Veronica/Ophelia's answer was so fast and direct that Gao Wen didn't react for the first two or three seconds, and then he realized that he had so simply found the key clue of Amber's life experience - an insider standing in front of him.

"Why did you suddenly mention Shadow Fortress?" Veronica noticed the changes in expressions of the three people in front of her and asked with a little curiosity, "Where did you hear this name?"

Gao Wen did not answer the other party immediately, but then asked a question: "Not to talk about this for now--since you know Shadow Fortress, have you heard of a Royal Shadow Guard named Surrey Randolph?"

Theoretically, during the active period of Surrey Randolph, the "saint princess" was not born yet, but Gowen knew that under Veronica's young appearance was the soul of an ancient disobedient. This disobedient has been moving in the world through soul parasitization. After changing to countless bodies, maybe one of her bodies was active in the Kingdom of Ansu decades ago, and even the mission performed by Surrey Randolph was related to her.

But Veronica shook her head: "I have no impression of this name."

Her expression was not like lying, but it was difficult for Gao Wen to see her true thoughts from the usual calm expression of this ancient disobedient person. At this moment, he could only believe that what she said was true.

"Sarry Randolph was a royal shadow guard decades ago," Gao Wen considered it and decided not to mention Amber's identity for the first time, but to start with the confidential mission many years ago. "We found some information from that year and found that the royal shadow guard was ordered to find an ancient Gondor ruin called Shadow Fortress - now it seems that this fortress is indeed part of the disobedient plan that year?"

Amber next to him followed Gao Wen's words: "Can you tell me in detail about the situation of this fortress? What is it studying? Why do you say it was abandoned?"

Veronica glanced at Amber deeply, which made the latter subconsciously feel guilty, and then said: "It's a wrong route - a route of escape and evasion. The Shadow Project tries to completely change the essence of human life, and by transforming into a certain shadow creature, hiding into the shadow world to avoid the tide of demons in the real world, and even avoiding the power of the gods. Shadow Fortress is the main research base of this project."

"Change the essence of human life? Transform into a shadow creature to hide in the shadow world?" Gao Wen frowned. This answer was vaguely consistent with some of the speculations he had made after seeing Sarry Randolph's diary. The essence of the plan was actually the "human continuation plan". Therefore, the shadow fortress must have been established to allow humans to escape disasters, but is the shadow world really a world that can escape the demon tide?

Veronica nodded slightly: "The Shadow World has existed forever, and the Shadow Inhabitants are a group that is older than humans, elves, and all the smart creatures known on the continent. Therefore, after launching the plan of disobedience, we naturally noticed them. Various evidences show that various changes in the real world will produce corresponding changes in the Shadow Inhabitants with certain mapping rules. Therefore, after the tide of magic happens in the real world, things in the Shadow Inhabitants will also change accordingly. In this process, the Shadow Inhabitants have never been affected...

"They have some kind of elemental creature-like traits that allow them to avoid the influence of the magic tide and quickly adapt to the new environment after the magic environment changes greatly, and re-stabilize their own form.

"On the other hand, the power of shadow is the most mysterious and widely distributed among all the elemental and element-like fields known. The shadow world covers our real world 100% without having huge limitations like other elemental fields. From the perspective of "development potential", the shadow world is a shelter worth choosing than other elemental fields.

"Together with these factors, the disobedients launched the Shadow Project in the early stages of the beginning of the plan and built a subspace fortress in the space gap near the Shadow Realm. For the needs of studying the environment, the fortress has no physical entrances and exits, but is connected to the material world through certain space-time anchors."

As promised, Veronica was very frank when it came to disobeying plans. She did not hide the brief information about Shadow Fortress, allowing Gao Wen to have a general understanding of the fortress's ins and outs.

"What's the specific way?" Pittman, who had never spoken on the side, suddenly said, "How did you transform humans into shadow creatures?"

"The initial method was simple and crude. In a way similar to the 'elemental erosion', the shadow power was directly introduced into the human body in batches, and gradually changed the material structure of the human body in this process. In this way, we created some mutants with powerful shadow power, but the state of the mutants was extremely unstable. The human soul could not completely control the external shadow power, and its body could not withstand huge mutations. The volunteers who initially received the transformation quickly could not distinguish the difference between the material world and the shadow world, and gradually lost the self-cognition of human beings..."

Veronica shook her head as she said.

"After we accumulated experience and realized that simply introducing external forces to change the material body is not enough. It also requires transformation at the soul level and cultivating the experimental subject's adaptability to shadow power from the embryonic stage, so we started the 'Artificial Human' plan."

Gao Wen clearly felt that when Veronica mentioned the words "Artificial Man Project", Amber's apnea paused for a beat.

But instead of interrupting Veronica's story, he listened to the other party continue to speak-

"With the biochemical technology experience accumulated by the 'God' project, the Shadow Project team created a batch of synthetic embryos. The somatic cells of these embryos were derived from the first batch of failed mutants, but were deeply transformed and stabilized. At the same time, we also captured the same number of shadow residents. After combining and re-encoded their souls and human souls, we created synthetic souls that can maintain human nature and control the power of shadows. After injecting them into the embryo, we formed an 'artificial human'."

At this moment, Gao Wen finally couldn't help but speak out: "The soul of an artificial human is a shadow inhabitant?!"

"It's a mixture of humans and shadow dwellers," Veronica corrected. "Although this sounds incredible, the shadow dwellers have soul structures similar to humans - in fact, they are almost a kind of 'spirit' creature. Apart from the shadow clouds and runes of unknown origin, they have only souls - and in the ancient Gondor era, the empire mastered very advanced soul extraction and transformation techniques."

Speaking of this, the ancient disobedient pointed at himself and smiled faintly: "You should be able to think that I am also a user of this technology."

There is no doubt that "Ophelia Norton", who has survived for more than a thousand years by relying on the soul parasitic form, has also accepted the transformation at the soul level.

However, at this moment, Gao Wen did not have extra thoughts to pay attention to these technical details. He just subconsciously glanced at Amber.

She is not a half-elf at all.

She is a "mixed blood" between humans and shadow residents, and a mixed blood on the soul level.

Amber also turned her head and looked at Gao Wen. After a brief thought and silence, she turned to Veronica: "How many such 'embryos' were created in total back then?"

"There were 126 who survived successfully," Veronica said. "This is the report I received back then."

"Then why was this project abandoned?" Gao Wen asked immediately, "Is there any hidden danger?"

What he is most concerned about now is the reason for the abandonment of this project, because it directly affects whether there is some hidden danger for those "artificial human embryos" - although Amber has grown up healthily for decades, who can guarantee that she will not have any problems one day in the future?

Veronica's eyes swept between Gao Wen and Amber, and after a few seconds of recollection, she whispered: "If an artificial person survives, there is no hidden danger, but there is something wrong with the project itself.

"After the experimental process entered the embryo culture stage, the entire Shadow Fortress and even the subspace rifts in which the experimental group were located entered an unstable state. Additional energy flows of unknown sources appeared in the fortress's energy circuit, and mysterious and brief echoes frequently appeared in the communication system. The projections of the shadow residents wandered around the building. In the later stage, some rooms even disappeared out of thin air, and some corridors had strange phenomena of extra branches.

"While the fortress was abnormal, the core personnel of the project also began to be troubled by frequent hallucinations and auditory hallucinations. Many people reported that they heard embryos still in the culture warehouse talking, and heard embryos talking to each other in a hoarse noise, but all the monitoring equipment found no evidence in this regard. When the project was difficult to progress to the embryos gradually growing into juvenile bodies, these strange situations became more and more intense - the phenomenon of auditory hallucinations began to spread to rooms outside the central area, and it became increasingly difficult for researchers to distinguish the boundaries of reality, and the entire Shadow Fortress began to show a state of "reality splitting".

"We tried a variety of extraordinary countermeasures, and they all failed in the end. The risk assessment department judged that the experiment in Shadow Fortress may have leveraged the 'domain boundaries' besides the Shadow World and the present world. In order to prevent the project from breaking through the security barrier and attracting the attention of the gods, I had to order the entire 'Shadow Project' to be terminated, and the Shadow Fortress was also abandoned."

This is the end of Shadow Fortress.

Pitman looked into Veronica's eyes and asked slowly, "What afterwards? Those embryos stayed in the fortress?"

"At that time, the embryos had grown into juvenile bodies, but were inactive, and I ordered them to be destroyed - before they opened their eyes," Veronica said. "The project was out of control and nothing could be left behind. It would be better for those subjects to disappear before they gained their own will than let them face death after they were born."

Amber took a light breath and asked in a low voice: "Are all destroyed?"

"All were destroyed, at least that's what the report I received."

"But there is actually one left." Amber looked at Veronica and said word by word.

Veronica raised her eyebrows slightly, but did not speak, but responded to Amber's gaze.

Amber pointed at himself, and his tone was calm: "I am the 36th Man."

"Ah," Veronica said softly, but not much surprise, "It's true..."

Gao Wen looked at her: "What do you mean? Have you been..."

"No, I didn't recognize her before," Veronica shook her head, "but how hard is it to guess the truth after you asked so many questions?"

While saying that, she looked Amber carefully for a long time, sighing with a little bit: "So... this is what you have when you grow up."

Amber couldn't help but step forward: "Do you have nothing else to say?"

"In the past thousand years, few things will surprise me, and what happened today finally surprised me... I know you don't want to hear this, but this is my most real idea now," Veronica responded calmly to Amber's gaze, but there was really no surprise in her calm expression. "I don't know how you survived. Perhaps this is related to the hallucination phenomenon that enveloped the entire Shadow Fortress at that time, but your survival was a surprise to me - I'm very happy to see you standing here so healthy."

"Oh? Isn't it a pity that I didn't destroy me back then?" Amber stared at Veronica, "Isn't this a hidden danger to you?"

Veronica's answer was very calm and calm: "You have grown up safely to this day, and it is no longer a hidden danger."

Gao Wen's eyes moved between Amber and Veronica. He thought Amber's reaction would be very intense, but after a few seconds of silence, the other party just shook his head: "That's it."
Chapter completed!