I’m Trapped in a Cube - Chapter 124

“Mr. Martin, did something go wrong with the experiment?” The security guard looked at Martin, who was covered in blood, and cautiously asked.

“It’s nothing. I haven’t done hands, on work in a long time and spilled the blood bag. I’ll call someone to clean up,” Martin replied calmly. “Take me to the monitoring room. I want to save a copy of the experiment recording.”

“Oh, okay.”

……

A few hours later, Martin sat in his office, dark circles under his eyes, replaying the experiment recording over and over, his eyes bloodshot.

He deleted the footage from the monitoring room, keeping only a copy for himself.

The repeated bizarre scenes in the recording tormented him, and that sense of unknown fear lingered.

With this fear, he went to the operating room, where a blood transfusion surgery was being prepared.

“Mr. Martin, are you performing the surgery yourself?” The doctor present saw him and asked in confusion.

“No, I’m just here to watch.”

Martin’s voice trembled. The last time he’d performed surgery himself was for Anna and the female tycoon, but that had led to such bizarre results.

The doctor responded and began the operation. They were all veterans Martin had hired at great expense, and with advanced equipment, this kind of surgery was easy for them.

After watching the surgery, Martin left.

The next day, he nervously went to the room of the wealthy client who’d had surgery the day before, wanting to see if there were any changes, but nothing had happened.

“Could it be that only if I do it myself will those results occur?”

He quickly summoned several intern doctors to the lab to repeat the experiments he’d done on the mice that day.

Everything was normal.

“This isn’t right. It shouldn’t be like this,” Martin muttered as he looked at the unchanged mice.

“Did we do something wrong, Mr. Martin?” The interns, hearing his muttering, asked in confusion.

“No, you all did very well.”

Martin forced out a stiff smile.

That night, Martin went to the lab alone again. He first repeated his experiment, then, after getting the same results, killed the mice.

Next, he added sodium cyanide to human blood and repeated the experiment again.

But this time, the result surprised him even more, the mouse injected with human blood did not die from poisoning.

Instead, it gained the ability to produce cyanide toxin.

All the fluids in this mouse’s body contained sodium cyanide, and the toxin was continuously secreted from its glands.

The mouse and the cyanide had become symbiotic.

Upon discovering this, Martin actually felt relieved.

Because the sanatorium was full of celebrities from all walks of life, Martin had learned a lot about the Cataclysm from their conversations.

If all of this was caused by some kind of relic, then everything could be explained.

Martin let out a long sigh of relief. His medical understanding wasn’t wrong.

What was wrong was this world.

He casually drew some tap water, injected it along with some waste blood into a mouse, and watched as the mouse continued to bounce around.

After a while, Martin killed the mouse and found that all the fluids in its body were mixed with tap water.

Now he was even more certain.

Martin sat in the laboratory chair for a long time, shaking his head helplessly.

Then he closed the door and walked out of the lab, relaxed.

“Mr. Martin, finished so soon today? Did the experiment succeed?” The security guard saw he looked well and couldn’t help but ask.

“Haha, it failed.”

Under the guard’s puzzled gaze, Martin hummed a tune as he left.

He slept straight through to the next evening, then went to Anna’s door.

When he opened the door, an elderly woman came out to greet him.

Her hair was slightly yellow, with faint traces of gold, but most of it had turned white, messy and sparse.

Her face was covered in wrinkles, with an indescribable exhaustion. When she looked at Martin, her eyes were already cloudy, as if numb to fate.

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. After trying for a long time, she finally squeezed out a hoarse sound.

“Mr. Martin… didn’t you say this was all a scam?”

Martin lowered his head, speechless…

A few days later, news of the sanatorium’s closure spread throughout the wealthy circles.

“I heard Mr. Martin got sick and can’t keep running it.”

“His Blood Replacement Therapy was pretty effective. What a shame.”

“……”

They kept chatting, then started talking about another way to prolong life, and no one cared what illness Martin had.

At the same time, official researchers were watching Martin skillfully inject blood, turning a mouse into an oil-slicked tiger.

“This is my ability. Is there anything else you want to know?” Martin asked.

The researcher looked surprised, then said seriously, “Have you considered that you might be under surveillance for the rest of your life? Because we still haven’t found the relic itself.”

“Whatever. Just treat it as the price I have to pay.”

Sometime later, a special relic appeared in the database.

……

[Relic: Martin]

[Cost: Blood]

[Ability: Can use blood to change a living being’s species, form, age, etc. Anything mixed into the blood will become symbiotic with the lifeform.]

[Discovery location: Earth]

[Discoverer: Martin]

……

The cost of this relic sparked endless debate among researchers.

Some said that if Martin himself was considered a relic, then the blood transfusion recipient should be considered the user, and the price they paid was the transformation of their own body.

But this explanation was easily confusing, so the relic’s entry was kept simple.

In the end, they decided that the blood required for Martin’s blood transfusions would be listed as the cost.

After that, Martin’s whereabouts became unknown, and this was not recorded in the data.

After reading this information, Mo Ling understood why the database had linked the robed figures’ ritual to this relic .

“It’s also a form of blood exchange, and they mix in those strange rotten scraps.”

The blood sphere floating in the sky was a mixture of all the robed figures’ blood, and after absorbing it, none of them had a hemolytic reaction.

“There’s no way they all have the same blood type, right?”

Mo Ling also noticed a limitation in the data: the relic itself was a person, Martin.

Only Martin could use this ability, and each person could only use it once.

But these robed figures clearly ignored that limitation, using another method to exchange blood.

However, Mo Ling didn’t think the ritual was effective.

He had personally seen the rotten scraps accumulate in the robed figures’ bodies, blocking their blood flow, and even cutting open blood vessels. This had nothing to do with symbiosis.

The data wasn’t complete, and the specific definition of “symbiosis” wasn’t explained.

“If it was symbiosis, they shouldn’t be harmed by those scraps.”

After reading all the data, Mo Ling felt even more confused.