Little Pink Starfish

—Then came the sound of glass shattering.

Tang Lan furrowed his brows and strode out.

The shrieking continued, followed by sounds of a fight.

The boy flinched suddenly, grabbing An Zhe’s arm as if seeking protection, though he said, “Don’t be scared. Someone turned into a monster. Brother Tang can handle it.”

They peered out through the open door. A humanoid figure was rolling on the central clearing’s ground, dense tentacles and bulges protruding from his back. His facial features twisted and deformed into a swollen gray mass. His limbs flailed in wild attack. Another person, part of whose body had turned into vines, fought with him. Tang Lan joined the fray, and before long, the figure was subdued.

“Lock him up,” Tang Lan said.

—That person was taken away, and Tang Lan returned to the room.

“We still have human minds now, but who knows when we’ll lose them,” the boy whispered. “So it’s best to cherish the time we can still be people.”

At that moment, a sound came from outside the window. An Zhe looked down and saw a large instrument lighting up in the plaza before the main building.

“Mr. Polly has been working on that these past few days,” the boy said. “It looks different from all the past experiments.”

An Zhe stared. Between the machines, harsh red light flickered. He asked, “What is that?”

Tang Lan didn’t respond, only gazed out the window. At the mountain’s summit, the aurora and starlight were so low and clear, it felt as if one could reach out and touch them.

The room was silent.

After a long pause, Tang Lan spoke.

“Mr. Polly is a scientist from the Integrationist faction,” he said softly. “The Integrationists believe that one day we can find a way for human and monster genes to coexist. Humans wouldn’t turn into instinct-driven beasts, but would retain strong bodies fit to survive this harsh world.”

“Like this.” He showed An Zhe his arm, where faint black scales shimmered. “The human body is far too fragile.”

“Eventually, before they succeeded, one of the Integrationist experiments escaped. A giant leech contaminated the base’s water supply, killing half the base—after that, the base government banned all such experiments. Integrationist scientists became criminals,” he said slowly. “But all other research yielded nothing. Only integration still held a sliver of hope. So the scientists defected, fled the base, seeking a place to continue their experiments.”

“To study fusion, they needed live subjects. Once they did experiments, they created monsters with human thought but inhuman essence. The base couldn’t allow that and sent military to hunt them down. In the end, they found this place.” Tang Lan looked up at the endless starry sky. “The Highland Research Institute is a ruin, once a site for early artificial magnetic pole research. It’s behind the Abyss, high in elevation, unreachable by armored vehicles, and filled with existing equipment. Some devices even generate magnetic interference, disrupting military aircraft and radar. So the researchers settled here. While taking in mutants, they’ve continued their work to this day.”

An Zhe asked, “Have they found a way to fuse genes yet?”

Tang Lan shook his head.

“There’s no pattern,” he said. “At first we thought it related to willpower, then to the type of foreign gene—but that’s not right either. Weak-willed people might wake up randomly. Plants with weak pollution ability could devour human will. Infection by strong monsters didn’t always lead to loss of mind. Retaining willpower is just… luck. Later, when the magnetic poles failed and everything got polluted, it proved genes weren’t the cause. Even gold and iron could ‘pollute’ each other. Under the microscope, one iron atom inexplicably turned into something we couldn’t understand. Mr. Polly said all previous research was wrong—we need a new way to analyze things.”

An Zhe remembered Dr. Ji saying similar things. “The base thinks the same way.”

Tang Lan was silent for a while.

“An Zhe,” he suddenly said, “can you feel that… ripple?”

An Zhe nodded. He had always been able to.

“After becoming mutants, many of us can,” Tang Lan said quietly. “And it’s getting stronger.”

—

At dawn, An Zhe opened his eyes in bed. His head ached fiercely. His dreams had been of the wild—shrieks ringing in his ears, the wet slap of claws in mud, cries—he didn’t even know whose. In the jungle, glowing beast eyes flickered. He fled in madness, searching for something he could never find. The vast, elusive ripple always trailed him, entangling him. It seemed to inhabit every corner of the world, even the dewdrops on leaf tips felt like its incarnation.

An Zhe pushed himself up with effort. His bones felt rusted—not only stiff, but thin and fragile. Each movement made him fear he would cease completely. He knew then—he was one step closer to inevitable death.

An Zhe clutched his blanket and sat in bed for a long time, dazedly staring at the warm room. Yesterday still felt like a dream; today began to feel slightly real. The people here were kind—but leaving Lu Feng, his true goal, meant he had failed.

Then what was here?

His nose stung. He felt guilty. But then, the door knocked.

It was the boy from yesterday, carrying a breakfast tray with bowls on it.

“You weren’t awake this morning, so we didn’t wake you,” the boy said. “Uncle Tree made potato soup again—you should have some.”

“Thank you,” An Zhe said.

The boy placed the tray on the table. An Zhe looked at the rich soup, small chunks of potato floating in it, mixed with bits of cured meat, releasing a warm aroma that filled the room.

—Inexplicably, the thought of leaving didn’t come up again.

Life at the Institute wasn’t as orderly as at the base. People had no fixed roles or tasks, but there was a natural division of labor. The Institute had taken him in. An Zhe knew he should give back. He wanted to help—and everyone welcomed his effort.

At first, he went out with the boy to gather edible roots in safe zones. Later, the cold winds overwhelmed his body, so he stayed to help grow plants or cook. Later still, even that became too much. People believed he had some unknown illness—this was common. In this world, anything could happen. The world itself was terminally ill.

One day, Polly came to see him. From then on, An Zhe stayed in the white building beside the lab with Polly Jones. Though his body weakened, his mind remained clear—enough to assist in the lab. There was also a quiet Indian man named Cord, skilled in equipment repair.

The lab was strict—surrounded by machines. One large machine had cables stretching underground, linked to an external device called the “Simpson Cage.”

The Simpson Cage had four five-meter towers—miniatures of the two white towers outside. Those towers resembled the artificial magnetic pole towers at the base. An Zhe realized the Institute was the origin site of magnetic pole research.

The four towers formed a rectangle, about ten by twenty meters. When activated, red laser-like beams filled the entire cubic space like a sea of scarlet fire. Everyone knew—entering the active cage meant a horrific death.

From the lab’s manuals, An Zhe learned that the Simpson Cage was once the pinnacle of human high-energy physics. It enabled the artificial magnetic pole’s success.

“Even now, we don’t know what causes Earth’s magnetic field,” Polly explained. “Some say it’s molten iron flowing in the liquid core, others suggest it’s from rotating electric layers in the mantle—but none are proven. Not knowing how it starts means we don’t know how it ends. It’s beyond our understanding. We can’t reproduce the electromagnetic field unless we create a magnet the size of half the Earth.”

“But in the laws we do understand, electricity produces magnetism. Moving charges generate magnetic fields.”

“One of the Simpson Cage’s contributions is that it can visualize the wave field of basic particles and their interactions—helping us replicate certain phenomena. That’s how we got the idea for artificial magnetic poles. You lack a physics background, so I can’t go deeper. Simply put, two magnetic poles emit special pulse waves that resonate with charged particles in the solar wind—as if we hold a megaphone and tell them, ‘go that way.’ The resonance and movement create a magnetic field, which protects the Earth.”

An Zhe nodded. He understood—just barely. His job didn’t require deep physics knowledge, just that he monitor the machines.

Sometimes Polly went out to calibrate the Cage’s frequency. When the other assistant went with him, An Zhe was left alone. He’d sit in the white building, staring at the night sky. Machines hummed. The analyzer connected to the Simpson Cage drew chaotic curves—recording unknown data.

The curves were tangled and messy, completely without pattern. They reminded him of the chaotic lines drawn by the compass in Eden. Closing his eyes, feeling the growing void-like ripple and the slow drain of life—he felt fear, yet at times, he felt as though he was nearing eternity.

Polly returned and began analyzing the tangled curves. An Zhe lifted the kettle with effort and poured him hot water.

“What are you doing?” he finally asked.

“We’re trying to find that thing,” Polly said.

An Zhe looked at the screen. “…What thing?”

“The thing causing this world to change.”

“It must be everywhere. If it exists in this world, then it must also be in the Simpson Cage,” he said.

An Zhe furrowed his brows slightly.

Polly picked up a compass. “We’ll never see the magnetic field, but the compass tells us it’s there. Other unseen things are the same. Our understanding is too shallow—we can only chase their projections onto reality.”

“Look here.” Polly highlighted a steady line. “Everything in the world interacts. These traces of interaction carry much information. Like this line—it’s like the compass, representing the magnetic field.”

“We hypothesize that the world is changing because something immense is descending… But if the magnetic field can resist it, then it must have a presentation similar to the magnetic field.” Polly stared in fascination at the chaotic screen. “It’s vast, beyond comprehension. It alters the world’s essence—but it is here. We believe there is a specific frequency that reveals its shadow in the real world.”

An Zhe asked, “And then?”

Polly slowly shook his head. “We must first know what it is before we can think of how to deal with it.”

But… can it really be found?

An Zhe looked at the screen in confusion.

As if sensing his thoughts, Polly spoke.

“It’s unlikely, but…” He sighed. “After all, we once created unimaginable marvels.”

An Zhe repeated, “Unimaginable marvels.”

Then he watched the light in Polly’s eyes slowly dim.

Polly Jones looked out at the endless wilderness. The sky was blanketed in gray haze. All around, beasts howled—within their calls, strange ripples that human sound spectrums could not decode.

“Only unimaginable to humans,” he whispered. “Before everything shattered, we thought we understood the world’s entirety.”

In that moment, An Zhe saw in his eyes a loneliness that spanned millennia.