Countdown 5 Hours: The Truth About Victor Zhou
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I ran back to the Zhou apartment, straight to Victor Zhou's study.
He was sitting in the dark—probably thinking the same thing I was.
I didn't have time to explain. I grabbed him by the collar and hauled him up.
"They gave you something, didn't they?"
He looked at me. He didn't say anything, but he didn't have to.
"How long have you been having nosebleeds?"
He wiped the blood away with the back of his hand. "About two months."
"What did they give you?"
"Gift," he said suddenly. "They call it 'Gift.'"
"'Gift'?"
"When you join the organization, they give you a shot. They say it's a gift from God that will save you in a critical moment.
"In reality, it's the most addictive drug the world has ever produced.
"Once you're injected, you can't leave the organization or you'll die in three to four hours."
I closed my eyes.
Organization. Drug. Creator of the Gate. Victor Zhou.
"Two months ago, they started giving me nosebleeds. I knew my time was almost up."
"Why did they recruit you?"
"To work on the Gate, of course. What they call 'the Timespace Convergence Device.'"
"The police say you built the Gate."
He laughed hoarsely. "I was doing my Ph.D. when I joined. My thesis was on variable universe theory.
"One day, a man approached me and offered to fund my research. In exchange, they'd get all my research data.
"I told myself I was building it for them, not just for myself. That made it easier.
"But one day, I finished the calculations, and I knew I'd created something terrible.
"I panicked. I ran. I took the key parameters and destroyed them. But they still had my prior research results.
"They found me every time I tried to hide.
"I couldn't tell my family—I was afraid they'd get hurt.
"Then I realized my only chance was to die and hope the organization would stop looking for me.
"That was my thinking. But I couldn't even do that. The Gift in my body would attack my nervous system.
"I can still force myself to function right now, but by dawn, I won't be myself anymore."
The irony was brutal.
Victor Zhou wanted to use his death to protect his daughter, and he couldn't even guarantee his own death.
And now I was standing here, in this moment, doing the exact same thing he'd done ten years ago.
One step faster.
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I released Victor Zhou, ran to the kitchen, and found a set of stainless steel chopsticks.
If I met those big bruisers again, I'd need a weapon.
I checked the time. I had about five hours until my time-travel expired and my consciousness returned to 2017.
If I was going to protect Jessica, I had to kill the leader.
If I killed the leader, would her subordinates scatter? Probably.
If they scattered, would they still go after Jessica? Unlikely.
And since Victor Zhou had already destroyed the parameter data, the scattered remnants of the organization wouldn't be able to reconstruct the Gate.
That was the overall plan.
But the leader was out of my reach right now. The delivery man had just left her place, and I didn't know where her hideout was. Tracking her right now would be risky and time-consuming.
So I needed another way.
On my first time-travel through, I'd been with Jessica the whole time, so I could only deal with the men who came to the apartment.