Somewhere beneath the ruins of Beijing.
The underground complex no longer resembled the sterile research facility it had once been.
Three years of neglect had transformed portions of Project Eden into something far stranger. Emergency lights still glowed along reinforced corridors, but many flickered weakly beneath vines that had somehow found their way through cracked ventilation shafts. Pools of dried blood stained the polished concrete, and abandoned laboratories remained exactly as their occupants had left them on the day civilization collapsed.
Yet the deepest sections remained untouched.
Hidden several hundred meters beneath the surface, an enormous chamber stretched beyond the limits of the eye. Banks of computers lined the walls, their displays still glowing with streams of biological data. Massive glass cylinders stood between rows of servers, each containing mutated organisms suspended inside pale green nutrient solution.
The room was silent.
