radiothebook Chapter 374: The Way Back Home
Chapter 374: The Way Back Home
For some unknown reason, upon seeing that faint mark, the emotions within Julian Sterling’s heart underwent a peculiar transformation.
There was no longer the extreme terror from when it first appeared. There was no longer the sheer panic that made him want to flee. He used his thumb to gently rub against that faint indentation, his mind subconsciously drifting back to the fragmented pieces of memory that he had "seen" through the resonance.
The suffocating iron room, so utterly dark without a single ray of light. The damp sound of dripping water. The heavy weight of the chains and... the thick, despairing loneliness of B-00.
At the breakfast table, the atmosphere was inherently very warm and cozy. Ethan Caldwell personally picked up a piece of fish that had been completely deboned and placed it into Julian’s bowl of porridge. However, Julian Sterling was spacing out. The pair of chopsticks in his hand gently poked at the porridge, but his gaze fell into an indeterminate void. He subconsciously raised his right hand, his thumb once again gently rubbing around his left wrist.
That gaze was exceedingly distant, as if he was sinking into a world that Ethan Caldwell could not reach.
The man’s movement of picking up food came to an abrupt halt. The depths of his eyes instantly darkened. Ethan Caldwell set his chopsticks down, his steady voice ringing out, directly shattering Julian’s absent-mindedness: "Are you sensing it again?"
Julian Sterling was startled, retracting his gaze. He looked at Ethan Caldwell’s stern expression and gently shook his head: "No. The mental waves are very quiet."
After a few seconds of silence, he put down his chopsticks, interlacing his two hands and resting them on the table, muttering in a low voice: "I was just thinking..."
"How long has it been locked up down there?"
The moment the question was uttered, the air in the dining room immediately froze over. The atmospheric pressure surrounding Ethan Caldwell visibly plummeted. His sharp eyebrows knitted tightly together, a wave of discomfort and deep-seated unease beginning to churn within his chest.
This discomfort did not stem from a trivial bout of jealousy. He was not jealous of a monstrous entity.
The thing that terrified him was the realization that Julian Sterling was starting... to soften his heart.
Better than anyone else, Ethan Caldwell thoroughly understood Julian Sterling’s true nature. He was an individual who lived an incredibly pragmatic, proud, and clearly calculated life, sometimes even coming across as profoundly aloof. However, deep beneath that thorny exterior, Julian Sterling possessed a fatal weakness: he was exceedingly prone to sympathizing and softening his heart toward those who shared a fate similar to his own.
He had once been an abandoned child, having to struggle desperately in utter isolation, having been imprisoned and stripped of his freedom and future by the members of the Sterling family. What difference was there with B-00’s current state? Locked away at the bottom of an abyss, viewed by the world as a grotesque monster, lonely to the absolute extreme, yearning for warmth, and completely stripped of the right to freedom.
The tragic circumstances of B-00 almost directly pierced into Julian Sterling’s most deeply hidden instinct of empathy.
What made Ethan Caldwell so uneasy to the point of nearly going mad was not the fear that B-00 possessed enough power to snatch Julian Sterling away from his hands. He had more than enough capability to crush anything that dared to touch what belonged to him.
He was merely afraid... afraid that this damned empathy would cause Julian Sterling to lower his defenses, afraid that one day, Julian Sterling himself would willingly want to step toward that darkness in order to save that monster.
"Do not think about it anymore." Ethan Caldwell reached out, tightly grasping Julian’s interlaced hands, his tone carrying a dominating nature that allowed no room for refusal: "How long it has been locked up, whether it is pitiful or not, has absolutely nothing to do with us. Your only task right now is to eat your breakfast, and forget about it."
Julian Sterling looked at his tightly held hands, then looked at the stubbornness in the man’s eyes, letting out a soft sigh but refraining from arguing back, obediently picking up his chopsticks.
Right at this exact moment, the tablet placed on Ethan Caldwell’s table vibrated slightly. It was a highly classified, encrypted email sent from Helen Lloyd.
Ethan Caldwell furrowed his brow, releasing one hand to perform the decryption process. Helen Lloyd was someone who worked with an extreme sense of propriety; if it were not a matter of utmost importance, she would never send encrypted documents during his personal hours like this.
The document was opened. It was not a financial report or business intelligence, but rather photographs capturing pages of yellowed, dilapidated paper documents. They were incredibly ancient research notes belonging to the Eden project from decades ago, something that Helen Lloyd’s intelligence team had just painstakingly excavated from an underground database.
Julian Sterling also leaned over out of curiosity, skimming his eyes to read along.
The document page primarily recorded dry technical parameters and vital signs. But in the footnote section belonging to a researcher, there was a hastily handwritten paragraph in faded black ink:
"...B-00’s riotous frequency cannot be controlled with high doses of sedatives. All attempts at physical intervention have failed."
"B-00 can only maintain emotional stability when placed in close proximity to A-01. The presence of A-01 acts as a kind of mental wave tranquilizer. Practical observation: After being forcibly separated from A-01 to conduct independent experiments, B-00 immediately spiraled into a state of madness, and exhibited a distinct tendency toward self-destruction..."
The atmosphere in the dining room instantly sank, becoming as heavy as if all the oxygen had been completely drained away.
After Julian Sterling finished reading that brief note, his entire being fell into a terrifying state of silence. His eyes were glued to the words tendency toward self-destruction, while countless chaotic fragments of emotion exploded within his mind.
He recalled the bone-piercing chill when he was dragged into the resonance. He remembered the starvation that tore at the stomach, the extreme exhaustion of both the physical body and the spirit. And above all, it was the thick loneliness akin to a pitch-black quagmire, that sensation of wanting to tear oneself apart simply because one could not find a single anchor to cling to.
As it turned out, the madness of B-00 was not a demonic nature. It was the reaction of an entity that had been stripped of the sole anchor of its existence.
The prolonged silence made Ethan Caldwell even more frustrated. He reached out to turn off the screen, but Julian Sterling suddenly lifted his head. His eyes were crystal clear and tranquil, yet they harbored an indescribable weight.
"Ethan." Julian Sterling called out his name, his voice incredibly light, like a sigh drifting into the empty air:
"It is not hunting me."
Ethan Caldwell froze, his Adam’s apple bobbing with great difficulty.
"It is merely..." Julian Sterling lowered his eyes, gazing at the faint indentation on his wrist, his bitter voice uttering a cruel truth: "...trying to find its way back home."
That sentence was like a final verdict, thoroughly and completely altering the entire psychological paradigm.
This was the very first time that Julian Sterling had completely stripped away his vigilance, hostility, and fear in order to perceive B-00. That monster imprisoned beneath the abyss was not a hunter; it was merely a lost soul, utilizing the most frantic and agonizing resonance to desperately search for the only person who could soothe it. Searching for A-01.
Meanwhile, in an entirely different dimension.
Deep beneath the earth’s surface, below dense layers of reinforced concrete, inside an airtight and freezing prison cell completely devoid of a single ray of light from the outside world.
B-00 was still sitting there.
It had been sitting in this damp, moldy stone corner for an unknown number of years and months. Previously, it had always remained in a curled-up state like a stillborn fetus, motionless, as utterly silent as a corpse, accompanied only by the clanking of chains whenever it occasionally convulsed from the agony.
But today, everything was different.
B-00 was no longer sitting motionless. Its emaciated, tattered silhouette trembled slightly. Beneath the dim, hazy illumination of the solitary red error light in the room, it could be seen performing an exceedingly abnormal action.
It was using its hand, covered in hideous scars, to laboriously press against its own fleshless, bony chest.
It pressed down incredibly hard, as if wanting to use that coarse sense of touch to pierce right through the layers of flesh and skin, directly touching a heart that had long gone cold. Because right there, deep within its barren realm of consciousness, there still lingered a thoroughly unfamiliar yet horrifyingly addictive sensation.
It was the sensation of scorching heat.
It was the intense, fiercely pulsating warmth, brimming with an overwhelming vitality, that it had inadvertently stolen from Julian Sterling during their sudden resonance the previous night. That profound warmth of being held tightly within another person’s embrace, that sheer sensation of being absolutely sheltered and unconditionally loved, was akin to the most exquisitely sweet poison for a creature that had existed solely within the confines of pitch black darkness and perpetual self destruction like itself.