That name caused the fleeting pain in Julian Sterling’s head to resurface. It only appeared for a split second, but that throbbing sensation still made Julian’s face pale a few shades. His tightly clenched hands seeped a thin layer of sweat.

But thinking of the man who had yet to fully calm down, Julian could only purse his lips and try to endure it. Fortunately, he was sitting in Ethan Caldwell’s lap, so the man could not see his tightly pressed lips.

At this moment, Ethan did not notice Julian’s anomaly at all. The man’s gaze remained firmly nailed to the name Professor Edmund Hale on the screen.

The second hand of the wall clock kept ticking rhythmically. Surprisingly, they had been sitting here until two in the morning.

The atmosphere in the study maintained that heavy, suffocating silence. The surroundings were pitch black, the curtains drawn tight, without a single ray of light filtering in from the outside. The sole light source at this moment was that laptop screen.

Far too much information had emerged, requiring the two men to process it. Ethan sat still in his chair, his arm draped loosely around Julian’s waist, seemingly calculating something in his mind.

Julian did not speak up to disturb the man. He shifted his body to lean closer against Ethan’s chest. At this moment, empty words of comfort seemed utterly meaningless, and thus Julian decided to remain silent, using his own body temperature to express to Ethan that he was still by his side.

No matter how massive the conspiracy that lay ahead, Ethan would still have Julian to face it with him.

The silence stretched on for over a dozen minutes.

Finally, Julian gently rubbed the back of Ethan’s freezing hand, his voice very soft: "If you do not want to continue reading right now, we can look at it tomorrow."

"I know." Ethan let out a heavy sigh: "But I have kept them waiting for so long."

It was the agonizing remorse he had carried for so many years after watching his parents be tormented on their hospital beds. Even though their bodies had lost all function, they remained resilient, refusing to depart this world.

Now that he was inching closer and closer to the secrets of that year, the very things that had driven his parents to their deaths, Ethan momentarily did not know how to handle it.

Because there were too many matters at hand, everything became increasingly chaotic.

Julian stood up from Ethan’s lap, circled around to the back of the chair, and placed both hands on the man’s broad, stiff shoulders, applying gentle pressure to massage them rhythmically.

It was as if he were soothing him. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Then he leaned against the backrest, resting his chin on Ethan’s shoulder, watching him open the folder named Hale Archive on the computer.

Inside the directory, it was further divided into four subfolders: Research Logs, Voice Memos, Neural Maps, Emergency Copy.

"Let us look at the research logs first." Julian suggested, his gaze fixed intently on the screen.

Ethan clicked to open the Research Logs. These were entirely scanned files from dilapidated paper documents. Some pages had torn edges and heavily blurred ink stains.

Perhaps this was done nearly a decade after the project was halted, when Ethan’s father had tracked down the remaining old information and scanned it.

They skimmed through each sequentially numbered page of the document.

The first document was a neural simulation chart of a patient in a deep coma on their forty-fifth day. They could not comprehend these things, nor did they know what the results meant. Fortunately, there were annotations on the side.

Ethan recognized that it was his mother’s handwriting, exactly the same as in that notebook.

Each meticulous stroke recorded the relevant assessments.

"The chart indicates that the patient’s brainwaves have shown positive fluctuations when stimulated by a specific frequency band."

The second sheet detailed an experiment on converting brain signals into text. This page recorded a case of a fully paralyzed patient who had lost the ability to speak. However, through the project’s sensory system, the patient was able to "select" the letters appearing on the screen solely through thought.

Julian and Ethan continued to scroll downwards. The further they went, the more complex and incomprehensible the reports became.

"Short-term memory model storage limits?" Julian murmured the line of information that had just appeared on the screen. Within that report, it was recorded that the researchers had succeeded in extracting and flawlessly preserving a five-minute memory segment from a test subject prior to the subject’s hippocampus sustaining damage.

Ethan parted his lips, but ultimately could not utter a single word, merely letting out a breath. Julian gently rubbed the man’s shoulder.

Both of them knew that if this project could have been developed to its very end according to its true purpose, it would undoubtedly have been a monumental leap for modern medicine.

Almost thirty years ago, the research had already advanced to this exteni. If it could have succeeded, there was no telling how many people it would have saved. No wonder, even more than a decade later, Ethan’s mother still wished to restart the project.

It was only a pity...

In truth, the essence of research was neither righteous nor evil, neither right nor wrong. Everything depended entirely on its purpose and the process of its execution. Much like CORE’s project, if used for the right purpose, it too would have been an enormous leap forward.

Unfortunately, those who utilized it did so for malicious purposes.

Furthermore, what was clearly a project bearing tremendous salvific value ultimately transformed into a lethal weapon, serving the corrupt ruling class’s schemes for immortality. It even led to the agonizing deaths of many researchers.

The moods of both men sank slightly, but they still had to review the remaining information. Sharp-eyed, Julian reached out and double-clicked on a file sitting at the very end of the Voice Memos folder, which was highlighted in a glaring red color.

A media player software window popped up.

The very first sound to spill from the laptop speakers was not a human voice, but an extremely ear-piercing hiss of static interference.

"Zzzzt... krrsssssh..."