Before my stunned eyes, the tentacles wrapped around Professor Marshall.
"Sylvia...?" Professor Marshall ran his hands over the tumor-covered tentacle, his voice confused.
Before he could finish, the tentacle constricted violently.
Professor Marshall's pupils dilated to their maximum as he stared at the flesh mountain.
The blood in his body was forced upward. His face went crimson, veins bulging across his forehead.
Blood seeped from his eyes and nostrils.
"Sylvia... Sylvia..." he managed.
Two seconds later, the tentacle wrenched with tremendous force. Professor Marshall was snapped in half like a sausage.
Intestines spilled from his upper body. His face wore an expression of absolute disbelief, blood bubbling from his lips.
His lower half fell to one side. His upper body dragged itself across the ice with both hands.
He writhed forward like an insect with a crushed body, inching toward the flesh mountain with his dying strength.
As if, in his final moments, he wanted to be just a little closer to Sylvia.
Blood gushed from the wound. Professor Marshall's face visibly drained of life.
I saw his lips move. He seemed to want to say something.
But in the end, he said nothing at all.
After that one desperate crawl, he went still.
Professor Marshall's corpse lay with his eyes wide open, fixed on the flesh mountain.
As if looking through it at the girl with the birthmark on her face who'd smiled so fearlessly.
From start to finish, apart from the name "Sylvia," he never managed to say a single word.
---
The tentacles plunged into Professor Marshall's body through the severed torso, feeding on the blood within.
Red liquid traveled up the pale tentacles, which took on a grotesque, almost romantic pinkish hue.
I watched in stunned disbelief.
Blood and organ fragments traveled upward continuously. The umbilical cord shifted again.
This time the movement was more violent. I snapped out of my daze, grabbed the vial, and sprinted for the Conversion Pool.
I couldn't let this thing detach!
Even though Sylvia hadn't fully matured, she still had conversion ability. Letting a creature like this loose upon the world was unthinkable!
Just before the umbilical cord could fully detach, I dove forward with everything I had and smashed the vial against the edge of the Conversion Pool. Glass shards drove deep into my palm. Blood mixed with green liquid trickled down the pool's walls and into the basin.
The flesh mountain froze.
For three seconds, silence.
Then it convulsed violently. Chunks of ice crashed down from all sides as the flesh mountain thrashed against the walls in agony, unleashing a terrible wail.
The sound was like nails on a chalkboard combined with the grinding shriek of metal on metal. I clamped my hands over my ears, but my nose began to bleed.
It felt like someone was stirring my brain with a stick. The pain was so intense I could barely breathe. My mind went blank.
Ice blocks rained down, thundering against the ground, punching holes in the floor.
For an instant, I thought the entire chamber would collapse!
I don't know how long the death throes lasted. Eventually, the wailing died down.
The flesh mountain lay like a heap of cotton waste, motionless.
My head pounded, my back screamed in agony. I collapsed on the ground, utterly spent.
I twisted my head to look at the pile of rotting flesh. There wasn't a trace of movement.
It was dead.
Sylvia was dead.
---
It was over. Finally over.
Ninety years of catastrophe. An unnatural species that should never have existed. Innocent expedition members transformed into inhuman monsters.
All of it, released at last.
I lay on the ground, gasping for breath, staring up at the ice dome above.
The flesh mountain melted like a candle beside me, gradually pooling into a layer of translucent liquid tinged with pale red.
That was Professor Marshall's blood.
The ice cave was dead silent. Not a sound.
I couldn't help but twist my lips into a smile.
Marcus's guardian spirit had come through after all.
He really did protect me.
He protected me all the way to killing this monster!
After resting a while, I pushed through the pain in my back and forced myself to my feet with shaking hands.
Not far away, Professor Marshall's body was slowly being soaked by the melting flesh mountain's translucent fluid.
I looked at his wide-open, unblinking eyes and felt something complicated.
To save his wife who'd become a monster, Professor Marshall had hatched an elaborate scheme, sacrificing who knows how many lives.
To us, he was a monster in human skin.
But to Sylvia, he was an incredibly devoted husband.
He'd spent half his life guarding her memory, half his life searching for her. His heart and soul belonged to her alone.
And in the end, he died by her hand too.
If Professor Marshall had known he'd die here, would he still have come?
Probably.
Now they were both dead. If there was an afterlife, maybe he'd consider it a happy ending.
I bent down and picked up my pack.
As I lifted it, I suddenly remembered Serena lying nearby.
I walked over. She was face-down beside the Conversion Pool, her hair spread around her, motionless.
I nudged her gently, and a wave of helplessness swept over me.
Serena must have completed the conversion — otherwise Sylvia couldn't have detached.
She looked unchanged for now, but soon she'd become just like the Matriarch.
Like the girl in the photographs.
From a beautiful young woman into a grotesque mountain of flesh.
Serena cared so much about her appearance. How could she bear knowing she'd become so hideous?
I gripped the last vial tightly. A cold certainty settled over me.
I couldn't let Serena live.
I'd already killed the monster that Kevin had become and the Matriarch that Sylvia had become — but they'd both lost their human forms and consciousness by then.
Serena was still beautiful and pale. A thin line of mucus glistened at the corner of her mouth, frost clinging to her hair.
My hand on the vial opened and closed, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.
After several attempts at nudging her, Serena finally stirred and opened her eyes.
When she saw me, her face lit up — then she spotted the vial in my hand, and all the color drained from her face.
I understood. Professor Marshall must have told her the truth.
I kept my head down, unable to look at her expression.
Serena said nothing. She slowly sat up.
Neither of us spoke.
For the first time, I found silence suffocating.
After a while, she gave a low, bitter laugh.
"I really brought this on myself. You tried to save me, and I actually believed Professor Marshall instead — thought you were trying to claim the discovery for yourself."
"Then again, you could barely pass your classes. Where would you get the brains to murder anyone?"
I said nothing.
Usually when Serena and I started arguing, we'd go at it for hours. But this time, my throat was so tight I couldn't produce a word.
"Where's Professor Marshall?"
Serena looked around.
I pointed at his bisected body. "Sylvia killed him."
Serena fell silent for a long time, then spat. "Old bastard. He got what he deserved."
"After all that — risking our lives for what? He got himself killed. Bastard!"
She turned away, rummaged through her bag, and pulled out a phone in an absurdly fluffy pink bunny case. She held it out to me.
"Password is 956822. The first address in my Taobao app is my home. The second is my boyfriend's."
"Do me a favor — go back and let people know."
"There are photos on my phone. Give them to my mom. Tell her not to worry about me. She's still young enough to have another kid."
"And when you get back, check on my parents for me. Tell them..."
Her voice caught. "Tell them I didn't suffer. Don't tell them I went missing. Antarctica is freezing — it'd break their old bones if they came looking for me."
I took the phone in silence. My eyes burned, but after all the crying I'd done today, they were completely dry. Not a single tear would come.
"Hey." Serena nudged me. Her lipstick was long gone, leaving her face pale and wan.
It was the first time I'd seen her without makeup.
She was pretty. Much prettier than when she'd been all dressed up.
Now she actually looked like a twenty-year-old girl.
"What are you waiting for? I might start converting soon, and then you won't be able to take me."
She closed her eyes. A tear slid down her cheek. "Go ahead."
I opened the vial with shaking hands, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.
"Serena..."
Serena wiped her face and gave a smile worse than crying. "Oh, please. You're probably secretly thrilled you won't have me scheming against you anymore."
Her tears no longer froze. They splashed onto the ground, scattering into tiny droplets.
"Just do it, Chloe. You're not going to make me do it myself, are you? That's too cruel!"
The green liquid in the vial trembled violently. I closed my eyes. A single tear froze on my eyelashes.
I reached out and gently poured the cure over Serena's body.
Serena flinched as if burned. Her voice carried a thread of restrained pain: "...It hurts a little."
"Hey." She looked at me with serious eyes.
My eyes were red, but I couldn't say a word. I could only stare at her.
Serena was beautiful. Pale skin, bright eyes like stars, thick lashes casting faint shadows on her cheeks.
When she smiled, it was like stars had fallen into her eyes, and for a moment the whole ice chamber seemed to brighten.
"Chloe." Her voice fell softly into the air.
"I'll protect you. Live."
Then, before my eyes, she rapidly dissolved — melting into a pool of water.
---
How I got out of the ice cave, I don't remember.
I only remember that dark passage. It felt endlessly long — as if I walked through it for a lifetime.
And yet it also felt impossibly short. One moment, and I was blinking in the light above.
When I stepped outside, blinding whiteness enveloped me.
Even the sunlight in Antarctica felt cold. As the light washed over me, I couldn't help but shiver.
Standing in the daylight, I felt as if I'd been reborn into a different world.
It had only been a single day, but it felt like an entire lifetime.
Five of us had walked in, laughing and talking.
Only one of us walked out.
Marcus, Serena, Kevin, Professor Marshall — their faces cycled through my mind like a reel. I reached for them, but my hands closed on nothing.
They were forever trapped in that dark, frozen underworld.
After so long in the dark, my eyes couldn't handle the brightness. A sharp pain lanced through them.
Through the blur, a dark shape in the distance was running toward me, shouting: "There's someone here! Someone's alive!"
I recognized Derek's voice.
My tears finally fell.