Transcendent Gene-Chapter 272: Chaotic Undercurrents [2]

Riverene was built to be easily traversed. Its buildings were organized in a grid pattern and businesses of different kinds were put next to each other.

The building Gio was looking for was in the financial district. Though the majority of the city was empty and rotting, the symbol on the building was still present.

It took some imagination to match it to the description Leonidas provided, but there weren’t many buildings with green logos on them in the first place. Locating it wasn’t an issue.

’Their lab was underground, coincidentally enough.’

They ended up living underground without a choice, but their work started below ground because they had something to hide. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

Gio led his party into a nearby bank building.

[If we didn’t have funding from the government, we would’ve never been able to do what we were doing. The government didn’t want Vita to be humanity’s savior. They got tired of not gaining anything through the improvement of humanity.]

As such, they put together research groups to combat VNGRD.

[We were one of them. There was one in New Renis, too, but most of them were in the south where the state governments weren’t as strict. It felt strange walking into a bank every day and acting like I worked there. I’m certainly not the kind of person you’d expect to see in a bank building, well, that is, if I wasn’t robbing it.]

If one walked past the service area of the building and into its office space, one would find a specific corner desk that looked slightly different from the rest. It was elevated just barely a few extra centimeters off the ground, but such a distance stuck out to the eyes of a Sequencer.

[When it started, I felt like we were almost an archaeological research group. We were being sent around the world to discover and dig up remains of species that never existed before. We thought they were planted in the ground during the Forthcoming, but the evidence we found suggested otherwise.]

They found evidence that the remains they found dated back to the earliest years of life on Earth. It was easily confirmed that they weren’t newly placed onto the earth, but that made even less sense.

[They haven’t been here before. If they were here, we would’ve found them. Archaeological research has been taking place on this planet for hundreds of years at this point.]

[Are you trying to tell me that it took until now to find remains that were so obviously waiting to be discovered? Or are you trying to tell me that these remains were dug up from places that would have been otherwise undiscoverable? Regardless of the conclusion, our research suggested a much deeper connection between humans and our newfound invading enemies.]

[We were determined to find that connection.]

The cubby was the most basic form of a hidden elevator that took Gio’s party underground.

The mechanism itself was broken, but using virtual energy, he was able to force its descent down the shaft.

’That’s all he said about it. Before ever talking about the research they did, he stopped. He didn’t run out of time. He just refused to talk about it.’

He had plenty of space left to use and he had more than enough time, as the book where the note resided wasn’t written towards the end of their lives.

Gio could see the obvious differences between it and books from that time. At the end of their days, Leonidas’ lethargy and hopelessness could be felt from each word. He had no hope that future generations would find his works, so he started to get lazier with his writing.

The lab at the bottom looked no different from any other lab. The equipment was obviously dated and looked extremely redundant in comparison to modern machines, but that was beside the point.

There weren’t bodies on the tables or anything of the sort. Gio and Serene found exactly that in New Renis, so they had some expectations for the kind of research they would find.

There were preserved body parts isolated in different containers, but no full specimen to speak of.

’It’s useless to look at the machinery.’

Gio went searching for books first and foremost.

’Leonidas didn’t start as a conventional researcher. He was more of an explorer with a scientific mind, which was why he was sent on expeditions and the likes.’

Gio read enough of his writings to understand parts of his character.

’If there was one quirk he had, it was that he wrote down everything. He kept better logs than the government itself, which helped him move up the ranks pretty fast. It was a good thing for him...until he became a part of something that made him a target.’

He searched for a while before he found a locker room some distance away from the main lab space.

There was a box hidden in one of those lockers. Its contents made themselves known easily.

These books weren’t made to be hidden, after all. The lab itself was hidden, and everything within was shared between its occupants.

’This was his.’

The locker wasn’t empty. Aside from the box, it was equipped with a uniform, various random items like a wallet and some keys, and a wall of photos cherished by its owner.

Gio had never seen the man before, but he could almost guarantee that the burly figure with the thick mustache and stone-like face had to be him. He gave off that kind of impression even just through text.

As his party members investigated the lab itself and the biological matter on the tables and shelves, he focused on flipping through the books in the box.

There were three of them in total. The first was a personal diary and the other two were filled with research notes.

They had no sense of chronology and weren’t written to be read by other people. Most of it was in the form of numbers, sketches, and roughly put-together sentences only meant to jog their writer’s memory.

’It goes to show just how much of a genius someone like Leonidas was. He never gave himself credit because he was surrounded by people who were smarter than him, but none of them would’ve been able to work so efficiently without him.’

Leonidas’ talent was different from theirs. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been recognized and selected to be a part of such a secretive operation.

Everything he jotted down as a minor note was likely explained in full somewhere else. Everything that needed an explanation was bound to have an explanation if one was looking through a work by Leonidas.

Gio knew he would find answers before he was ever near them.

[It started with those remains. We were putting together bones that formed into the monsters we knew, but it just didn’t make sense. There were too many redundancies for the skeletons to be as large or unique as we were making them. No matter how stupid Friedrick’s theory sounded, we had no other leads. We thought it wasn’t a waste to test what he claimed while brainstorming more tangible conclusions.]

[So, we started a different kind of research. We tried to arrange the bones more similarly to our own bone structures. There were definitely differences. Too many things changed for those bones to be compared to a human’s. However, we can’t call Friedrick crazy anymore.]

’Wait...’

Gio’s eyes widened.

[We’re considering the possibility that these are not monster remains. They may be the remains of a hybrid between a monster and a human, a demihuman of some sort that unequivocally existed on Earth.]

It was a jaw-dropping assumption. Gio looked away from the book at the various artifacts his team members were looking through.

’What is he suggesting?’

Gio couldn’t make sense of their hypothesis. His only choice was to keep reading...

"Everyone, gather!"

...but they weren’t alone in Riverene.

Gio’s party rushed to him. Following his lead, they squeezed bodies behind the lockers that looked flush against the wall and hid themselves.

His movements spoke for themselves. Nobody needed context.

After all, mere seconds after they hid, several thuds resounded through the lab space.

"Is this really the spot?"

"Be quiet. Judging by the state of the elevator, someone may have entered before us."

"Huh? This city is empty, though. Everyone else is doing what the Old Duke is telling them to and heading east for Lyverne. The real party is down south in Fischel. Who else came this way?"

"I don’t know, but nothing is impossible. Just shut up already and follow me."

Only two voices spoke, accompanied by at least six pairs of footsteps now walking through the lab. The two were speaking about situations Gio’s party had no idea about, but those things temporarily weren’t important.

What Gio and the others focused on was the sheer fact that they had company.

Someone was trying to take what was theirs from right under their noses.