The lower level was the edge of 'Fishbone Street'.
The air here was more stagnant than anywhere else, as though it were the exhaust fumes from the digestion of some gigantic organism. Karen Vance dragged a heavy black plastic bag across the sloping, slippery metal planks. It contained the remains of Old Pete's tissue, which had become so mutated that the B.R.A.'s research department had deemed it worthless and labelled it "waste".
According to regulations, this waste should have been sent to the regional incinerator, but Karen took a different route. She arrived at an abandoned drain where organic sludge from high-rise emissions had accumulated.
'Hiss—' Karen unzipped the plastic bag. In that instant, the pent-up odour in the confined space was released like a bomb — the Adam cells, no longer protected by the human immune system and completely out of control, were still undergoing their final distorted metabolism after death and emitting a strong, almost bitter, bloody smell.
Karen's body jolted violently and his jaw muscles twitched involuntarily. Glands in his mouth began pumping frantically and a clear, viscous liquid spilled from between his teeth and dripped onto the metal plate beneath his feet. With a hiss, the hard alloy plate gave off a faint corroding sound and a puff of white smoke.
This was the digestive fluid unique to 'deep-sea creatures', containing extremely high concentrations of lysozyme and bio-acids capable of easily dissolving even the hardest shells of deep-sea organisms.
'Damn it...' Karen slammed his forehead against the iron pillar beside him, trying to suppress the almost uncontrollable urge with pain.
However, the limbs in the bag were no longer rotting garbage in his retina, but red veins of minerals, a spring flowing with high-energy nutrient solution.
He could clearly see the texture of each severed blood vessel and the dark purple muscle fibres trembling slightly in the air. Although they were lifeless, the presence of Adam cells meant they still contained enough energy to energise Karen's cells.
Her hand trembled as she reached for his collar, trying to find the last suppressant, but she found nothing; her fingertips only touched the cold outer shell of the needle. In that instant, the world changed colour in his eyes.
The sound of the torrential rain vanished, replaced by the roar of blood surging through his veins. He could even hear the heartbeat of a rat lurking in the shadows a hundred metres away. His tongue swept across his palate involuntarily; his two rows of fine, needle-like teeth had fully grown in, stretching his gums until they bled profusely. He felt no pain, only extreme thirst.
It was the 'hunger resonance' of a deep-sea predator.
When the flesh and blood of his own kind were exposed to the air, his genetic code was forcibly awakened. His abdomen began to spasm violently and his stomach acid churned. He felt a barbed hand reach out from his throat, trying to grasp anything to fill the void. 'Just one bite...' a low, wet voice whispered in his mind.
'You can't save him, but you can make him part of you, transforming his lowly, wasted life into fuel to sustain your "humanity". Isn't that the most perfect 'recycling'?"
Karen's eyes were completely consumed by a ghostly blue light. He slowly crouched down, his long, slender fingers swelling with blood and his nails transforming into translucent blades that dug deeply into the edge of the plastic bag.
He approached the dark red mass of tissue with his nose.
His saliva flowed faster and faster, dripping down his chin and dissolving the surface flesh of Old Pete's remains into a groove. He opened his mouth. In that instant, he ceased to be B.R.A.'s star employee and Karen, a human being, and became a deep-sea monster imprisoned on land: a genetic engineering miracle that had escaped.
'If I were you, I wouldn't have dinner there.' A hoarse, echoing voice drifted from the shadows of the drain. Karen froze, adopting a bizarre, beast-like defensive stance with her back arched high and a low growl emanating from deep within her throat. A creature defying all logic emerged from the shadows.
He wore a tattered lab coat, but beneath it there was no skeleton; his body seemed pieced together from countless half-melted waxes, with skin that was constantly flowing and reassembling. Even his face wasn't fixed – his left eye might slip to his mouth in a second, or his ear might end up on his collarbone. He was "The Fusionist", Aris Thorne.
'This low-grade, corrupt protein will only make your evolution mediocre,' Aris said, walking with a voice like countless whispers. 'Karen, the Achilles gene within you is crying out; it craves a higher logic, not the remnants of these porters.' Karen bit his tongue hard, forcing a sliver of sanity back through the excruciating pain.
'Thorne...' he managed, his voice still tinged with wildness.
Aris stopped five metres away. Suddenly, a long, fleshy tentacle sprouted from his body and coiled around a piece of limb corroded by Karen's saliva, bringing it to his ever-shifting mouth. 'Look at you, dressed in that ridiculous black outfit, pretending to be a guardian of order.'
With a slurp, Aris swallowed the piece of flesh and let out a satisfied groan. 'This tastes filthy, filled with the anxiety of the middle zone and cheap spices. But I'm different from you. I don't need suppressants. I embrace this hunger, and that's why I'm whole.'
"I am not a monster like you." Karen knelt on one knee, panting heavily. "A monster?" In this 'sanctuary', only pruned potted plants are 'human'. You, me and even Silas are all outcasts, struggling in this quagmire.' Suddenly, Aris's figure elongated eerily, appearing before Karen. A relatively intact hand emerged from the flowing flesh, its fingernails filled with nerve fragments carrying memories.
'Did you feel it? The tentacle I grafted onto you,' Aris whispered seductively in Karen's ear. 'It's telling you the truth. It's telling you why you need to eat red meat to survive: because it was originally extracted from your mother's spinal cord.'
"Shut up!" Karen swung her right arm, and a spiky bio-spike instantly sprang from her sleeve and transformed into a cold glint that swept towards Aris's head. However, Aris's head caved in like liquid and she easily dodged the attack. Her body then wrapped itself around Karen's arm. The slippery, warm sensation made Karen feel sick.
"Don't rush to kill me. Your 'masters' are watching you.' Aris pointed to a nearby flashing surveillance camera. 'Silas is behind the screen, watching you like a gladiator in a Colosseum. He wants to know if you'll eat this bag of garbage or ask me for help."
Karen looked down at the monitor, an unprecedented sense of humiliation rising within him. He looked again at the bag of Old Pete's remains. He was still hungry, and his saliva still corroded the ground, but this time he felt a deeper resonance — a destructive yearning for freedom.
Suddenly, he reached out, not to grab the bag of meat, but to plunge it into his thigh. With a soft thud, the spikes pierced his muscle deeply. Karen let out a muffled groan; the intense pain overwhelmed his senses and his distorted irises slowly faded. He used the dopamine released by the self-harm to suppress his cannibalistic instincts.
"An interesting choice." Aris took a step back and his flesh and blood reformed into a blurry human form. 'You chose self-torture. It's a kind of evolution, Karen. It's excess flesh, called 'guilt'."
Aris disappeared into the shadows, leaving only a light, fleeting sentence: 'Go to number 4 Fishbone Street and see a girl named Leah. If your 'red flesh' is finished, her blood... might remind you what true 'holiness' is.'
Karen collapsed in the torrential rain, blood gushing from his thigh, but it had returned to its human crimson colour. He looked at the bag containing Old Pete's remains, finally taking a deep breath and lighting the high-temperature incendiary stick he was carrying.
Flames shot into the sky and, in the orange-red light, the last traces of Old Pete turned to ash.
Karen stood before the flames, feeling the corrosive saliva gradually drying in his mouth.
He knew that the next hunger would be more intense and irresistible.
This was the central area of the Sanctuary, also known as the 'White Tower' of the B.R.A. headquarters.
Unlike the lower and middle levels, there was no rusty smell or acrid stench here. The air was permeated with an almost ethereal purity, resulting from high concentrations of ozone and a powerful filtration system. The walls were made of nanoceramic, a colourless material devoid of emotion, making the area resemble a giant operating theatre. Karen Vance stepped through the first isolation door.
A synthesised mechanical voice echoed in the confined space: 'Identification: Execution Department, Number 00-Achilles. Biohazard scan in progress.' Hundreds of powerful ultraviolet lamps instantly switched on, their purple light slicing across Karen's raincoat and skin like sharp blades. While this intensity of ultraviolet light could kill most known Adam mutant cells instantly, it also caused Karen a dull ache — the silent groan of her "deep-sea species'" photoreceptors burning under the rays.
The wound on his thigh had healed, leaving only a gruesome, purplish-red scar. To conceal the self-mutilation, he had forcibly stiffened the local muscles before entering the White Tower, thus stopping the bleeding.
"Beep—Heart rate: 142, Endocrine level: Extremely disordered. Immediate infrasonic sedation recommended."
'Refuse sedation,' Karen said hoarsely to the empty ceiling. 'I want to see the Inspector.' The isolation door slowly slid open to reveal a deep, pale corridor behind it.
This room was named the 'White Funeral' office after Silas Morgan's aversion to any form of colour. There was a white desk and a white leather chair, and even the view of the upper sanctuary outside the window was filtered to a greyish-white.
Silas stood before a huge one-way mirror, holding a glass of clear, pure water. On the other side of the glass, Karen was undergoing a deep scan. In Silas's vision, she was no longer a person, but a pulsating mass of thermal signals and a complex set of biometric curves.'His Adam cell activity has increased by 12% since the last mission,' reported the research assistant wearing frameless glasses in a low voice. 'Inspector, the "Achilles" sequence is trying to break through the genetic locks we've set. If we don't carry out the 'Great Purge', he might enter the 'Ultimate Predator' state directly in the central region." Silas looked at the unusually thick shadow of Karen's spine on the screen, a playful smile appearing on his face. 'He just burned the sample on Fishbone Street.' Silas took a sip of water. 'He's resisting, using pain to fight hunger – what a captivating will, like a candle flickering in a storm. But what if he comes into contact with the 'Ember'…?" 'That lump of rotten flesh, Aris Thorne?' Silas turned around, his eyes flashing with cold logic. 'Thorne believes chaos is evolution, but I believe order is eternal. Karen is our carefully bred 'hound'. It's not terrible for a hound to occasionally smell the scent of a wild dog. What's terrible is when the hound forgets the taste of its collar.' He pressed a button on the table. "Let him in."
The door opened.
Karen walked into the office, leaving a small, damp, cold mark on the gleaming floor with each of his footsteps — rainwater residue from the soles of his shoes. Silas frowned, staring at the stain. 'You're seventeen minutes late, Officer Vans.' He didn't look up. 'Nine of those minutes, you were lingering at that filthy drain. What did the slag smell like there?"
Karen remained silent. He could sense the 'Dagon's Annihilation' aura emanating from Silas. The command box lay on the desk, its silver casing reflecting a chilling light in the lamplight.
'I executed the target and cleaned the scene. The process was lawful,' Karen replied curtly.
'Lawful, but not "art".' Silas walked up to Karen, stopping half a metre in front of her — a dangerously close distance.
Karen could smell the extremely clean, almost medicinal scent coming from Silas. Through his eyes, she could clearly see the unhealed scales on her neck.
Suddenly, Silas reached out and pressed his long, slender fingers precisely against the wound on Karen's thigh, accurately touching the newly formed, fragile tissue through her thick combat pants.
'Ugh...' Karen let out a muffled groan, her body reacting defensively out of instinct. 'Self-harm,' Silas commented, applying slight pressure with his fingers. 'Is it to suppress your appetite or to prove your remaining humanity to me? You are a weapon, Karen, and weapons don't need humanity; they only need sharpness.'
'I am not your pet,' Karen gritted, a flicker of blue light appearing in her eyes.
"You are," Silas whispered, his voice like a venomous snake slicing through the grass. 'I hold your genetic backdoor. If I activate it, every cell in your body will disintegrate into water molecules. You'll become a colourless liquid, flowing away through the cracks in the floor. At that moment, you won't even qualify as flesh."
Silas withdrew his hand, adopting his elegant inspector demeanour once more. 'But I'm giving you a chance to prove that you're still a useful "tool".' He waved his hand and a holographic projection appeared in mid-air.
It was a photograph of a young girl who looked about eight or nine years old and was wearing a tattered dress. Her most striking feature was her heterochromatic eyes — one gold, one purple — which radiated a tranquility beyond her years.
'Leah,' said Silas, his tone becoming serious for the first time. 'She is the original mother remnant of the "Adam Project". Not only does she contain mutated genes, but she also contains the 'neutralising factor' that we have been searching for for thirty years." Karen's heart skipped a beat. She remembered Aris Thorne's parting words: 'Her blood… might remind you of what true "holiness" is.'
'The Awakened organisation "Ember" is trying to take her away.' Silas walked to the window and looked at the rust-coloured shadows of the lower level, which were bathed in neon lights. 'They believe she is a racial...' "Hope, but I believe she is the city's final completion."
Silas turned, his gaze sharp. "Bring her back whole. If the 'Ember' tries to stop us, kill them all. If she tries to resist..." Silas paused, then took a specially made, jet-black syringe from a drawer. 'This is "Inhibitor Zero",' he continued. 'It can completely lock her biosensors, but the price is that she will lose her sanity forever. I don't want to see that outcome unless it's absolutely necessary.' Karen took the syringe, her fingers touching the casing and feeling a strange heaviness.
'Why me?' Karen asked.
'Because you and she are the same kind.' Silas sat back in his chair and opened a pristine white document. 'The hunger within you can only be soothed by her blood. This is your ultimate test, Karen. Will you choose to devour hope in order to maintain your 'pseudo-human' identity, or will you choose to protect hope and then collapse completely as a monster?'
I eagerly await your answer. Karen turned and left. Silas picked up a clean white silk handkerchief behind him and carefully wiped the spot where Karen had just stood. The slight dampness from the rain quickly disappeared and the office was once again suffocatingly clean.
Karen walked down the corridor of the White Tower, gripping the black syringe tightly. The hunger within her hadn't lessened after the confrontation; in fact, hearing the name 'Leah' had stirred an unprecedented longing within her.
It was a longing far deeper than the instinct for survival. He was going to see her, not for Silas's mission nor because of Aris's manipulation, but to confirm whether there truly existed a 'redemption' in this rotten 'Sanctuary' that could be obtained without killing.
The air inside the B.R.A. Executive Department's locker room reeked of cheap, potent disinfectant and synthetic rubber. Rows of milky-white lockers gleamed coldly under the cool fluorescent lights. It was during a shift change and the room was empty. Only the monotonous hum of the exhaust fan filled the air, like the breath of a dying man.
Karen Vance sat with his back to the blind spot of the surveillance cameras, shirtless. His back, stained a dark red from the recent ultraviolet scan, cracked and popped beneath his pale skin as his spine shifted subtly. This was the 'deep-sea' gene trying to expand to accommodate the massive exoskeleton and allow for a smoother emergence in the next battle. However, Karen Vance's attention was now focused on his right hand, which was no longer purely human.
His fingernails had grown three centimetres longer than before and were no longer greyish-white keratin but a deep, cold, almost crystalline, translucent dark blue. The fingertips were as sharp as precision-polished scalpels and reflected a chilling glint in the light.
'Another evolution,' Karen muttered, his voice barely audible to himself. These blue nails were like claws, ready to tear through the thick skin of giant sperm whales under the high pressure of the deep sea. He pulled an industrial-grade alloy file from the depths of his locker — files originally used to sharpen parts for bio-bone guns, which are extremely hard.
Gritting his teeth, Karen pressed his right hand on the bench and gripped the file in his left hand, aiming it at his index fingernail. 'Squeak—crunch,' a piercing metallic scraping sound exploded in the silent locker room.
He felt no pain because there were no nerve endings inside the nail, but he could feel the vibration travelling up his knuckles to his spinal cord — his genes protesting, screaming and raging because the host had rejected this 'superior evolution'.Blue, keratinous fragments like fine gemstone dust fluttered and fell onto the cold floor.
Karen's movements were mechanical and frantic. She had to smooth these foreign objects, grinding them into rounded shapes that conformed to the definition of 'human'. Otherwise, if Silas's patrol team discovered that his nails had become fully 'deep-sea mutated', he would be labelled an 'uncontrollable individual' and sent to the bottomless pit of corpses.
'Squeak—squeak—' Sweat trickled down his temples and dripped onto the file. His breathing became heavy and his corrosive saliva began to secrete again. As his nails were forcibly worn down, the Adam cells in his body seemed to sense the threat, launching a more violent counterattack. The skin on the web of his left hand cracked, not because it was dry, but because a tiny thorn was trying to break through the skin to fill the defensive gap created by the worn nails.
"Damn it…stop…stop it!" Karen growled, dropping the file and gripping his wrist tightly. He could feel the blood throbbing wildly at his fingertips; the blue keratin pulsed with life under the light. This was the price of 'disguise'.
In this so-called 'sanctuary', everyone wore a mask: the upper echelons disguised themselves as gods, the middle echelons as elites, and he — an experimental subject whose genes had been crushed — was desperately trying to disguise himself as an 'ordinary person'. He looked at himself in the mirror.
The blue light in his eyes grew stronger, almost overflowing their sockets. He knew this shell called 'Karen Vans' was about to burst. He was like a monster crammed into a narrow glass bottle that was already riddled with cracks as he expanded.
With just the slightest force or emotional lapse, this disguise would shatter completely, revealing the hideous soul within yearning for flesh.
"Your nails are filed too round. It doesn't suit a hunter's instinct." At some point, the locker room door had been pushed open, and Barnes was leaning against the doorframe with an unlit cigarette between his fingers. His cloudy eyes stared at the dark blue powder on the floor, and the wrinkles on his face betrayed an indescribable weariness.
Karen quickly withdrew his hand and hid it behind his back; his body was tense, like a fully drawn bow.
'Barnes, do you never knock before coming in?'
'Knocking is a courtesy reserved for "purists". As long as we can hear breathing, we assume we can come in." Barnes slowly approached Karen, took a lighter out of his pocket and lit it with a click, illuminating his scarred face. He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled the smoke in front of Karen.
'Silas gave you a new mission? About that girl named Leah?" Karen paused for a moment, then nodded. 'Yes, that's what he said.'
"Don't go, Karen." Barnes' voice suddenly became extremely low and pleading. 'That's not a mission; that's bait. Silas knows you're reaching your limit; he's testing you." Barnes walked over to Karen, held out his calloused hand and tried to press down on her trembling shoulder.
'I know what you were doing just now. You're afraid of mutation, afraid of becoming a monster like Thorne. But you have to understand that, in this tower, Silas is worse than any other mutant. He has no hunger because he has no stomach; he has no fear because he has no heart.'
Karen shook off Barnes's hand and looked at him coldly. 'Are you trying to persuade me to disobey, or are you helping Silas test me?'
Barnes gave a bitter smile, pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and stuffed it into Karen's hand.
'This is a private pass for Fishbone Street. Take the girl and run. Leave the Sanctuary and head to the 'Wasteland' outside. It's highly radioactive and teeming with mutants, but at least you won't have to file your nails in front of the mirror anymore.'
Gripping the note tightly, Karen's gaze fell on Barnes' neck, where he spotted an unusual fluctuation: a tiny, almost imperceptible bump embedded beneath the skin. It was a "remote-controlled biological bomb" developed by B.R.A.'s research department.
Karen's heart sank. He understood: Barnes was also being monitored and might have been given a death order.
"I'll consider it." Karen put away the note, stood up and put his black executive department trench coat back on, buttoning it all the way up one button at a time until it was completely sealed. He walked to the sink, turned on the tap and flushed the dark blue keratin powder on the floor down the drain.
Water splashed against the pool floor with a crisp sound while his worn-down, ominously blue fingernails seemed to mock his futile struggle.
"Barnes." Karen stopped before leaving the locker room but didn't turn back.
"What?"
'If one day I really do eat "red meat", don't hesitate. Shoot me in the back.' Barnes didn't answer; he just watched the cigarette butt burn between his fingers until the sparks seared his skin. Karen stepped out of the White Tower into a downpour. Black raindrops lashed against his newly worn-down fingertips, creating icy ripples. He could feel the subtle keratinisation occurring beneath his thick black clothing, as if an invisible scale was forming on his skin.
The disguise had cracked, and that girl named 'Leah' might be the point of impact that would shatter the entire mirror.
Instead of going directly to the mission location, he headed to the vending machine on the street corner. After inserting a few coins, he took out a can of synthetic nutrient solution that tasted of rust and gulped it down, trying to suppress the bloody taste in his mouth with the nauseating chemical sweetness. But he knew it was useless; his body craved something thicker, warmer and more vital.
'Fishbone Street, Number 4,' Karen murmured, giving him the coordinates before disappearing into the rain. Behind him, through a window of a high-rise building, Silas Morgan held a glass of red wine and watched the black dot disappear into the darkness.
'A leopard with its claws smoothed is still a leopard.' Silas chuckled and pressed the red button on the table. 'Notify the recovery team: Karen Vance has entered the area. Activate Plan B.'