The Way to Defeat SCP-3125

The weather was overcast, and a bit dull, and a sandstorm was coming soon. This kind of storm in the desert is horrifying. If they are not getting into the site, there is a good chance that they will not see the sun tomorrow.

The three returned to the main building but did not go straight upwards to look for it. Because Zhang Jue had already suffered a loss once, that black shadow was moving so fast that even Zhang Jue could only barely keep up with it. Even if they went all the way up there, it must have escaped long ago. They were going to be in the building all night anyway, so there was still plenty of time to play hide-and-seek with it.

They returned to the room where those researchers were unconscious, and Zhang Jue took out food and water from the Pocket Dimension, and the three of them ate something to replenish their energy. It was estimated that they would not have the opportunity to eat again this night.

Loris looked at the unconscious colleagues and then at Zhang Jue. "Can't we wake them up?"

Zhang Jue threw away the chicken bones in his hand, licked his fingers, and didn't even look at her, "I can't."

"Why?"

"You wouldn't understand if I told you."

"You-"

Seeing their tendency to quarrel again, Yang Xue explained, "Loris, the reason why these colleagues of yours fell into a coma is still unclear, and ordinary methods can't wake them up."

"What about me?" Loris said, "How did you guys wake me up?"

"..."

It was still uncertain whether Loris was infected by SCP-3125 or not, so there was no way to explain some things to her.

Zhang Jue gave a humph, "Sorry, no comment."

Looking at them, Loris was silent for a moment and then spoke. "I know you don't trust me, and I will prove my worth to you."

It seemed that Gray's death had affected her greatly. When they had just arrived here, it was hard to imagine that Loris would say something like that.

Zhang Jue shrugged, "I hope you're not just strong-mouthed."

...

After eating, the three rested for another half hour. This time, Zhang Jue leaned against the wall and rested his eyes. He had been using SCP-714 for a long time, which was a huge load on his mind, and he had to rest. Once they started to move, there would be no time to rest.

The time was 8 PM. The wind had already started to howl, and a huge storm would soon come. The three locked the main building's doors and prepared to start moving.

The main building had thirty-two floors, divided into A and B areas, with an elevator room and a stairwell on each side. Before the operation began, Zhang Jue jammed the two elevators on the first floor. They would divide their forces into two, Yang Xue with Loris, and Zhang Jue himself, searching upwards from the two stairwells together.

Before they left, Zhang Jue handed Yang Xue a pistol and a whistle.

"Every time you check over a room, turn the light on. Before you go upstairs, blow the whistle. Shoot, if you encounter danger, I will rush over immediately. Also, be careful of Loris."

Zhang Jue spoke in a not-so-low voice and did not deliberately lower his voice as if he was deliberately speaking to Loris. She looked at him and did not say anything.

Yang Xue said, "Take care of yourself."

Zhang Jue hummed. "Don't worry about me. I'm the Special Advisor to the Foundation. Those demons and monsters can't hide when they see me. I'm invincible now, and it's not that easy to kill me."

Zhang Jue habitually sold himself; this time, Yang Xue didn't roll her eyes. She hummed, then took Loris and headed for the stairwell on the other side.

Watching them disappear around the corner, Zhang Jue shrugged, took out his SCP-714 again, and carried it in his hand. The wind was howling and getting louder outside. Sand from the wind hit the glass with a crackling sound. Zhang Jue looked up at the ceiling and pressed the joints of each finger to snap.

"I'll see where else you can run this time."

The first floor was searched by the three of them together, so Zhang Jue stepped away and headed for the second floor. As told before, the lights in each room were turned on for each room explored.

Zhang Jue's body was strong and already immune to the vast majority of physical damage, so he searched very quickly. In less than ten minutes, he had searched the part of the second floor, Area A, and then waited at the door of the stairwell.

"Fweeet!" The sound of a whistle came from the corridor, and Zhang Jue knew that Yang Xue and Loris had also finished searching this floor.

He put his finger in his mouth and whistled in response, then continued on to the next level. By doing this, he could ensure that both sides would always be searching within the same floor, to ensure that if one side was in danger, he could get to the scene quickly, and secondly, for fear that the dark figure would exploit the opening and run away.

The storm will stop in a few hours, and they will hardly have the chance to trap it like this again. Three floors, four floors, five floors, and six floors were explored. They went all the way up. If you look into this main building from the outside, you can see that the lights on each floor are being lit in turn, as if they are playing some kind of game.

Several hours passed, and it was already late night. At this time, Zhang Jue had already stepped onto the twenty-second floor, and the process was more than halfway through. During that time, they only rested for a few minutes and drank water.

The wind outside was still howling, without the slightest intention of stopping, and it looked like it would not stop until the next day. In a way, it was a good thing. At least they could definitely finish exploring the building.

The three of them are like fishermen who were fishing by compressing the space where the fish can move a little. There were still ten floors left. It would take less than two hours for them to finish exploring.

However, the more they spend more time, the closer the danger and the more careless they would do it.

Zhang Jue kicked open a locked door. However, there was nothing inside. He had already done this action for an unknown number of times, and his feet were numb. After exploring this floor, Zhang Jue was at the door of the stairwell. As usual, he was waiting for Yang Xue to whistle for him.

However, there was no sound coming from the distant corridor. Zhang Jue glanced at his watch. It was already 1:30 in the morning. He waited a few more minutes, but still, no sound came. This time he could finally confirm that something had happened on their side.

Why hadn't Yang Xue fired a shot?

Too late to think about it, Zhang Jue ran all the way over in the direction of Area B. Luckily, the tactics they had developed were very reasonable, and Zhang Jue skipped past many rooms with lights on all the way without even looking at them and saving a very large amount of time.

When they reached the last corner, Zhang Jue slowed himself down and approached little by little. He stopped at the door of the last room that had been opened. He held his breath and cautiously peered inside.

He saw two women looking intently at something on the table, each of them holding a book in their hands. Looking it over carefully, they were in a state of focus. It looked like the two were fine. They just found some clue and forgot to blow the whistle.

Zhang Jue breathed a sigh of relief and walked into the room.

"What are you guys doing?" He suddenly spoke out, startling the two.

Yang Xue instinctively drew her gun and only patted her chest when he saw it was him.

"Come and see." Yang Xue pointed to the shelf behind him.

Zhang Jue looked up and found that it was all filled with books. "What's wrong with these books? What's so special about them?"

Yang Xue pointed to the bookshelf, "Look carefully again."

After Yang Xue reminded him, Zhang Jue once again looked at the books that were displayed inside and realized Yang Xue's meaning. There were many books on the bookshelf, both in Chinese and English.

There weren't many Chinese people at this site, and this office was exquisitely decorated, so the position must not be low. Then the identity of an office owner is most likely Yang Xue's father, Yang Wensong.

"This is your father's office?" Zhang Jue asked.

Yang Xue nodded, "At least he was here for a while."

"How did you know it was him? Maybe there were other Chinese people."

"No, I'm sure it's him." Yang Xue opened a book and flipped to a random page with some annotations on it.

She pointed to a certain character and said, "I know my father's handwriting. It was like this when he wrote a book."

Zhang Jue followed her finger and saw that the stroke was indeed very recognizable, and since Yang Xue had been injected with an X Class memory enhancer, she couldn't remember it wrong. It seemed likely that this was the place where Yang Wensong had once worked. This is a very valuable discovery.

After Yang Wensong came here, he had been working to help Director Healey re-contain SCP-3125 and if he could see his working notes or some other information. He could tell the direction of their experiments. Although they ultimately failed, they still can be used as a reference. At least to know which method does not work.

Loris looked at where Yang Xue's finger was and wondered, "Sister Yang Xue, what are you guys talking about? Why can't I see the handwriting you guys are talking about?"

Zhang Jue gave her a look and probably guessed the reason. He had brought SCP-714 with him, and Yang Xue was able to see the words because Yang Wensong had left some kind of backup plan for her.

Loris and Gray have been living on this site for so long that they must have been influenced by those Antimemetics anomalies to ignore these books. If Yang Xue hadn't been here, I'm afraid she wouldn't have even noticed these books.

Zhang Jue didn't waste time explaining to her but turned back to look at the bookshelf. They were all detailed books, and he couldn't even read the English ones. He randomly picked the basic Chinese books and took them down to look at them.

The book is mixed. There are new and old. Some of the books had creases and annotations on every few pages, so it was obvious that Yang Wensong had put a lot of thought into them. Zhang Jue was about to collect those books he often read together to see if there were any commonalities.

"It's all here." Yang Xue said, pointing to her own side of the book, "What father reads is mostly mental health-related books."

Zhang Jue nodded as he flipped through a few books and found that this was indeed the case.

"Mental health books?"

He clenched his jaw, currently only able to determine the direction of Yang Wensong's research but without a practical solution on how to contain SCP-3125 yet.

Zhang Jue said, "Go through all these books and see if there are any valuable findings."

Yang Wensong was a cautious person. He had a very good habit of reading books and annotating. He would write his thoughts on the edges and title pages of those books that were useful to him in very neat handwriting.

Loris couldn't see these words, so Zhang Jue and Yang Xue divided the work between them. One was reading Chinese books and the other reading English ones. There weren't many books, to begin with, and with the two working together seamlessly, they soon found a valuable clue.

"Look!" Yang Xue pointed to a page in her hand, looking excited.

Zhang Jue fixed his eyes on it, only to see a string of words written in Chinese on the slit next to a book page in Yang Xue's hand.

"I've come up with a possible method on how to deal with 'it', but the space here is too small for me to write. Also, this method has considerable danger and uncertainty, so I may need to experiment with it myself." When Zhang Jue saw this paragraph, the veins on his head slowly jutted out.

What the hell was this? Yang Wensong's Grand Theorem? This was such an important thing. What was Yang Wensong thinking?

Zhang Jue looked carefully and found that the book had been rummaged, the printing was crude, the layout was wide left and narrow right, and they really couldn't write anything.

A sentence squeezed out of his mouth. "When we go back, remember to remind me to ask Huang Xingwen to improve the treatment of the staff on the site. He can't even afford to buy a book. How ridiculous it is!"

Zhang Jue gritted his teeth for a while before returning to the book's content, but his English was so poor that he couldn't read this kind of professional book.

He handed the book back to Yang Xue, "Dr. Yang, please translate what is said on these pages."

Yang Wensong saw this and wrote down that annotation, which should be inspired by something. Yang Xue nodded, opened the book, and quickly browsed through it. After a few minutes, Yang Xue closed the book and frowned slightly.

"This chapter is about how the patient's brain nerves will differ from normal people's after suffering from schizophrenia."

"Huh?" Zhang Jue looked at Yang Xue with a strange look.

The two of them had been together for so long that Yang Xue still didn't know what was going on in her head.

She sighed and said helplessly, "At least in my memory and my uncle's. My father was a normal person and had not had a history of schizophrenia."

"Oh, that's good to know. I heard in some folklore that that stuff can be hereditary. You have to be careful. Don't be offended. I'm being nice here. Well, since your father is not mentally ill and you are not mentally ill. Then we can take a guess why he wrote this here?"

When it comes to business, Yang Xue did not have the heart to fight with him and concentrate on thinking. But Yang Wensong was so knowledgeable that even as her daughter, it was hard for Yang Xue to imagine exactly why her father had written this passage here.

"Ah, I see!" Zhang Jue suddenly snapped his fingers.

"In order to defeat SCP-3125, someone must suffer from schizophrenia!"