ecstasy

"So... so we should just wait and see what happens?"

"Anyway—so I just want you to be my bodyguard for a while; I'll help you with your homework, too. Neighbors helping each other, right?"

The mathematician had no energy at all, and his voice seemed to come out of his nose. He seemed to be getting weaker and weaker.

Doudou shook his head, stood up, and zipped up his raincoat:

"You're right. I certainly have to help my neighbors. But I can't do that. I want to help you thoroughly and completely solve your problem. The math problems in our school are so difficult. I have to be loyal to you."

He clenched his fists, secretly pleased with his own logic; he couldn't help but feel that he had taken another big step towards thinking like a human being.

"You never thought, did you? In just a moment, I've come up with a good solution to your problem! Come, come; get up quickly, and let's go out."

Chapter 35 Shock

The mathematician stood there for a long time, almost breaking the rotten cardboard box under his arms:

"Oh. So? Going out? Going out now? Where to? In the middle of the night—"

Doudou scanned the room but couldn't find any clothes hangers; the mathematician's clothes were still in the box. He walked over to the tape recorder and flipped the tuner left and right, searching for the station he often listened to:

"Hey, stop talking nonsense, Doctor! Get dressed now, we're going out. There's a radio station in Mong Cai that specializes in oddities and legends. It has a huge audience. It's amazing! I used to listen to the host on that radio station talk about things like 'Dr. Iron Ruler', 'Iron Ruler Killer', and 'Iron Ruler Butcher'."

Naturally, Doudou is also a loyal listener of this radio station.

He suddenly turned his head and stared at the mathematician:

"Oh, you only have this one set of clothes; so economical. Come on! Let's go, take the bus to the radio host's place and ask the radio station to announce your location directly so that the people chasing you can come find you."

The mathematician, who was about to pick up the cardboard box, froze, his disbelief almost piercing through his glasses.

"Huh? You mean to lure the pursuers away from the mountain? Lure the pursuers somewhere, and then we can escape? Then we can actually stay here. No one has noticed us yet."

Doudou's eyes were filled with doubt, as if he was beginning to doubt that a mathematician could have the intelligence of a doctoral student.

"No, I told you: let the people chasing you come directly to you! If you reveal your location, they will definitely come to capture you or kill you."

He shook his raincoat; on the edge of the coat, there were some unfaded red marks:

"Running around like that is such a hassle. I can't stand waiting in this shabby apartment of yours for a week! Don't look at me in a raincoat, I'm a sunny person at heart and need to be out and about more. It's summer vacation!"

"They want to kidnap you and frame you. They're bad people, criminals. I'm here to kill them all; it's over once and for all. Otherwise, you'll be hiding every day, living in constant fear. You made a mistake with my homework, so I'm the one who suffers."

The mathematician had not expected to receive such an answer, just as he had never imagined that he would step into such a sticky and biting quagmire.

His gaze followed Doudou's hand, sweeping over the red, black, and orange stains; but he didn't dare to guess where the filth came from.

"But, but--"

Snap, crash.

The mathematician did not have time to sort out and finish his chaotic words; everything was interrupted by a sudden noise.

With a crisp sound, the curtains suddenly bulged, as if they had suddenly risen from a hill: the glass was shattered by some foreign object -

Along with the broken glass, a cylindrical, black object also fell; it rolled into the center of the living room and stopped between the two of them.

Doudou suddenly screamed with excitement:

"Oh! It's a stun grenade!"

laugh--

What arrived wasn't a bright flash or a loud explosion: wisps of smoke erupted from the cylinder, then erupted. A thick, intoxicating white mist burst forth, instantly filling the entire living room and enveloping Doudou and the mathematician.

A soft, awkward voice came from the smoke:

"Oops, I said that wrong."

boom!

The door was smashed open, and the dull thud of the sofa falling onto the wooden floor; the crisp sound of the door frame cracking and wood chips scattering; the "thump thump" of solid thick-soled leather shoes hitting the ground, and the collision of metal on metal mixed together -

Someone broke in, shouting muffled by the mask:

"Corporate law enforcement, get down! Get down! Corporate law enforcement—"

The shouting stopped abruptly. But a new sound replaced the roar and roar:

Bang, bang, bang—

From time to time, flickering lights flashed through the thick smoke: whoever had carried out the raid had spared no effort in using the bullets in their magazines. Like fireworks on a New Year's Eve, soaring into the sky and exploding in the clouds, they suddenly lit up behind the grayish-white sky.

"Aaahhhhh!!"

Between the flickering and the fading, the mathematician's vision was already blurry. He curled up on the ground, covering his head, and cried loudly because of the burning and burning pain in his eyes, face, and entire upper respiratory tract; his eyes behind the lenses were blurred with tears and he could not see anything clearly.

Bang, boom!

In between the pain, the mathematician could occasionally feel the air blowing across his scalp and the pain of flying pieces of drywall hitting his body: he was lucky, neither the bullets nor the stray bullets hit the mathematician huddled in the corner.

But luck could not take away the torture. He was undergoing tests both physically and mentally, and the itching and pain in his chest became stronger.

After an unknown amount of time—in this torment, the mathematician felt as if the passage of time had slowed down—the noise in the small room gradually changed. The explosion of the ignited primer no longer occurred, replaced by a dull sound, like the sound of a blunt object knocking.

Tap, tap, tap.

Suddenly, the mathematician thought of his university cafeteria: when the cafeteria chef was in the kitchen, chopping pork legs and splitting bones with a kitchen knife, it seemed to sound similar; but the sound was more moist -

Is it because the pork purchased from the cafeteria has been bled?

Such inferences turned over in the mathematician's mind, abrupt and detached.

-

Time seemed to pass for an eternity, yet it seemed only a moment; but eventually, the living room fell silent. The smoke was no longer as thick as before, like a mirror wiped clean of steam.

The mathematician raised his head, and saw a blurry picture in his red and swollen eyes:

In each of his left and right hands, Doudou held a crooked human body - they were wearing black helmets and gas masks, Kevlar bulletproof vests, and bullet belts with magazines inserted - and he waved them like a fan to drive away the tear gas that filled the entire room.

A gaping hole had appeared in the drywall, its edges weaving like spiderwebs up to the ceiling. A soldier or agent knelt in the middle, his head buried in the hole. Beside him lay another motionless figure—only the upper half. The lower half dangled from the ceiling fan, its intestines dangling like ribbons.

The old ceiling fan squeaked, reluctantly shifting with the sudden weight. Blood dripped down the exposed internal organs, hitting the wooden floor and seeping into the cracks: more like an air conditioner leaking.

The human body in Doudou's left hand looks like a turtle that wants to retreat into its shell but is stuck, with its bearded chin pressed against its chest and its ears touching its shoulders; the entire head seems to have lost its neck and is sunken deep into the torso.

In the right hand, the limbs were twisted into strange angles; if you ignore the torso and head, it looks like a swastika.

It was a funny scene.

Doudou continued to wave the human bodies in his left and right hands like palm-leaf fans; their legs bent 90 degrees, occasionally banging against the wall. Compared to these fully armed, muscular figures, Doudou was so tiny that onlookers thought he was holding some crude inflatable doll.

After a while, the smoke in the apartment finally mostly vanished through the kicked-open door and shattered windows, carried away by the night breeze. Along with it, the smell of blood and gunpowder faded. Doudou didn't know how much of a contribution his two "fans" had made to this round of clean air.

A "beep, beep" sound came from the distance: it sounded like a police car, but also like an ambulance.

Doudou glanced at the mathematician still huddled in the corner, then nudged the tear gas bomb with his toes, setting it rolling after the smoke cleared.

"Hey—it's really not a stun grenade; why is it tear gas? Are these idiots deliberately trying to embarrass me?"

Doudou squatted on the ground and gently put down the two corpses in his hands. His expression was a little embarrassed - this expression instantly turned into anger and dissatisfaction, as if it had never existed:

"Hey! Everything else is fine. But why do they even step into other people's houses with shoes on?"

Only now did the mathematician notice Doudou's bare feet soaked in blood and human tissue: he had never worn shoes.

"Wow!"

The mathematician vomited for the second time that night - no longer undigested food, but gastric juice and bile.

But this time he was careful not to vomit on his clothes.

Chapter 36 Natural Disaster

Richard put down the telescope, his hands shaking.

He didn't know whether it was due to the cold wind blowing through the high-rise tower cranes at the construction site, or because of what he had just witnessed: fear and cold, sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference.

A young man in a yellow raincoat was carrying out four crooked, scattered bodies from an apartment, piling them up beside the shared stove in the hallway; it was as if they were pieces of freshly slaughtered pork, waiting to be cooked.

The four-man assault team, fully equipped and trained in the urban assault force format, took the lead in the assault; in the blink of an eye, it became like this:

Richard calculated the time; from the moment the team officially began breaching the door to the moment the gunfire stopped, only thirty-two seconds had passed. How much longer had the direct contact and attack taken?

This wasn't even casually outsourced security, but a special forces unit directly managed by the Special Package Handling Section.

Richard had never seen [ecstasy] reach this level of intensity—

Whether I saw it with my own eyes or read it in the files of the Special Package Handling Department

In fact, he had never heard of any sinner or patient who could develop such destructive symptoms of ecstasy - even from the outside, no physiological changes could be detected.

What had this young man done? Had he committed some crime so monstrous it would overturn the very foundations of modern civilization's laws and ethics? Or was there some mental illness, undiscovered even by modern medicine, simmering within him?

[No, there's another possibility: Could it be because of the [package]?]

Until now, Richard still didn't know what the [package] that [the client] was carrying was.

He thought of his deceased partner and the tear duct infection incident two days ago: at the time when John Dou died, Chuck Richard also cried loudly and was about to get conjunctivitis.

I had originally thought it was a case of ecstasy caused by John Dou's near-death experience—there had been precedents for this before; the extreme emotions of people nearing death sometimes led to ecstasy symptoms that were beyond their capacity.

But now, after seeing [Yellow Raincoat] killing people wantonly, he was unsure of his decision.

Is the "package" some special device that can amplify and increase the intensity of ecstatic manifestations? If so, it's no surprise that it's so important. No, the word "important" is probably an understatement.

Richard untied his pager from his belt and turned it on. In the dim green light, he took out the yellowed newspaper clippings he had secretly cut from the city library that day. The paper was already dry.

Gas Explosion: Miracle Boy Unharmed.

The location, time and age all matched; however, the protagonist of the report did not even have a pseudonym. There was only a blurry, overexposed black-and-white photo showing the devastated scene after the explosion.

Richard was surprised at how easily he could find the information - after five minutes of preliminary screening in the library's public database, he found information about the boy in the yellow raincoat: it's just that there seemed to be too many strange things happening in Mong Cai City in recent years, and there had been no further follow-up reports.

[Ecstasy appeared several years ago, but insufficient information makes it difficult to determine the intensity of its manifestations during that period. It's possible that the [package] happened to fall into the hands of Huang Yuyi, causing his ecstasy to increase to such a high level.]

But Richard was still confused - his intuition told him that this was not the truth. Although he also liked the story of a young boy who happened to get a treasure and soared to the sky, the reality was not so complicated.

Does a device that can enhance ecstatic symptoms really exist?

He turned around and looked at the dried white bird droppings on the glass window of the tower crane cab. He felt that the fog covering his eyes was much stickier than this dirt.

-

A moment ago, Richard saw it clearly from the tower crane: after a rough search and confirmation, the four-man team rushed directly into the apartment - the negotiation location that Richard had previously proposed to the Special Package Handling Department through a code.

[Inhabited room.]

So this four-person team was sent by the Special Package Handling Section; their target was actually Richard.

[But why is Huang Yuyi in the new tenant's house? What's going on?]

Before the team officially began the assault, he observed that there was no light in the room at the end of the corridor - the apartment where [Yellow Raincoat] lived; only the window of the new tenant who moved in a few days ago was flickering dimly.

Richard was not panicked by this. He just put a cigarette at the entrance of the corridor that day, and the "yellow raincoat" came up to him - from this we can infer:

As long as the assault team starts to suppress the "new residents" who are closer to the corridor, the man in the yellow raincoat may be attracted by the noise and clash with them in the corridor; in this way, Richard will be able to observe more information.

Even if the guy in the yellow raincoat never showed up from beginning to end, at least Richard could be sure of how much the section chief was willing to pay to kill him.

For Richard, this deal is a win-win situation no matter how you look at it.

Although he knew that the section chief would never really negotiate with him, seeing these corpses being played with like toys still frightened Richard.

more importantly.

The team started the suppression work without any hesitation: perhaps they originally thought that Richard's trump card was just an ordinary method such as taking local civilians as hostages; this method is of course one of the most commonly used cases in textbooks.

But now, Richard knows - his colleagues all think he is just a nerd who only knows how to read textbooks.

Coupled with the small-caliber light weapons on Richard, no matter how dangerous he is, it is limited; a head-on confrontation is enough to kill Richard a hundred times.

After Richard had killed the "invisible man" who came to silence him, sending out such a configuration was reasonable: but according to the previous inference that [the package can enhance ecstasy], such an assault team is not safe enough -

If Richard had come into contact with the [Package], causing him to awaken from a state of trance and become enhanced; then although it would be impossible for him to annihilate the assault team as easily as [Yellow Raincoat], the possibility of successfully escaping would be greatly increased.

Not to mention:

If there really was a special device that could enhance the manifestations of ecstasy, and it was taken away by the defecting staff - even Richard, who had been away from the headquarters for a long time, knew how shocking this news was.

If that were the case, they wouldn't have just sent John and me to handle this in the first place; this kind of thing is more important than anything the entire Special Package Handling Department handles combined.

[In other words—the Section Chief really didn't know anything about the [yellow raincoat]; and the possibility that the [package] could enhance ecstasy wasn't as high as I originally thought. The Section Chief isn't a gambler, at least not at work: there's no way she doesn't even know the nature of the [package's] contents.]