08.00 am Sunday
Part of the reason why Mo XuanYu thinks he's so great at hacking into databases is because he has insane, insatiable curiosity. But the other part was fuelled by the desire to see who his father was, the no good lowlife, the scum of the earth, who had dared to abandon his mother.
He didn't know much, and Mo XuanYu had to hack into the government agency responsible for recording birth certificates to find out.
That's when he found out that his mother had pronounced him a girl, and his father was called Jin GuanShan.
At last, he had found out who was the other fifty percent to his DNA, half accountable for what he looked like.
And since he loved his mother, and his mother loved him, he correctly assumed that there must have been a really good reason why his mother had changed his gender on paper. Which meant that Jin GuanShan had to be investigated.
Mo XuanYu had thrown up that night more times than in his whole life, and he sent up a prayer to the Universe, thanking the powers that be, that his mother was an Angel.
Everything was a con in his list of pros and cons, reasons why he should or should not go and face this man, tell him of his existence. But by now, he was part of a gang that felt more like his real family, certainly way more enriching than anything he could have gained from the slimy turd currently festering in that cell, resembling whatever was in that chamber pot.
Something made Mo XuanYu find the security settings and he slid the door open, not truly understanding what made him do that.
Then he closed that tab and moved back to Wen Rouhan, just checking in on what was going on there.
Wen Rouhan is smiling.
Oh no...that can't be good.
Mo XuanYu's fingers fly over the keys because he's sure, sure as Jin GuanShan is worse than a dung beetle, that he's missed something.
Something really important.
He rewinds the security feed, and what he sees turns his blood to ice.
Heart racing, he tries to call his group, Baoshan Sanren, and then anyone in that little room, who has no idea what is going to happen.
"Come on! Come on! Come on!" He's muttering under his breath, willing someone to pick up, at least check their messages, SOMETHING!
The line crackles and then he hears Baoshan Sanren say, "A-Yu? What's up?"
***************
Wen Qing slid across and pushed Song Lan into a sitting position, trying to ignore the deep growling that was coming from the centre of his chest, even though his eyes were still closed.
"Hold his hands!" She fires at Xiao XingChen, as she gets the pliers around the first nail.
It's tough to pull out, slippery because of the corroded metal and wet blood. She has to brace the handles of the pliers against the base of his skull, and she yanks so hard that she's flat on her back, blood dripping from the nail in the mouth of her tool.
All the air has slammed out of her lungs, and it takes her a while to be able to breathe properly again.
She sits up and attempts to find the second nail but just as she does, Song Lan opens his eyes and Xiao XingChen gasps, because their time has run out. Her pliers hold the head of the nail and she pulls just as Song Lan wrenches his head out of her grasp, and the momentum yanks the nail right out of his skull.
He slumps into Xiao XingChen's arms, in too much pain to do anything else.
Meanwhile, suddenly all their phones go off at once.
***********
05.00 am Sunday
Outside the Lan Manor, the still night held no warning on what was going to happen. By nine o'clock on the previous night, Lan Qiren had gone to sleep with the children, after they opted to sleep with him in his bed.
XiChen and MingJue had returned from collecting PoPo from Wei Ying's apartment, and after Da Tuzi had all but forced everyone to have milk and cookies, they had to watch Wei Ying leave with their butler.
That alone was hard for XiChen, as MingJue knew only too well. This was the second time his baby brother's life was in danger, and XiChen felt more helpless than ever.
They waited for news.
And waited.
By two in the morning MingJue had fallen asleep with his head in XiChen's lap, and XiChen was having a hard time staying awake. He must have dozed off because the sudden shrill alarms going off woke him out of slumber.
MingJue jumped up and looked around, and XiChen was trying to remember where he was.
Uncle Qiren suddenly appeared, carrying both the sleepy boys.
"Follow me. The staff will join us," he said, quietly.
And then he turned the candle holder on the mantelpiece ninety degrees to the left and the fireplace slowly turned a hundred and eighty degrees to reveal a hidden room.
"Cangse Sanren told me that if I ever heard that sound, I was to come here. We installed a panic room soon after." Uncle Qiren explains, pressing his palm against a scanner.
Thick metal doors slide open effortlessly, and there's a whole safe room here, complete with beds, a desk, monitors and dry food. A working refrigerator, a generator and a computer.
Uncle Qiren places the sleepy kids on the bed and covers them with a throw, turning back to face his nephew and MingJue.
They are suitably impressed and shocked in equal amounts.
The staff that stayed with them on a rota, filed in soon afterwards, and once Uncle Qiren made sure that all residents were safely here, he closed the doors so that they were away from the certain danger.
Then he switched on the monitors and there were gasps all around.
Hundreds of people were trying to break into the Lan compound, climbing the tall iron gates with the cloud emblems, with little success...because every time they touched the clouds, they screamed in agony, one after another.
Toppling backwards in obvious pain, while others replaced them trying to break in.
However, this only made the others even more angry and they began swarming at the gate, and then they realised that some of them could climb over the ones already injured by the wards, effectively insulating themselves from being hurt.
"Now what do we do, Shifu?" XiChen asks him, feeling more and more helpless as he watches the multiple split screens.
"We will wait. Nothing can get inside here, and there's nothing to worry about. It will be daybreak soon, and most of that," he gestures at the screens, "will be resolved by itself."
XiChen turned to stare at him.
That could only mean one thing.
"So...that means you know about vampires, Shifu?"
*************
08.00am Sunday
"A-Yu, what's up?" Baoshan Sanren asks, frowning at the still changing notifications telling her that there are numerous messages waiting for her.
But this deep into the ground and the signal is sketchy to say the least.
The line crackles and goes in and out in waves, and she only manages to catch a few words.
"...Rouhan....warning...security room...cages..."
And the connection dies.
She goes back to the chat, hoping the messages will have loaded by now, but that infuriating circle of death was still spinning uselessly instead of actual words.
A rising crescendo of sound reaches them now, and Lan Zhan's sharp hearing clarifies a hundredfold, as he suddenly realises that the waves of sounds he had been hearing before, the ones that actually sounded like calm and gentle waves on the beach shore, was in fact, vampires.
Lots of them.
Where they had been murmuring in idleness, just existing somewhere on this level, that sound has been getting louder and louder, until now when it is impossible to ignore.
It sounds like there are hundreds of them, and they...are hungry.
Joint panic paints all of their faces and they together, as a collective, understand what is about to happen to them.
"How many of them will there be?" Baoshan Sanren demands, drawing both of her swords and standing at the forefront of the oncoming conflict.
As usual, she's one step ahead of everyone, and she has figured out what is going to happen.
Since it is obvious now that there will be a fight, and it's only a matter of time before it reaches them.
Their situation isn't ideal, either. They're stuck in a room hundreds of feet underground, where no one can hear them, and even if that weren't true, what could mere humans do to help them anyway?
No one had wondered what happened to all the test subjects, to all the people who came forward to participate in the medical trials, all those homeless people, the hookers, the streetwalkers, drifters...people who were unattached and wouldn't be missed.
More than two thousand people...
Was it really such a stretch to think that they'd all been turned, and kept somewhere?
Even if the drug testing hadn't worked fully, vampires were vampires, whether or not they were able to keep their cognitive faculties.
Wasn't this the ideal place, to keep them locked up and away from prying eyes, from the outside world because Wen Rouhan simply had no idea what to do with them? And now, they were about to attack, because someone had released them from their confines, opened doors which would otherwise have remained locked forever.
Without wanting to, they have walked right into Wen Rouhan's trap, wholly unintentionally.