Chapter 75 - Nightmare

The red elevator descended all the way to the bottom floor.

With a ding, the elevator doors automatically opened, revealing a spacious corridor.

Li Cheng did not step out of the elevator immediately but first took out a drone and let it fly to observe the corridor.

This place had no fire exits or emergency doors, the elevator being the sole access route.

At the end of the corridor was a three-meter diameter round alloy blast door, now slightly ajar.

In front of the door were two armed guard stations, where eight armed personnel lay dead, blood oozing from their orifices.

In the middle of the corridor’s ceiling, four railings were installed, each holding a scanner.

“It seems this is the core facility of the bunker.

Visitors must pass through the corridor and go through the scanners — probably facial recognition plus gait analysis.”

In the field of intelligent surveillance, gait recognition technology has advantages over common image recognition.

Irises can be faked, blood can be swapped, fingerprints disguised, and faces masked.

It’s truly challenging to imitate someone’s habitual gait over a long duration — each person’s muscle strength, tendon length, bone length, coordination abilities, weight, height, and walking habits are unique.

Li Cheng realized this early on.

When entering the mission, besides using worm genes to alter his appearance, he would wear height-increasing shoes and place a few pebbles in his shoe soles to alter his walking posture.

“After passing the scanner, one still needs to present identification at the armed stations and only after verification will the blast door open.

All these measures are either to protect the items inside the door or to protect the people inside the bunker from the items.”

Since the drone was not powerful enough to open the blast door, Li Cheng used a remote control to call it back, stepped out of the elevator, and shot at the ceiling rail to make the scanners fall to the ground.

To prevent any potential issues if the scanners were still operational and detected that Li Cheng’s gait was not in the authorized personnel list, which would trigger the bunker’s alarm and cause complications.

After preparing, he walked through the corridor and cautiously opened the blast door.

Inside was a vast space, not the monstrous free-for-all he had imagined, but exceptionally normal.

At the very center was a sealed room made of blast-proof glass, three meters in dimension, with a hollowed-out stone resting on a metal stand in the center.

Surrounding the glass room were numerous devices, mechanical arms, and experimental tables.

Li Cheng picked up an experimental log from one of the tables and read the detailed entries.

[Special Containment Measures: Project 012 must be placed in a heat-insulated, radiation-proof sealed room, and the room should be fumigated with 100℃ high-temperature steam for 5 minutes once every 24 hours.

Any test procedure performed on Project 012 must be pre-approved by at least two Level Three authorized personnel]

[Description: Project 012 is a palm-sized, elongated piece of hollow stone, and its date of creation is unclear.

Before recovery, Project 012 served as a decorative material on the walls of a kindergarten in Chicago.

This kindergarten was abandoned in the early 21st century, and there had been rumors of a series of supernatural phenomena]

[When there is a fully intact intelligent being sleeping within five meters of Project 012, it produces a five-meter radius zone of reality distortion anomaly.

The sleeper will fall into uncontrollable nightmares, experiencing symptoms like accelerated heart rate, sweating, and trembling.

Meanwhile, the reality distortion zone will manifest monsters imagined by the sleeper in their nightmares]

[These monsters remains static, and dissipate on their own as the sleeper’s sleep ends.

However, long-term testing has shown that if the sleeper undergoes psychological hypnosis before sleeping, or listens to certain audio during REM rapid eye movement, there is a high likelihood of generating monsters from movies they’ve watched]

[Monsters generated in this way can leave the reality distortion zone and exist for extended periods, showing some level of intelligence and self-awareness.

Monster types cannot be replicated; if observed by more intelligent beings, their active duration extends]

[This facility has now reached agreements with several international film-production studios, including Hollywood and Bollywood, to halt all ongoing horror movie filming plans.

Expert teams are tasked with scripting the movies and designing horror content, aiming to artificially generate specific characters—evil super scientists paralyzed, mastering controlled nuclear fusion, superconductive materials, super-light engines, super artificial intelligence, and a host of other technologies]

Li Cheng looked up from the record and glanced at the hollow stone in the glass-sealed room, connecting all the clues in his mind.

This stone might be an anomalous item lost from a killing field or inherently possessing odd properties; in any case, it could distort reality and generate characters from people’s nightmares.

In that world, the government discovered the stone, contained it, and through continuous testing, learned its rules.

The various types of monsters generated from nightmares could cause significant disruption to social order, but what if the approach was changed?

For instance, by having a governmental think-tank write scripts and design horror movies to create the image of an evil scientist.

Moreover, since monster types cannot be repeated and monsters last longer when seen by more people, the government, under the guise of a wealthy tycoon, built a theme park filled with monsters to attract tourists while also eliminating other options.

All these were done in the hopes of creating an evil scientist to swiftly gain advanced technologies and achieve a technological singularity.

However, as is often the case in horror movies, the more confident one is, the more likely things are to go wrong.

Ultimately, the bunker was compromised for some reason, leading to the death of all personnel.

“Project Number 012, this means that in that Otherworld resembling Earth, there are at least 11 other anomalous items.”

Li Cheng mused, “It’s just unknown whether the organization that invested in building the bunker ever achieved their goal of creating that evil scientist.

And if they did, where is he or she now?”

After pondering for a moment, he began to move, loading all mechanical arms, devices, experimental tables, and research materials into a corridor lined with skeletons.

Finally, he stepped into the glass-sealed room, used an Artillery Launcher to shatter it, trampled over the glass shards, and using gloves, took the stone from the metal stand.

Just as anticipated, when his palm touched the stone, an item description popped up in his system.

Reading the item description, Li Cheng’s expression changed slightly, “This thing…

why is it a key?”

With no time to study it closely, he glanced at his watch.

It was almost thirty minutes since Su Jie mentioned.

He took the stone, set up timed explosives throughout the room, and teleported away from the killing field.

Minutes later, when the Special Affairs Bureau’s agents rushed into the depths of the bunker, all they saw was the aftermath of an explosion scattered everywhere.