At Hogwarts, the story begins with deconstructing Avada Kedavra.

Chapter 107 The Sorrow of Blood

Emily abruptly withdrew her hand, her face turning deathly pale.

Gray noticed her reaction.

"Miss Carter?"

"Those ones--

Emily's voice trembled as she pointed to the thin sheet of paper, "—something mentioned in that document."

She looked up at Gray, her eyes filled with terror.

Is it true?

Gray was stunned.

His expression underwent a complex change in an instant, from indifferent businesslikeness to a kind of undisguised astonishment.

He clearly didn't know what Emily had just gone through, but he could tell that the young girl was on the verge of some kind of extreme breakdown.

He slowly turned his head to look at Dr. Julia Carter, who had remained silent behind him.

Dr. Julia took a step forward and removed her glasses.

She looked at her with a gaze that Emily had never seen before, a gaze that was a mixture of tenderness and compassion.

"Emily".

She began, "You've been able to hear that since you were little, haven't you?"

Emily's pupils contracted sharply.

She instinctively took a step back, her back resting against the lab table.

"you----"

"I can hear it too."

Dr. Julia said softly, "Not every time, I'm not as perceptive as you."

But occasionally—when I touch certain special objects, I can sense their—emotions.

She paused, her tone becoming extremely serious.

"People like us have a specific name in my research. But now is not the time to explain that."

Emily, what did you "hear" on the document just now?

"Metal----"

Emily gasped for breath, her back soaked in cold sweat. "People are screaming inside the metal, thousands of people."

They are burning, they are being exploited—

Dr. Julia closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

"Mr. Gray,"

She turned to the Department of Defense agent. "Test complete. Her perception rating is S-class."

Take her away, now.

"Wait! Where to?"

Emily frantically grabbed the edge of the lab bench. "I'm not leaving! I still have experimental data to run, and my advisor needs to come tomorrow morning..."

"Your advisor has been informed that you have been called up to participate in a top-secret national project, Miss Carter."

Gray stepped forward and swiftly but irresistibly grabbed Emily's arm. "From now on, all your travel, communications, and personal freedom will be under the control of the Department of Defense."

Please cooperate; we don't have time to waste.

Half an hour later, Emily sat in an unmarked Black Hawk helicopter and flew over the New Jersey night sky.

The roar of the propellers was deafening, but Emily found the sound incredibly comforting.

Because it was natural noise; there was no crying, no screaming, no eerie whispers.

She was taken to the outskirts of Detroit, Michigan.

It was already dawn when the helicopter landed in a vast industrial park surrounded by countless searchlights and barbed wire.

Emily recognized the place: Ford Motor Company's Red River plant.

But this place doesn't look like a car factory now; it looks more like a doomsday fortress facing a nuclear attack.

Everywhere were soldiers armed with live ammunition, armored vehicles were parked at the workshop entrance, and anti-aircraft missile launchers pointed directly at the hazy sky.

She was taken directly to a makeshift medical center.

"Sit down. Roll up your sleeves."

A military doctor, dressed in full protective gear with even his eyes covered by goggles, said coldly to her.

Emily did as she was told, without thinking.

She watched as the military doctor took out a needle much thicker than a regular blood-drawing needle and inserted it into her vein.

"What are you looking for?" Emily asked weakly, looking at her pale lips. "An infectious disease? A toxin?"

The medic didn't answer her; he simply pulled out the needles and sealed the blood collection tubes.

What followed was endless inspections.

This is not a regular physical examination.

She was taken into a fully metal-shielded room, and her head was covered with EEG electrodes.

A researcher in a white lab coat operates instruments outside the glass curtain wall.

"Miss Carter, please look at the image on the screen and tell me how you feel," a voice came from the loudspeaker.

A photo flashed on the screen.

It is an extremely complex geometric shape.

The moment Emily saw that image, her optic nerve felt like it had been pricked by a needle.

She didn't hear any sound, but she felt a strong "pulling sensation," as if the image was a vortex trying to suck something out of her brain.

"Disgusting—" she covered her forehead. "I feel nauseous. That image looks extremely unsettling."

The researchers outside the glass curtain wall were quickly taking notes.

"Very good. Next."

For the next three hours, she was asked to touch objects of various materials:

A warm meteorite, a rusty antique dagger, a piece of charred wood, or even a seemingly ordinary block of lead.

Each time she was touched, the researchers would carefully inquire about her sensory responses.

What did you hear? What temperature did you feel? Did you experience any emotional fluctuations?

Emily felt that they were treating her like some kind of sophisticated sensor.

She tried to explain her feelings using terms from physics, such as "abnormal thermal conductivity" and "resonance," but the researchers had no interest in that; they were only concerned with the auditory and visual hallucinations she had always considered "mental illness."

Finally, all the checks were over.

She was led to a counter that resembled a registration desk.

A female soldier with a blank expression took her photo, extracted her fingerprints and iris information, and then handed her an identification tag with a number.

Number: P-042.

"Take this and go to the waiting hall in Zone C to await further instructions." The female soldier pointed to a gray iron door at the end of the corridor.

Emily hung her ID tag around her neck, dragged her exhausted body, and pushed open the heavy iron door.

The sight behind the door stunned her.

This is a huge rest hall, which may have originally been the factory's employee canteen, but has now been transformed into a temporary shelter area.

The lobby is filled with dozens of rows of plastic folding chairs, and there are a few vending machines and coffee machines in the corner.

What shocked Emily was not the environment, but the people.

There were about seventy or eighty people gathered in the hall.

They looked completely different and had nothing in common.

There were middle-aged men wearing expensive bespoke suits who looked like Wall Street executives;

There were street artists wearing ripped jeans and with their fingers covered in paint:

There was a watchmaker with gray hair and reading glasses;

There was even an Asian girl wearing a high school uniform and carrying a backpack.

Their only commonality was that each of them wore the same number tag around their neck as Emily, and their faces were filled with exhaustion, fear, and a deep sense of bewilderment.

Emily found an empty seat against the wall and sat down. Her arrival attracted the attention of several people nearby.

"Were you also just 'kidnapped' here?"

A burly Black man in a mechanic's uniform sitting to her left handed her a steaming cup of coffee. "Have some. It tastes like mud, but it'll warm you up."

My name is Marcus, and I worked on airplane engines in Detroit for fifteen years.

"Emily. A student at Princeton." Emily took the paper cup and whispered her thanks.

"Students? Good heavens, they don't even spare the students."

A blonde woman sitting on the other side of Marcus sneered.

She was wearing a smart business suit, but her makeup was ruined, making her look somewhat disheveled.

"I am Sarah, an antiques appraiser at Sotheby's New York."

Last night, several FBI agents kicked down my apartment door, without even giving me time to change my shoes.

"Did they draw your blood too?" Emily asked.

Marcus made an exaggerated gesture, "And those damn tests."

They showed me a bunch of random, nonsensical scribbles and asked me what I thought of them.

I said I felt like that thing was a misinstalled gearbox, it was a headache just looking at it.

The doctor actually wrote it down, quite seriously!

Sarah nodded in agreement: "They let me touch a piece of scrap metal and asked me what I felt."

I told them that the thing was emanating an emotion of extreme sadness and anger.

It's like someone was slaughtered in front of it hundreds of years ago.

Sarah's words made Emily suddenly look up.

"Can you sense the emotions of objects?"

Sarah gave a wry smile, her eyes darting away: "Sounds like a madman, right? I've had this problem since I was a child."

Whenever I come across something that has a sense of age, I can "see" or "feel" fragments of the past.

My parents once thought I was possessed by an evil spirit, but I learned to hide it and used this intuition to make a name for myself in the antique appraisal world.

Until last night.

Marcus also sighed: "I am 'listening'."

I can't hear the voices of the dead, but I can hear the mechanical "breathing".

I can tell by the sound of a screw on the engine being half-loose or a bearing not having enough lubricant, even with my eyes closed.

I always thought this was perfect pitch —

Emily stared at them in shock.

For sixteen years, a full sixteen years, she thought she was the only monster in the world.

She believed that a curse flowed through her family's bloodline.

But now, in this heavily guarded underground hall, she suddenly discovers that she is not only not a monster, but is even part of a "group".

Everyone here possesses similar, unique perceptual abilities that cannot be explained by science.

"So, what exactly do they want to achieve by bringing together all of us 'freaks'?"

A refined-looking man wearing gold-rimmed glasses approached. He glanced at the heavily armed guards around him and lowered his voice, "Do you think this might be some kind of secret genetic experiment?"

"You mean a mutant program like in science fiction movies?" Marcus frowned.

"I am a professor of genetics at Boston University."

I just observed that our blood draw volume and testing procedures closely resemble the characteristics of a certain recessive gene screening program.

The bespectacled man pushed up his glasses and analyzed, "Perhaps we carry some kind of rare gene mutation that causes our nervous system's sensory threshold to be different from that of ordinary people."

The Department of Defense may want to extract this gene to create a serum for super soldiers.

"Super Soldier?"

Sarah laughed sarcastically. "Look at us, the old and the young, how many of us can even lift a gun?"

"Are we using our genes to create super soldiers so they can feel the sorrow of the enemy on the battlefield by touching their tanks?"

"Then tell me why?" the bespectacled man asked, somewhat displeased.

"I think it's some kind of deadly infectious disease."

An older woman who had been huddled in a corner spoke up tremulously, "Haven't you seen the news? It's very chaotic outside right now."

Britain has become a complete puppet of Russia, and people are dying all over Europe.

Perhaps the Russians deployed some kind of biological weapon, and we are the only ones carrying antibodies.

"Biological weapons don't need to test our reactions to strange symbols, ma'am."

Emily couldn't help but speak up.

"Those patterns, those material tests—they weren't looking for antibodies, nor were they looking for mutated genes."

They are looking for a kind of "resonance".

"What resonance?" Marcus asked.

"I have no idea."

Emily shook her head. "But I can sense that the graphics and objects they tested possess a powerful information field."

And we are the only ones who can decode this information.

"Decoding the information—could it be to decipher the Great Hairy Man's new code?" the bespectacled man mused.

The mention of the Russians caused the group, who had been talking in hushed tones, to fall silent.

An invisible, heavy sense of oppression spread through the air.

In 1991, the mere mention of Moscow and the Iron Curtain that stretched across the European continent evoked fear in every ordinary person.

Have you heard about what happened in Berlin?

Sarah suddenly lowered her voice, almost whispering. Her eyes darted in terror toward the soldiers standing at the door.

"What's going on in Berlin? Didn't the news just a couple of days ago say that NATO's armored divisions were forced to retreat another five kilometers?" Marcus asked.

"This isn't news; it's inside information I heard from a Pentagon client."

Sarah swallowed hard. "A major event happened on the West Berlin front early yesterday morning."

All eyes were on her.

Sarah's fingers twisted nervously together, her voice trembling slightly with tension: "Those mechs of the Big Hairy people—you know, those monsters with skulls, impervious to cannonballs, and capable of shooting green light that turns people into pus."

The temperature in the hall seemed to drop several degrees instantly.

Even Americans far from the battlefield were filled with fear of those war machines known as the "Chernberger type," thanks to television and newspaper portrayals.

That was an invincible symbol of death.

"What happened to those monsters?" the bespectacled man pressed.

"They're all wiped out."

Sarah uttered the words as if she herself could hardly believe it: "A full thirty of them, just as they were about to breach the Brandenburg Gate, were simultaneously paralyzed."

No, it wasn't paralyzed; it was blown to bits from the inside.

"That's impossible!"

Marcus instinctively retorted, "My friend who works at an air force base told me that the shields on those mechs can't even be penetrated by depleted uranium armor-piercing rounds!"

We simply don't have the weapons to destroy them, let alone thirty at once!

"But that's the truth."

Sarah's voice lowered even further. "My client was so frightened on the phone that he was incoherent. He said it wasn't a nuclear weapon, it wasn't a missile."

It is said that a blue light swept across the area, and the monsters all self-destructed.

and----"

She paused, her face turning deathly pale.

"Moreover, my client said that when those mechs exploded, soldiers on the front lines heard the screams of thousands of people."

The sound coming from those lumps of iron was like—like countless living people were imprisoned inside.

Emily's paper cup was suddenly crushed, and scalding coffee splashed onto the back of her hand, but she seemed not to feel the pain.

"Metal—people screaming inside the metal, thousands upon thousands of people."

The voice she had just "heard" on Gray's document perfectly matched the scene Sarah had described.

It turned out that what she heard was not a hallucination, but a real massacre that was happening on the other side of the ocean.

Those so-called invincible mechs were actually made from living people.

"My God—"

Marcus covered his face. "If this is true, then what exactly are we fighting against? Are the Russians stuffing soldiers into machines as fuel?"

"The big hairy people are just puppets."

The bespectacled man's voice was also trembling, "There has long been a rumor in academia that a supernatural force has taken over the top leadership of the Soviet Union and Britain."

A form of black magic that physics cannot explain.

"Shh! Shut up!" Sarah interrupted him in alarm. "Don't mention that word here! Do you want to get us killed?"

A deathly silence fell over the hall.

Everyone was overwhelmed by this immense, unknown terror.

If the enemy is using magic, and if science has failed, then what role do these "freaks" who have been suddenly gathered together play in this apocalyptic game?