"Beep——"
The magnetic card in Liu Cheng's hand swiped across the sensor zone, and the heavy gray-white metal door slid open slowly to both sides.
The main lights were off.
What hit them first was a thick, almost pungent smell of medical alcohol, with an indescribable stench of the sea buried deep beneath it.
It was like rotten fish and shrimp soaked in high-concentration disinfectant—one whiff was enough to churn your stomach.
Jiang Nuan instinctively held her breath, her fingers quietly pressing against the edge of her holster.
The cabin was spacious, but dimly lit.
The only source of light was a massive silver-white medical pod set in the dead center of the room.
It was running, its base and the edges of its transparent lid emitting a faint blue glow that cast eerie, shifting shadows across the metal walls.
"Who's there?"
A slightly panicked voice came from the shadows in the corner.
A young man in a white lab coat stepped out quickly. He looked to be in his early twenties, with disheveled hair and a name tag on his chest that read "Researcher: Yin Hao."
"Xiao Yin, it's me."
Liu Cheng spoke up quickly, gesturing at the three people behind him—Qi Sui and his companions.
"These are the search-and-rescue team sent by the Federation, and this is Doctor Qi. How's President Bai? Why didn't you answer when we knocked?"
"Sorry, sorry—I've got a fever, I wasn't feeling well... I fell asleep and didn't hear the knocking."
Yin Hao's gaze was evasive.
"President Bai... he's not doing well."
Jiang Nuan wasn't listening to a word they said.
All her attention was captured by that medical pod glowing with blue light.
Her heart was pounding hard in her chest, blood rushing against her eardrums, bringing a dull, thrumming roar.
Was he in there?
That boy in the white shirt. That shadow that occupied the deepest, softest corner of the original body's memories.
She wanted to see him clearly, but she couldn't.
The transparent lid of the medical pod was covered in a thick layer of gray-white condensation, impossible to tell if it was on the inside or outside of the glass.
It was dense like frosted glass, barely revealing a vague, slender silhouette lying within.
A human-shaped silhouette.
Jiang Nuan's feet moved a step forward on their own.
It was strange.
This was her own body, yet something else seemed to be pulling at her.
To keep this unfamiliar, nearly overwhelming emotion from swallowing her reason, she forced her mind to race, dragging up a mental debate within herself.
Two voices in her head were battling it out, hot and heavy.
One said: Get a little closer. Maybe you can wipe the glass and see.
Another said: Are you insane? What if what you see isn't what you want to see?
And a third voice chimed in weakly: What if it is him? Are you ready to say something to him? "Hi, I'm a stranger living inside your friend's body"?
"..."
Jiang Nuan forcibly shut down the debate in her head.
"Sick?"
Qi Sui's gentle voice sounded through the dim cabin.
"Yeah, last night President Bai developed a high fever and passed out. There's no doctor on the ship, so I moved him in there."
Yin Hao rubbed his hands together, pointing at the mist on the treatment pod.
"But I noticed a problem—the treatment fluid seems to be leaking. I tried to open the lid to check, but it seems to be locked. Can Doctor Qi open it?"
"Locked?" Qi Sui repeated.
He pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses, the lenses reflecting the pod's blue light.
"Mr. Yin, this is a Medical SS-Class-07 fully sealed treatment pod."
His tone was still gentle, even carrying a patient, educational quality.
"This model's door-locking mechanism is one-way. It can only be activated from the inside, and it can only be unlocked from the inside."
He raised his eyes.
"There is no external method to override this permission."
The corner of Yin Hao's mouth twitched, almost imperceptibly.
"If President Bai has been unconscious from a high fever the whole time," Qi Sui tilted his head, the smile still hanging at his lips, "then how did he operate the internal lock?"
But in those eyes, magnified by the lenses, there was no warmth left at all.
Yin Hao's face shifted color. His mouth opened and closed twice before he finally squeezed out a sentence.
"Maybe... I misremembered. It might be that President Bai went in himself and locked it before losing consciousness."
"Mm, that makes sense too."
Qi Sui didn't press further. He stepped closer to the medical pod, preparing to inspect its status panel.
Just then, the ship gave a violent shudder.
The metal hull let out a piercing groan, and everyone staggered a step.
Jiang Nuan grabbed a fixed handrail to steady herself.
Qi Sui, who had been moving forward, lost his balance and instinctively reached out his right hand, bracing it against the transparent lid of the pod.
The moment his fingertips touched that cold glass—
Time seemed to freeze.
Jiang Nuan watched in horror as Qi Sui's careless, gentle mask shattered into pieces within a single second.
Pure agony.
For an instant, his features twisted into someone else's entirely.
"—!!"
At the same time, a severely suppressed grunt came from behind her.
A dull, guttural sound squeezed out from the deepest part of the throat.
Jiang Nuan whipped her head around.
Qinian.
His left hand was clenched desperately around his right wrist, veins bulging on the back of his hand, each one standing out starkly, as if something were gnawing ferociously beneath his skin.
His face was contorted. Those beautiful upturned eyes were now bloodshot and wide, his lips pressed tightly together.
Sensory sharing.
Whatever Qi Sui felt, Qinian was enduring in real time.
Jiang Nuan's body reacted faster than her mind. She drew her gun in a flash, the muzzle trained on Yin Hao and Liu Cheng.
"Qinian—"
Qi Sui yanked his hand back from the pod's surface, stumbling back several steps.
Jiang Nuan saw his right hand.
On the palm, where the skin had been fair, a gray-black color was spreading at a visible rate. From the palm to the fingers, then climbing from the fingers toward the wrist.
She had never seen an affliction like this. Even in the SS-level exclusion zone, when Ye Que's arm had been pierced by a bone spur, the corruption hadn't spread this horrifyingly fast.
Just now...
She had almost touched that medical pod too.
So close.
Cold sweat broke out instantly down her back.
"Stay away from the medical pod! All hands on alert!"
Qi Sui's voice had gone raw—that always-untroubled gentleness was completely gone, replaced by a bone-chilling ruthlessness.
"The mist is on the outside!"
Qi Sui stared hard at the pod, his left hand clamping down on his right arm's artery as a burst of green healing light erupted from his palm.
The two forces clashed violently on his forearm, producing a teeth-grinding sizzle.
"That's a high-concentration contamination source!"
The words had barely left his mouth when something unexpected happened.
"Doctor Qi, what are you talking about?"
Yin Hao's voice rang out, low and eerie.
He didn't retreat; instead, he stepped forward.
The face that had been wearing exhaustion and anxiety just moments ago was now completely rigid.
The corners of his mouth twisted upward in an unnatural grin.
Higher.
Higher.
Stretching to an angle that human muscles simply couldn't achieve.
Liu Cheng turned his head too, staring straight at them, elation frozen on his face like a grotesque mask.
"How could it be a pollution source... that's... our... god..."
The smell of brine in the air thickened to the point of nearly bursting.
"What worthless god! Burn it all!"
A ferocious roar shattered the dead silence in the cabin.
Qinian ignored his own right hand, which was still trembling violently with bulging veins, and swung his left hand forward sharply.
"Boom—!"
A ball of crimson explosive flame detonated instantly in the dim cabin, radiating heat hot enough to incinerate everything in its path, slamming directly toward Yin Hao and Liu Cheng.
The wave of heat rushed over them, curling the loose strands of hair on Jiang Nuan's forehead.
The flames consumed both men without hesitation.
But there were no screams.
No one writhed or rolled in the fire. No stench of charred flesh.
Jiang Nuan stared at the center of the blaze.
Under the extreme heat, the skin of Yin Hao and Liu Cheng began to melt and peel away in thick chunks, like cheap wax figures.
The muscle and bone beneath collapsed just as rapidly.
And what had been holding up those two shells wasn't human organs at all.
It was mist.
Thick, near-solid gray-white fog, compressed inside human husks.
As the shells split open, the mist poured out like floodwater finally finding an outlet, raging and wild.
And within that churning cloud, dozens of pitch-black tentacles, coated in slime and covered with suckers, twisted frantically like snakes, tearing through the remnants of flesh and shooting toward the three of them like lightning!
No wonder Shen Wu couldn't read their minds.
Because there was no brain inside those shells! Only a manipulated mass of polluted mist and these disgusting parasitic tentacles!
"Swish!"
The thickest tentacle grazed the edge of the flames, heading straight for Jiang Nuan's face.
She didn't retreat.
She dropped low, right leg stepping back half a stride to brace herself.
"Bang! Bang! Bang!"
Three armor-piercing rounds bit into the tip of that tentacle in a perfect triangle pattern.
The bullets detonated the moment they touched the slime, the sheer force blasting the tip of the tentacle into a mess of black shreds.
The tentacle recoiled in pain, twisting violently as it retracted into the mist.
The recoil jarred Jiang Nuan's palm numb, but her hands remained rock steady.
Steadier than she remembered being.
The muzzle shifted in an instant, locking onto the next target.
"Nice shooting!" Qinian laughed out loud, his laughter tinged with bloodlust.
He slammed his hands together, and the flames in his palms swelled into a wall of fire in an instant, splitting the cabin in two and holding back the tentacles still clawing out of the husks and the fog trying to spread.
"Bro! Nuan! Move!"
Qinian didn't linger for a fight.
A confined space, a parasitic fog entity whose true form was unknown—fighting head-on was suicide.
Not to mention, Qi Sui's right hand was still deteriorating by the second.
"Fall back."
Qi Sui gritted out a single word, sweat on his forehead having already soaked his hair through. The green glow in his left hand had dimmed.
He was draining himself to suppress the contamination in his right hand.
Qinian grabbed Jiang Nuan's arm with one hand and hooked Qi Sui's shoulder with the other, retreating hard.
"Boom!"
The wall of fire erupted the moment they stepped back into the corridor, creating a brief vacuum zone.
The three of them burst out of Cabin B-01.
The corridor lights still flickered in irregular intervals.
"Left!"
Jiang Nuan swept her gaze across the passageway and spotted a cabin door that wasn't locked.
B-09.
"In here!"
Qinian kicked the door open, shoved Qi Sui and Jiang Nuan inside, then slipped in himself.
He turned and pressed his hands together. A blazing line of fire ran along the doorframe, welding the metal door shut.
Crude, direct, effective.
The cabin was dim, lit only by a motion-sensor nightlight that flickered on as they entered.
Qi Sui leaned against the door, his body sliding slowly down the cold metal surface until he collapsed to the floor.
He gasped for air in ragged breaths, his right arm hanging limp at his side.
The gray-black layer had crawled all over his skin, the flesh shriveled and withered, already spreading past the elbow and creeping steadily toward his shoulder.
"Bro!"
Qinian crouched down, fumbling to reach for him but freezing halfway.
The always-brash, sharp-tongued, trouble-making Qinian now had bloodshot eyes and a voice shaking with unmistakable fear and helplessness.
"Just a scratch... not gonna die." Qi Sui struggled to pull the corners of his mouth into a faint smile, still trying to maintain that gentle curve even now. "Cut the link."
Qinian's brow furrowed hard. "No! If the link lets me share the pain, I'm taking it for you."
Jiang Nuan leaned against the opposite wall, chest heaving violently.
She forced herself to look away from Qi Sui's horrifying arm, forced herself not to think about what monstrosities were now crawling through the corridor outside.
Stay calm.
Jiang Nuan, you have to stay calm.
She looked down at the hand gripping her gun.
Her palm was still numb, but the residual muscle-memory steadiness hadn't faded away.
Then she remembered those three shots.
Triangle-pattern trajectory, precise in a way she shouldn't have been capable of.
Since when was her aim that good?
But that wasn't something to think about now.
Priority one: find backup and survive this.
Lu Shiyan.
Yes, the captain.
She suddenly realized something—the comms had been dead for a long time now.
Ever since they'd rappelled onto the deck, everyone's shared channel had been live.
But with all this chaos going down.
For this long.
The channel was silence.
Jiang Nuan's heart clenched tight.
She averted her gaze, refusing to look at Qinian, who looked like he was about to shatter.
She pressed her earpiece, opening Lu Shiyan's channel. "Captain, calling Captain. This is Jiang Nuan."
Her voice came out steadier than she expected.
"We ran into hostiles in the B-01 lounge. Liu Cheng and Yin Hao are mist-parasite hosts—no bodies, just tentacles."
"The medical pod in the lounge is coated with a high-concentration contaminant on the surface; the interior is unconfirmed. Doctor Qi is severely infected and combat-incapacitated."
"We've retreated to another cabin. Door is welded shut. We're safe for now."
She condensed the situation into the briefest report possible.
Static hissed through the comms.
A few seconds of silence.
She waited.
For that calm, steady voice to say "Copy" or "Hold on."
Even a "Don't pull any tricks" would have worked.
Anything.
The comms connected.
"I know."
Jiang Nuan's heart skipped a beat.
It wasn't Lu Shiyan.
It was a cool, clear voice.
A pause.
In that pause, she heard faint metallic clashing on the other end, and a muffled, heavy sound she couldn't place.
Like something substantial hitting the ground.
Her fingers went cold.
"Shen Wu."
"..."
Silence.
Long enough for a person to run through every worst-case scenario in their head.
"Where's the captain?"
The other end fell into dead silence.
After several long seconds, Shen Wu didn't answer her question. Instead, his tone carried an indescribable sense of wrongness.
"Which cabin are you in now?"
His tone was calm to an unnatural degree.
A chill ran up Jiang Nuan's spine.
Her fingers gripping the earpiece turned cold, and she began to tremble uncontrollably.
