The East Port in the storm looked like a beached whale, with the wreckage of cargo ships rising and falling in the waves. Lu Chen pushed the last half-dose of inhibitor into his veins, the surface of his mechanical arm lighting up with a web of bioelectric circuits. Xiaoyu crouched atop a rusted shipping container, carving words into the steel plate with her cross: [They are underwater.]
"Ashen's hounds don't swim." Lu Chen wiped his vibroblade, its blade reflecting the sickly blue tint in his sclera—evidence that the virus was breaching the inhibitor's defenses. The girl suddenly jumped down, tugging at his pant leg. With fingers stained by sea salt, she traced a message onto his palm: [Not human.]
A foghorn-like roar echoed from the deep, making the dock's wooden planks tremble rhythmically. Lu Chen's pupils contracted—he recognized the sound of an armored vehicle's hydraulics, but the waveform analysis showed the source was three hundred meters down in the trench.
"Fall back!" He grabbed Xiaoyu and rolled behind a crane base. A moment later, the spot where they had been standing was impaled by a massive, murky-green tendril, sending chunks of concrete flying like shrapnel.
Six bioluminescent deep-sea lanterns emerged from the water, illuminating the monstrosities making landfall.
It was a nuclear submarine, bloated with tumorous flesh. Thirty mutated crew members protruded from its command tower, their lower bodies fused with the hull. Exposed spines pierced through their protective suits, and glowing jellyfish drifted inside their empty eye sockets.
At the forefront stood a decayed figure bearing the Ashen insignia, a rotting hand clutching a Neurovore launcher—fully armed.
"So Neurovores aren't just ammunition..." Lu Chen's mechanical arm deployed its grappling hook. He noticed that each mutated crew member had a metal canister embedded in their skulls, where translucent larvae writhed inside.
Suddenly, Xiaoyu clutched her ears and collapsed, blood dripping onto her cross and sizzling into blue smoke—the submarine was emitting infrasound waves, attacking their nervous systems.
Lu Chen seized her and leaped onto the crane, swinging toward the wrecked cargo ship with his grapple. Behind them, metal screeched as three tendrils slashed through his backplate, melting his bulletproof vest like butter.
He twisted midair, hurling his vibroblade. The electric arc struck one of the crew's canisters, igniting it in a burst of blue-green flames.
The explosion engulfed the submarine's forward hull, its shockwave hurling them into the sea.
Saltwater flooded his wounds with searing pain. His mechanical arm suddenly reconfigured itself, shifting into a streamlined shape as propulsion nozzles deployed from his elbow. A robotic voice echoed in his skull:
[AQUATIC MODE ACTIVATED.]
"Just how many damn features do you have?" he cursed, grabbing onto Xiaoyu's collar.
Her cross pulsed with faint light. The surrounding fish suddenly went berserk, swarming their pursuers and tearing at the soft tissue of the mutated crew.
A colossal shadow loomed in the abyss. The submarine creature panicked, expelling a cloud of inky fluid before retreating. Lu Chen seized the opportunity to surface—East Port's dock was now within reach.
On a rusted gantry crane, someone fired a green signal flare.
"Over here!" An old man in a rubber apron waved a torch, standing before a shipping container branded with Black Tower Corporation's eagle emblem.
Xiaoyu suddenly struggled violently in Lu Chen's grasp. Only then did he notice the employee ID badge hanging from the old man's chest:
[Biological Recovery Division Supervisor – Park Chang-ho.]
The smell of blood inside the shipping container made Lu Chen nauseous. The 20-square-meter space was filled with cultivation pods, each containing a crystalline girl resembling Xiaoya, submerged in fluid. Park Chang-ho was injecting Xiaoyu with a sedative, with blood-drawing needles with barbs resting in the surgical tray.
"Subject Zero is smaller than I expected." The old man stroked Xiaoyu's barcode. "But the cell activity is enough to restart the 'Ark Project'..." He suddenly screamed in pain and recoiled as Lu Chen's vibroblade pressed against his throat.
"You're in charge of collecting experimental subjects?" The mechanical eye displayed that the old man's heart rate was completely stable. "Three years ago, the virus leak in Mexico City..."
"It was me who deliberately blew up the ventilation system." Park Chang-ho revealed a grin with yellow teeth. "How else could I convince the board that we needed a more powerful vessel?" He pressed a hidden control in his sleeve, and all the cultivation pods opened simultaneously. The crystalline girls' eyes snapped open, data streams flickering in their pupils.
Lu Chen suddenly felt a searing headache, and his mechanical arm uncontrollably clutched his own throat. Fragments of memories flashed across his retina: him gunning down protesters in Mexico City, pressing the vent valve, and Xiaoyu screaming while strapped to the operating table—none of these were his memories!
"Like this gift?" Park Chang-ho retreated to the control console. "Every time the cybernetic uploads data, we write a new personality backup into your cerebral cortex." He tapped on the keyboard, and Xiaoyu suddenly floated into the air. Her cross pendant split open, revealing a USB port.
Lu Chen screamed and lunged at her, but his mechanical arm twisted, dislocating his shoulder. The old man swiped through data streams on the holographic screen. "See the real X-23 miracle—Subject Zero isn't even human. She's a patchwork of 207 corpses made into active flesh!"
The container was suddenly ripped open, and rain mixed with seawater flooded in. The barnacle-covered submarine monster returned, but this time, a woman in a white lab coat stood atop it. Lu Chen's heart nearly stopped—half of Bai Jin's body had fused with the mutated tendrils, yet her left face remained intact, smiling gently at Xiaoyu.
"Mom..." Xiaoyu's voice suddenly rasped, the first time she had spoken. Bai Jin's mutated form roared and pierced through Park Chang-ho, the old man's screams ending as he was injected with a dark green egg sac. Taking the opportunity, Lu Chen broke free from the control, grabbed Xiaoyu, and crashed through the container, diving into the sea.
The salty seawater was filled with glowing jellyfish, and Lu Chen felt his lungs about to explode. His mechanical arm's propulsion system activated again, but instead of pushing him to the surface, it propelled him deeper into the sea. Xiaoyu was struggling in his arms, her cross glowing with a blinding red light.
Just before their oxygen ran out, they were sucked into an underwater vortex. When Lu Chen opened his eyes again, he found himself lying in a coral cave, with countless cross-shaped cultivation pods embedded in the rock walls. Xiaoyu was using her glowing blood to stitch up his wounds, and a chant-like recitation echoed nearby.
"Welcome to New Jerusalem." A woman in a robe stepped out from the shadows, holding a lantern containing a tiny breeding creature. "Bishop Anastasia foresaw your arrival."
Lu Chen instinctively reached for his knife, only to find that all his weapons were gone. The woman lifted her hood, revealing a face strikingly similar to Xiaoya's. "We are the deep divers of the Quietus Church. For the past three years, we have been salvaging Black Tower's sins." She gently touched the rock wall, and the cross-shaped pods opened one by one, revealing the crystalline girls asleep inside.
"Dr. Bai Jin was our first sister. She split her own genes..." The chant was interrupted by an explosion, and the entire cave shook violently. The deep divers looked up in terror, as seawater began to seep in, now tinged with crimson—it was Ashen's blood bomb.
"Take them to the sanctuary!" The woman pushed Lu Chen toward a dark river. "The Neurovores will dissolve..."
Her head suddenly exploded. Lu Chen grabbed Xiaoyu and dove into the dark river, as the roar of the submarine monster echoed behind them. In the fast-moving water, he saw a cross-shaped monument lying at the riverbed, its inscription bearing Black Tower's motto: [At any cost, for human evolution].
A sharp pain suddenly surged in his mechanical arm. The cyborg eye forcibly displayed a blood-red prompt: [Main brain signal detected. Do you wish to synchronize neural activity?]. As he pressed the confirmation button, Lu Chen heard Tang Jiu's screams and the cold countdown of the Black Tower board:
"[Ark Project] final stage initiated. All experimental subjects are beginning to merge."
Xiaoyu's cross suddenly plunged into his mechanical arm interface. In the intense pain, a flood of memories rushed in. Lu Chen finally saw that rainy night—it was him who had personally placed Xiaoyu on the operating table, and it was also him who had triggered the poison gas switch in Mexico City.
The blood of the deep divers stained the dark river.