I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood

This wasn’t the first time Pandora had seen this outcome. In fact, during the large-scale trial she’d launched half a month ago, she had deployed hundreds of different samples.

Each sample corresponded to a meticulously designed parameter set, cycling through countless combinations covering nearly every environmental variable: temperature, humidity, light duration, soil pH.

But no matter how carefully she tweaked the parameters, the results were dismal. Complete failure to germinate was the most common outcome—the overwhelming majority.

Only a scant few samples had successfully sprouted. And the one before her now, labeled “Sample-247” in her logs, had been the longest-lived and most stable of all the germinated specimens.

Three days. Just three days. And it was the best performer out of hundreds.

Theoretically, the conditions she’d set for this sample were as close to the textbook “ideal” for plant growth as possible. Just the right temperature. Just the right humidity. Rich, rigorously sterilized black soil. A precisely controlled photoperiod.

She’d even followed every nuance mentioned in the cultivation manual Amanda had left behind—like the twelve-hour cold pre-treatment for the seeds before sowing, or the need to maintain a specific diurnal temperature range during germination. Pandora had followed it all to the letter.

Yet, just as the manual had forewarned: “The seeds are extremely sensitive to environmental conditions. The germination and early growth phases carry an exceedingly high failure rate. Cultivation is profoundly difficult.”

Pandora’s first systematic trial—an entire month, hundreds of samples—had ended in total failure. The best result so far was a sprout surviving three days.

The distance between this and cultivating a full, mature plant in full bloom was, to put it mildly, staggering.

She stared at the withered shoot inside the glass dome, its life utterly extinguished, and gave a small shake of her head. No sigh. No visible frustration.

She simply reached over, opened a small access hatch on the dome’s side, and with a pair of sterile fine-tipped tweezers, carefully lifted the dead sprout and deposited it into a sealed container labeled “Discarded Samples.”

Then she smoothed over the patch of soil where the seed had been buried.

Her expression remained placid, free of any deep disappointment or defeat. After all, hundreds of samples were merely the first systematic attempt. Amanda had warned her from the start that cultivation would be “extremely difficult.” She’d braced herself accordingly.

Honestly, getting several samples to sprout at all in hundreds of attempts—and having one persist for three days—struck her as a fairly decent start.

Not dwelling on the failure, Pandora moved to the adjacent workbench. A thick leather-bound notebook lay open there. She picked up a fountain pen and neatly transcribed all the experimental data, environmental parameters, and growth-state observations into the heavy logbook.

She then spent some time standing before the workbench, eyes gently shut. In her mind, the past month’s worth of experimental data flipped past like pages in a book.

A more refined, more precisely calibrated secondary cultivation plan steadily took shape in her thoughts.

Once finished, Pandora exhaled softly and opened her eyes. She turned to face the girl who’d been standing silently beside her the entire time, carefully clutching the hem of her garment.

“Come,” Pandora said. “The work here is done for today.” She extended her hand. The girl immediately placed her own hand into Pandora’s palm. Pandora took the girl’s hand and led the girl toward the other side of the lab.

The Cloud-White Currant cultivation lab was connected to a larger laboratory through a heavy metal door fitted with rubber sealing strips and an airlock-grade lock. This larger lab was dedicated primarily to the study of... Anomalies.

Though, given that Pandora currently had only a single Anomaly specimen at her disposal, the lab’s present—and sole—research subject was the girl she’d tentatively named “Miss Anomaly.”

She pushed open the airlock door and entered the Anomaly research chamber.

The layout here was entirely different from the plant cultivation room next door. The space was far more expansive. The walls and ceiling were lined with sound-dampening panels. Clear demarcation lines were drawn across the floor.

One side served as the living observation zone, furnished with a simple bed, a desk, a chair, and basic daily necessities.

The other side was the experimental operations zone, equipped with sturdy restraint apparatuses, an array of instruments for monitoring vitals and Ether fluctuations, and a dedicated isolation workstation for sample analysis.

Over the past month, through constant observation and testing, Pandora had largely mapped out the characteristics of Miss Anomaly’s abilities.

For instance, Miss Anomaly could utilize a wide variety of common materials from her surroundings to fabricate the “Gunman” Anomaly derivatives. Experimental results confirmed that soft leather, hard metal, brittle plaster—even certain plastics and fabrics—could all serve as constituent materials.

These materials were later positively identified in the remains of destroyed Gunmen.

But regardless of the starting material, the fully formed Gunman’s total mass consistently stabilized within the weight range of an average adult male—roughly sixty to seventy kilograms.

Its height and build fluctuated slightly but hovered around one meter seventy-five, never deviating too far.

Repeated post-destruction dissections confirmed it definitively: the Gunman possessed none of the internal organs, brain, or nervous system of a normal biological entity.

Its interior was more of a chaotic patchwork of crude stuffing, formed from the twisted and reconstituted base materials.

Yet, through numerous combat trials and prior field experience, it was also clear that the Gunman did have a means of being killed.

Inside the Gunman-type Anomaly, there existed a kind of energy circulation and control network, sustaining its activity and imparting its basic behavioral logic and aggression.

Severing the key nodes of this network would trigger the transition of the Gunman from active to dead.

Furthermore, this invisible energy network appeared to possess two relatively concentrated key nodes. Destroying them achieved a similar effect.