Gurgle—gurgle.
A low gurgling echoed at intervals, rising like a breath held too long and released through thick liquid.
It came from a half-sealed room, where an eerie green light pulsed against the cracks in the reinforced door—sickly and unblinking, like the glow of something alive.
The air outside throbbed faintly, tainted by a nauseating blend of chemical rot and sterile medicine. A hospital abandoned underground, left to fester.
This place lay buried beneath the shining metropolis — beneath the gleaming towers and their illusion of progress. Far below the surface, the Fractisdus worked in silence.
A sanctum of machinery and madness, where ambition no longer bowed to restraint.
Among their experiments, one doctrine ruled: To transcend human limitation, one must not avoid the Tacet Discords — but embrace them.
To absorb them.
To fuse with them.
In a crucible of violence and will, risking annihilation for a taste of something greater than human.
Yet... how could such mutations ever truly succeed? When something bends too far from its shape, it snaps.
The most the Fractisdus could create were not new beings, not higher forms... but monsters. Creatures with the eyes of men — and the hunger of something else entirely.
A spectacular failure—but in the eyes of the believers, it was paraded as a success. After all, it amplified Resonance in its subjects.
But the truth was plain: Too much lethality, traded for a marginal gain above the average threshold, a gamble of life for numbers on a chart.
"Another failure," a woman in her thirties muttered monotonously as she clicked her tongue.
"Truly a bummer." She frustratingly ruffled her hair as her terminal began to beep with an incoming call. The screen read: Caller: Dan Lin.
She tapped her terminal to accept the call and asked in a flat tone, "What?!"
Though her voice was monotone, the frustration was evident.
A voice on the other end responded, "Oh, my darling seems to be in a bad mood."
"Don't sweet-talk me right now, Lin. I'm in a terrible mood," she warned. Yet, Lin's joy did not falter as he said, "That's why I have a present for you."
"I don't enjoy luxury items, Lin," the woman said, her voice edged with annoyance. She assumed—no, knew—it was another lavish gift.
By now, she had an entire warehouse filled with such meaningless offerings.
But Lin, as always, was unfazed. "Oh, my sweet Bianca." He chuckled softly, his tone light yet unreadable. "Don't guess too early. What I have for you... is a specimen."
"A specimen?" Bianca's eyes narrowed slightly. Interest sparked, faint but real.
"Yes," Lin replied, his voice taking on a theatrical hush. "A very special one."
"Hmph." Bianca folded her arms and leaned her back against the chair.
"We'll see," she said coldly, and ended the call.
Lin stared down at the navy-haired boy, recently brought to the warehouse. His gaze darkened with memory.
Something about the child's delicate, serene face reminded him of a flower girl he'd once met.
A girl he had long forgotten. She had been weak. Terminally ill. Useless. So, naturally, he left her behind.
"Sir, the reports you requested."
A Fractidus member approached, bowing slightly as he handed over a sealed envelope marked: Parentage Test – Confidential.
Lin hummed, his expression unreadable as he unfolded the report. His gaze shifted from paper to boy.
"Well, who knew…" he murmured, eyes darting towards Kyorin. "The so-called Doomed Child survived."
He stepped closer, crouching down. His fingers, cold and impersonal, brushed across the boy's cheek.
"A miracle," Lin said softly. "You are my son."
Yet there was no warmth in his tone. No wonder. No pride. Only thinly veiled disgust… and expectation.
"Anyway, unlike your useless mother," he began, his breath a whisper against the boy's ear, "I believe you to be competent."
"Being your father," the man said with arrogant finality—his words devoid of compassion, saturated only with greed—"I command you to assist your stepmother."
He lingered there, letting the silence stretch like a blade. His voice dropped lower, venomous and smooth.
"Be the specimen she needs for her research," he commanded the unconscious. "Make her feel grateful to me."
He pulled back slightly, his lips curling into a mocking smile. He let out a wistful promise: "If you do so…" he murmured, "you may just earn the right to live."
"But..." His tone hardened. "Don't try to become her favorite."
His hand suddenly clamped around Kyroin's neck. The boy stirred awake with a choked gasp, his blurred vision catching the figure looming over him—a man with raven-black hair and pale yellow eyes.
The man's eyes were like his own, though much duller, colder, stripped of spirit. "You have my eyes," the man said quietly.
Then, with steel in his voice, he commanded: "Don't fail me. And don't even think of disobeying."
With that final note, he slammed Kyorin's head down. The boy barely registered who the man was—only that he had claimed they shared the same eyes—before his vision slipped into darkness again.
"Take him away," Lin commanded, his voice cold and casual.
He rubbed the test paper between his fingers, then lit it on fire, watching the flames devour it with detached satisfaction. As if to say: It means nothing unless my darling Bianca is pleased.
***
The same obscured room. The same locked door beyond which Bianca's sterile lab hummed in cold fluorescence.
She watched her newest lab rat, Kyroin, undergo testing as his flesh was forcefully synthesized.
But unlike the disinterested mask she usually wore during such procedures, this time her expression betrayed something else: pleasure.
No, this was Fascination. A glint of triumph in her eyes as she observed the specimen.
Just then, Lin's call came through. "Do you like it?" he asked.
"Very," Bianca said without hesitation. Then, after a pause, she added with rare indulgence, "You are allowed in my chamber. Once."
Lin's eyes glinted, but she cut the call before Lin could respond and returned her focus to the ongoing tests.
Her pleased expression stayed for a while before gradually fading. A subtle crease formed on her brow.
"A pity you're imperfect," Bianca murmured, more to herself than anyone else. She shook her head slightly, eyes fixed on the data stream.
"If you had full compatibility with Tacet Discords, you might have survived." She leaned forward, narrowing her eyes at the anomalous readings.
"But it seems…" she muttered with a frown, "…only your organs, when extracted and merged individually, are compatible."
She stared at Kyroin, unconscious on the table, as if trying to solve a riddle wrapped in flesh.
"A 100% mutation rate," she whispered. "But only when disassembled."
"But oh well.." Her voice grew colder. "We'll just need to harvest you..."
Bianca stepped closer to the unconscious boy. Without hesitation, she drove a surgical scalpel deep into his side.
The pain jolted Kyroin awake.
"Oh? The darling boy is up?" she cooed, a cold smile on her lips as she requested, "Stay still, alright."
His eyes fluttered open in panic. He was chained—limbs restrained, breath shallow. He tried to thrash, to cry out, but his voice caught in his throat.
Bianca sighed, clearly annoyed. She reached for the tray beside her and picked up a surgical hammer.
Crack.
The blow landed squarely on his forehead.
"I said, stay still. I hate being interrupted," she hissed.
With mechanical precision, she proceeded to extract half of his lung.
Blood spilled. Kyroin's body convulsed weakly.
"Well," she murmured, lifting the bloodied tissue, "time to morph this."
She placed the organ into a portable pod, sealed it, and administered a high-dose anesthetic into Kyroin's bloodstream.
His struggling ceased instantly, his consciousness fading under the weight of chemically induced silence.
Bianca wiped her gloves clean and turned, leaving the room without a backward glance.
Moments later, she entered the adjacent chamber—the merging lab, a cathedral of sterile horror—where fusion processes were conducted.
She placed the harvested lung into the morph chamber and aligned it with a frozen specimen: the horn of a Tacet Discord known as Tic-Tack. Its energy signature shimmered faintly with latent resonance.
"Let's see," she whispered, activating the machine. "If you are the golden thread or not."
***
A few hours later, a shrill, manic burst of laughter echoed through the hallway, punctuated by the sharp staccato of heels against sterile tile.
"HAHAHA!"
Bianca stormed into her lab, her face lit with a frenzied joy.
She approached the unconscious boy—still bound, still unmoving—and whispered, breathless with excitement: "Oh, what an amazing find you are…"
But the words caught in her throat. Her eyes narrowed. "Hmm?"
She inched closer, inspecting Kyroin's chest. Her fingers trembled slightly as she checked the vitals, then leaned in, eyes widening.
His lung—the one she had removed—was whole. Restored. As if it had never been taken.
"How… is this possible?" she muttered, stunned.
Lungs could regenerate, but never to this degree, and never so quickly. What she saw now defied every biological law she knew.
"Can it be…?"
With renewed urgency, she drove her scalpel into him again, this time extracting his kidney. She rushed the organ into the morphing chamber and left, half in hope, half in skepticism.
When she returned—not more than an hour later—she froze.
Where she had cut… the kidney had returned restored. As if he had never been touched. Her breath caught. Then slowly, her lips parted into a smile.
"Ha"
A small giggle escaped.
"Haha"
Then another.
And then it erupted—a hysterical crescendo.
"HA… HAHAHA!"
Louder, shriller, higher, until she was nearly screaming in exaltation.
"Praise the Lord!" she cried. "Fractsidus has been blessed!" She spun in place, eyes wild, arms lifted like a prophet.
"We stand at the threshold of realizing Lament!" she declared, gazing heavenward in reverence.
But while the one gazing upward basked in triumph, the one gazing downward did not.
Far above, a golden hand beyond the veil of divinity, faltered—its movements uncertain.
This… was not in the plan.
Yet the hand resumed its work, though slower, more cautious. With delicate strokes, it traced new fate onto a divine ledger already nearing its close.
And there, in fine, glowing script, it wrote: "Unable to endure, the mortal Kyorin will be freed from his suffering via death soon."
***
"Amazing. Truly... amazing."
Bianca's voice rang through the sterile lab like a hymn, echoing off cold steel. Blood slicked her gloves; her face glowed with rapture, as if witnessing a miracle.
Kyorin hung suspended, metal bindings biting into his limbs. He couldn't move. Couldn't scream. A gag sealed his mouth, and some chemical curse kept him conscious, awake for every second.
His vision blurred at the edges. His chest heaved in shallow, ragged gasps.
She stepped closer, eyes fixed on the cavity in his chest. His heart was still beating.
"Look at it," she murmured. "Still trying to protect you. Still pumping… still hoping."
Her lips curled.
"Pathetic. So... unnecessary."
She turned to the console. A hiss broke the silence. From above, a sterile pump descended. It was beating, yet was cold to the blood, carrying but a false rhythm.
"You see, my darling," Bianca whispered, affixing the device, "you don't need that warm, fragile thing anymore."
She clamped the arteries with surgical ease, rerouting the flow. The machine took over where muscle once ruled, humming as it forced blood to his brain, keeping him alive, aware.
Kyorin's pupils widened. He felt it—the shift. His heart stopped. But death never came.
He couldn't die.
"There we go," Bianca said, lifting his now-useless heart like a trophy. "You won't miss it."
She slipped it into a preservation case, still humming.
"Now," she said, turning back, voice bright with sadistic delight, "let's see what happens when we go for the brain."
After a meticulous biological rewiring, Kyorin's body had turned into something monstrous—something inhuman. A perfect bio-harvesting ground.
His frame, once delicate and defiant, now hosted two brains: one a donor, the other his own—both kept alive for extraction. The transformation had been brutal, meticulous.
His vitals—heart, lungs, liver, kidneys—could now be harvested endlessly, sustained by regeneration and a twisted symbiosis of artificial machinery and living tissue.
Bianca's smile had grown crueler with each procedure. Kyorin could only watch. Paralyzed. Voiceless. A caged mind trapped in a repurposed shell.
"Endure well," she whispered, scalpel in hand once more.
And so the torment continued—repeatedly—until the boy named Kyorin had vanished from the world.
***
Far away, in Hongzhen, Grandmaster Xuanmaio returned and heard the news of Kyorin's disappearance. His fury flared as he turned on Changli.
"Have you lost your mind?" he shouted, voice sharp with disbelief. His hand rose to strike her, but Mayor Fu caught his wrist mid-air.
"Think," Mayor Fu reasoned coldly. "She's not solely to blame."
But grief does not heed reason. One of his students was missing, and guilt clawed at him regardless. Xuanmaio set off to search.
Yet how could one find what had been so thoroughly erased?
Years passed, no sign, and now, even his bones gave in.
On his deathbed, old and failing, he said to Changli, now a leader in her own right: "We couldn't protect him. We can't bury him. If he's dead, we've failed him twice."
***
Back in the New Federation, a mechanical marvel scoured the region like a madman—but to no avail.
Kyorin was buried in a lab more advanced than any known, hidden from even the most meticulous eyes.
He had become more than a specimen. He was the cornerstone of a grotesque ascension through science.
And worse... he had become sustenance.
In the frozen halls of Fractsidus, some members in crimson gnawed on a piece of flesh with morbid satisfaction.
"Tch. If only more humans like that boy existed," one muttered, blood smearing her lips. "We'd never go hungry again."
"It's been said," murmured one of the Fractsidus, gnawing on a strip of charred flesh, "that the harvesting ground has lost its fertility. It can no longer regenerate."
"Doesn't matter," a researcher replied, chewing thoughtfully. "We can harvest it one final time. After that… nothing will remain."
In the heart of a hyper-controlled lab, Bianca stood over the final vestige of the once-living boy.
Suspended in nutrient fluid was a single organ: a heart, no longer soft or red, but blackened, hardened like stone.
A fossil of agony.
Bianca tilted her head, curiosity flickering briefly before vanishing into disgust. "Looks like something unflesh. Stone. That's all that's left of you."
Flesh, turned into stone. A crescendo of Flesh and Stone.
"Throw it out." She snapped her fingers. "It's useless now."
And so, the last trace of a boy named Kyorin—once human, once alive—was discarded like refuse. Not with ceremony. Not with sorrow. But as waste from a process that had turned a soul into stock.
But even in ruin, Kyorin had not ceased to feel. His pain—unsoftened by sedation or surrender—had remained human to the bitter end.
And perhaps that's why, as the stone heart drifted downstream—forgotten by its tormentors—it pulsed. Just once. A weak, final Resonance.
Across the wind-cut riverbank, a mechanical orb hovered, scanning for echoes of life. Its light flickered—and then focused.
There, lying half-submerged in mud and silt, was the black stone.
The orb stilled. Its lenses narrowed as it hovered near the mud and then dropped as if every system running in its core failed.
With a trembling mechanical voice, devoid of hope, she whispered: "Kyorin?"
She uttered the name of the one who had endured everything… until nothing was left of him that could endure, as the body was annihilated, leaving only the beatless heartstone.
To be continued...