The next morning staff from Starfire College came to escort the 14 survivors ready to go, or take care of the remaining 5 who Lina couldn't treat on her own.
Knowing that the treatment for the boy carved with sigils may require the notes they took from the library, Kain and Serena didn't sleep the night before night.
Instead, after removing the furniture to fill the living, dining, and second bedroom with temporary beds for those recovering, Kain and Serena stayed in the other bedroom to copy as many of the notes related to sigils as possible—surprisingly there were far more than expected.
Even with the 2 of them working all night, and the use of an enchanted artifact they had brought along for this specific purpose, capable of scanning and rewriting a page's contents, they almost didn't have enough time to finish scanning them all.
When the two exited the bedroom the next day, to Lina's blushing face while giving them strange looks, they handed her over a space ring with all the notes they'd already made copies of—which probably only amounted to less than 20% of the total contents.
Thankfully, neither Lina nor the Starfire staff noticed that the quantity of notes was much less than expected, and it should by them some time to copy the rest. So while nobody was focused on them Kain and Serena headed back to Dark Moon College.
Upon arriving they immediately went to Kain's laboratory. They hadn't seen Gabriel in weeks and needed to check up on him, plus it'd give them a private area to make copies of all the remaining notes before they were forced to turn them in—hopefully, requests for the remaining notes slipped through the cracks for a few more days.
As they stepped into Kain's laboratory, the familiar scent of ink, parchment, and faint alchemical fumes greeted them. The space was cluttered but orderly, with rows of neatly labeled jars and stacks of research notes lining the shelves.
Gabriel was seated at comfortable bed that Kain had installed along with some other furniture to form a makeshift bedroom for him.
At the sound of the door opening, he glanced up, his tired eyes brightening instantly.
"You're back," Gabriel said, jumping up from the bed. "I was beginning to think you'd forgotten about me."
Kain decided to take Gabriel's happiness at his as an indication that they had grown much closer over this period—not that he was mostly happy about Serena arriving, or that he'd have some more company period.
Kain and Serena recounted the story of how they took down another lab to the eagerly listening Gabriel.
"How were they? Do you think they'll be alright?" Gabriel asked sadly, he could empathize with the terror and pain of being held captive by these people much better than Kain and Serena could.
"They should be," Kain comforted him, "most if not all of their injuries are easier to deal with than yours, so let's just focus on you. We brought back some more notes that may be helpful. You rest, while we make copies of these." Kain said before going to his workstation in the laboratory with Serena.
Likely because they didn't arrive back at the college until quite late, it didn't take long for Gabriel to fall asleep, even though he seemed so eager to accompany them as they went through the notes.
Kain and Serena worked tirelessly in the quiet of the lab, copying the remaining notes with the enchanted artifact they had brought from the facility. The device hummed softly as it scanned and rewrote each page.
Meanwhile, they began to go through the notes already copied in more depth.
Many of the documents were written in a cryptic shorthand, with diagrams of body parts, sigils, hybrid creatures, and arrays scattered throughout.
"What do you make of this?" Serena asked, holding up a diagram of a large sigil array carved into what appeared to be the floor of a chamber.
Kain studied it for a moment. "It looks similar to the one they used to summon the abomination. But this one is... different. It's larger, more intricate."
"And there's this one," Serena said, pointing to a line of text written beside another diagram.
Kain squinted at the words, his brow furrowing. "'To commune with the divine.' What the hell does that mean?"
Serena shook her head. "I don't know. But if they were carving these into people, it was likely that their experiments didn't just plan to end at creating those hybrid soldiers—as we already guessed, they may even intersect with some of the research being performed for the other series of experiments."
Serena leaned closer to him, and a subtly sweet scent immediately filled his senses. Her sharp eyes scanned the intricate web of sigils composing an array meant to be on a human body. "Look at the center," she said, pointing to a set of overlapping symbols. While Kain forced himself to snap back into focus.
'I must be tired from working for so long…'
"This is the focal point of the array. If I'm reading this correctly, and I may not be since many of these sigils are ones I had never seen before, the most important points in this array seem to have the meanings of 'heaven,' 'destiny', 'resonance' and a 'request for blessing.' Perhaps this organization is affiliated with some kind of religious extremist group?" Serena stated with evident confusion in her voice.
After all, although other nations may have a major religion, the Celestial Empire is largely atheistic. And from what they'd seen of the members of this organization, none made mention of acting in service of some kind of 'higher being.'
However, after being momentarily surprised that Serena was so adept at reading sigils, Kain's thoughts headed in a completely different direction. Could these arrays be related to the mysterious Heaven's Will?
The one thing that was serving as the major roadblock in both Kain's plans for Gabriel to begin cultivating and the main goals of both the Series E and Series X experiments?