Fog Harbor was deep into autumn, and the weather forecast called for heavy rain that evening. The setting sun illuminated the city skyline, its light striking the glass façades of the densely packed buildings and casting vivid patches of orange-red light across them.
Beneath the straight span of Fog Harbor Bridge, a luxury cruise ship moved slowly across the deep-blue sea. An event was underway on deck, where formally dressed musicians performed romantic, lilting classical music.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are now passing beneath Fog Harbor Bridge. Beiduo Bay lies just ahead. Please have your phones and cameras ready—the longest-lasting, clearest, and largest mirage of the year is about to appear before you.”
The moment the host finished his introduction into the microphone, a small stir swept through the crowd.
“It’s here, it’s here! St. Anne’s Cathedral!”
“I heard our route has the best view!”
“It better. Otherwise, why would the tickets be this expensive?”
Amid the joking and chatter, the cruise ship entered the bay.
At the boundary between sea and sky, a magnificent, imposing structure suddenly appeared. Its snow-white walls, intricately patterned window lattices, and even every tile on its pointed roof were rendered with astonishing clarity.
St. Anne’s Cathedral, destroyed in the wars more than a century ago, now stood before them with impossible realism.
Even though everyone had already seen plenty of spectacular mirages on television news and social media, the sight before them still left the entire crowd stunned.
“This… is even crazier than the Pearl Lake mirage I saw last year.”
“Experts already explained it. It’s just light refraction.”
“That building disappeared over a hundred years ago! What kind of refraction can project something for two whole weeks?”
“Something about quantum entanglement, I think? I don’t understand it either.”
“Earth Online has a bug. Just wait for them to patch it.”
…
Amid the crowd’s astonished exclamations, the cruise ship continued forward, sailing toward that strange and dazzling spectacle.
A girl standing beside the railing accidentally stepped backward while taking a photo and landed on someone’s foot. She hurriedly apologized. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”
The person behind her did not respond. With a muffled thud, he collapsed onto the deck.
“What’s wrong?!” The girl immediately bent down to help.
But the moment she saw what he looked like, she let out a terrified scream. “AAAAAAAH—!”
The heavy rain arrived exactly as forecast.
Two streets leading away from Beiduo Bay Pier were temporarily closed. It was eight in the evening and right in the middle of peak travel hours, so complaints were inevitable.
“What happened? This is ridiculous. You can’t even get a cab at this hour, and with rain this heavy, how are people supposed to get home?”
“Someone posted a video online. Apparently there was a deformed person on that ship. A ton of police showed up.”
“A deformed person? Weren’t those videos AI-generated?”
“I don’t think so. No official source has ever actually come out and denied them…”
Through the curtain of rain, a white pickup truck came racing along the coastline, shot into the restricted area, and barely managed to stop outside the pier, sending up a sizable splash.
The newcomer was clearly in a hurry. He jumped out without even bothering to open an umbrella, ducked beneath the police tape, and strode quickly up the boarding ramp.
Compared with the commotion outside, the pier itself was extremely quiet, with only the roar of the rain filling the air.
A canopy had been erected over the cruise ship’s deck, where police were conducting their investigation and collecting evidence.
“Team Leader Shang from the Anomalous Case Department is here!”
At the shout, forensic pathologist Dong Yue looked up.
The Anomalous Case Department, formally known as the Department of Anomalous Incident Control, had existed in countries around the world for more than a decade. Its branches included the Analysis Center, Dispatch Center, Investigation Action Groups, Containment Center, and others. The entire organization had operated in secrecy all this time and had only begun emerging into public view in recent years as circumstances forced its hand.
When they heard Team Leader Shang had arrived, the officers began whispering among themselves.
“Strange. The Anomalous Case Department has taken over way more cases these past two months than before.”
“That’s because there’ve been way more strange incidents too. There were two just like this last week. It makes my scalp crawl.”
“Either way, once their people show up, I doubt there’ll be much left for us to do.”
The young team leader was named Shang Lu. He belonged to Investigation Action Group Seven of Hua’s Department of Anomalous Incident Control and was only twenty-eight years old. Rumor had it that his connections ran deep and that when he first joined the Department, he had been parachuted directly into his position.
He had clearly rushed over. In only a short walk through the rain, he had been soaked from head to toe, his black shirt clinging tightly to his chest and back. His expression, however, remained as stern as ever, without the slightest trace of disarray.
Shang Lu nodded in greeting to several officers he knew, accepted a pair of gloves, and asked as he pulled them on, “What’s the situation?”
“Bruising and edema in the subcutaneous tissue. Abnormal bone growth and displacement in multiple areas. Irregular muscle tearing.” Dong Yue’s expression was grave. She pulled open the dead man’s eyelids to show him. “Double pupils.” Then she parted the dead man’s lips. “Double row of teeth.”
The deceased was a man in his early thirties. His face had taken on an unnaturally diamond-shaped appearance, and under Dong Yue’s direction, the abnormalities across his body were clearly visible. Each eye socket contained two eyeballs. Behind his normal row of teeth was another full row, while an extra tongue had split at the tip like a snake’s.
Elio’s Notes: “Double pupils” and “double row of teeth” are the literal Chinese terms used here. In this scene, the novel physically manifests them as duplicated eyeballs and an additional row of teeth.
“Fusion disease,” Shang Lu said.
His voice was low enough that only the two of them could hear.
Dong Yue gave a slight nod.
Shang Lu frowned and lifted the dead man’s sleeves and shirt hem. Sure enough, other parts of the corpse were also misshapen, with distorted protrusions faintly visible beneath the skin. He knew exactly what that meant: there was another skeleton inside the body.
He stopped examining the corpse and looked up at the officer beside him. “Time of death?”
The officer in charge answered immediately. “Around 7:35 p.m. There were multiple eyewitnesses at the scene. All of them said the deceased showed no obvious warning signs beforehand. He suddenly began convulsing and collapsed. By the time anyone tried to save him, it was already too late.”
Dong Yue pointed toward the corpse’s neck and chest. “The abnormal bone growth began here. The chest cavity protruded and deformed, making it extremely difficult for him to breathe. The growth spread to his face very quickly. In less than a minute, the double pupils and double row of teeth had fully formed. There were multiple fatal injuries: a ruptured trachea, displaced ribs piercing the heart and lungs… He died in terrible pain.”
Water was still dripping from the ends of Shang Lu’s hair, but he had no time to care. He summarized, “In simple terms, it progressed extremely fast, just like the previous victims.”
“Exactly, but I still need to perform an autopsy before I can give you the final conclusion. Either way, this is definitely a case for your Department. I’ll prepare my report as soon as I get back. Your own people can handle the autopsy and analysis.”
Shang Lu nodded.
He rose to his feet and first observed a few seconds of silence for the deceased. Only then did he casually bring up, “Director Dong, are you really not considering transferring departments? The Analysis Center desperately needs someone with your expertise.”
Dong Yue immediately waved both hands. “Everyone knows the Anomalous Case Department—”
Shang Lu supplied, “Is a place even a dog wouldn’t join.”
Dong Yue sighed helplessly. “As long as you know. That department of yours works people to the bone. I’ve got a whole family depending on me. I wouldn’t survive it.”
Even dogs wouldn’t join.
Shang Lu had.
After spending a few years in the Anomalous Case Department, his daily routine consisted of running himself ragged from one place to another. There was no such thing as truly getting off work.
Fine.
Shang Lu had lost count of how many times she had turned him down, but he was hardly discouraged.
He smiled briefly and quickly returned to the case. “Have you confirmed the deceased’s identity?”
The officer answered, “Yes. His name was Li Bei Shan, male, thirty-one, local. He worked as a construction site supervisor for a real estate company. His coworkers said he was extremely interested in mirages. He bought the cruise ticket a week ago specifically to see St. Anne’s Cathedral today.”
Shang Lu nodded. “If possible, I’d like your help obtaining the cruise ship’s surveillance footage, along with a complete record of the deceased’s movements over the past week—everywhere he went and everyone he came into contact with. The more detailed, the better.” Then he added apologetically to his colleagues from the police department, “I know you already have a heavy workload. Sorry to trouble you with even more.”
With Team Leader Shang being so polite about it, the officer hurriedly replied, “It’s no trouble. This is our job anyway.”
Dong Yue had finished her examination of the scene and removed her gloves at around the same time Shang Lu stood up. Hearing this, she asked, “Why are you the only one here? Where are your two team members?”
“They pulled two all-nighters in a row, so I gave them some time off to get some proper sleep,” Shang Lu said. “I can’t sleep anyway.”
Dong Yue had known Shang Lu for a long time and understood his personality. “Don’t push yourself too hard. Actually… there’s something I’m not sure I should say. Sometimes I feel like people like us can only do so much in this world now. Just do what you can. Don’t drive yourself into the ground.”
People made pessimistic remarks like that all the time, but despite what they said, everyone was still doing their best.
From the way Dong Yue was dressed, she had obviously been called in from home at the last minute as well. She was long accustomed to it and had not voiced a single complaint.
The string inside Shang Lu seemed drawn impossibly tight, never relaxing for even a moment.
He gave no clear response to Dong Yue’s words, and there was no telling whether he had taken them to heart.
Because both of them understood perfectly well that whether their efforts were truly limited or not, they could not simply stand by and allow the world to keep collapsing.
Tonight’s victim had once again died of fusion disease.
That was the name given to it throughout the Department of Anomalous Incident Control’s 1,532 case files.
After several thousand autopsies, investigators had determined that fusion-disease victims developed massive amounts of proliferating tissue and, within a short period of time, grew another complete set of limbs and a torso. In other words, another version of the patient was replicated inside them, unable either to fully fuse or separate.
Some case files even documented patients with two heads. The additional head was identical to the victim’s own. One such patient had survived for two days after the onset of symptoms, the longest-known survival time for fusion disease so far.
With no known method of prevention or treatment, fusion disease remained highly classified worldwide.
And that pointed to one thing.
Somewhere unknown, a new interference zone had appeared.
In a world now overrun with mirages and anomalous phenomena, anomalous cases were innumerable.
Investigate each one carefully, however, and most would be found clustered within the same particular area. Those specific areas were known as interference zones.
Fusion disease occurred almost exclusively within interference zones.
Fog Harbor was a major interference hotspot. Hua had designated and secretly sealed off twelve interference zones nationwide, and Fog Harbor alone contained five.
A phone suddenly rang.
Shang Lu stepped out from beneath the temporary canopy and answered it. “Investigation Action Group Seven. Shang Lu speaking.”
The caller was Da Xin from the Dispatch Center. “Brother Lu, I heard there was a fusion-disease case aboard a cruise ship in Beiduo Bay.”
“Yeah,” Shang Lu said. “I’m already at the scene.”
Da Xin immediately began buttering him up. “That was fast. As expected of my Brother Lu. But you’ll have to hand the Beiduo Bay case over to your team members for now. A new assignment just came down from above.”
Shang Lu had already gone two days without closing his eyes. One assignment was not even finished, and another had arrived. They really did work people like beasts of burden.
He sighed. “What is it?”
“The Earthcore Research Institute was hit by a terrorist attack. There was a massive explosion. Thirty-two people were killed, including some of our researchers, and nearly a hundred were injured.”
Earthcore Research Institute? A terrorist attack?
The matter was serious enough that Shang Lu’s expression immediately sharpened. “When did this happen? Why haven’t I seen any reports?”
“A month ago. The news was deliberately suppressed. It might not become public for a while.”
The Earthcore Research Institute was one of the world’s leading scientific research institutions, and much of its work was closely connected to the anomalies appearing around the world. A considerable amount of equipment and technology currently used by anomalous-case departments in various countries had originated there. The institute was also responsible for most of the research into fusion disease.
However, because the relevant laws and regulations had yet to catch up, some of its projects still existed in a legal gray area. Various organizations and individuals had publicly expressed extreme opposition to its work, but no one had expected the institute to actually suffer a terrorist attack.
“The boss just sent the assignment down,” Da Xin said. “He wants you to leave immediately and pick someone up. The operation is confidential.”
“A survivor or one of the injured?”
“No idea. All I know is that they’re a family member of one of the Earthcore Research Institute’s researchers. The file is encrypted too, so I can’t access it…”
Da Xin’s keyboard went clack-clack-clack.
“Sent it.”
“Got it.”
After hanging up, Shang Lu immediately logged into the Department’s internal network.
The heavy rain showed no sign of stopping. A helpful police officer handed Shang Lu an umbrella.
The cruise ship remained docked beside the pier. Through the downpour, the city’s lights had blurred into indistinct smears, and St. Anne’s Cathedral had vanished entirely from the surface of the sea. Everything within sight was swallowed by darkness.
Raindrops hammered densely against the black umbrella.
Suddenly, lightning split the sky, followed by a deep roll of thunder across the horizon.
Shang Lu withdrew his gaze and used his personal decryption key to open the file, watching as layer after layer of information loaded onto the screen.
At last, the file finished decrypting. A few brief lines appeared on the first page:
Name: Fang Huan Xing
Sex: Male
Date of Birth: Classified
Identification Number: Classified
Current Identity: Son of Fang Lan, senior researcher at the Earthcore Research Institute
Current Location: 2A, No. 115 Fenglin Street, Xueping County
At the top was a photograph.
An East Asian teenager with a thin, delicate face stared coldly into the camera.
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