Chapter 15
502words
Kay carved through the ice with his acetylene torch while Lila scattered cricket remains to repel approaching mycelium. When the final ice chunk gave way, a rusted elevator shaft appeared below.
Frost covered the shaft walls, but the handrails bore unmistakable bullet holes and desperate scratch marks. The elevator car had crashed, leaving only steel cables dangling above the abyss.
"I'm going down," Kay said, winding steel cable around his waist.
"It's forty below!" Lila wrapped Amy tighter in a thermal blanket. "You'll freeze solid!"
Kay held up a glowing fish scale. "With this." The mutated tilapia swimming in the ice hole had scales that glowed brighter in the extreme cold. He scraped off scale powder and smeared it across his body, creating a faintly luminous blue armor.
"Fungi fear cold and strong light." He gripped the steel cable and descended into darkness.
The shaft bottom was hell's specimen gallery.
An arched hall housed hundreds of cylindrical cultivation chambers. Inside floated frozen, distorted humanoid creatures—some with limbs transformed into fungal tentacles, others with skulls split open to reveal spore sacs. On the central console, a dust-covered screen suddenly illuminated:
【52ND CHEMICAL DEFENSE RESEARCH UNIT CLASSIFIED FILES: PROJECT PERSEPHONE】
Buck's face filled the surveillance footage. Seven years younger, both legs intact, he roared at the camera: "...the serum transforms human bodies into fungal cultivation vessels! We must terminate the experiment!" Gunshots cracked, and blood spattered across the lens.
Kay discovered a diary chip tucked in the console corner. When inserted into the reader, Buck's electronic voice echoed through the cavernous space:
【...They created Amy using my DNA—the first perfect symbiotic organism. She's not an antibody but bait—her blood makes fungi addictively cluster, allowing military forces to eliminate them with cryogenic weapons...I escaped with Amy, but left my leg behind...】
Ice crawled up Kay's spine. He stared at a cultivation chamber in the corner—a legless skeleton curled inside, remnants of hazmat unit tattoos still visible on the decayed torso.
This was the real Buck Holland.
Lila's scream echoed from above! Kay looked up to see the steel cables violently shaking. The intercom crackled with her panicked voice: "Amy jumped down!"
A shadow flashed past Kay. Amy plummeted toward the cultivation pods like a diving falcon, heading straight for the massive central chamber—inside floated a pulsating golden mass, its surface webbed with blood vessel-like filaments.
"Mother core!" Kay sprinted forward.
Amy had already reached the hatch, slicing her wrist and smearing blood across the glass. The moment her blood touched the cryogenic fluid, the fleshy mass convulsed violently!
"It's awakening!" Kay snatched Amy and backpedaled. The cultivation chamber exploded! The golden mass expanded into a towering fungal tree, its crown splitting open to spew thick clouds of spores!
"Deep Freeze Protocol... activate!" Kay thrust the USB drive upward.
Too late. The spore cloud engulfed them, jasmine fragrance drowning their consciousness. In his final moment of awareness, Kay saw a massive golden eye opening at the fungal tree's crown.
