MMPS Ch. 12

Chapter 12: A Reliable Ally

It had to be him.

The hand that held Yu An’s was bare, its fingers warm, slender, and exuding a blend of gentleness and steadfastness—just as Yu An had imagined.

Pulled through the endless darkness of the corridor, Yu An ran with him, the light fading behind them, casting fleeting glimpses of the white doors lining the walls. Yu An kept glancing back. Behind him, the brass doorknobs on the white doors were twisting frantically. One by one, the consultants from the beauty rooms burst out, their smiles unnaturally wide and frozen.

Each consultant paused for two seconds upon emerging, their artificial bodies processing the vibrations from Yu An’s hurried steps. Then, with a sickening snap, their heads twisted toward his direction, their plastic frames jolted into action, chasing after him.

Due to the fast movement, their program will inevitably have bugs. Their movements became uncoordinated: arms swinging out of sync with their steps, high heels clattering against the floor as they stumbled, often losing balance and falling. Yet, driven by an inexplicable will, they clawed their way forward even after their limbs cracked and broke.

It was a night of desperate pursuit, the line between life and death growing thinner with each passing moment.

Yu An had already examined the consultant he disabled in the restroom, slashing through her internal mechanisms. Unlike the Eagle Bureau’s mechanical birds, these consultants were not powered by Aberrant Cores.

This meant they wouldn’t stop from running out of energy. As long as Yu An remained in their line of sight, they would hunt him relentlessly.

After three frantic laps around the building’s square-shaped layout, Yu An’s lungs were on the verge of collapse. Gasping for air, he yelled: “Interviewer, do you even know where you’re going…?”

A bead of sweat rolled down the hand holding his in the darkness.

There was no reply. Yu An suddenly understood—this trial was meant to be completed alone. The interviewer couldn’t help or guide him.

But knowing the interviewer was there was enough to steady his nerves.

Yu An pushed himself to sprint around the final dark corner. Ahead, light spilled into the corridor. Behind him, the scraping and grinding of plastic limbs against the walls and floor grew louder.

The most dangerous place was often the safest. Steeling himself, Yu An flipped their roles, pulling the interviewer’s hand and leading the way.

At last, they arrived back at the starting point: Room 704. The white door stood ajar, and a consultant inside, her back to Yu An, began to turn. Her head and torso twisted unnaturally, her arms spinning in a full 360-degree rotation to reach behind her, and she charged forward, running on her heels.

Yu An released the interviewer’s hand and dashed into the light, his body dropping into a defensive stance. With a quick pivot, he swung his left leg, sending the sterile tray she held clattering to the floor. His right leg followed with two powerful strikes in rapid succession.

The black hood of his suit triggered automatically as he leaped. Steel claws flashed from the soles of his boots, slicing through the consultant’s plastic head. As he landed, the claws retracted, leaving no sound in his steps.

Before him, the consultants gathered in a mass, their numbers overwhelming. Yu An rolled to the ground, diving into Room 704, slamming the door shut, and locking it.

The consultants crowded outside, their nails scraping furiously against the door.

Yu An collapsed onto the floor, his muscles trembling from exhaustion.

Looking around, he saw no sign of the interviewer. Panic seized him as he scrambled to his feet: “Did I just lock the interviewer outside?”

Pressing his ear to the door, he strained to listen, but the sound of nails scratching drowned out everything else. Frowning, he pulled out his phone to send a message:

Yu An: Where are you?

The message wouldn’t send. No signal.

“Stay calm.” Yu An muttered, slapping his face lightly before pocketing his phone. He began searching the beauty room for another exit. The consultants, though unnerving, didn’t appear to have significant offensive capabilities. As long as he avoided their grasp, he could stay relatively unharmed.

On the consultation desk, he found a tablet—the one the consultant had used earlier to suggest cosmetic procedures.

Curious, Yu An opened it. The layout resembled an online shopping app, allowing users to search by body parts—eyes, noses, and so on.

He scrolled through the options for eyes. The screen filled with close-ups of irises, each unique in color and pattern, catering to a variety of customer preferences.

“Do they really have this much inventory?” he wondered aloud, flipping through page after page.

Then, a familiar image stopped him cold—a pair of pale plum-colored eyes, so distinct they were unforgettable.

His wiped the cold sweat off his fingertips and tapped the listing. As expected, it included the name, workplace, and photo of the owner.

They were the interviewer’s eyes.

This wasn’t inventory; it was a database of living people. Customers could simply pick what they wanted, and someone would be sent to “collect” it.

But how had they obtained such detailed personal information?

Yu An instinctively touched his left eye. In this chaotic world, even his own eye might have been stolen by these thieves.

Perhaps he had misjudged the interviewer all along.

But his unease lingered. The interviewer’s attentiveness unsettled him. Growing up, Yu An had received so little kindness that he couldn’t help but question ulterior motives.

The room was unsettlingly warm, its walls covered in soft pink wallpaper. To the left stood a bar counter and sink; at the center, a plush leather sofa. Two white doors adorned opposite sides of the room.

One door bore a plaque reading “Consultation Room.” Without hesitation, Yu An made for the other, his instincts urging him forward.

The time on his phone read 1:50 A.M. Nearly two hours had passed since he began, yet he hadn’t even glimpsed the hostage. He needed to find the body sculpting area quickly.

As for the interviewer—someone so strong didn’t need Yu An’s worry.

The door led to a long hallway, its pink wallpaper matching the room. Overhead, warm light cast an inviting glow, but the polished floor beneath reflected an oily sheen, making each step precarious. The air carried the faint scent of lemon cleaning solution.

Yu An treaded cautiously along the wall, his steps slow and deliberate. He mentally reviewed the layout. This corridor likely connected two buildings.

Ahead, faint splashing noises echoed—a wet mop gliding over tiles, accompanied by the soft squeak of damp cloth.

Yu An flattened himself against the far wall, quickening his pace and sharpening his focus.

As he rounded the corridor, he glimpsed someone to his left.

A janitor stood by a metal bucket, dressed in a deep blue uniform. He dipped the mop into the bucket, shook it out, and began swiping it across the floor.

Despite bracing himself, Yu An’s heart jolted when the janitor raised his head and greeted him with a stiff smile, exposing eight neatly aligned teeth.

“Good evening.” the janitor said, his voice as mechanical as his grin.

Relieved by the lack of immediate hostility, Yu An licked his lips and replied: “Hi. Could you tell me where the body sculpting area is?”

The janitor’s gaze fell on Yu An’s feet, his eyes lingering on the fresh prints left behind on the floor. He hunched over, picking up his mop and bucket, and with a slow, deliberate shuffle, he began moving toward Yu An.

Yu An instinctively took several steps back. But the janitor did not continue his pursuit. Instead, he set his bucket down in the very spot Yu An had just vacated, and without a word, began to mop the floor with a meticulous, almost reverent, attention to detail.

Yu An’s eyes widened as the realization hit him: the janitor was cleaning the very spot where his feet had touched the floor. He had left a mark, an imprint of his presence, and it had to be erased.

It was strange, this quiet devotion to the task. It felt almost as though the janitor wasn’t just cleaning the floor—he was wiping away the trace of something that shouldn’t be there.

Yu An stood frozen for a moment, watching the janitor’s movements, before he turned and continued his way down the hallway. He had no intention of wasting any more time here. With only two paths ahead, he chose the one to his right.

But as he walked down the right corridor, a sense of emptiness settled over him. The walls were lined with doorways leading to what seemed like storage rooms, utility closets, places of function rather than form. After walking a short distance, about thirty meters, the hallway abruptly ended. He had gone nowhere.

Frustrated, he turned around, retracing his steps. But when he reached the point where he had first encountered the janitor, the man had vanished.

A strange, sharp chill ran down Yu An’s spine. His muscles tensed, his breath quickened. There was something about the stillness of the hallway that felt wrong, and the sense that something unseen was watching him made his pulse race.

He turned on his heel, glancing over his shoulder, his eyes scanning the empty corridor behind him.

Then, with unnerving silence, a figure emerged, almost as if from thin air. A shadow pressed against his back. The janitor stood there, close enough to feel his presence. The mop and bucket were still in his hands, his face twisted into a grin, revealing jagged teeth.

“Good evening.” the janitor said, his voice unnervingly calm, as though nothing were out of place.

Yu An’s heart skipped a beat. His body jerked instinctively, almost leaping out of his skin. The zipper of his black hoodie meowed as he flinched.

The janitor had followed him, had been trailing him, quietly mopping the floor in his wake.

“Stay away from me.” Yu An spat, his voice hoarse with panic. Without a second glance, he broke into a sprint, his feet pounding against the floor as the janitor followed, one hand clutching the bucket, the other dragging the mop behind him like some twisted, nightmarish shadow.

As Yu An ran, he reached into his shoulder bag, his hands shaking as he rifled through it. Finally, his fingers closed around a small bottle of gasoline he had brought from home. His breath ragged, he tore the cap off with his teeth and flung it behind him.

The bottle hit the ground and rolled, its contents spilling across the floor in a wide, toxic arc. The sharp, acrid smell filled the air. The janitor faltered, his pursuit interrupted. The greasy residue on the floor, the stench of the gasoline, seemed to pull him in. He paused, captivated, and lowered his mop, beginning to clean up the mess with an almost ritualistic fervor.

Yu An, heart still hammering, took a fleeting moment to breathe before he looked up and saw a sign at the end of the hallway: Body Sculpting and Contouring. 

The walls were lined with tightly sealed white doors. Yu An approached them one by one, pressing his ear to each, straining to hear anything from within. He stopped at the third-to-last door, a faint sound of heavy breathing reaching his ears.

But the door next to it was ajar. Yu An’s curiosity, mixed with dread, urged him to approach. He moved slowly, carefully, his feet making no sound as he pressed his body to the doorframe, peering through the narrow gap.

The sight inside nearly made him sick. The room was eerily familiar, the same layout as the video Officer Ye had shown him. A beauty bed in the center, equipment arranged against the walls—but everything was wrong. The floor was slick with oil, the walls spattered with blood and what appeared to be grotesque, diseased cysts. The stench of decay, of something gone terribly wrong, filled the air, making Yu An’s stomach churn with nausea.

Two janitors were inside, their smiles as fake as their effort to clean. They scraped at the walls with small trowels, removing flakes of something, only to reveal what lay beneath: a patch of skin, flesh-colored, too lifelike, too real. One of the janitors pulled it from a bucket, shaking off the soaking liquid, and with a practiced hand, they stretched it, smoothing it over the damaged wall to cover the gouges left by their tools.

Once the “wallpaper” was in place, they opened a can of paint, a pastel pink that felt sickeningly soft against the horrors of the room, and began to coat the wall with it.

Yu An didn’t want to think about where that skin had come from. His mind recoiled at the thought, but his body moved mechanically. He pulled out a precision toolset from his bag, selecting a long, slender needle, and approached the locked door next to him.

The more tense he became, the more his hands betrayed him, slipping on the delicate mechanism. His fingers were slick with sweat, and his heartbeat thudded in his chest, drowning out the faint clicks of the lock turning.

The lock seemed designed specifically to thwart him, its complexity mocking him.

This was a mistake. I’ve messed up.

Just as Yu An was about to give up, the janitors finished their work. With fake smiles plastered on their faces, they packed up their tools and headed for the door.

One of them paused, hearing something from the adjacent room. His smile twitched before he quickly grabbed his bucket and pushed open the door, rushing out.

The hallway was silent.

The cleaner scratched his head and walked away with the plastic bucket. 

Yu An held his breath, watching the janitor leave, and then, in the stillness that followed, he slipped inside the room they had just cleaned. The door clicked softly behind him as he moved quickly, quietly, out of sight.

He unscrewed the peephole, inserting a mechanical lens to peer through the keyhole of the adjacent locked door. He adjusted the lens carefully, positioning it just right.

Minutes passed, the silence of the hallway pressing in. Then, at the far end, he saw movement coming from the hallway. A man, a doctor, his black-framed glasses gleaming faintly in the dim light, walked steadily to the door, unlocking it with a key, and stepped inside.

Yu An let out a quiet breath, relief flooding through him. If he had tried to break in earlier, he would have been caught for sure.

He placed the lens back in its compartment, carefully returning the peephole to its place. Patience. He needed to wait, to find a better opportunity.

But as he turned to sit, his eyes caught something in the mirror across from the beauty bed. His breath caught in his throat. His body froze, the world tilting on its axis.

On his backpack, clinging to the strap, was a pale, slender hand.

It wasn’t attached to anyone. It was a severed right hand, cut cleanly from the forearm.

When had it gotten there?

Yu An felt his heart stop. The air around him seemed to thicken.

And then, another thought, more chilling than the last.

Could it be that the had pulled him away earlier wasn’t the interviewer’s?

The hand hung there, unbothered, unaware of its discovery, acting as though it were just an accessory, an innocent charm.

*

The Underground Metro, in the team leader’s office. 

The faint melody of The Sorrow of Han filled the room. Zhao Ran, still wearing gloves, rested his chin on his left hand, a small wine glass in the other, humming softly as the opera swirled around him. His eyes were slightly unfocused, glazed with a tipsy haze.

Beside him, his subordinate Xiao Qi stood, holding a folder in his hands: “Team Leader, Yu An’s been inside the Xiliu Beauty Clinic for two hours. Are you not worried about sending a rookie to complete an A-tier dangerous mission alone?”

“I sent a little helper with him.” Zhao Ran replied confidently. “Kao Pu won’t let me down.”

He lifted his empty wine glass, and a slender left hand emerged from a drawer to refill it.

Zhao Ran squinted at the hand, his drunken gaze lingering on it.

Suddenly, the wine shot from his mouth in surprise: “Kao Pu? If you’re here, who’s helping Yu An?”

Xiao Qi’s voice was calm: “It should be Li Pu^[1] who went..”