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CHAPTERTWENTY

❝YIXING:ENLIGHTENMENTFROM

ANUNLIKELYSOURCE❞

"Sunggyu?" 

Said man turned around and saw Woohyun standing in the doorway. Dongwoo and Hoya were standing behind him, peering into the room. Dongwoo was holding a box filled to the brim with files and folders. Hoya, on the other hand, had seemed to had encounter yet another BEQP facility scientist and was gripping the guy tightly by the arm.

The man had short, brown hair that was matted with blood and some other sort of substance. The glasses that sat on the bridge of his nose were crooked and had several cracks within the right lens. He was gaping at the unconscious Tao on the floor.

“Is that Tao?” Hoya asked. Sunggyu could hear the fear in his voice. “Isn’t he supposed to be dead?”

“Unfortunately, he’s not,” Sunggyu sighed, still eyeing the scientist in Hoya’s clutches. “We’ll discuss more about him later. Let’s just go.”

“Shouldn’t we try and kill him now then?”

“I don’t care. I just want to go back home,” Sunggyu whined. Both Dongwoo and Hoya gasped at that.

Sunggyu never whined.

The rebel leader rolled his eyes at his comrades and gestured to the boxes (and the scientist) in their arms, silently asking them what they were for.

“So what’s up with this?” Sunggyu pointed to the scientist, who, by the way, wasn’t resisting Hoya at all.

“Oh yeah! Look at what I found in a random room,” Hoya exclaimed, as if he forgot the man was even there. “Sunggyu, meet Dr. Zhang Yixing; sometimes, he goes by the name of Lay. Doctor, meet Kim Sunggyu.”

“Hi. I’ve heard a lot about you from my bosses,” Yixing gave a small wave.

“Hi,” Sunggyu nodded.

The conversation did not go past that.

“We have some good and bad news, Sunggyu,” Dongwoo informed after a brief moment of silence between the two men. They all shuffled into the hallway. He raised the heavy box he was holding. “The good news, I stumbled upon a room filled with many documents, and, as you can see, we found loads of information that we could use. I grabbed as much as I could, and Hoya took several shots of some of the papers we couldn't carry.”

Woohyun didn’t follow at first, for he was confused about Yixing. Was no one, except him, curious as to why the man was still in the facility, like Kris, while everyone else evacuated? “Um,” he started. Everyone stopped and looked at him. “Are we not going to question him?” He pointed to Yixing.

“…What for?” Hoya asked.

“What do you mean ‘what for?’ This man is a scientist at the facility we have infiltrated and now are currently trying to escape! Shouldn’t we, oh, I don’t know, maybe interrogate him? Figure out why he is here, see what we can get out of him that can help us? If that’s not what you’re planning on doing to him, then why is he even with us? You’ve obviously already attempted to beat him up or something! I mean, look at him, his glasses are broken, and he’s all bloody and .”

Woohyun just didn’t get it. He felt like he was losing his mind every minute he spent in this time period. One moment, these people, the members of INFINITE, the inhabitants of South Hallow, appeared smart and vicious and brutal, and then the next moment, they acted as clueless as a child. They acted like they didn’t know how to do anything properly. What was wrong with these people?

“He has a point…” Yixing nodded, agreeing with the brunet.

“Thank you!” Woohyun sighed.

Suddenly Hoya pinned Yixing against the wall roughly. “Alright Doctor, why are you here while everyone else evacuated? Who are you really?” Hoya demanded. “If you don’t tell us, I’ll break the other lens!” He gestured to the left lens that didn’t have a scratch on it.

“Wait, so you had beaten him up earlier for no good reason?” Woohyun asked incredulously. Hoya ignored him.

“Please don’t break them more than you already had,” Yixing held up his hands in defense, wailing in despair. “My health insurance won’t cover the costs again. I’ll tell you everything you need to know!”

“Start spilling!”

“Well, as you already know, I’m Dr. Zhang Yixing. I am Dr. Wu Yifan’s assistant. When he or Dr. Kim Joonmyun or his assistant, Dr. Do Kyungsoo, are not around, I am in charge of this underground facility.”

“Why did you stay behind?”

“Just like Dr. Wu, I’ve decided to stay behind to finish up some research and reports that we’ve recently started.”

“How recent are we talking?”

“We just started the other day.”

“What was so important that you needed to finish up?” Sunggyu was the one to ask this time.

“W-Well, Yongguk, sir, wanted us to work on a new project…”

Hearing Yongguk’s name caught Sunggyu’s attention. Anything that was related to Yongguk was always important to Sunggyu. Anything that was related to Yongguk was always considered dangerous to Sunggyu. “What’s this new project he wants you all to work on?” Sunggyu asked before Hoya could say anymore.

“Technically, it’s not a new project. He’s reopening the K.O.T project.”

Woohyun remembered Kris mentioning something about not wanting to restart the K.O.T project. And he remember coming across this project KOT in one of the files he skimmed through back on the third floor of the facility.

Dongwoo started, “What’s the K–”

Sunggyu pushed Hoya out of the way and pinned Yixing to the wall. Yixing squeaked as he was being manhandled by Sunggyu. “What?! Why has he restarted the program? I thought YG closed that down for good.”

Woohyun looked at Sunggyu, taking note of the troubled look on his face and how frantic his voice sounded. It seemed that Sunggyu knew exactly what kind of project K.O.T was. “I-I-I’m not exactly sure why. Dr. W-Wu didn’t want to do it, but Y-Y-Y-Yongguk is insisting–well, more like forcing–this project to start up again, especially after that disaster that happened the other day.”

“The earthquake…?” Dongwoo asked.

Yixing shook his head. “No, that wasn’t just your average earthquake. How often do earthquakes even occur here in South Hallow? And especially one of that magnitude!”

Sunggyu released Yixing, eyeing the man with confusion. Yixing didn’t try to escape, though. He felt his neck and flexed it a bit before fixing his glasses and smoothing out his lab coat.

“Go on,” Sunggyu insisted.

“Up until the other day, we’ve have been working on a study of the human DNA and how to enhance a person’s capabilities. We wanted to create a being that was strong enough to handle and survive a war. We’ve experimented on a lot of people, but only one has survived all the test. We call him Patient X. He has reacted quite well to all of the drugs and enhancements we have given him. Everything seemed to be going good for us. We thought that maybe we had finally hit a breakthrough in our research since six years ago with Project K.O.T

“But something… abnormal occurred during that earthquake, so abnormal that everything we have been working on, since the incident six years ago, was pushed to the side, almost forgotten it seemed. I, unfortunately, was not present outside during the quake, but Dr. Kim and Dr. Do was.”

“Joonmyun and Kyungsoo?” Sunggyu asked, but it was more of a statement if any. To Woohyun, it seemed Sunggyu understood everything the young doctor was explaining. But then Woohyun remembered that Dongwoo said something about Sunggyu being in the military before INFINITE came into existence. Woohyun guessed that during that time, Sunggyu had been exposed to the many horrors that went on in the BEQP facility.

Yixing nodded. “During the tremor, not only did the sky grow dark, dispelling our eternal sunset, but a beam of light shot through it, cutting the skies above in half. Thunder and lightning could be seen and heard, and a black hole formed.”

“A black hole? You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dongwoo laughed, finding Yixing’s story implausible. “Hoya and I were out there during the quake. We didn’t see anything. The only things we witnessed were buildings fall apart and fires starting everywhere.”

“Maybe that’s all you were able to see from the lower sectors, but from sector six and up, everything that was going on in the heavens was clear. But on your way here, did you even glance at your surroundings? Did you take notice of the buildings and establishments in the distance that were in ruins? Did you see the highways and bridges that were still in the process of collapsing?”

Woohyun looked down for a moment. He did remember seeing a few buildings in the far distance in shambles and ruins while he was looking down into the city from the elevator, and he remembered all the chaos and destruction that was going on when he first woke up in this time.

 “That black hole pulled everything in its vicinity into it. Almost everyone and everything was swallowed.”

Dongwoo shook his head, not believing a word.

“He’s telling the truth.” Woohyun clarified.

The members of INFINITE turned to Woohyun sharply with a questioning look. The brunet continued, “When I first woke up here, Leeteuk led me outside. Everything was in chaos just like the doctor said. People were running everywhere; fires broke out everywhere; Leeteuk told me that South Hallow had just suffered from an earthquake. He told me that not even a couple of minutes before I crashed through the roof of his place, a hole formed in the sky and people and buildings up, but then it suddenly spat everything but the people back out.”

Everyone grew silent as Woohyun finished giving evidence to Yixing’s story. Woohyun was almost sure Sunggyu would accuse him of lying again and claim that the government told him to lie about it. But Sunggyu didn’t say anything. Dongwoo and Hoya looked back to Yixing, waiting for the young man to continue his explanation, but Sunggyu was still staring at Woohyun.

It was a bit unnerving, and Woohyun wished he knew what Sunggyu was thinking.

Yixing took a deep breath before continuing, “Just like he said. The black hole morphed into something else and spat out almost everything it had swallowed. Gravity tugged and shifted at everything. And the hole morphed into some sort of tunnel in the sky as it continued its process, and, according to Dr. Kim and Dr. Do, they saw a body enclosed in a beam of light descend from the tunnel in the sky into somewhere in the city.”

“A… body?” Sunggyu asked, his brows furrowing.

“It turns out, the black hole somehow formed into a wormhole. And in Dr. Kim’s exact words:  ‘In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of space time that would be, fundamentally, a "shortcut" through space time. For a simple visual–’”

Suddenly, Sunggyu punched the wall behind Yixing’s head, denting the wall greatly. Everyone but Woohyun jumped at the unexpected action. Woohyun had just met Sunggyu yesterday–though it had somehow felt longer–and he was already used to Sunggyu’s sudden anger and violence.

“Shut up!” Sunggyu scowled. “I do not care what Joonmyun said, and I do not care about the exact science behind wormholes and black holes. Just tell me why Yongguk had restarted the project. Tell me what Yongguk is getting out of all of this. What does this all have to do with K.O.T?!”

Yixing whimpered at Sunggyu’s words and actions, flinching at the tiniest of movements Sunggyu made, and Woohyun wondered if the young doctor was going to pee on himself.

“U-Uh, Yongguk wants us to reopen the project because based off of the actions and patterns of the black hole and based off the information we know of about wormholes, the body that came out of the black hole is of someone who’d time traveled.”

At the mention of time traveling, the members of INFINITE looked back to Woohyun. The brunet was sure he was thinking the exact same thing the members were thinking.

Was it he that the BEQP scientists saw coming out of that wormhole?

Was he the same person Dr. Kim claimed time traveled?

That would explain why, when he woke up in the abandoned children’s home, that Leeteuk claimed was his home, there was a huge hole in the ceiling, as if someone crashed through it from above.

Did Woohyun come from the wormhole? It made more sense than he just randomly appearing and waking up in South Hallow. But how is the question. Woohyun fell off the bridge during the earthquake back in his time.