Qinian's figure was completely swallowed by the crimson sea of flames.
Jiang Nuan clenched her palms, her fingernails digging deep into her flesh. She whipped her head around and broke into a desperate sprint toward the corridor leading to the deck.
"Don't look back."
The boy's hoarse voice seemed to still be whispering against her ear, but the searing heat behind her—enough to melt steel—already told her everything.
The fire was spiraling out of control.
Jiang Nuan bit down hard on her lower lip, forcing herself not to think about what it meant, not to think about what kind of annihilation that boy was enduring at this very moment.
All she could do was run.
Run forward.
The temperature inside the passageway was climbing at a terrifying rate.
The originally gray-white metal bulkheads were now taking on an ominous dark red glow.
The air had been superheated to its limit, and a searing, scorching sting tore through her windpipe.
Jiang Nuan's vision began to blur. The soles of her combat boots were softening, and a piercing burn shot up from the soles of her feet.
The heat had penetrated the boots entirely, scorching her skin directly.
The stench of cooked flesh mixed with the salty sea air slammed into her nostrils.
Her stomach lurched violently, but she didn't even have time to gag.
She clenched her jaw.
Don't stop. Stop means death.
Ahead, at the end of the corridor, the metal staircase leading to the upper deck was almost within reach.
But just a few meters short of the stairwell, a dull, muffled explosion rumbled from deep within the passage behind her.
The wall of fire had completely lost control.
A violent surge of heat, mixed with black ash, slammed into her back like a solid mass.
Jiang Nuan was hurled through the air, crashing hard against the metal treads at the bottom of the stairs.
"Ugh!"
Her chin cracked against the hard metal edge, and the taste of blood flooded her mouth.
She didn't stop to think. Grabbing the handrail with both hands and feet, she began clawing her way up.
Every step she took left behind a blackened, blood-stained print.
After the first few agonizing steps, her pain receptors slipped into a kind of numb, self-preserving state.
Jiang Nuan felt as if her feet no longer belonged to her. All that remained was raw survival instinct and mechanical inertia propelling her upward.
The light above grew brighter.
That was the pale gray daylight of the outside world.
Just two more steps.
She looked up, her blurred vision locked onto the half-open hatch ahead.
Then, beneath her foot, she heard a sickening groan of rending metal.
Crack.
The step she was standing on—already weakened by the relentless heat—finally gave way under her weight, snapping clean in two.
Jiang Nuan's foot found nothing but air.
Her body lost its balance in an instant, pitching backward.
Below her, the crimson sea of flames had already surged forward.
"No!"
In the split second her body tipped backward, her right hand shot upward and clamped down onto the metal handrail beside her.
The violent force of her falling weight wrenched her right shoulder with a dull pop, nearly dislocating the joint.
But even worse was the feel of her palm.
The metal handrail had been superheated by the rising heat from below, its surface glowing a faint dark red.
The instant Jiang Nuan's palm made contact, her skin sizzled with a hiss.
White smoke curled up.
The agony flashed white-hot behind her eyes, and she nearly blacked out.
But she couldn't let go.
Letting go meant death.
Her left hand reached up, layering over her right. Both arms strained with everything they had, dragging her dangling body upward.
The moment she heaved herself over the step, she squeezed her eyes shut, took a ragged breath, and viciously ripped her right hand free from the railing.
"Ah—!"
A stifled scream finally tore from her throat.
A layer of flesh from her palm remained stuck to the metal.
Blood gushed out, dripping onto the scorching treads, vaporizing instantly into a puff of red mist.
Jiang Nuan trembled violently. With what little strength she had left, she rolled herself up the final steps and stumbled through the hatch.
With a heavy thud, she slammed onto the deck.
Cold, wet metal deck.
The salty sea wind poured into her scorched throat, bringing a tearing, burning pain.
But it was fresh air.
She was alive.
She was still alive.
She pushed herself up off the deck, forcing herself to stand.
The deck was empty.
The pale gray fog still enveloped the entire White Whale, visibility no more than ten meters. The mist pressed down heavily on the sea, swallowing every sound.
She wanted to call Lu Shiyan's name.
Her throat moved, but no sound came out.
She wanted to call Ye Que, Jiang Ce, Shen Wu.
She opened her mouth, but only air scraped out of her throat, tinged with blood.
She wanted to call Qinian, Qi Sui.
Her lips moved, then closed again.
Because the moment she called out a name, it meant she was waiting for a response.
And she knew—more than likely, there would be none.
An elite combat team.
And the figure in that medical pod.
Gone. All of them.
Just like that, in the eerie silence of the White Whale?
It was so absurd.
The deck of the White Whale held only her, and an endless sea of fog.
The sound of waves crashing against the hull came from every direction, like something breathing beneath the ship.
Jiang Nuan stood in the center of the vast deck, a cold dread seeping from the very marrow of her bones.
Loneliness.
A total, utter loneliness of being abandoned by the entire world.
Since she had crossed into this world, she had never—not once—felt so acutely aware that she was alone.
Alone, stranded in a despair so vast she couldn't see the end of it.
She looked down at her hands.
Her right palm was a shredded, bloody mess. Blood seeped between her fingers, pooling into a small, dark red puddle on the deck.
Her left hand was still trembling. Both feet had nearly lost all sensation.
On instinct, Jiang Nuan reached up with her left hand to touch her comm earpiece.
All she found was cold, dead skin.
Only then did she remember—in chamber B-09, to cut off the signal from the creature disguised as Shen Wu, she had ripped the earpiece off and thrown it away.
She was completely cut off from the outside world.
But she still had one thing.
She reached into the inner pocket of her combat suit, her fingertips brushing against a cold metal cylinder.
A flare.
She didn't hesitate.
She twisted off the safety cap, aimed it at the gray sky above, and pulled the firing ring.
Hiss—pop!
A bright red beam shot up into the fog, dragging a long fiery tail as it punched into the gray-white mist.
The light of the flare spread through the fog, dyeing the surrounding dozens of meters a deep, dark red.
Then she heard a sound.
Far away. Faint.
But she hadn't misheard.
Rotors.
The thunderous drone of helicopter blades, cutting through the fog from the other side.
The sound grew closer, clearer.
The slicing of the rotors grew louder and louder, and the fog began to churn violently under the disturbance of the airflow.
Someone was coming.
Jiang Nuan's eyes stung with sudden heat.
She tilted her head back, her gaze fixed on the churning fog above, waiting for that helicopter to tear through the mist.
Her heart pounded like a war drum against her ribs.
She heard it.
Closer now.
Almost—
Then.
A gust of air came from behind her, impossibly fast.
The instant she realized something was wrong.
A chill ran through her chest.
Jiang Nuan looked down.
A pale gray tentacle pierced through her chest from behind.
Blood dripped from its tip.
In her lowered gaze.
Drop by drop.
It didn't hurt.
Or rather, the pain hadn't reached her brain yet.
She only felt something ice-cold surge into her chest cavity, a hole that shouldn't exist torn open across her front.
Breathing became difficult.
Pain arrived only at that moment, belatedly—an indescribable agony that instantly drained every ounce of her strength.
Jiang Nuan opened her mouth, but all that came up her throat were great gushes of blood.
The empty flare gun slipped from her hand, clattering against the deck with a sharp ring.
It rolled twice. Stopped.
She wanted to turn around.
Wanted to see what was behind her.
But her body no longer obeyed.
Her knees buckled, and she slowly crumpled downward.
Her vision blurred more and more as she fell.
Gray deck. Gray fog. Gray sky.
The rotor blades still roared overhead, close enough to touch, yet already none of her concern.
Her last conscious thought rested on one absurd notion.
Was she the girl in that record Qinian had mentioned?
If so, why would she appear in a record in this world?
If not... then what exactly was her past life?
That thought carried her down into darkness.
What does death feel like?
Jiang Nuan assumed it would be absolute nothingness.
But she found herself wrong.
Her consciousness didn't dissolve. Instead, it floated suspended in fog thick as syrup.
No physical body to restrain her—no pain, no breath.
Like a spectator, trapped inside something vast and alive.
There was no sense of up or down, no flow of time.
But strangely, she could "feel" this fog.
It wasn't hollow—it had mass, it had emotion.
Then, without warning, a violent tremor swept in from every direction.
Jiang Nuan's sense of "taste" snapped awake.
Saltiness.
A thousand times saltier than anything she'd ever tasted before.
And buried beneath that salt was something she had never sampled.
An emotion.
Rage.
Pure, absolute, monstrous rage.
It rolled over her like a tsunami—directionless, endless.
Deep within that rage, Jiang Nuan sensed more presences—tiny things, like insects.
They were trembling.
Cowering.
Afraid.
Like subordinates who had failed, waiting for an unrefusable punishment to descend.
Then the flavor of that rage shifted, and Jiang Nuan felt the fog's emotion even more vividly.
Something of paramount importance to it had failed.
So—it was angry.
The turbulence within the fog grew wilder, fury slamming against the fog's boundaries, seemingly contained by some force, able only to churn and roar within.
Then Jiang Nuan felt an irresistible pull.
The fog around her began to spin in a nauseating vortex.
Her consciousness was seized by an invisible giant hand, dragged toward some direction.
Time in her perception became bizarre.
Like a river.
Flowing backward.
The helicopter rotors thundered overhead.
"Bow deck, directly ahead. Distance approximately forty meters."
Shen Wu's voice.
"How many?"
"Eight. Moving at normal speed, body temperature normal."
Jiang Nuan's consciousness surfaced like being hauled from the bottom of a lake.
She opened her eyes.
Her memory was briefly scrambled, her brain wrapped in a thin haze.
Who am I?
Where am I?
Oh. Right.
She remembered.
Lu Shiyan had dragged her out of the base against her will to work.
Today was the day they headed to Sector F waters to search for the missing White Biologics research vessel, the White Whale.
They had just rappelled onto the deck.
And in the dense fog straight ahead—
Eight blurry figures were slowly emerging.
Gray-blue work suits, White Biologics logos, white lab coats.
The sturdy middle-aged man in the lead, deep weather-worn lines on his face, the characters on his chest badge.
First Mate: Xu Guoping.
The corners of his mouth were splitting open.
A relieved smile.
