Love Code At the End of The World

“I found the lab!” Raffles said suddenly. His disc hovered before us, “Let’s go and see what happened,” he looked at me and said in a gentler voice. He sounded like he was comforting me.

I creased my eyebrows and nodded. I let go of the circuit board and my blue crystal energy lingered on it.

Harry kept a distance between us as he walked with me; there was a whole row of cultivation cabins between us. Raffles had said that they were still cultivating so they were no longer specimen capsules. In other words, those organs weren’t exposed because they were dissected, but because they had yet to fully develop.

The humans in the cultivation cabins were deformed. Some of them looked like flying corpses with sharp claws and bat-like wings, while some had animal fur, a few arms and tails. They looked nothing like humans nor ghosts. 

Were these people volunteers?

Why would they volunteer themselves to become monsters?

How many secrets were there hidden in this world before the arrival of the end of the world?

Walking through the world that was like a monster warehouse, we reached the end of the road and saw the lab. It was messy and it looked like someone had left the place in a hurry.

We opened the door and went inside. There were papers scattered all over the place and across the table. Harry picked up a piece of paper and saw that there were complicated chemical formulas and structures with human anatomy scribbled all over it.

I stood in front of a computer and one of the scouting robots extended its claw to put it into the port. As the light blinked, the equipment was powered on.

“All of the files are deleted,” Raffles said in disappointment, “It seems like they were found and all the data was destroyed,” Raffles looked around.

Humph, it was definitely a secret experiment. Of course, they couldn’t be exposed.

Even though the information and records were completely wiped out, the people who worked here had left behind a warehouse full of mutants. They had become a mystery in this world. What kind of filthy distorted experiment were they conducting here, back then? What was the purpose of the scientists conducting such experiments?

“Human evolution came to a bottleneck…” Harry suddenly mumbled.

I looked at him and saw him holding a notebook while squatting on the ground. He continued to read the words written on a page from the notebook, “Breaking the bottleneck is the most important thing for the scientists of our generation. It is our mission, it is our assignment. The password to access genes is sealed by God. God doesn’t let us get close…” Harry flipped to the back page after he finished reading. “What did he want to do?”

I took the notebook from his hand and flipped through its pages. It was filled with alphabets that I couldn't read, but I understood his drawings. He wanted to combine human and animal genetics. Was that the kind of evolution he wanted? He wanted humans to combine with animals?

There were many reference pages clipped inside the notebook. They were illustrations from mythology, just like our Thunder God who took the shape of a human with a beak and black wings….

An idea popped inside my head, and I looked up in shock.

“He wanted humans to go through a secondary evolution!” Raffles squatted next to us, his image appearing unstable.

Harry looked at him in confusion. “Secondary evolution?”

Raffles nodded and his expression became extremely solemn, “In evolution, there is a school of thought, whereby, they believe that all kinds of Gods, fairies, demons, and monsters from mythology belong to the secondary evolution. In other words, they are humans who have superpowers…” Raffles pointed at one of the illustrations. “However, it seems like the scientists did not have a breakthrough about evolution back then. It is said that there were people who secretly combined human genetics with animals’ in order to find that breakthrough. Although they went against ethics and humanity, from a certain angle, it was a great creation in genetic study. They were too crazy… Too crazy… These are scientists…”

I couldn’t help but fear when I saw Raffles’s expression. I continued to flip through the notebook and I came to the last page. There was another quote, “Find that key to open the door to God’s world, - Hagrid Jones…”

“Hagrid Jones!” Raffles almost shouted, “It’s Hagrid Jones’s journal?! Are you sure?! Let me take a look!” Raffles looked down in excitement, half his body overlapping mine, and his face was right next to my face. He stared at the notebook excitedly, “It’s really Professor Hagrid Jones! It’s him! He is the professor who studied blue crystal energy!” Raffles stood up and looked around. There was adoration and reverence in his eyes. “He stood here, once, in the exact place. Right here!”

“Raffles! Why do you still admire Hagrid Jones, when he did such crazy experiments?!” Harry shook his head as he asked Raffles.

“Scientific breakthrough requires sacrifice!” As expected, Raffles was completely immersed in his excitement of a fanatic. “He was definitely conducting a great experiment here. These people must have been volunteers. Maybe, they were the ones who requested to be genetically modified? They didn’t want to be an ordinary person. Why be an ordinary person?” Raffles’s gaze was still. He was once again running on his mad scientist mode. “Back then, civilization had reached its peak and had got stuck at the bottleneck. Human civilization had no progress and life was too comfortable. Hence, there was no breakthrough in science as well. If a human could become God and achieve secondary evolution, isn’t that…”

“Whoop!” Harry suddenly punched Raffles’s image, bringing him back to reality. He looked at Harry in confusion. “Harry, what’s wrong with you?”

“I am upset to see you behave like that!” Harry replied straightforwardly with rage, “If you dare to carry out such a crazy idea in Noah City, I will throw you out!”

Raffles blinked and there was a tinge of awkwardness and regret across his face. “I’m sorry. Sometimes, I can’t control the madness in the other half of myself. But, don’t worry. I wouldn’t conduct any genetic transformation experiments.”

“Pfft, who will believe you after seeing your mad expressions?” Harry rolled his eyes at Raffles and hugged himself. It was obvious that Raffles’s earlier behavior had frightened him.

Raffles smiled faintly. “Because… haven’t we gone through secondary evolution already?”

Harry was stunned. Raffles looked at us and said, “We are metahumans. In actual facts… Aren’t we people with superpowers? We have completed the secondary evolution. We have found the key and have become the God tribe that Hagrid Jones has mentioned in his book.”

The three of us exchanged glances. Ain’t it right? Professor Hagrid Jones’s purpose was posthumously realized at the end of the world.

“I think we are now entering tertiary evolution,” Raffles said solemnly with tightly knitted eyebrows.

Harry immediately moved far away from Raffles’s disk. “What do you want to do?!” Harry’s expression looked as though he was going to throw Raffles out!