The hospital, the research fund, the switched newborns, the erased records.

Whenever that name came up, his head would throb.

A series of clues led Julian to suspect that the origins of this body were far from simple.

"Tell me..." Julian’s voice was weak, though fortunately, the pain had subsided significantly: "Has the Sterling family been working for CORE all along?"

Ethan didn’t answer right away, but he was thinking the exact same thing.

Outside the glass window, the sky over St. Lawrence City was beginning to lighten. The heavy black of the winter night was slowly giving way to a pale, ashen gray. The two of them had actually stayed up all night.

Ethan reached for a fountain pen from a nearby holder and pulled a blank sheet of paper toward him. Still holding Julian in his arms, the man carefully sketched out two timelines.

"Twenty-eight years ago, Professor Hale and my mother launched the Genesis Project. Then he died, my mother left, and the project was completely suspended. Twelve years later, my parents uncovered the truth behind it, and they were killed."

The pen moved down to the second timeline.

"Hale died, but a slush fund under his name was kept circulating for ten years before being used to build a hospital. The money was invested into the hospital under the Sterling family’s name."

"And here." The pen marked another point: "Nineteen years ago, you were born, and then you were switched."

Julian stared at the two timelines on the paper, his lips pressed into a thin line: "Are you saying..."

"It’s the same hand pulling the strings over all these years," Ethan said, his voice much calmer now: "They killed Hale, stole the Main Server, and then used the money from his own research fund to build that hospital."

"If the money was funneled in under the Sterling family’s name, then..." Julian paused, and Ethan quickly finished his thought: "Then it means the Sterling family knew you were switched from the very beginning."

"This might have even been their plan all along."

Julian suddenly felt a profound emptiness, a sharp pang of pain piercing his heart. But he knew it didn’t come from his own emotions; it was a lingering memory from this body.

The original owner was grieving, aching for his years of suffering.

He was their biological son, yet he had been ruthlessly cast aside by his own parents, left to wander in poverty and endure every kind of pain.

"Perhaps your return was also part of their plan. When you joined CORE’s research, when you married me, it could have all been planned."

"The only thing they didn’t foresee was that you were the one who came here, not him."

After Ethan said this, he didn’t quite know how to comfort Julian. Based on what Julian had told him before, the current Julian only possessed fragments of those past memories and hadn’t lived through them himself.

But as for who had truly experienced it, Ethan couldn’t know. Yet, for a barely-of-age young man to find out his parents were the ones who abandoned him, pushing him into the darkest abyss while cherishing an outsider...

It was a shock that would be hard for anyone to swallow.

But Julian didn’t look devastated. He just gave a mocking scoff: "No wonder..."

"Hmm?"

"I was wondering why, out of so many people, I was the one chosen for that experiment. Turns out... I was the designated sacrifice from the very start."

Bluntly speaking, the moment Julian was born, the Sterling family had already sold him out. All the misery this body had endured had been orchestrated by his biological parents from beginning to end.

Family ties were truly that paper-thin.

Julian felt a soft touch on his lowered eyes. The man pressed a feather-light kiss to his eyelids, tracing down the bridge of his nose. It wasn’t a kiss of desire, but one of pure comfort.

Julian snuggled deeper into the man’s embrace, taking a soft breath: "I’m fine. I just find it all a bit ridiculous."

Ethan reached out and took Julian’s growingly cold fingers, wrapping them in his warm palm: "I’m not trying to comfort you. I’m holding onto you so you don’t let your mind wander and scare yourself."

Julian chuckled at that.

He wasn’t the one scaring himself here. Ever since Julian revealed that he was a "brainwave" implanted into this body, Ethan had been on edge, his nerves constantly strung tight. That was exactly why Ethan was so tense this time and had overreacted to CORE.

"It’s okay," Julian said, wrapping his arms around the man’s neck: "We’ll get through this."

Yes, they would get through it. As long as they hadn’t hit a dead end, nothing was impossible.

Right then, Ethan’s phone rang. It was Helen. Ethan answered and put it on speaker.

"Boss." Helen greeted briskly. Not knowing Julian was right beside Ethan, she skipped the pleasantries and got straight to the point: "Our people just accessed the old database of that private hospital. After double-checking, it’s confirmed: about nineteen years ago, the Sterling family invested a massive sum into this hospital under the guise of preparing for Catherine Sterling’s delivery there. In reality, the funds came directly from the trust fund of the Genesis Project’s lead professor."

"But the biggest issue is the day Mr. Sterling was born."

She paused for a moment, and a file sent by Helen popped up on Ethan’s laptop. Ethan glanced at it, it was data from the old archives.

"On the night Mr. Sterling and Aaron were born, there was a power outage in the hospital’s neonatal ward. It lasted for eleven minutes."

"The backup generators threw an error and failed to start. All security cameras in the hallways and delivery rooms went completely dead."

Julian narrowed his eyes. Eleven minutes? If he remembered correctly, this was a high-end private hospital, reputed for having the best medical expertise and facilities in St. Lawrence City. An unexpected eleven-minute blackout in the maternity ward wasn’t catastrophic, but it was absolutely not a minor glitch either.

Back then, the Sterling family had just stepped into high society. To encounter such an incident on the very day his wife gave birth to his son, yet Richard Sterling did absolutely nothing about it, that was quite suspicious.

But it made sense, because chances were, Richard himself had ordered the blackout.

"We can’t confirm exactly what happened during that window. But Mr. Sterling and Aaron must have been swapped right then. I’m guessing... they made their move at that exact moment. Because the next morning, a nurse in charge of that night shift abruptly resigned and vanished without a trace."

"The hospital’s official records wrote it off as a procedural error due to an electrical short. But... take a look at page six of the document."

Following her words, Ethan opened the sixth page and zoomed in. Helen’s voice continued.

"This is a scan of the internal incident report from that year. The bottom left corner has a faint tear mark. I had our tech team run a restoration algorithm. This logbook... had its two most crucial pages ripped out, the pages containing the initial statements from the doctors and nurses on duty."

"Someone wiped the scene clean very early on."

They hadn’t just swapped the babies. They had erased all evidence, smothering any potential suspicion in the cradle. Everything was perfectly staged to look like a standard hospital mix-up caused by an electrical accident.

The chaotic jumble of information in Julian’s head made him narrow his eyes, and finally, he couldn’t hold back a scoff.

He couldn’t help but marvel at how selfish human affection became when faced with personal gain. The Sterling family had truly executed the most flawless plan to orchestrate a tragic background for their own biological son.

Push him to the absolute depths of despair, force him to live a grueling childhood at the very bottom of society, and when he was finally brought home, turn him into a ghost in his own house, alienated by his own kin.

Piling misery upon misery, pain upon pain, the ultimate goal was to break him completely.

Then, using some absurd excuse, they’d make him put his faith in a completely illusory experiment. Perhaps they wanted to see how human brainwaves could be extracted under different mental and neurological states, and how much a physical body could endure in the process.

But even Julian was starting to feel overwhelmed by all this information. Because as Helen spoke, his heart was throbbing with relentless pain.

It felt like it was weeping for its own miserable fate.

The emotions were so raw and real that, for the first time since arriving in this world, Julian felt his very existence being severely threatened. Who was he? Was he the Julian of the previous world, A-01, or just a cobbled-together product of a deranged scientific experiment?

Perhaps he looked too pale, because Ethan couldn’t help but cut Helen off, telling her to hold on. The man then leaned down and carefully lifted Julian, shifting him to sit on his lap so Julian’s face was slightly higher than his own.

The man’s thumb gently stroked Julian’s cheek: "Don’t let your heart ache for people like them."