Chapter 265
Lily might’ve told me to meet her in the main theater, but from the second I step inside, it’s clear she regrets it.
She stands near the center of the sterile, high-ceilinged lab with her sleeves rolled to her elbows, gloves already on, scalpel flashing under the surgical lights. A couple of her handpicked researchers flank the slab where the creature lies, bloated and stretched, like someone tried to compress a thousand years of evolution into a single horrifying night. They glance at me like I’ve walked in with a ticking bomb strapped to my chest.
“Thought I said you could observe,” Lily says without looking up. Her tone’s clipped. Sharp enough to draw blood.
“Observation works better when I can see what I’m observing,” I reply, snapping a pair of gloves over my hands. “Relax. I won’t knock anything over.”
One of the researchers—a twitchy guy with a data pad and zero upper body strength—starts to object, but Lily waves him off without a word. Her eyes meet mine for a second. There’s tension, sure. History. But underneath it, there’s curiosity too. And maybe a flicker of something else: relief.
She slices into the creature’s torso like she’s slicing into a birthday cake—if the birthday cake were covered in slick, scale-toughened hide and reeked of seawater and rot. The smell hits me fast. It’s not just dead—it’s wrong. Like something never meant to exist.
“Try not to contaminate the tissue,” Lily mutters.
“I’ll try if you try not to say something passive-aggressive every five minutes.”
“Unlikely.”
Still, we fall into a rhythm.
The room is quiet except for the sounds of suction, scalpel against bone, and the occasional scribble of notes. I take the left side of the creature’s midsection while Lily handles the upper cavity. The deeper we go, the worse it gets.
“See this?” she says, gesturing toward a cluster of tissue that looks like a tangle of thick, veiny sacs. “This wasn’t here yesterday.”
I lean in. “Are those… lungs? Or, lung-like, anyway. The branching’s all wrong. It’s like they’re trying to be lungs but haven’t quite figured it out yet.”
She peels back more muscle. “And these—” she points to bulbous, growing nodules, “—those weren’t present in the last sample. They’re in different stages of development.”
I furrow my brow. “You think it’s growing a whole new organ system?”
“I know it is,” Lily says. “These aren’t just mutations. They’re iterative. Purposeful.”
The idea lands heavy. My brain starts firing, the way it always does when something new clicks into place. Despite the mess, the tension, the years of mistrust, I feel it—that spark. That thrill that comes with discovery. And I see it reflected in Lily’s face too.
We work side-by-side without speaking for a few minutes, trading tools, making quick observations, pointing out strange patterns in muscle fiber and bone density. It’s weird, how well we sync. She’s methodical, precise. I’m fast, instinctual. We fill in each other’s gaps without needing to talk about it.
That’s the scariest part, really. How natural it feels.
“We need to look at the brain,” Lily says after a while, already making the incision. “If this thing’s adapting this fast, it might not be just physical. It could be neurological.”
“Wait—slow down,” I say, but she’s already peeling back the protective cartilage around the skull.
I step closer, heart pounding.
The brain is larger than I expect. Smooth, with strange creases and ridges that glow faintly beneath the harsh white light. It looks almost human… if someone had tried to build one from memory and used too many parts. It pulses faintly. That shouldn’t happen. It’s dead. It’s supposed to be dead.
Lily slices into the organ with her scalpel.
And something black oozes out.
Not blood. Not ichor. Something darker. Something slick and almost metallic, veined with deep purple lines that stretch across the tissue like roots through soil. The veins pulse faintly, like they’re breathing.
My stomach flips. My skin goes cold.
I stumble back a step, bile rising in my throat.
Lily doesn’t notice—she’s too focused. Too fascinated.
“What is that?” she murmurs, brushing a gloved finger through the veins. “It’s like... like it’s been infected.”
I know what it is.
The second I see it, I know.
Ether.
Not the vague pull that binds two Enkians together, or the pulsating energy that flows through my veins whenever I channel Electra’s power. It’s the oppressive stranglehold that feels like fire in the blood, a tumor growing at the speed of light throughout your body. I’ve only felt this in Ao, when the sheer amount of Darklite in the city caused the ether to turn into something primordial and natural into something eldritch and sinister.
It’s poisoning them. Corrupting them.
These aren’t evolutionary leaps. They’re perversions. The mutations. The lungs. The legs. The erratic neurological patterns. This isn’t nature adapting—it’s something else. Something ancient and wrong bleeding into the real world and rewiring biology like a virus.
I grip the edge of the table, hard. Lily looks up, sees the expression on my face.
“You alright?” she asks, like she’s annoyed I might throw up on her corpse.
“I’m fine,” I lie.
She watches me for a second longer, something calculating behind her eyes. She’s a lot of things—callous, smug, power-drunk—but she’s not stupid. If she notices the way I’m shaking, she doesn’t say anything.
I force myself to speak. “You said these were purposeful mutations. That they’re evolving.”
“Yes,” Lily says, turning back to the brain. “And at this rate, we won’t be able to predict where it ends. Could be days before we see another full transformation. Could be hours.”
My mind races. I can’t let her see what I know. Not yet.
Because if she connects the dots—if she realizes that ether isn’t just a side effect but the source—she’ll never stop. She’ll push harder. Faster. She’ll try to replicate it. Control it.
And the world won’t survive that.
The creature jerks on the table—just a little, just a twitch—but it’s enough to make one of the other scientists scream. The moment passes quickly. Reflexive nerve spasm, maybe. Maybe not.
“I want a sample of this tissue,” Lily says, gesturing toward the purple veins. “Bag it and store it in cold stasis. I want to run comparisons with the earlier specimens.”
I nod. Because what else can I do? Say no and watch her start asking questions I don’t want to answer?
My hands move on autopilot. Bag. Seal. Stash. All while my brain spins wildly in my skull.
Because this? This is bad. Worse than bad. These creatures aren’t just monsters. They’re warnings. Their bodies are screaming for help and no one’s listening.
And now that I’ve seen it, now that I know—
I’m not sure I can trust anyone here. Least of all Lily.
She hums to herself as she finishes closing the incision, like this is just another day in the lab. Just another bizarre discovery. She doesn’t see it. Not yet. But she will.
Unless I stop her.
And somehow, I have to figure out how.
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