the building.

Suddenly, Fu Wenduo turned his head and looked at Tang Mo. Tang Mo immediately withdrew his gaze.

Fu Wenduo raises an eyebrow.

Something doesn't seem right about ...?

The sun shines brightly on the ground, giving it a pale golden hue. The building is very close to the address of the laboratory given by Luo Fengcheng. Fu Wenduo's home was known to Chosen, and Fu Wensheng's home was not safe either. Fu Xiaodi's father worked for the government and was well known in Beijing. Even if Chosen had been unable to get Tang Mo's location coordinates, they could have found Fu Wensheng's home address from government sources and set up an ambush there.

So the three of them planned to find the research material from the United States that Luo Fengcheng had mentioned, before going to Fu Wensheng's house.

The three of them walk quickly through the streets, concealing themselves from view through the dense street trees. Tang Mo takes some paper out of his backpack and looks at the shapes and letters on them to identify their direction. This is the map Luo Fengcheng left for them before they left. There are two institutes of The black tower in Beijing, one outside the seventh ring road and one in the Chaoyang District. Even Luo Fengcheng didn't know their exact addresses, except that they were transformed from top-secret national research institutes. It is likely that the institute where the information was released is the one in Chaoyang District.

"There are seventeen institutes of advanced science in Beijing, and two in Chaoyang District." Tang Mo looked at the sketch on the paper for a long time and sighed softly, "If we're lucky, we should be able to find the institutes in three days. If we're unlucky, it could take us a long time."

This map by Luo Fengcheng is too abstract.

He has roughly marked the locations of several key scenic spots in Beijing, and has drawn two dozen letters on the map. According to him, these twenty places could be the Institute. Luo Fengcheng had only been to the Institute once, in a car. He was asleep and had no memory of how he got into the Institute. He was able to determine the location based on the time he got off the plane and got on the bus to the Institute, as well as the few places he had been treated to during his few days in Beijing.

With over twenty locations, the furthest away being tens of kilometres apart, it must have taken a lot of time to find them all.

Fu Wenduo pointed to the map, "Find location C first." C was just three kilometres to the east of their location.

Tang Mo's heart froze and he looked up at Fu Wenduo. Their eyes met in the air. After a moment, Tang Mo said calmly, "Well, we'll go around here."

Three black figures move through the skyscrapers at breakneck speed. As they passed a building, Tang Mo suddenly stopped in his tracks, his body pressed against the wall, and stared warily at the crossroads not far away. Two middle-aged men were seen cautiously crossing the road.

"Not the Chosen One." Fu Wensheng whispered.

Only when the two players had gone did the three move again.

As Luo Fengcheng's map was drawn in an abstract way, they drew a circle three kilometres in diameter, using the Temple of Heaven as the centre, and searched all the suspected sites of the Institute within the circle.

Fu Wenduo: "The black tower institute is usually disguised as a normal university laboratory to hide its true identity and protect the researchers inside, for example, The black tower institute in Shanghai has been transformed into a normal marine biology laboratory. But such places are usually heavily guarded and have a clear separation zone from the surrounding area."

Tang Mo followed Fu Wenduo's lead and abandoned the ordinary office buildings first.

The office building is so secluded that no one would ever think that the confidential The black tower research institute would be located in such a place. But there are so many people in the office building that it would be easy for someone in the same building to spot the anomaly. His target was a number of small isolated buildings.

In the evening, Tang Mo crossed an alleyway and saw from afar a small old three-storey building bathed in the glow of the setting sun. He said, "There?!"

Fu Wenduo followed his gaze and nodded, "Quite possibly."

The three of them cross the road together and walk towards the small building. Just as they are about to leave the intersection, Tang Mo's feet stop and he slowly turns his head to look at the other end of the intersection. It is a very narrow area where two one-way roads meet to form a small crossroads. Both sides of the road are walled off, making Tang Mo completely invisible in the other three directions as he approaches from the south.

Fu Wenduo also turned his head to look east.

Fu Wensheng took two steps forward, realised something was wrong and followed the line of sight of Tang Mo and Fu Wenduo. When he saw the situation clearly, Fu Xiaodi's eyes widened and he rushed back to Tang Mo. Fu Wenduo stood ten metres away and waited for a moment, listening carefully to the sounds in the air to make sure that the man on the ground was not in an ambush, then he stepped forward.

Checking the situation, Fu Wenduo looked up, "Dead."

On the edge of the narrow road, a middle-aged woman fell headfirst to the ground, not breathing. Bright red blood flows from beneath her body and down the sloping road into the sewer slots on either side. In a few moments, however, the blood solidified, leaving a dark brown stain on the ground.

Tang Mo crouches down and reaches out to touch the woman's neck. The temperature had not yet completely faded. His face sinks as he looks up at Fu Wenduo and the two men immediately understand what the other means.

Fu Wenduo: "Just died less than five minutes ago. He died very quickly, with a stab to the carotid artery and a cut to the vocal cords. The fatal wound was this stab from the front of the forehead, which must have been stabbed first and then cut the neck in a very short period of time. The technique was very sophisticated and should have killed many people."

Fu Wensheng: "The Chosen One?"

Fu Wenduo shook his head, "Not sure, but it doesn't look like it."

Tang Mo: "The point is ... she's only been dead for five minutes."

Five minutes earlier Tang Mo had arrived in the neighbourhood, looking around for the location of The black tower research centre. They were no more than 200 metres away when the middle-aged woman died, but neither Tang Mo nor Fu Wenduo had seen anyone suspicious, which is why Tang Mo was so surprised when he suddenly saw the woman's body.

When Earth is online, even during the day, there are players who will kill random people on the road. There are many reasons for killing people, most of the time it's to loot props and resources. Some psychopathic stowaways kill for no reason at all, just to vent their emotions. This time, however, the woman died under the watchful eyes of Tang Mo and Fu Wenduo, who have yet to find her killer.

This murderer seems to have evaporated out of thin air, without a sound.

After examining the middle-aged woman's body, Tang Mo said, "Be careful."

The three men were on alert, always on the lookout for a sneak attack by the Chosen. If there is anyone who can kill under the noses of Tang Mo and Fu Wenduo, it is most likely Chosen. Half of Beijing's most powerful players are in this organisation, and there may be players whose powers are instantaneous, allowing them to kill and disappear out of thin air. Either way, they had to be more careful.

After entering the building without incident, Tang Mo searched for a while and found that it was just an ordinary literary bookshop and not The black tower research centre. He crossed "C" on the map to make sure there were no enemies around and the trio reappeared to find the next location.

In three days, Tang Mo travelled halfway around the Chaoyang District, looking for eleven locations. Without exception, none of the eleven locations were The black tower Institute.

On the fourth day, they found a robotics lab. Tang Mo looks at the name on the outside of the building and his eyes light up.

This robotics lab is located in a small, secluded courtyard surrounded by an ordinary residential area of bungalows; a small two-storey building like this looks so old that it would be unnoticeable in these old houses. But its courtyard is large enough that people outside cannot see inside the building from outside the courtyard.

Tang Mo pushes the door in and there are several robot models in the hall of the small building. The entire ground floor is a general robotics research room, and on the first floor, the three of them search for a while before finally stopping in a small room at the far end of the corridor. Tang Mo reached out to open the door, but when he pressed it, he found that it didn't open.

He looks to Fu Wenduo.

Fu Wenduo's right hand flips into a pitch-black, three-pronged sharpshooter. The sharp weapon cuts through the thick steel door and inside is a robotics research lab! Tang Mo didn't die, he had a feeling something wasn't right here. His eyes scanned every corner of the room, ending up on a bookshelf leaning against the wall.

This shelf contains many books on robotics, and without exception, each book is very new, as if it has never been turned over.

In the next breath, Tang Mo said, "Push this bookshelf out of the way."

Fu Wenduo also noticed this and pushed the bookshelf open. Fu Xiaodi exclaimed, "Is there something behind the bookshelf?" With that, he also ran over to help.

With Tang Mo and Fu Wenduo's current strength, the bookshelf only moved five centimetres when they pushed it with a fifth of their strength. This is further proof of the unusual nature of this shelf. As the shelf is pushed away, a dark staircase hidden behind it is revealed. The bookshelf was pushed completely away and there was a click as if something had been crumbled by brute force.

Tang Mo was about to go down the stairs first when Fu Wenduo stopped him: "I'll go down first."

Tang Mo froze. After a moment of looking into the man's dark, sunken eyes, he nodded, "... good."

The three of them went down the stairs one after the other. It was a long staircase and they had crossed one floor to the ground floor. Tang Mo took out his torch to illuminate this strange place, and before them was a half-open door. Fu Wenduo pushed the door in and a long-abandoned laboratory appeared in front of them.

The various models of The black tower, the strange equations drawn on the blackboard, all point to the true identity of the place.

The three men showed no great surprise as they immediately searched the The black tower Institute. Most of the information in the institute was the same as what Fu Wenduo had seen at The black tower in Shanghai, and there were not too many discrepancies. It was clear that there was an exchange of information between the two institutes. Tang Mo had also heard Luo Fengcheng say that most of this information was wrong.

For six months, the world's leading nations have been building research institutes for The Black Tower, trying their best to study it, almost to no avail.

They have made numerous hypotheses, ranging from physical phenomena, optical reflections, to cosmological and particle theories. None of them could produce The black tower. It is like a civilisation that does not belong to mankind and is beyond the reach of current scientific means, as it is far beyond the limits of human scientific understanding.

Tang Mo searched for a long time before Fu Wensheng suddenly raised his voice and said, "Eh, what is this?"

The crowd immediately turned their heads to look.

The children were seen moving a black safe from the corner with a blue glass vessel on top of it. The water in this glass vessel was cloudy, as it had been aged for five months and the quality of the water was already unclear. The black safe and the glassware were just sitting there in the corner, inconspicuous.

Tang Mo took the glass vessel and observed the traces inside. He was acutely aware of a number of fingerprints on the outside of the glass, which were layered and crossed over each other. The glassware had obviously been picked up and observed regularly by more than one person, and Tang Mo was able to distinguish a dozen different fingerprints alone.

Tang Mo had an answer in mind, he shone a torch on the black safe and looked at Fu Wenduo: "This glassware must have contained something. Open this box and the information should be inside."

Fu Wenduo had already taken out his dagger and was ready to open the box. He was holding the black dagger he had used in the fight against the big turkey, and just as it was about to hit the safe, Fu Wensheng said, "Is this really the valuable research material we're looking for?"

Fu Wenduo's movements come to a sudden halt.

Tang Mo was startled. After a long time, he quickly said, "If it's precious information, it shouldn't be possible to just take an ordinary safe to contain it ... There's a trap, there must be a trap."

Fu Wensheng said in dismay, "A trap?" The child did not expect his casual remark to be so important.

Tang Mo immediately looked to Fu Wenduo: "We can't use brute force, we have to open the box manually."

--------------------

The author has something to say.

Tangtang: Look how calm I am, what Viktor, which is not as important as finding information~

Mr. Fu: ... Please don't be so calm.