【SC】Endless Journey

"White Black, Ph.D. in life sciences from Midgar University. Midgar University, lecturer, two years. Midgar Duchy Fourth Biochemical Research Institute, researcher, two years. There is no record in the archives from here on, The eight years in the middle were blank, and now it is registered as missing."

The jeep kept bumping on the gravel road, and Pete, who was flipping through the communication terminal, almost bit his tongue.Angel, who was driving beside him, glanced sideways at him and sighed helplessly.

"What did Claude tell you?"

"He said that there is an underground research facility 110 kilometers east of New Midgar, with a large scale, where he and Sephiroth were cloned. They were an experimental body called the Savior Project, and there were three or four years They are all being subjected to various human experiments..." Pete recalled the similar experience in his dream, and his heart tightened slightly, "...In short, White Black was working in the research institute at that time. Later, Claude planned to escape. He wanted Sephiroth to do some sabotage in the research institute to buy him time, but Sephiroth suddenly lost control and killed all the people in the research institute. Only those who were with Claude White survived."

Angel recalled the scene when he first met Sephiroth, and said angrily: "It is well deserved to conduct experiments on such a young child."

"Right! I think so too!" Pete straightened up excitedly, and the top of his head hit the skylight immediately.

"Hiss..." He rubbed the swollen place carefully, and continued to read the information in the email, "Claude said that he had emailed White before, and it took him two weeks before the other party asked him to go to a place called Niebuhr High." Claude is now in the Cosmic Canyon, and there is no way to personally verify whether the sender is White himself, so he told us to be careful."

"Nibelheim?" Angel had some doubts about this location.

"What? Have you been there?"

"Well, I've been there before on a mission." Angel parked the car on the side of the road and clicked on the car map to find the area.

Pete leaned in front of the screen and found that the location Angel was pointing at was a stretch of mountainous area.

"Is this place really inhabited?" Pete dragged the map left and right, zoomed in twice, and found a small town surrounded by mountains, "Oh... there really is."

Looking at the small town on the map, Angel folded his arms unconsciously.

"This area is sparsely populated due to terrain problems, and it is the habitat of a kind of green dragon. It is infested by the green dragon breeding season all year round. But there is a very old and large facility on the mountain outside the town. We went in and took a look when we were patrolling. , that may be some kind of Mako extraction device from 200 years ago."

In the old Shinra era, the Shinra company used to extract the life stream of the planet and reprocess it to produce magic energy, and continued to use this energy for half a century.It wasn't until 200 years ago that meteorites razed Midgar, where the headquarters of the Shinra Corporation was located, that humans turned back to fossil energy.Today the Mako Furnaces of Old Midgar have been completely dismantled, but many Mako Furnaces built in areas outside of Midgar still remain as abandoned buildings.

Angel reset the navigation, and the two drove for another day and night, before arriving at the small town of Nibelheim in the mountains at noon on the second day.

When he first entered the town, the desolate scenery in the town made Pete wonder if there were still people living here.Most of the buildings in the town are old-fashioned houses built of masonry and wood. There is a small square paved with stone slabs in the center of the town. On the square stands a wooden water tower that looks old. The rust and cobwebs on the water tower seem to be several years old. It has not been used for ten years.

They parked their cars on the square and walked around the town along the square. However, the doors and windows of every house were closed, and there was no trace of residents going out.Pete vaguely felt that someone was watching them upstairs, but when he looked in the direction his gaze came from, there was no one there.

"Hey, Cloud. If you're uncomfortable, why don't you take off the helmet?"

A strange but familiar voice suddenly echoed in my mind.Pete turned his head subconsciously, but the world in front of him was covered with mottled black spots like an old-fashioned photo that had been soaked in yellow.He blinked vigorously, and when he focused again, the surrounding buildings had already changed.

"This is the first time you've been home in a long time, right? So, what's it like now? I can't feel it because I don't have a homeland..."

Pete suddenly looked at a certain position in the square, and there appeared a figure that should not exist here.It was an unusually tall man with a face similar to Sephiroth's and long silver hair, talking to a soldier wearing a helmet beside him.

... By the way, he had seen this scene in a dream.

This was the town he had come to with Claude Strife, they were captured here, they became experimental subjects in the underground facility of a certain building, and they escaped after five full years.

So that town is—

"...Nibelheim." Pete held his forehead and muttered to himself in a burst of pain.

"What's the matter, Pete? Are you uncomfortable?" Angel noticed his abnormality, and hurriedly pulled his hand away, and after a moment of careful inspection, he was slightly relieved.After a few seconds, the other party suddenly reacted.

"Do you know this town?" Angel asked.

"...Well." Pete nodded hesitantly, "I was in a dream... No, I came here with Claude in the last cycle."

He looked around, over the past 200 years, all the buildings here have changed, but the layout of the town has not changed much.He tried his best to recall for a while, took a few steps in a certain direction, and then turned his head towards Angel: "I remember that there will be a big mansion at the end of this road, and there is an underground library and an underground library under that mansion." The lab, there may be some clues..."

Although Angel didn't know exactly what happened, he followed him all the way to the mountain in the north of the town.After they had walked along the path for half an hour, Pete stopped suddenly.

Before them was a weedy clearing, and beyond them were desolate mountains.Pete carefully compared the shape of the mountains and scratched his head in confusion: "It should be here, but things seem to be completely missing..."

"Maybe that building has been demolished in the past 200 years?" Angel tried to find a reasonable explanation for him.

"Maybe. But that building has a huge underground space. Even if the upper part is demolished, it shouldn't be deliberately buried underground. There should always be an entrance to go down..."

Pete walked into the grass and carefully checked the traces on the ground inch by inch.At a certain moment, he felt the sight behind him again.He wanted to turn around, but Angel held his shoulder.The other party made a silent gesture, and Pete immediately understood, pretending to continue looking for the entrance in the grass.

The two searched for about an hour, and found a trace of soil renovation in the northwest of the open space.They went back to the village and found a shovel that was placed outdoors. They removed the soil at that location and found a rusty secret door under the soil.

"This is it?" Angel used a flashlight to carefully observe the situation in the crack of the door. There was nothing but a bottomless spiral staircase.

"I guess so? Go down and have a look first?" Pete asked uncertainly.

The person who followed them was still watching from a distance. If they went down together, the door would probably be locked by the other party, and the situation would become very troublesome.

Angel winked at him, opened the secret door forcefully, and walked in first.Pete followed closely and saw Angel leaning his back against the wall, hiding in the blind spot of the stalker.

Pete pretended to walk down a certain distance, groping for any mechanism on the wall along the way.He remembered there were magic lamps at the bottom of the basement, but he just didn't know if those circuits were still working after 200 years.

Just when he was halfway there, there was a sudden loud noise above his head, followed by a series of sounds of fighting and resistance.Pete quickly ran back to the top of the stairs, and saw Angel supporting the secret door that was about to close with one hand, while the other hand cut a man's arm backwards, and kicked the gun that was removed from the opponent's hand towards Pete.

Pete immediately picked up the gun and aimed it at the still struggling man.He helped Angel open the secret door, and the skylight fell on the man's face, reflecting a face they had seen in the documents.

"White Black?" Pete asked cautiously.

The other party stopped struggling immediately, and his expression became extremely terrified: "Who are you?! You are from Midgar?! I don't know anything, and I can't say anything!"

Pete and Angel looked at each other, put down their pistols, and slowly approached each other.

"Hey, don't be nervous, I'm a friend of Claude." Pete raised his hands to show that he was not hostile. "He is far away from here now, and it is not convenient to meet you, so please let us come to you."

The men are still suspicious of their identities, and their pupils are full of thoughts of escape.Pete discovered this, so he called Claude face to face, and clicked on the video communication.

The phone rang three times before it was picked up, and a familiar blond youth appeared on the screen.

"Peter? What happened?" The phone's camera kept shaking, mixed with chaotic background sounds, and the other party seemed to be carrying something outdoors.

"Uh, we found White Black, do you want to confirm with each other?" Pete turned the screen to the man, who widened his eyes in surprise.

"Claude?! Is it really you??" White's voice trembled with excitement.

The blond young man at the other end of the screen was stunned for a moment, and immediately raised the communication terminal in front of him.

"Thank God, you're still alive..." Claude let out a long breath, and then realized that he hadn't introduced the existence of Pete and Angel to each other, "Sorry, I wasn't sure it was you who replied, so please Two friends have come to join you. This is—"

"Pete Grayson, former sergeant of the Midgar Marine Corps, is now a free man." Pete took the initiative to extend his hand to White, who hesitated to shake his hand, but he grabbed it and shook it vigorously.

Upon seeing this, Angel also briefly introduced himself: "Angel Cook, former captain of the Midgar Marine Corps. We have all been removed from the military of the Grand Duchy. We are not here to arrest you. Don't be afraid."

White nodded, looked around carefully, and made sure no one was looking here before carefully closing the secret door.

As he took Pete and Angel down, he said to Claude in the video: "After we parted last time, I planned to go back to Midgar and take my family with me, but my wife persuaded me to follow your advice on the phone. Opinions, so I fled to Kelier before the martial law at the military port... I really didn’t expect you to contact me, so it took me a while to get here from Kelier.”

Claude shook his head lightly, and a slight smile floated on his lips: "It's okay, I was just trying it out at the time, and it's really great to be able to contact you. About the Carter Holm thing you mentioned in your email..."

"That's exactly what I'm going to say next."

White took the two to the bottom of the stairs and pulled the switch on the wall.The lights in the corridor flickered twice, emitting a cold green light.

——Magic lamp.

A certain scene suddenly flashed before Pete's eyes. He once galloped through this long corridor and came to the door of an underground library, and then he saw the silver-haired man who was buried in reading——

"...Sephiroth."

A severe headache hit Pete, as if a hammer were driving nails into his skull.

Claude was the first to notice his abnormality, and subconsciously said with concern: "Pete—" The other party suddenly paused, and then asked hesitantly, "... Zacks?"

Pete woke up suddenly, and everything around him returned to normal.

"...I'm fine." Pete looked at the worried eyes of the three, and managed to hold up a smile, "I remembered something... Maybe it's my last memory?"

Claude frowned deeply when he heard this.But he didn't speak in the end, just nodded silently.

They walked underground for a few minutes, passing the underground library Pete had seen in his dream.The library is empty, save for the rotting wooden bookshelves that testify to the fact that all the walls were once filled with books.

Pete glanced in the direction of the library, and quickly looked away.Claude on the phone has returned to the room, and is sitting at the table watching them go deeper, his expression has become inexplicably complicated.

White took them into an underground laboratory, where there was only one workbench left, with a sofa and coffee table moved from the library next to it.White's computer was on the workbench, so the other party arranged for them to sit on the sofa, and then moved the computer to the coffee table to ensure that everyone could see the screen.

"Actually, after I left Midgar, I was also investigating the religious order." White opened a page, entered his verification information, and showed the collected information to Claude, "After the incident in the institute, I think Thinking about it, it feels like something's weird. If I could guess you're—"

Realizing that he had almost exposed Claude's identity, White immediately glanced nervously at Pete and Angel next to him.Claude knew his concerns, and said softly: "It's okay, they are our own people, you can just say it."

White hesitated for a few seconds, then finally nodded.

"If I could have guessed that you were the savior himself, then Carter Holm should have guessed it long ago. But he never announced this to the research institute, nor did he report your existence to the military, so he left the research institute that day So I backed up the intranet database on my own hard drive before, and then slowly cracked his authority over the next two years..."

"Wait?!" Pete felt that he had heard some terrible information, and looked at the young man on the screen in shock, "You are... Claude Strife himself? But you are not his...his ..."

"Clone." Claude said the word for him, and there was some unexplained pain in his blue pupils. "I will explain this to you later. Sorry, White, please continue."

White seemed to be aware of some unusual relationship between them, and couldn't help but look at Pete suspiciously.After a while, he said slowly: "During this process, I checked the papers published by Carter Holm in the past, and found that no one had raised the possibility that the savior might be empty in Peking University before him. This theory is completely It was born out of nowhere, and there is no data to support it. He just sorted out some researches on "planetary weapons" in the history of the planet. According to the witness records of the weapons, he deduced that the place where they were sealed was in the Peking University Cave, and then he thought that your crystal was also in the Peking University Cave. It's a forced reasoning, right? But it found you very accurately."

Claude fell into deep thought for a while.

At this time, the camera on the opposite side shook slightly, and a dog-shaped creature with red fur and a man with black hair and red pupils appeared on the screen.

"Ah, I forgot to introduce. This is Vincent Valentine, and this is Nanaki. They are all my... friends in life, and they are also witnesses of the meteor event 200 years ago."

Claude said something that shocked everyone on the screen again without changing his face, Pete felt that his brain was about to be overloaded.

Vincent nodded to the three of them, his eyes stayed on Pete's face for a few seconds, and then turned to White: "We also have doubts about Catholm's true identity, if he knew from the beginning that Cloud was in the big hole , there must be an accurate source of information.”

"Indeed." White's expression became extremely serious. "In fact, before Carterholm published that paper, he was one of the founders of the Redeemer."

There was a brief moment of silence in the room.

They all know what that means.The legend about the disaster and the savior 200 years ago that the Redeemer attracted many believers appeared before the crystal was discovered. This legend is more accurate than all existing historical materials.Then the person who first compiled this legend may be the one who knew the truth back then and told Catholm all about it.

"I also suspected this, so when I cracked his authority to access the database, I found that there was an experiment record in his personal file that had not been disclosed to the research institute at all."

White called up a document and showed some cell videos taken under a microscope to the three people opposite. Vincent was the first to recognize the strange movement of the cell.

"That's it. The thing in the big hole." Vincent said in a deep voice.

"That's right." White nodded, "When Carterholm was digging the Savior's crystal in the Peking University Cavern, he found some strange biological traces at the bottom of the cavity. He collected a sample of this creature, and did a detailed inspection and analysis of it. Gene sequencing, but in the end this sample was not kept, and only a little bit of the data of this thing was recorded. Carter Holm wrote that it is extremely similar to Claude's gene sequencing, but it has stronger mutations, and can only be performed simply The cells in this sample are self-replicating and dividing, unable to undergo cell differentiation, just like a multicellular organism with a high-level structure reverted to some interconnected cell clusters, so he named this sample—the original S type.”

...the original S-type.

Not type C.

Claude immediately realized the abnormality.

"Type S." He repeated in a low voice, his face paled instantly, "...Sephiroth."

White was stunned for a second before finally reacting.

If Carter Holm would use the S type to name the unknown creature in the Peking University Cavern, it means that Carter Holm believes that Sephiroth is the origin of this gene.

However, in the years since the Institute was established, everyone thought that C cells were the ancestors of this gene, but Catholm never corrected this matter.

No, not right.White remembered.Catholm did something very strange now that I think about it, that is, when C-07 showed silver-haired and blue-eyed traits, he argued with everyone that this is a common feature of C-type clones.Since the C-11 had not yet been manufactured, others at the institute were skeptical of his theory, but had no good reason to refute it.However, after the success of the C-11 project, no one mentioned Katterholm's original mistakes. Only Katterholm was still focused on training Sephiroth, and he didn't even want to hand him over to the military.

"You mean..." White felt a dryness in his throat, and it became very difficult to even speak, "The object that Catholm wanted to clone from the beginning was Sephiroth? But how did he know... no, Sephiroth?" What the hell is Philos?"

There was silence on both ends of the screen.

White suddenly had a bad feeling.He looked up at Claude again, and asked in a low voice, "Whoever he is, he must not be the savior... right, Claude?"

For a full minute, the blond youth closed his eyes, as if he was experiencing some kind of painful struggle.After a long time, the other party looked at him again.

"He is not." Claude's tone was full of guilt, "He is the disaster 200 years ago."

White was stunned for a moment, and then he realized from the eyes of other people what a shocking fact the other party told.

Sephiroth is the extraterrestrial disaster 200 years ago, so...then——

As an insider, the savior had lived with Calamity for nearly six years, and hadn't even tried to destroy each other.Claude and Sephiroth were cloned from the same person's cells and had the exact same gene. According to Carter Holm's theory, Sephiroth is the ancestor of this gene, which means that there is still a gap between them. layers of even more shocking relationships.

"Is... Sephiroth your... ancestor?" White tried to find an explanation that could rationalize this relationship, but the blond youth shook his head regretfully.

"No, I used to be human." Claude whispered, "But 200 years ago, I was forcibly implanted with Sephiroth's cells by a scientist who was very similar to Catholm, and transformed me I became his clone, so I can no longer extract the real C cells from me. The S cells you obtained from the crystal are indeed S cells, and in theory, you must be able to clone Sephiroth himself."

White was stunned by all this.

He never thought that the savior and disaster had such a complicated past, and he couldn't understand why Claude tried to protect Sephiroth when he was living in the research institute.But thinking about it from the other side is even more frightening. Sephiroth's disaster as a planet actually treats Claude as his mother and younger brother. His feelings for Claude are visible to the naked eye. In this case, if the other party knows If the truth is revealed, the planet may suffer catastrophe.

"Where is Sephiroth? Does he know this? Where is he now?" White asked subconsciously.

"He already knows who he is. He—" Pete looked at Claude's expression, and decided to hide the fact that Sephiroth was driven away by him for the time being, "...is temporarily out of contact."

White suddenly became extremely nervous: "Will he destroy the planet?"

"I don't know, maybe not for the time being. If he will, I will be responsible for killing him." Claude replied wearily, "The problem now is that we want to find the person who told Catholm this information, if I can’t stop that person, I’m afraid there will be things that we can’t even imagine will happen in the future. Do you know any information about Carter Holm himself? For example, his origin, people close to him..."

"Ah." White finally remembered the results of the investigation that he could not finish.He clicked on another file, which contained a detailed resume of Katterholm, and Claude saw Nibelheim written in the place of birth at a glance.

...that was too much of a coincidence.He and Vincent looked at each other, frowning slightly.

"He was born in Nibelheim, then went to Midgar to study two degrees in planetary history and life sciences, and then founded the Redeemer?" Claude simply extracted the key information on the resume, thinking about the doubts .

"Actually, I came to Nibelheim this time to investigate this matter." White's expression became serious again, "As you can see, the environment here is too harsh and barren, so there are very few residents left in the town, most of them are An old man over seventy years old. I asked all the residents who can remember, and Katterholm was not born in Nibelheim. In fact, he was 13 years old when he came to Nibelheim, without parents, and it is said that he came from He came here after a long journey from the Northern Continent. He said that he didn't remember the place of birth, but there was a perennially frozen cave there, and the ice inside was green..."

White didn't know where on the planet the scenery corresponding to this description appeared, but the three people at the other end of the screen immediately realized that it was the bottom of the Peking University Hole.

"Reunion."

A strange noise suddenly invaded Claude's mind, as if the noisy radio waves were constantly switching channels, which made him have a splitting headache for a while.

It was neither Sephiroth's voice nor Xenovia's, it was a completely new voice that had never appeared in his life before.

...the original S-type.

At this moment, some scenes that he should not have seen with his own eyes suddenly appeared in Claude's memory.He saw the large void two years after the meteor event, where the owner of the body was cruelly ravaging the two Turks.

He realized that this was the memory of Sephiroth, and the owner of the body was one of the three thought bodies that the other party had created for resurrection.The spiritual sharing between him and Sephiroth was originally one-way, but under the interference of the original S-type, it seemed to be strangely synchronized.This means that the relationship between the original Type S and them is much closer than Cloud originally imagined, and the other party is trying to summon the two of them.

But this memory suddenly woke up Claude and reminded him of another thing.

"...Thinking body." Claude thought of a possibility that made him terrified, and all the blood faded from his face in an instant.

"What?" Nanaki didn't understand what he meant, but Vincent's face immediately changed.

"The person who can use the flow of life to create a thought body uses someone's memory...to create him..." Claude's speech speed became slower and slower, and he felt that he was close to something he least wanted to know the truth.

At that moment, intense anger, hatred and despair seized his heart.

If that's true, if that's true—

He can accept that he admired and admired that person sincerely, and he can also accept that he once loved that person like a mother and brother. The emotion he loved is as real as the emotion he hated, but he cannot accept this kind of playing .

This is a complete betrayal of him.

Claude stood up suddenly and rushed out of the house.The people present didn't know what happened, and they froze in place for a while, only Vincent chased him out immediately.

Claude stepped on his locomotive and drove all the way in the empty cosmic canyon, until he stopped at the edge of a cliff.

He looked at the vast night sky, and the stars shone like some ancient and distant life in the sky.Claude stood on the edge of the cliff for a long time, and finally broke down and cried bitterly.

"Alice, I'm sorry..." Claude buried his face deeply in his hands, "Alice, I should have thought of it, I should have known it from the beginning, he will always be him, and he cannot be changed. He hates me, as I have always hated him, but I naively hoped for him. I betrayed the planet, I betrayed you all. I—”

"No, it's not your fault, Cloud." A cold metal arm wrapped around his shoulders. "None of us will blame you."

But Claude didn't look up, his ten fingers clenched the cloth on his body tightly, almost piercing through the glove and pinching his palm.So Vincent didn't continue to comfort him, but just stood beside him quietly, waiting for him to calm down.

They stood in the cold evening wind of the canyon, like two silent sculptures.About half an hour later, Claude finally sorted himself out and said in a very low voice, "...I will find him and the original Type S."

Vincent turned his head slightly, and saw a trace of cold hatred in those blue pupils that he hadn't seen for a long time.

"I'll let him tell the truth about it all, and then I'll kill him. That's my responsibility."