Touch and color grew clear; human perception was returning to his body.
But Lin felt that he was losing something in the darkness.
Such a peaceful night—he didn't want to break it.
Sleep.
Lin took off his helmet and walked toward the bed.
His peripheral vision inadvertently caught the full-length mirror in the room.
His pace hit the "Pause" button.
Lin hand hesitated for a few seconds before reaching to the back of his head. He gripped a strand of hair and yanked it out.
Clenching the hair, he brought his fist before his eyes. Lin slowly opened his hand. Through the gaps between his fingers, aided by his partially restored color vision, he saw the hair.
A quarter of the hair had turned silvery-white.
"Stop."
A shadow silently blocked the path. Gray Serpent was stopped by an ice blade that shone crystal-clear under the moonlight. A cold, spirited woman stepped slowly from the corner.
"Miss Sakura, for organic life, this is the hour for rest. Furthermore, you are a beautiful woman; you should cherish your skin more." Gray Serpent was not surprised to see Sakura; he had informed her in advance and had not hidden his movements.
The tip of the sword pointed directly at Gray Serpent's head beneath his hood. "What did you do?"
"You surely already know. Why ask?"
Sakura had indeed seen Gray Serpent and Lin enter the room, and then Gray Serpent emerge ten minutes later. But what she wanted to know was...
"What did you say to Lin?" Sakura gaze turned into another blade, piercing Gray Serpent's throat.
"Some facts, and a search for validation." Gray Serpent folded his hands and spoke with a smile. "Cubs always seek validation from their parents; it is an innate human instinct."
"Lin could never validate you."
"True. Even after being harmed, betrayed, and deceived by humans—even after his childhood and past became sacrifices to human greed—Mr. Lin consistently believes in and loves humanity."
Gray Serpent laughed, raising his hands as if to embrace something.
"He does not care how humanity harms him. But... that is only him."
Sakura frowned. "Nonsense."
"To you, naturally, it is nonsense. But surely, there will come a day when we all witness..."
Gray Serpent left.
Sakura did not stop him. She had received no orders to capture or assassinate Gray Serpent. All she had to do was faithfully report everything she had seen.
Everything?
Sakura looked toward a certain door from afar.
Beep——
The communicator lit up in the pitch-black room.
Lin, sitting by the window, turned to look at it.
A call at this hour? Who could it be?
He never allowed the outcome of one matter to affect an unrelated one. But this time, he didn't really want to answer. He wanted to sit here quietly for a night, thinking of nothing.
Once he let his brain move, the MANTIS Project, Lunar Remains, Gray Serpent... those things crawled into his thoughts, clamoring and disrupting everything.
Beep——
It rang for a minute. The caller didn't hang up. Who was so relentless?
And Lin felt that the persistent ringing seemed to carry a certain impatience.
As if... if he dared to continue not answering, something unpleasant was about to happen.
Perhaps out of annoyance, or perhaps because he felt it was wrong to leave someone hanging like this, Lin reached for the communicator. Without looking at the caller ID, he answered.
"Are you tired of living?"
The smell of formalin accompanied by a cold draft poured in from the other side.
Lin was stunned, then looked at the caller ID.
Mobius.
"You dared to leave me hanging for half a day without answering?"
"...Sorry, just saw it."
"Don't make excuses. What did I tell you before? If you dare to leave one of my calls unanswered for more than a minute, you'd better watch out."
"..."
He had, indeed, said that.
When Lin first arrived at the Tenth Branch and made a "Three Rules" agreement with Mobius, she had mentioned this.
Of course, the agreement was entirely unilateral on Mobius part.
"I'll let it slide this time."
Lin was taken aback. Mobius actually didn't press the matter. She glossed over it casually and moved on: "What are you doing?"
"...Nothing."
"Gray Serpent contacted you?"
"..."
The sentence caught Lin off guard. How did Mobius know...
"Heh, you didn't think you could hide your little movements from me, did you?" Mobius sounded quite proud. "The fact that he could leave Fire Moth alive back then was only because of my tacit permission. His tenacious will to survive at the time gave me a bit of interest in seeing if he could endure."
"..."
"And I've been monitoring what he's been doing lately. To be honest, his growth has exceeded my expectations."
"Do you know what he's doing?"
"To be precise, my clearance allows me to know what he's doing. An interesting social experiment, isn't it?"
"..."
"Lab rat—I haven't called you that in a long time, have I?" Mobius tone changed; her teasing carried another meaning. "Do you remember what you once said? Everything you have is mine. You are my property. If anyone in this world is to experiment on you, it can only be me—not anyone else, and certainly not some thing I created on a whim and then discarded!"
Lin did not reply. His breathing echoed through the communication, tenuous and seemingly about to break at any moment.
"He is a creation with an extremely high learning capacity, yes. But everything he has learned comes from humanity itself. Could you possibly be shaken by humanity itself?"
"Mmhmm? Could you?"
"Answer me. Could you?"
Mobius hung up and leaned back in her chair, staring upward in thought for a while. Then she reached out, wanting to grab a bottle from a shelf.
Her hand stopped in mid-air, a long distance from the vial.
Even on tiptoe, she couldn't reach it.
It really was inconvenient.
Mobius looked down at her tiny body. No one could possibly link her current self to the mature Mobius of before.
Beep——
A call came in. Mobius leaned lazily in her chair and answered it with her toe.
"Hello? I'm about to sleep. State your business quickly."
"Mobius, you accessed the mission reports of Chrysalis Squad without authorization..."
Mobius curled her lips into a disdainful sneer. "So it's you, old man. What, as one of the founders of Fire Moth, I don't even have that much authority?"
"But this is against protocol..."
"Do you want me to look into the fact that you used my unrefined Project Soldier Surgery without authorization?"
"..."
"Listen well. This is a warning, not a 'kind notification.' First: stay away from my experimental results that you aren't permitted to touch. Second: stay away from my 'property.' I am a germaphobe. Otherwise, I can't control when you might 'voluntarily' participate in the MANTIS Project."
Mobius ignored the roaring from the other end and casually hung up. She took a deep breath, curling her small body into the chair.
"What a nuisance..."