The others make it down to the lab maybe twenty minutes later. She can’t imagine she’s all that hard to track, Qi signature or no, in this place of perfect silence and death. Or maybe Jun Vral just sent a snake into every tunnel and room and this is just the first one to find her.
Still, she only really needed a few minutes to set the scene.
She takes the bag from around the corpse’s body, rifling through its contents quickly. A shard of Cold Sunstone gets placed on the table, used as a paperweight for all the documents detailing the horrors of the human anatomy and what was done to the people here. Reduce the need to repeat any experiments by providing the data, she hopes, even as she takes all of the pages relating to his planned experiments, and any observations about the sunstone skull or the black metal, and carefully bundles them tight and eats them.
Then, she scatters what’s left, about the room, about the table.
The body is easier, actually. Already it’s taken on some of the cold, deathly permanence of anything that interacts with the sunstone, making it hard to tell if the now black and muddy blood spatter and the body have been there for minutes or weeks. Still, she cleans the edges around the impact spatter with a towel she found, one of dozens stored haphazardly and semi-clean from other, older bloodstains, trying to make it seem like the transition from normal skull to implanted rock looks a bit less violent than before.
It’s not much, but she doesn’t need much. She just needs to sell it. She just needs to lie, just convincingly enough.
Jun Vral and Taran walk into the chamber first. Shapefixit and 13 she can vaguely scent further back, down the tunnel. The goblin smells anxious, and… afraid.
Jun Vral smells of snakes, and she doesn’t know what snake fear smells like. But considering the look on his face, the perfect mask that is no longer smiling or shifting and coiling, she thinks it might be a smell she can recognize now.
Taran and Jun Vral both look at the corpse impaled by its skull on the wall.
Raika studiously says nothing, pretending to examine the papers on the table. Some of them are genuinely interesting, even.
“Did you kill him?” Taran asks, tactless as only he can be. She imagines Hao Kai groaning in his head.
She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Found him like this. I think a lot of his creations weren’t recent. Looks like he tried to augment himself, reach a higher level. A lot of his notes reference implanting pure sunstone into a body, and I guess after long enough with the relic he thought to try it."
Snakes make a miniscule sound as they scent the air. She doesn’t mind. Dink countered the Qi that the corpse-crafter tried to unleash, and if her own senses can’t pick up the smell of recently shed blood, neither can theirs.
“A relic?” Jun Vral asks, face impassive, calm, as he walks over to the body. The skull of sunstone is easy to see protruding out the back of her victim’s head. “Ah. Fascinating. An artifact, perhaps, left to us by some honorable ancestor for someone to find.”
He looks around at the room. At the tables. At the old blood.
She is focused very, very intently on him, or she’d have missed the slight tremble that goes through some of his snakes.
“A pity,” he says, “that he chose to use it so foolishly.”
“It’s also possible that he lost control of his victims,” she says, keeping her tone even. Even as she avoids looking at Jun Vral, she makes sure her senses pick up even the slightest hint of scales, the slightest change in all the minute heartbeats he harbors. “Maybe he tried to enlist them, and they managed to fight back enough to force harm onto him. From his notes, I don’t think he was a fighter, even if he was somewhere in the Core Formation realm.”
“What makes you say that?” Jun Vral asks.
She shrugs. “Some of his notes,” she says, sweeping a hand over the table. “He talks about some of his subjects. All of them were mortal grade, and he seemed wary of trying to push any of them into Nascent Core levels, combat-wise.”
Jun Vral doesn’t comment on that. She can hear his snakes slithering, track their hearts and see them looking around the room. They move slower than normal, avoiding any of the tables.
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She recognizes the behavior. It’s subtle, as Jun Vral tends to do best, but she can see the hesitation, the elevated heart rates. The snakes, or maybe Jun Vral himself, recognize the space, or find it familiar enough to react to it fearfully.
Yeah. The plan keeps forming as she goes, and Zhoulong is on the list.
She collects the papers, picking some up from the floor, others up from the table, and shuffling them into the satchel so conveniently close by.
“I think we have what we need,” she says. “Some little madman, desperate for approval. We know where this is located, we can come back for the body later.”
Taran hasn’t moved.
She reaches out to touch his shoulder, and he flinches, hard enough to make his guns rattle and ring against some of the piercings poking through him.
“The rooms,” he whispers.
She… nods.
“They had things left,” he rasps. “Trinkets. Little things. Little…. Did he- we assumed they were corpses first.”
“We did,” she whispers.
He’s trembling. His hands shake and twitch as he seems to struggle with something inside himself.
Fueled with a burst of Qi, he moves fast enough that she doesn’t see it coming, unable to sense his body like she can others, and unloads his revolver-shot pistol into the corpse, making it jerk and dance and filling the room with the thunderous clap of gunfire in an enclosed space.
He says something, and she doesn’t hear, the first shot having popped an eardrum, the others forcing her to shift flesh and block the other ear from the sound. She unclenches her fists and lets herself regenerate before looking back at Taran.
“Did he say anything?” Taran asks, eyes glowing slightly with the weight of his gathered Qi. The scent of gunpowder and alchemy is so strong for a moment it almost washes over her.
Raika shakes her head. “No, senior brother,” she says, quietly. “Like I said. He’s been dead a long time.”
Taran does not move for a long time. The gun he is holding creaks with the pressure of his grip.
He holsters it, silently, and stalks out of the room.
“What do you think Researcher Zhoulong may achieve with such remarkable research?” She asks Jun Vral, not turning her eyes away from Taran as he walks out.
Jun Vral says nothing for a moment, but the smell of snakes and blood fills the room, bit by bit, so she knows he’s using his Qi.
“If you’re trying to pressure me,” she says quietly, “I am afraid this junior is not adept at sensing it. Still, this junior can only admire your restraint.”
“What do you want,” Jun Vral hisses.
Good. He’s on edge, off his game. Now to play this right.
“I told you already,” she answers.
“And since you did, he can take that knowledge from me,” Jun Vral hisses. “I have been trying, over and over, to warn you off of this. Did you think I put my fangs around your ankle just to beg for aid? Did you think I’m so delusional, I’d ask for help from someone a quarter my age to kill someone a realm higher than me, never mind you?”
He had been trying to warn her off. Being subtle, being quiet. The fact that Zhoulong can somehow pull knowledge from him contextualizes a lot of his actions, even if you discount the trauma. Still, she can’t help but look for signs. He said “Just” to beg for aid, indicating it was that and more, not denying it entirely, and the act of warning her inherently acts as a sort of concern in the right light.
And she has him on edge.
And she has a plan.
“Does he need to cut you open to know things?” She asks.
Jun Vral freezes. His eyes go cold. His skin roils and shifts, until it is hard to tell if she is speaking to a person or a knot made entirely of scales and glistening eyes.
She feels the pressure now. A slightly trembling in the air around them, a small shift in the gravity of the room as he brings his Qi to bear, the scent of slithering violence overwhelming. She can hear Taran saying something, hear the others reacting, but she ignores it for now.
“I’m being genuine, senior brother,” she says. “Can he pull from you at will, or does it take something else?”
Jun Vral says nothing for a moment. Then-
“It requires proximity,” he hisses. “And pain.”
She nods. “Then it will be fine.”
He snarls at her, human voice warbling as dozens of snake throats take over. “How do you KNOW?” he asks.
She looks at him. She is cold to his heat, and she does not let her wounded heart rest or elevate one drop.
“Because I changed my mind. I’m gonna kill him today.”
Jun Vral says nothing. Trained obedience and violent pain war in his eyes, mingling and coiling and snarling at her, even as she looks for the slightest hint of hope, the slightest chance he believes her. The plan can work without him, but not nearly as well, not nearly as efficiently.
Eventually, she sees it.
She waits for him to calm himself. Waits for him to take a breath through a human throat once more.
“Do you think the ones who came with you would aid us?” she asks.
He thinks for a moment. Then- “Shapefixit, maybe. But the twins will be trouble. They believe in him.”
“I don’t care about them,” she answers. “If they’re like Kaena, I’m confident that they can deal with the two. Project 13 doesn’t strike me as the independent sort anymore, can we trust him to stay outside and keep quiet?”
Jun Vral nods. “But… he needs Researcher Zhoulong to live. No one else knows how to maintain him, and he can go bad without care. It’s what Zhoulong does when he wants to remind him to be loyal, just lets him fall apart.”
She nods. A problem, for sure, but probably not an insurmountable one. “Does he keep notes?” She asks. “Unless he’s hiding things from this ‘Central’ or whatever, he should have some kind of treatment notes, right?”
“He has some,” Jun Vral admits. “I don’t think he sends as many as he should, though. Keeps them in a separate spatial ring, one without the sign of the Division on it.”
She smiles, wide. “Perfect,” she says. “In fact, that’s even better than I hoped. Call Shapefixit in here, call Taran too. I’ll tell you how we’re going to kill a Nascent Soul Cultivator.”