The metal walls of the abyssal base screamed.
Elaine crashed against the shuddering observation window, watching Qi's figure atop the enemy submarine—his mechanical left arm now fully crystallized, blue filaments extending from fingertips into the control panel. But worse was his right eye: within that swirling galactic vortex, human pupils occasionally flickered like dying stars.
"He's fighting the symbiosis." The Patriarch slit his own wrist, letting luminescent blood flow into a sonar emitter. "The hive controls flesh, but not will."
As sonar pulses penetrated the water, Qi's mechanical arm spasmed, carving three symbols: ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ (Naval code: ARCTIC). Simultaneously, the crystal merfolk army from New York Bay froze. One turned toward Elaine, its rotting vocal cords vibrating: "Traitor's daughter...return the Coral Key..."
Elaine's spinal spikes ignited with heat. Memory fragments flooded her—1946, her great-grandfather taking more than just the "Ancient Engineer" corpse from Bikini Atoll. A metal plaque with warnings now burned across her skin, resonating with the Patriarch's prism.
"Not betrayal." The prism projected holograms showing the ancients willingly giving genetic keys to the Harpers. "They were fleeing something worse..."
A torpedo struck the base's east wing. In the chaos, Elaine saw her parents in transparent chambers—their mutations reversing. Human skin reappeared as scales fell away, but capillaries beneath turned crystalline.
"Purification protocol." The Patriarch's gills flared violently. "The military engineered you as living weapons!"
Elaine's chest device activated autonomously. The jellyfish map highlighted a thermal signature beneath Arctic ice—identical to the New York Ark. But when she tried focusing, her vision flooded with warnings:
[GENETIC CONTAMINATION 79%—FORM LOCK IMMINENT]
Qi reappeared on all screens. This time, his mechanical arm ripped open his own torso, revealing a half-crystallized heart. As blue blood splattered the lens, Elaine caught faint Morse code:
· · · — — — · · · (SOS)
· — · · · — · (REMNANT)
The Patriarch yanked her toward an escape pod: "The Arctic holds the Ark's 'remnant'—the only thing that can stop genetic collapse!"
Before the hatch sealed, Elaine witnessed true horror—Qi's human eye wept blood while his crystalline half smiled unnaturally. His lips moved in dual voices: his own whispering "Find...ice chapel...", while a thousand cold echoes overlapped: "We await you, Keybearer..."
As the pod ejected into abyssal darkness, Elaine's transformation accelerated. Sensory cilia sprouted from her fingertips, detecting infrasound hundreds of miles away. One frequency stood clear—Margaret's call from within the New York Ark, woven with an ancient lullaby.
Elaine suddenly understood. The rhymes her grandmother sang weren't nursery songs.
They were activation codes.
The Deep Hunter base bled from its walls.
Elaine crouched in the cell corner, watching blue slime ooze through alloy seams—not water, but some living culture medium. Three hours ago, Xu Miao's mechanical tentacles had dragged her into this sunken oil rig amidst screams that had since faded into eerie silence.
"Don't touch the slime." A hoarse voice came through the bars—Old Chen, the fisherman who'd shared fresh water at the shelter, his ulcer-covered hand still wearing the copper ring. "It rouses them."
The slime abruptly retracted as if understanding. Elaine's wrist monitor jumped to 58% contamination, her new pearlescent scales replacing rotten tissue at accelerated rates. She touched the prism hidden in her waist pocket—given by Qi during the chaos—now maintaining perfect 37°C resonance with her body.
Gears ground in the corridor. Elaine feigned unconsciousness, glimpsing Xu Miao pushing a surgical gurney past. The strapped-down boy convulsed, his tail fin crudely grafted with mechanical limbs, three crystal tubes protruding from his neck. Worst were his eyes—pupils split into hexagons, madly recording everything.
"Subject 49, neural grafting complete." Xu spoke into her wrist unit. "Contamination 82%, exceeding safety thresholds...Yes, General Mo, memory wipe standing by."
When footsteps faded, the prism projected Qi's hologram—his right eye normal amber, left glowing with Engineer nacre. "Listen," his voice seemed light-years away, "this isn't a Hunter base, but the military's 'Neptune B-7 Lab.' They're breeding living sonar using Type-Betas—weapons to track Engineer frequencies."
Old Chen coughed up a metal-wrapped flesh clot. "Girl...they planted something in my skull..." He ripped his shirt open, revealing a chest crystal implant. "But some memories persist...Bikini Atoll...what your great-grandfather recovered wasn't..."
Ceiling nozzles sprayed anesthetic gas. Holding her breath, Elaine saw all cell doors slide open automatically. Dozens of modified merfolk marched like puppets, their necks sprouting fiber-optic nerves connecting to a central jellyfish-shaped biocomputer.
The prism burned. Qi's image switched to a 3D map highlighting a "Memory Stripping Chamber" in the lowest level—where a star-shaped marker pulsed with her parents' life signs.
"They're whispering..." Old Chen's pupils dilated, luminous networks surfacing beneath his skin. "Hear them? The dead from Mariana Trench...begging..."
The entire rig tilted suddenly. Seawater burst from ruptured pipes yet miraculously avoided Elaine. Her new scales were manipulating aqueous trajectories within ten meters.
Xu's shriek echoed: "Stop the luminescent one! General Mo wants it alive!"
Elaine crushed the prism. Sharp fragments cut her palm, and when blood dripped into the culture medium, the blue slime boiled, forming translucent hands that dragged guards into walls.
The whispers clarified at last—countless experimental victims' memories flooding her mind through water. The strongest signal came from a colossal shadow 3,000 meters below...