“Gurgle... gurgle...”
A dull, irregular sound of popping bubbles echoed continuously in the tomb-like silence.
This was an extremely vast underground space with a towering ceiling supported by rough stone pillars covered in moss and dried grime. From the crevices of the stone walls, a dark red, slightly gelatinous liquid slowly seeped out, trickling down the rough stone veins and eventually gathering in a massive sunken pool in the center.
The water in the pool was a dark, near-decayed black, and the air was thick with a pungent stench of rust.
Beside the blood pool, a strangely proportioned figure stood quietly.
One part of it was completely shrouded in a greyish-white robe, starched yellow with edges rotted into tattered shreds. He was freakishly tall, and beneath the loose robe, there seemed to be no muscle or fat to support him, only shockingly thin bones.
This was "Winter." His head hung low, the space beneath his hood pitch-black, with only a faint, nearly frozen breath proving he was still functioning.
And on Winter's back, the woolen fabric of his clothing had been violently torn open from the inside. What was revealed was not a spine and ribs, but another face—the face of a young woman.
This was "Grail."
On the other side of the blood pool, in the deepest, darkest corner, a behemoth lay quietly on the damp black mud in an eerily docile posture.
It was a giant insect.
It was over three meters long, its entire body covered in a pitch-black shell purer than the coal tar of the East End, its edges bristling with tiny bristles resembling human eyelashes. On either side of its blunt, deformed head, tens of thousands of tiny compound eyes clustered tightly together, reflecting the dim light that occasionally rippled across the blood pool.
The insect's abdomen rose and fell heavily against the ground. With every squeeze, a damp white mist smelling of sea salt puffed out from the gaps in its jointed limbs.
This was "Chris."
“Wow! Chris, you look really ugly right now. But do you like your new body?”
Chris's voice suddenly dropped:
“If a freak like you, who has two brains growing on the same spine, could shut your ugly mouth and also clean me out of this damned, pus-dripping shell, I would be more than happy to say I like it.”
“Don't make it sound like we forced you, big bug.”
"Grail" rolled her eyes over Winter's shoulder. Her long, slender, forked tongue flicked the air, her eyes filled with undisguised disgust:
“Back at the East Port docks, who was the one crying and screaming that human bones were too fragile and wouldn't stop lead bullets, insisting on pasting a layer of chitin over themselves? You have tens of thousands of compound eyes now. If looking at us disgusts you, you can just close nine thousand of them and leave a thousand to stare at your naked little darling in the blood pool.”
“Who knew your skills were so terrible that I wouldn't be able to change back!”
“You're just dregs. Being a bug suits your status perfectly, doesn't it?”
“Enough.”
Winter's desiccated body shuddered slightly beneath his robe, his bones letting out a dull crack as he forcibly cut off their bickering.
The giant insect Chris snorted coldly, his massive black body turning heavily in the black mud.
“Gurgle—!”
A bubble the size of a washbasin suddenly burst in the center of the blood pool. The thick, blackish-red blood rolled and receded in all directions as if it were alive.
A hand abruptly thrust out from the depths of the thick plasma.
The hand was long and pale. Having been soaked in the blood pool for so long, a greasy, cuticle-like film still clung to the surface of its skin. Right after came a second hand, then a third.
These hands clawed frantically at the air, palms scraping against palms, fingernails digging desperately into the stone edges of the pool, making a grating, skin-crawling scratching sound.
Winter's head, buried deep beneath his hood, rose very slowly by an inch. His voice was hoarse and dry, like rough sandpaper grating against each other:
“...It succeeded.”
The woman's face on Winter's back opened her eyes at the same time, her pupils a dark red like overripe berries. She watched the body pulling itself out of the plasma inch by inch, the smile at the corners of her mouth deepening as she let out a sigh of near-satisfaction:
“So beautiful... Look at this smooth skin, look at this perfect skeleton. Richard, you have to admit, the fragment brought back this time is much more stable than the last one. He didn't grow any of those extra ribs during the melting process.”
Blood dripped continuously from the newborn flesh, making sticky, pattering sounds.
A young man slowly sat up in the center of the black blood pool.
His wet, pitch-black short hair clung to his forehead, and beneath his eyelashes was a pair of eyes that were equally dark, yet so deep they held not a single speck of light. His skin was of a sickly, near-pathological pallor that no normal person could ever possess, and his face—whether the curve of his nose or the line of his jaw—was identical to Ryan's, who was currently walking through St. Paul's Square in the West End.
Only his gaze was different.
There was none of the mortal Ryan's caution, restraint, or wariness of the unknown in those eyes. Instead, they held a near-despairing exhaustion and an absolute coldness.
“Ugh... ah...”
The man sat in the plasma, gasping heavily as dark red slime trickled down the corners of his mouth and collarbones.
His chest heaved violently. With every breath, his trachea rasped like a broken bellows. Inside his skull, a silent war was currently raging.
His brain felt as if it were being sawed in half by a rusty steel saw.
Countless images that did not belong to this era at all roared and churned frantically in the depths of his mind like a bursting dam.
Towering buildings of steel and glass shimmered in the night with neon lights unimaginable to mortals; the earth was covered in smooth, black asphalt, with countless steel shells called "cars" racing wildly along the roads; people held glowing, rectangular pieces of glass, using something called the "Internet" to transmit information to the other side of the ocean in mere seconds.
There were also memories of the East End: the yellowed, cursed ledger books in the archive; Team Leader Morton's harsh, withered face; Alvin, Simon, Irene...
And blood.
Boundless blood, and a white door standing at the end of the Wood, radiating a faint light of absolute rationality.
Two completely different sets of memories, two entirely incompatible lives, clashed, strangled, and devoured each other frantically within the same cramped cranial cavity.
“Ah—!”
The man clutched his head in agony, his fingernails digging deep into his scalp, carving white gashes into the fresh, fragile skin.
Beside the blood pool, the giant insect continued to watch him quietly. Within those tens of thousands of compound eyes, the tiny, convulsing figure of the man thrashing in the pool of blood was reflected all at once.
Rate on N.U.
