Star Rank Hunter

Chapter 414: Mengqialuo

The warehouse remained pitch-black, but thanks to his protective mask and his relatively unique vision, Cillin could see the person clearly.

If this man kept quiet, his presence was practically nonexistent. He emitted no killing intent, his breathing was barely audible, and his heartbeat was nearly imperceptible—you wouldn’t have the slightest idea what he might do next. The dead men on the floor had clearly seen him before they died; otherwise, they wouldn’t have worn such terrified expressions.

“Who are you?” Cillin asked.

The man clinging to the warehouse ceiling didn’t answer. After a brief silence, his feet detached from the roof and he plummeted. He flipped himself right-side up in midair, landing without a sound.

He didn’t open his wings at any point during the drop. He fell from the height looking light as a feather, yet his descent was fast and executed with extreme practice.

He landed ten meters away from Cillin, maintaining his previous posture. It looked as if he were wearing a cloak. Standing over two meters tall and wrapped in that bizarre cloak, he exuded an overwhelming sense of oppression in the dark environment. He looked at Cillin, then at Wheeze and Czedow, seemingly curious about all of them.

His expressionless face and pale gray eyes seemed completely devoid of emotion, but Cillin sensed that he was actually excited and curious. He just wasn’t showing it.

Another eerie silence settled over them. Just as Wheeze lost his patience and prepared to speak, the man moved. He unfurled the wings that had been caged around him and folded them behind his back. His arms hung naturally at his sides, his body covered in a fur-like outer layer, and his feet were bare. The immediate impression he gave was simply—pitch-black!

His entire body was almost completely black, which made those pale gray eyes look even colder and more ruthless. Of course, that was only how they looked.

He didn’t speak, but Cillin could feel the man’s confusion growing.

Cillin signaled for Czedow to step aside with Wheeze and give him some room.

Czedow scooped up a reluctant Wheeze and retreated, stopping next to a transport craft. A split second later, the man moved.

His figure blurred, reappearing right in front of Cillin the next moment as his folded wings slashed out diagonally. Cillin didn’t dodge; he just raised an arm to block the strike.

Bam!

It sounded like two types of hard metal ore colliding.

The moment the blow landed, his figure appeared behind Cillin, delivering another wing strike. Then he struck from the front left, the right, the rear left...

Every strike came from a different position, growing faster and faster. At first, his silhouette was visible after every blow, but gradually, all that could be seen was a black blur flashing continuously around Cillin. It was the blur of his beating wings; the man himself was moving too fast to be caught by the eye.

Bam bam bam!

The impacts rang out endlessly.

Cillin never moved his feet, standing in the exact same spot from start to finish. However, as the attack rate grew faster, his arms moved so quickly to block the wings that they seemed to vanish as well.

Half a minute later, the man stopped his assault and returned to his spot ten meters away. He stood exactly as he had before. He wasn’t panting, he wasn’t flustered, and even his aura remained completely unchanged, looking exactly as he had before the attack.

“Mengqialuo,” the man said.

It was the first thing he said after testing Cillin. His voice was deep, laced with a dry hoarseness—perhaps due to not speaking for a very long time.

“Huh?” Wheeze, crouching impatiently on an aircraft, looked completely baffled by the man’s words.

“Mengqialuo... means ‘Holy Light’ in the ancient tongue,” Cillin said, translating for Mengqialuo as well as explaining it to Wheeze and Czedow.

“Cillin.” Cillin pointed to himself, then to Wheeze and Czedow. “Huru. Czedow.”

“Hubielu! It’s Hubielu!” Wheeze corrected him from the side. “Huru is just a nickname.”

Mengqialuo looked at Wheeze, seeming to ponder the concept of a nickname.

“Who are you?” Cillin asked again. “Did you broadcast that signal?”

Hearing Cillin’s questions, Mengqialuo finally looked back at him. “Yes.”

Then, silence.

Cillin: “...”

It seemed this man truly didn’t talk much.

“Why broadcast that signal? Why couldn’t anyone else feel it or detect it?” Cillin asked.

Mengqialuo had no intention of hiding anything. “Because they don’t have the chip.”

Cillin’s eyelids twitched. It really was because of the chip!

“Horay Hanson’s chip?”

“Yes.”

“Were you forcibly injected with it too?”

“Yes.”

Wheeze’s whiskers twitched repeatedly. Talking to this guy was exhausting. He was exactly the legendary type who wouldn’t utter a word unless forced to, yet always looked incredibly serious. Fortunately, Mengqialuo was at least answering, but doing it in a one-question-one-answer format was tiring just to listen to.

“Do you have any information on Horay Hanson?” Cillin asked.

Mengqialuo nodded. He raised a hand, and a projector on one of the transport craft immediately displayed a stream of data.

The files were very comprehensive and detailed. Through this data, Cillin learned Mengqialuo’s origins. At the very beginning, however, Mengqialuo hadn’t been called Mengqialuo; as a biochemical orc test subject, he only had an experiment number.

Horay Hanson was a member of Miracle. Cillin had already suspected as much the moment he met Mengqialuo, but seeing this information brought a flood of memories rushing back—the day he was injected with the chip, his desperate escape from that underground chamber—and several of the lingering questions buried in his mind were finally answered.

Horay Hanson was an employee of the pharmaceutical plant and a member of Miracle’s Underground Base. But as a Miracle employee, Horay Hanson was far from satisfied. He harbored ambitions of conducting his own research. However, given his status at the plant’s Underground Base at the time, he couldn’t possibly own his own research project. He could only serve as an assistant, forced to do whatever his superiors commanded.

Dissatisfied with his situation, Horay Hanson constantly dreamed of having his name published in Glory and Code, the two e-zines hailed as the “history books” of the GAL. Like the giants featured in those two prominent GAL e-zines, Horay Hanson wanted to become someone admired by millions. He wanted that honor. But Miracle gave him no such opportunity. The director of the plant’s Underground Base was utterly dismissive of Horay Hanson’s ideas, even mocking him to his face.

Shortly after, Horay Hanson began conducting his own research in secret, and the test subjects he needed were the biochemical orcs. However, his failure rate was far too high. Unsanctioned theft of so many test subjects without the director’s approval couldn’t go unnoticed forever, and he was eventually discovered. Horay Hanson fled from the pharmaceutical plant that housed the bio-orc labs to this location, creating a massive distraction. While everyone’s attention was diverted to the workshops, he stole a small aircraft from this warehouse. He couldn’t steal a larger vessel, nor could he easily pilot one, so a small craft was his only option.

Because the small aircraft had a strictly limited payload, Horay Hanson dumped everything he deemed non-essential. That included Mengqialuo, who had just been injected with the chip and immediately classified as a failed subject, because his heart had stopped by the time Horay Hanson reached the warehouse.

After Horay Hanson piloted the aircraft away and before the underground warehouse investigators arrived to inspect the area, Mengqialuo woke up. By then, his chip had already achieved an activation rate of over ninety percent—something Horay Hanson never would have anticipated in his wildest dreams.

From that day forward, Mengqialuo lived in this pitch-black warehouse. Because this underground warehouse was merely a backup facility and the plant had other above-ground hangars for its transports and cargo ships, very few people ever came down here. Combined with Mengqialuo’s stealth abilities, he remained completely undetected.

Later on, when a crew came down to requisition one of the underground transports, they found that none of them worked. That was when Mengqialuo was discovered. The crew opened fire on him, and the outcome was entirely predictable—not a single one of them made it out alive. When a second team arrived to investigate, Mengqialuo didn’t show himself, hiding inside a cargo ship instead. None of the transports or ships in this warehouse were functional anymore; the massive energy surge from the chip’s activation had completely destroyed their operating systems, along with the warehouse’s surveillance cameras and lighting arrays.

The next wave of investigators failed to pinpoint the cause. At the time, several high-ranking executives at the pharmaceutical plant were embroiled in a power struggle for control. The issues at this warehouse were conveniently explained away with other excuses, becoming just another weapon the executives used to attack one another.

Following the change in the plant’s management, the new administration didn’t bother using this warehouse’s aircraft either. Moreover, because the warehouse sat directly beneath several crucial workshops, the managers were terrified of making a mistake and having their weaknesses exploited, so they repeatedly swept the matter under the rug. However, from that time onward, rumors began quietly spreading among the workforce that a demon lurked in the underground warehouse.

When Miracle discovered that Horay Hanson had been secretly stealing test subjects to conduct his own experiments, and that several premium subjects had been ruined, the director flew into a rage and dispatched assassins to track him down. According to the files Mengqialuo provided, Miracle’s enforcers had blown Horay Hanson’s aircraft out of the sky. As far as Miracle’s records were concerned, Horay Hanson was a dead man.

Cillin didn’t know how Horay had managed to pull the wool over the eyes of Miracle’s people here. He figured that afterward, Horay Hanson must have packed his bags and fled to Planet Brown Earth in the X Star Sector. He built an underground lab there and cautiously continued his experiments. The people he feared weren’t the inhabitants of Brown Earth, but the people of Miracle.

However, because the people on Brown Earth generally possessed poor genetics, their physiques couldn’t possibly compare to those premium test subjects, and progress had been agonizingly slow. That was why Horay had spent so many years running trials. It wasn’t until Cillin appeared that his upgraded chip finally showed its true potential.

Horay thought that Mengqialuo, this test subject, was already dead. What he hadn’t expected was that after he abandoned him here, the subject classified as a failure actually succeeded, living in this warehouse ever since and only slipping out to hunt when he was hungry, never letting anyone discover him.

Horay Hanson had fled to that underground base on Brown Earth for over seventy years. Over seventy years... How would he have felt if he’d known his greatest success had actually occurred over seventy years ago?

If Horay Hanson had brought Mengqialuo onto that aircraft back then, Cillin certainly wouldn’t have been involved later on. And perhaps, the name Horay Hanson truly would have appeared in Glory and Code.

There was no denying that Horay Hanson was a truly capable man. Although it was different from what Cillin had initially assumed—the chip was manufactured here and brought over, rather than built on Brown Earth—Cillin still admired him. It wasn’t solely because he had created this chip and altered the course of Cillin’s life, but for other reasons as well.

Ever since his narrow escape back then, Cillin had always harbored a lingering doubt. Looking at it now, Horay Hanson had clearly left behind a failsafe.

Cillin readily admitted that he had been outplayed by Horay Hanson. He clearly remembered that moment in the underground chamber: after killing Horay Hanson, a synthetic electronic voice had echoed from the mechanical consoles, saying, “Master is dead. Initiating purge sequence.”

Why would a purge sequence announce itself? Furthermore, every single file about to be deleted had flashed across the screen. If he truly hadn’t wanted his secrets discovered, programming such a purge mode was entirely superfluous. Then there was the timing: five minutes for the data purge, immediately followed by a five-minute countdown for the self-destruct sequence—the sandification protocol. Every door in the underground chamber had opened, leaving his escape route completely unimpeded. Replaying that seemingly staged scene in his mind, those perfectly calculated five minutes were exactly enough time for Cillin to crawl out through the ventilation shaft.

Everything had been part of Horay Hanson’s plan. While Horay Hanson might not have anticipated that Cillin would be the one to succeed and escape, Cillin had to admit that he had orchestrated everything perfectly. He was crazy enough to even factor his own death into his calculations.

Why let the successful test subject out? Perhaps Horay Hanson simply hadn’t recorded that information, or perhaps Cillin hadn’t seen it. After all, time had been too tight back then; Cillin hadn’t paid attention to the data on the other consoles. Or perhaps that particular machine simply hadn’t been placed near the examination table Cillin was lying on. Whatever the case, Cillin had missed that information.

The projector in front of them displayed a star map. A highly detailed star map. It wasn’t entirely complete—it only covered the R Star Sector and a few neighboring, lagging sectors—but the information plotted across it was impossible to ignore.

It was a map pinpointing the locations of Miracle’s other bases. Over seventy years ago, or perhaps even earlier, Horay Hanson had charted out the distribution of those secret research facilities. Even back then, Miracle was a corporation with immense backing that completely controlled the shadows.

Cillin raised a hand and expanded the star map, finding the location of their current planet. He easily found the marker for the pharmaceutical plant above them, confirming that the Underground Base beneath it belonged to Miracle. However, the plant itself—along with the other pharmaceutical plant—was merely a corporate partner. They did not belong to Miracle.

While Cillin had been looking through this data, Czedow had already copied all the information, saving Cillin the trouble of doing it himself.

Looking at the person in front of him, Cillin didn’t know what attitude to take. Mengqialuo harbored no malice toward him. It was, perhaps, something akin to brotherhood. The chips fused with their very genes were like the blood ties between the two of them.

In the eyes of those researchers, this was nothing more than a relationship between test subjects. However, this chip was too special. It functioned just like a bloodline connection; even before Cillin had truly arrived on this planet, he could sense Mengqialuo’s presence. This was the resonance between their chips.

Across the entire GAL, and perhaps even within this vast universe, only Cillin and Mengqialuo shared this special blood tie.

Mengqialuo kept his eyes on Cillin, seemingly waiting for him to make a decision.

Mengqialuo, “Holy Light” in the ancient tongue, was the race of happy people who lived under the light in Genesis Mythos. Mengqialuo appeared very stern and unfeeling, but this name revealed his true thoughts.

Perhaps back when he was an experimental subject in an underground base, back when he was someone with nothing but a serial number, Mengqialuo didn’t understand this world. What was life? What was an ideal? What was a dream?

Later, however, he stayed in this warehouse all alone. He took the external information and footage he stole while hunting and played them through the projectors on these transports. Hanging upside down from the ceiling of the warehouse by himself, he watched the citizens outside, watched their lives in the sunlight, and gradually came to understand the world and the people beyond the warehouse.

He knew he was different from everyone else, whether it was the people outside or those biochemical orcs hidden beneath a pharmaceutical plant far away on the other side of the planet. He knew that on this entire planet, not a single person could receive the signal he emitted from his chip. It was like standing in a bustling crowd and offering a friendly greeting, only for no one to understand, and no one to respond.

Disappointment had become a habit. He always went out at night. Knowing his existence was too anomalous, he deliberately avoided the daytime. Mengqialuo remembered a girl he had saved during one of his outings. When he rescued her from the hands of some gang members with ill intentions, that girl had stabbed him with a knife.

She was a very beautiful girl, but Mengqialuo remembered the terror, alienation, and intense rejection in her eyes when she looked at him. It was as if she were looking at a monster, looking at what people called a devil.

What did that stab wound feel like?

Mengqialuo couldn’t remember clearly anymore. It seemed to hurt a lot. He just didn’t know where it hurt.

Unable to integrate into this society, he could only stay alone in this dark warehouse, watching the bright world outside through the projector day after day.

Until that day. He had been broadcasting the signal from his chip as usual, as if it were a habit that sustained his life and proved his existence—something he had to do every single day.

That signal was received.

Mengqialuo waited here, knowing the other party would come.

Cillin looked at Mengqialuo in front of him, then turned and walked toward the warehouse doors.

Wheeze glanced at Mengqialuo, who was still standing in place, and followed Cillin toward the doors along with Czedow.

Mengqialuo watched the three of them walk out without any movement, without any words, and without any change in his expression.

But when Cillin stopped at the warehouse doors, turned his head, and called out to Mengqialuo, “Keep up!”, Wheeze saw a gleam of light return to Mengqialuo’s pale gray eyes.