“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let you act alone,” Zhang Heng apologized. “I keep feeling that they have their eye on me all the time, which means they’d be attacking me first. Besides, we still have some time left. To my surprise, I didn’t expect them to so quickly come up with a plan to attack us at the same time.”


  “Did they attempt to replace you too?” Bai Qing was still a little frightened, “.……in school?”


  “Yes. The alien at Workshop No. 3 last night should have hatched by now. Theoretically, it would need some time to learn about our society before replacing me. However, it seems they’ve run of patience. Early this morning, they attempted to attack and replace me with the fake Zhang Heng.”


  “They called me to the disciplinary office, but the discipline teacher was not there. The room was filled with those aliens. Fortunately, they had only slightly better combat power compared to a normal person. And they didn’t even come up with any special attacks to subdue me.” Although Zhang Heng made it sound like it was no big deal, Bai Qing could imagine just how dangerous the situation was.

  “I see now,” she replied, “Director Gao from Children’s Palace told me that you have been lying to me from the beginning. If I hadn’t seen you using Lego bricks to build a CT scanner, I might have believed her. I think she knew I was pretending, so she found someone to follow me. After that…… the thing appeared, pretending to be you and saved me. At first, I really thought it was you, but he failed to recite our secret code.”


  Bai Qing started crying again. “I was too scared at the time and could only act like it was the real you. I was looking for opportunities along the way to run from him, but each time, only dead ends greeted me. And it seems like they are everywhere now. It brought me all the way here. It made me believe that the aliens had captured you.”


  “It’s okay. We are safe for now,” Zhang Heng said. “Just in case, I put a tracker in your pocket secretly before we parted this morning. After dealing with the school problem, I called you, and I found your mobile phone turned off. When I looked at the screen, I saw that you had deviated from Children’s Palace, which is why I came over as quickly as I could.”


  “I tricked that thing into buying me bayberry. He might be coming back soon.” As some thoughts crossed Bai Qing’s mind, she started panicking again. “And the fat boss downstairs! I think he is one of them as well! How did you come up? Once that thing steps into the cafe, they will know you are here……”


  “Relax, relax, I have a clear picture of the current situation,” Zhang Heng calmed Bai Qing. “Rest assured, that thing won’t come back to life again. It’s lying in my trunk now.”


  Bai Qing finally breathed a breath of relief. It was time to loosen up a little. After a while, Bai Qing reorganized what she wanted to say to Zhang Heng. “We have failed. Those things have total control over Children’s Palace. Other than director Gao, there is a male teacher, probably one of them as well. If the three children really left something there, it is probably in their hands already.”


  “Yeah.” Zhang Heng was in a relatively calm mood. After discovering that there was a problem with Bai Qing’s position, he figured that Children’s Palace must have fallen into the hands of those things. However, he didn’t think that they had obtained whatever they wanted. If so, they wouldn’t have been so rash.

  Attacking Zhang Heng at school in broad daylight was taking a monumental risk, not to mention that Zhang Heng’s copy was only a semi-finished product. If he could not fool Bai Qing, there was a good chance he’d be exposed once he encountered grandpa.

  “The aliens are not in Children’s Palace.” Zhang Heng thought for a bit. “Otherwise, they would have found it by now. Maybe we have complicated the whole thing from the beginning. If there weren’t some item that could deal with alien tree beneath the Workshop No. 3, the three children would have never risked their lives to hide it.”


  “Hmm?”


  “It’s been a question I have been thinking about. If the item exists and is so important to them, why would they kill those three children before they locate the item? They could have imprisoned the children and tortured them to find out the item’s whereabouts. Even with professional training, continuously withstanding high-intensity torture would be difficult, to say the least. Not to mention they are only children.”


  “I am confused. Are you trying to say that the item doesn’t exist at all?” Bai Qing asked.

  “No. Judging from their actions and reactions, I’m pretty sure that that item exists. However, it cannot be destroyed nor retrieved. So the aliens had to use every means necessary to prevent its existence from coming into light.”


  “What sort of object can’t be destroyed and retrieved?” Bai Qing asked, her eyes landing on the computer on the side. Then she thought of something and exclaimed, “The internet? Do you think that those three kids posted the method to kill that alien tree online?”


  “This is the most reasonable explanation, isn’t it?” Zhang Heng said, “If you want to spread any news, the internet is the best place to do so. Once you post something online, someone’s bound to read it and record it down somewhere. Even if they delete the original post, there is still no way to stop what has happened. So, they can only kill the source and nip the bud’s spreading to avoid it from getting known. They misled me from the beginning and made me think they were looking for something tangible. The college student was deceived as well. Whether it was the river or Children’s Palace, there were no useful clues buried there. On the contrary, the people that visited these two places would be automatically included in their elimination list.”


  “But now that the original post has been deleted, how can we know who has seen the content, and how do we get in touch with them?”


  “Leave it to me.” Zhang Heng turned on one of the computers. “As long as the information was once posted on the internet, there will be digital footprints. Do you know Baidu Snapshots? In layman’s terms, Baidu will keep on unleashing Baiduspider while obtaining data. Baiduspider is an automated program that accesses and collects various data on the internet. They would then build a database index. When Baiduspider reaches a new website through a link, it will download and store the website’s homepage and corresponding pages. Whenever a user searches for the term through the Baidu search engine, Baidu will extract the cached data from the database server. And this is Baidu Snapshot.”


  “With this function, we can quickly locate keywords and view the old web pages. If we are lucky, we may be able to see deleted and unauthorized posts.”


  After Zhang Heng finished speaking, he saw that Bai Qing’s mouth was wide open. And she was dumbfounded. It took a long time for Bai Qing to come back to her senses. She then exclaimed, “Since when you become so good at utilizing technology??”