Blood Pressure Steady State

The moment the scalpel pierced the fourth corpse, the silver chip rolled off the pituitary gland. Female forensic doctor Xia Tong's breathing was stagnant - this miniature device was exactly the same as the prototype found in the wreckage of the explosion in her father's laboratory ten years ago. In the cold light of the Gothic funeral parlor, serial murders are coming to the rhythm of the "Divine Comedy". The skin of the deceased was engraved with the seven deadly sins in blood, and the temperature of the wound was constant at 37°C, like a precisely controlled biochemical experiment. When her father's suicide note disappeared out of thin air in the evidence room, when the DNA of the gentle nanny appeared on the nails of the deceased, and when the stained glass in the church reflected the profile of her late father's carved murder notice, Xia Tong finally saw the formula behind this bloody ritual: Each victim had participated in a "personality correction" clinical trial led by his father, and the type of dopamine receptors they were missing corresponded to the secret diagnosis in his forensic report. The virtual reality of Dante's Inferno began to swallow reality. Seven fetal specimens suddenly appeared in the wall of his childhood bedroom, glowing with a light blue embalming fluid. In the holographic image, the father's eyeballs were bloodshot: "The chip is preventing the urge to kill, and you, my daughter, are the first specimen to lose control." The freezer in the funeral home burst open, and the latest deceased was the police sergeant whom she had been with day and night. In his stomach were the remains of the coffee she had drank this morning. The second before the mirror shattered, Xia Tong saw the muzzle of her sister's gun rising from behind. The smell of turpentine was suddenly as strong as the tide, enveloping the memory fragments of the day of the explosion - it turned out that all the pursuit of redemption was just an atonement program implanted in the hippocampus.