Chapter 292 - 291: Is It Asher and Cecilia Caldwell’s Child?

Chapter 292: Chapter 291: Is It Asher and Cecilia Caldwell’s Child?

"Don’t go down." Lucas Grant grabbed my arm and shook his head at me. "Felix Foster and I will go check it out."

After all, protecting Gigi and getting her back safely was the police’s responsibility.

I shook my head. "It’s not just for Gigi. I have this feeling... something down there is drawing me in."

I didn’t know why, but I just had to go see for myself.

The feeling was incredibly strong.

It was indescribable, but the pull was undeniable.

"Let’s go see." Asher took my hand and led me down.

"Do you feel it too?" I asked Asher nervously.

He nodded.

Felix Foster scratched his head in confusion and looked at Lucas Grant. "Do you feel it?"

Lucas Grant rolled his eyes. "All I know is that it’s probably dangerous down there. Curiosity killed the cat, and I’m not that curious."

Even though we knew it was dangerous, we all went down anyway.

Mason Carter followed nervously behind us and whispered, "I’ll keep watch for you guys."

In reality, he was just too scared to go down.

The stairs leading down were narrow, more like a ladder that could be retracted at any moment.

I was surprised that no one was on guard today.

It was as if... we were being deliberately lured down.

"Hee hee... Brother."

"Ball."

Suddenly, the sound of a ball rolling back and forth, along with two childish, milky voices, echoed through the long, dim, underground cabin.

I stared into the distance, astonished. ’Are there really children here?’

For now, we could only hear their voices.

"Brother..."

*RATTLE.*

A toy ball rolled over from the end of the corridor.

I stopped and looked at the ball on the floor.

Soon, two small heads peeked out from the end of the cabin, watching us cautiously. Their four bright eyes shimmered like a sea of stars...

"Big Sis, there are kids!" Gigi suddenly ran over, pointing at the two small, fluffy heads.

I stood there in astonishment. Now I believed it; there really were children down here.

"You two..." I walked forward quickly, but the two little ones seemed scared and quickly ducked away.

By the time I chased after them, the corridor was empty, lit only by flickering lights.

I felt an inexplicable panic, unsure why I was so nervous.

"Little ones?" I called out.

The few of us walked cautiously down the corridor, looking at the cabins.

The ship’s hold was lined with one tightly shut room after another. We had no idea what was inside them.

And we couldn’t open them.

Finally, we reached room 707 at the very end, its door ajar.

I reached out to push the door open but was stopped by Asher.

"I’ll do it." He shielded me and pushed the door open.

We all stood on high alert, terrified of what dangers might lie on the other side.

But when the door swung open, the scene inside left me stunned.

It was a perfectly normal-looking room, like a standard two-bedroom apartment.

The two children were sitting in the living room. The windows displayed a simulated outdoor environment, making the entire room feel as if it were in a normal building, complete with the sights and sounds of birds and flowers outside.

This was like a giant laboratory, designed to make one mistakenly believe they were living in a city.

"Daddy!" Suddenly, a little boy rushed over and hugged Asher’s leg.

Asher and I both looked down at the round little head.

’The resemblance... it’s uncanny. He looks like he was carved from the same mold as Asher. Those deep, dark blue-black eyes like the deep sea, the long eyelashes, the adorable look of a mixed-race little boy, that chubby, cherubic face...’

My breath hitched. "This couldn’t be... a clone of you, could it?"

’Those people? They actually put clones in the ship’s hold? Could this whole ship be a giant experimental zone?’

’Similar to Nathan Lawson’s experimental zone.’

Asher stared intently at the child hugging him, just about to speak.

The little boy looked at me blankly. "Mommy, why do you... look a little different?"

In the living room, the little girl was hiding behind a wall, peeking at me timidly. "It is Mommy!"

Then she rushed over and hugged me.

I almost instinctively wrapped her in my arms.

’She’s so sweet...’

The little girl and boy looked like they were cast from the same mold. You could tell at a glance they were boy-girl twins, both with the same deep eyes and adorable faces.

They looked so much like Asher.

"They look a bit... like you," Asher whispered.

"These two kids... they look so much like you two," Felix Foster said in amazement.

Lucas Grant was clearly bewildered too. "If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you two had them."

Picking up the little girl, I walked into the living room.

The two-bedroom apartment was simple. A wedding photo hung on the wall... and the man and woman in the picture were Sebastian Lancaster and Cecilia Caldwell.

I stared at Asher in shock.

"The photos in this room are all of Sebastian Lancaster and Cecilia Caldwell," Felix Foster added in surprise.

"That’s Mommy and Daddy." The little boy pointed at the ’Cecilia Caldwell’ in the photo and said she was his mommy.

Then he looked at me again. "Mommy, why don’t you look like the picture anymore?"

I was speechless for a long moment.

’What does this mean?’

"This entire lower deck seems to have been opened for us deliberately. It’s too obvious, too intentional. Someone guided us to these two children," Asher said in a low voice.

"Have you two ever met your mommy and daddy?" I asked quietly.

They both shook their heads. "Nanny said Mommy and Daddy are scientists on a mission. It’ll be a few years before they come back. We have to wait for them at home and not go outside."

I sucked in a sharp breath and looked at the other doors in the corridor. "Don’t tell me... all those rooms are full of children?"

"They’re all dead," the little boy said suddenly. "They were eliminated..."

"What do you mean?" A chill ran down my spine.

"Only the excellent babies get to live and meet Mommy and Daddy," the little boy said earnestly.

"Brother protects me..." The little girl hugged me tighter and whispered in my ear that her brother protects her.

I couldn’t imagine what horrible things these two children, who looked to be only three or four years old, had experienced here.

"Look at this." Felix Foster spotted a camera in the living room and also found a tablet on a bookshelf.

"This is experimental data. The data is on you two." Felix Foster handed the tablet to Asher.

The data inside was on Sebastian Lancaster and Cecilia Caldwell.

"Biologically speaking, they’re your and Cecilia Caldwell’s offspring. Her parents took her eggs when she reached sexual maturity and used them for embryonic cultivation to create the next generation. Because Cecilia’s genes are defective, it was very difficult to produce a healthy embryo. These two must be a miracle."

Felix Foster looked at the experimental data and the researcher’s confession on the tablet, then played a video and handed it to me.

The person in the video was Cecilia Caldwell’s mother.

On camera, she recounted the experiment’s repeated failures before documenting the successful embryonic specimens.

The two little ones... were among the successes.

Besides the two of them, there were other children born with heterochromia, polycoria, or even other congenital diseases. Most of them had some kind of defect.

But because Cecilia Caldwell’s parents died in a car accident, the experiment was later handed over to someone else.

Reading the subsequent records on the two children made my blood run cold.

Asher and Cecilia Caldwell both have flawed personalities, but these two children were even more unnerving.

Due to genetic attraction, the brother seemed to have been protecting his sister from the moment he was born. He could sense approaching danger and, as he grew, killed any animal that tried to get near his sister.

Furthermore, the two children had extremely high IQs, were highly aggressive, and would be difficult to socialize.

There was software on the tablet to view the surveillance footage. In the playback, I saw the two little ones trick their nanny into a bedroom and lock her inside. Then they opened the password-protected door to the experimental bay themselves... the same one we had just come through. If that door had closed completely, it was a hidden door, very hard to find.

I looked toward the bedroom and walked over, step by step.

All the door locks in this apartment were on the outside, probably to make it easier to lock the children in their rooms.

I unlocked the door and gasped. The nanny... was dead. It looked like she’d been locked in for a long time and had starved to death.

I instinctively turned to look at the two little ones who were now acting cute in Asher’s arms... and a chill went down my spine.

’What kind of little monsters are these...?’

In that instant, I had the strange feeling that it was these two little things who had lured us down, step by step, using the fact that the doors locked from the outside to deal with the people in the hold beforehand...

But they looked four years old at most...