Northwest of New York City — 20 kilometers out

  Dim streetlights stood alone along both sides of the empty road. Their yellowish glow filtered through a thin veil of fog, spilling onto the asphalt and forming hazy halos of light. The night was deep and silent, broken only by the wind brushing treetops and the occasional distant bark of a dog.

  A white car sped through the desolate night. The low roar of its tires echoed sharply along the empty street, unnaturally loud in the stillness. Outside the windows, light and shadow flowed past in a blur, the streetlamps stretching into long golden streaks as the car accelerated.

  “How much longer?”The blond man in the passenger seat suddenly spoke, his English tinged with a peculiar accent, as if the language didn’t quite sit comfortably with him.

  The black-haired man driving kept his eyes on the road, his expression tight. “Ten minutes. According to the GPS.”

  The blond man’s ice-carved face revealed no emotion. He shifted slightly in his seat. His head was practically brushing the car’s ceiling, and his long legs were awkwardly folded, clearly uncomfortable.

  “Hey, you could slide the seat back a bit,” the person sitting behind him suggested. “You can recline it too.” As he spoke, he reached forward to adjust the seat himself.

  “Aiden, don’t touch it, damn it!”The man sitting in the middle of the back seat immediately slapped his companion’s hand away, lowering his voice in warning. “Don’t provoke him.”

  “What? I’m just trying to be friendly!” Aiden shot back. Then he squinted at the other man’s face. “Sam, what’s wrong with your eye? Twitching or something?”

  Damn it. This idiot.

  Sam smacked Aiden on the back of the head with a sharp smack.

  “You hit me?!”

  The third person beside them sighed helplessly. “Can you two keep it down? Do you really have to cause trouble right now?”

  “Boss, Sam hit me first!” Aiden protested.

  “Aiden, shut up.”

  While the two in the back continued bickering, the blond man in the front crossed his arms and said coldly,“If you really wanted to show goodwill, why did you capture Chen?”

  “Uh… probably to experiment on him?”“—Ouch! Sam, why did you hit me again?!” Aiden yelped.

  Sam withdrew his hand, glaring at him with a look of pure frustration, silently mouthing insults.

  “Experiment on him?”The blond man turned around fully this time. His sharply defined features were frighteningly serious.“Are humans really that brutal? First contact with a new civilization, and your instinct is to experiment on them? Not even a formal negotiation?”

  “Th-that’s not—no, of course not,” Lanice, seated on the far right, tried to smooth things over. “Some people are bad, sure, but most of us want peace.”

  Even as he said it, the situation itself offered little credibility.

  The blond man looked as though he could barely tolerate it anymore. He pressed a hand to his forehead, teeth clenched.“This is bad. Very bad. If I fail to report back to Teleopea within one star-ring cycle, not only will I be executed by the Council—you, and Earth itself, will be reduced to cosmic dust.”

  The humans swallowed hard.

  “Boss… what do we do?”

  The black-haired driver grit his teeth and slammed his foot down on the accelerator. The car surged forward.“At this point, we find Chen first.”

  Ten minutes later, they reached the coordinates indicated by the navigation system.

  “Chen is nearby.”The blond man at the front suddenly stopped, eyes fixed on the holographic display projected from his left wrist.

  They were standing in the middle of a vast cornfield.

  Sam glanced around, confused. “Mr. Xiao, are you sure? There’s nothing here.”

  Xiao turned his gaze toward him, his expression unchanged.“He’s not here,” he said coldly, then pointed downward. “He’s below.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “…So he’s already six feet under?”Aiden’s immediate interpretation of below was dead.

  Oh hell. Is the ‘catfish alien’ really dead?Aiden’s mind instantly jumped to Independence Day, imagining Teleopeans raining destruction on Earth from orbit. The thought made his blood race.

  “He’s alive,” Xiao said flatly, mentally scorning this human’s tendency of dramatization. “There’s a massive structure underground.”Then he looked toward the scientist beside him.“Yan Qing. Do you know where the entrance is?”

  “…”Yan Qing didn’t answer.

  He hadn’t expected the ones who took Chen to be the Fifth Technology Division.

  That underground facility—this hidden lab—fell squarely under Fifth Division jurisdiction. It was used for top-level biochemical research, and the man in charge was Fifth Division’s inspector:

  Hollins.

  Yan Qing searched the ground until he spotted a fist-sized stone. It looked ordinary, but on an otherwise flat field it stood out. He crouched and grasped it.

  “What’s he doing?” Aiden whispered to Lanice, who gestured that he had no idea either.

  Left, three turns.Right, five.

  When Yan Qing finished the sequence, he stepped back.

  Krrrk—clack!

  The ground split open where they stood, like a concealed door sliding apart. Gears ground against one another, and a platform slowly rose from beneath the earth.

  “Let’s go.”Yan Qing stepped onto the platform first, his fists clenched so tightly his nails dug into his palms.

  Hollins… what are you planning to do to Chen?

  At the same time, far beneath the earth—past pressure seals and reinforced partitions—

  Severed from the terminal, Chen redirected his full attention to the stream of data now residing within his multifunctional bracer. He dissected the command infrastructure underpinning the facility’s computational systems.

  The foundational logic reflected conventional human engineering—clean, predictable, and familiar. Yet, embedded within the digital framework, subtle aberrations emerged: code fragments that eluded standard syntax, logic that warped around unseen parameters.

  These anomalies signalled the intervention of a non-human source—but a familiar pattern from his old universe.

  Without pausing the diagnostic process, Chen initiated a location query.

  The bracer’s display registered Xiao’s arrival, pinpointing his presence deep within the labyrinthine complex, several kilometres distant.

  Calculating the optimal route, Chen set his navigation to track the signal, his intent clear: to re-establish contact and converge within the heart of the containment facility, regardless of the obstacles embedded in the structure’s design.

  The Teleopean advanced soundlessly until he stopped at a metal wall – seemingly a dead end.

  Without the slightest hesitation, Chen removed the multifunction bracer from his left wrist.

  The silver band elongated, its form reshaping into its alternate configuration—

  An anion gun.

  Anions themselves possessed no intrinsic force.But when an anion met a cation, both were annihilated—and what was released was the purest energy in the universe.

  BOOM—

  The wall that had appeared solid was blown open in an instant.Yet there was no rubble, no shattered concrete—only a smooth-edged void, as though the material had simply been dissolved.

  Chen stepped through the opening he had created.

  Beyond the wall lay a vast chamber.

  He swept his gaze across the space and lifted an elegant, willow-curved brow in open mockery.

  “Impressive.”

  Inside massive containment vessels were preserved biological specimens.

  Calling them organisms felt inadequate—because what lay within those containers were species that could not possibly exist on Earth.

  Green, serpentine creatures bristling with long, razor-sharp spines.Beings shaped like octopuses yet crowned with unmistakably human faces.

  Here were things imagined—and things no mind should have conceived at all.

  Each specimen was frozen in the final moment of agony before death, their distorted forms seeming to accuse their creator of cruel abandonment.

  Chen—himself no native to Earth—continued forward without pause, passing one grotesque corpse after another.

  Then, just as he reached the far end of the chamber, something caught his eye.

  For the first time, his expression changed.

  Suspended in pale yellow preservative fluid was a specimen as strange as the others—yet its internal structure bore a resemblance that made Chen’s blood run cold.

  It was alarmingly similar to Teleopean physiology.

  He stepped closer, placing a hand against the glass of the vessel.

  This universe was uncharted territory for Teleopeans.No historical record spoke of their kind crossing universes along the axis of time.

  And yet—

  “Could it be…” Chen murmured, brows knitting unconsciously,“…that we were not the first to arrive in this universe?”

  Click—whirr—

  Suddenly, mechanical sounds echoed behind him.

  Chen spun around instantly.

  A rectangular doorway was opening in the wall to his right.

  A sharp, hissing sound escaped his throat—like a predator preparing to strike. He lowered his stance instinctively, every nerve screaming a warning. From the darkness beyond that door radiated an intense pressure—dense with killing intent.

  Tap.

  Footsteps.

  Soft. Controlled.

  But they did not escape his notice.

  Tap.

  Closer now.

  At last, a figure stepped out of the shadows.

  Under the full light of the chamber, Chen’s eyes widened.

  Shock froze him in place.

  “That’s impossible,” he said, voice tight.“You should be dead, Lian. Xing. Lian.”