They saw the bunker long before they reached it. A jagged gray protrusion buried into the mountainside, camouflaged beneath years of moss, falling ash, and twisted vines. Like a wound left to rot, Hollow Ridge bore no signs of welcome—just a gaping maw in the rock face where metal doors once stood proud, now bent inward, melted and scarred.
The sky above was heavy, churning with quiet gray clouds. Not the kind that rained, but the kind that made everything feel dead.
It had taken three days to hike into the range. Each night colder than the last, each shadow longer. On the second day, they passed what remained of a ranger station, its walls stained red, furniture rotted, and in the middle of the cabin—half of a vertebrae picked clean. Chen Yu tried to make a joke about it.
"Hey, someone had a spine once. That's rare these days," he said, kicking a can with his boot.
Li Wei didn't laugh. He hadn't laughed in months. Rui didn't either, but she turned to Chen and smiled with a faint, eerie sweetness that made him pause.
It was late afternoon when they reached the perimeter fence of the Hollow Ridge site. Metal stakes leaned in the soil like tired soldiers. Rust and black mold had consumed most of the warning signs, but one still clung to the fence:
"RESEARCH COMPLEX 014 – LEVEL RED RESTRICTION
Authorized personnel only. Biohazard containment protocols in effect."
The gate creaked as Chen Yu pried it open with a steel crowbar. "Biohazard, my ass," he muttered. "Bet this is where they kept their secret noodle recipes."
Li Wei's voice was cold. "This is where they buried people like Rui."
Rui didn't answer. She was staring past the gates, at the structure ahead.
Inside the bunker
The entrance tunnel was long, sloped, and dripping with condensation. Walls once painted white were now streaked in rust and something darker—black, thick, and flaking like old blood. Emergency lights lined the ceiling, long dead. The group moved with flashlights strapped to their chests, beams bouncing against signs in Mandarin and English.
One said:
Lab Wing A – Genetic Recombination
Another:
Holding Bay 3 – Biological Storage
And then:
Echo Terminal – Central Access
They followed the map etched on a smeared plexiglass panel toward the control center. The hallway slanted down farther, into the cold gut of the mountain. Pipes lined the ceilings, many ruptured. There were claw marks in some of the walls.
"Claw marks," Chen muttered, running a finger along the torn concrete. "Not from tools. This was alive."
They reached a steel door marked ECHO AI CORE. It was sealed tight—at least until Rui stepped forward, touched the biometric scanner with two fingers, and the door hissed open.
Li Wei and Chen exchanged glances. Rui didn't look back.
The AI: Echo
The control room was a wide, circular chamber surrounded by monitors and dead servers. In the center stood a glass pillar, spiderwebbed with cracks, cables fused into it like roots. A female voice filled the room—soft, synthetic, glitching slightly.
"…Error…Welcome, Subject 0107.
Echo protocol…rebooting.
System integrity: 17%
Do you wish to proceed?"
Rui stood still. Her eyes didn't blink.
"Proceed," she said.
The pillar lit up dimly with blue light. Several monitors flickered. One showed DNA sequences. Another displayed a list of terminated experiments. Then another—video footage from twelve years ago.
Rui. Younger. Bald. Strapped to a chair with electrodes in her skull. Screaming silently.
Li Wei turned away. Chen Yu didn't move.
Echo's voice returned.
"Security breach detected… External exposure to mutated RNA strain X-84B.
Mutation phase active.
Tracking systems compromised…
Welcome home, Subject 0107."
"Rui," Li Wei said quietly. "How much do you remember?"
"Not everything," she replied. "Just the parts that hurt."
Later that night
They set up a temporary camp inside the lab's engineering bay, the only room that seemed safe from contamination. Chen Yu fiddled with a broken vending machine, hoping for snacks. Instead, he found a rat—mutated, missing its eyes, with translucent skin that pulsed with something glowing inside.
He crushed it with his boot before Rui could see.
"I hate this place," he whispered.
Li Wei sat by the wall, polishing his machete. Rui sat beside a dormant console, reading from a torn logbook she found on a desk. She read aloud:
"Phase IV shows unstable psychic resonance in Subject 0107. Recommend termination. Subject displays uncontrolled empathy suppression. Subject is not human.
She laughed. Not like Chen Yu's laughter. A cold, sharp laugh that echoed in the room like glass breaking.
"Maybe they were right," she said.
Li Wei looked at her. "You're not one of them."
She met his eyes. "But I'm not like you either."
Later, exploring deeper
They ventured into the lower chambers the next day. The bunker had a labyrinthine structure—rooms with shattered containment pods, walls coated in chitinous residue, and air that crackled with unseen energy.
In one chamber, they found a garden—an overgrown lab converted into a strange, bioluminescent biome. The plants grew with glowing veins, and among them were remains—human, partly digested by roots.
"Jesus," Chen Yu said. "This place grew its own graveyard."
They found a journal on the floor:
Entry 0457: Hollow Ridge was never a lab. It was a testing ground. We didn't create the virus. We cultivated what was already buried here.
Li Wei read it twice.
"Not man-made," he said slowly. "They found it here… in the mountain."
The second night was colder.
No rain. No wind. Just an eerie stillness, like the mountain was holding its breath.
They slept in turns. Rui barely closed her eyes. Chen Yu had begun talking to himself—muttering dry jokes into the dark. Li Wei stayed awake the longest, listening to the faint hum still coming from Echo's terminal, like the whisper of a ghost stuck in a machine.
That morning, they found her.
In a half-collapsed wing of the facility—Bio-Testing Chamber C3—a human being, barely alive, trapped in a hibernation pod. Tubes still connected to her neck. Eyes sunken. Hair like silver straw. Skin a parchment of veins.
"Holy shit," Chen Yu said, stepping back. "How the hell is she still breathing?"
Li Wei crouched, eyes hard. "She's not stable. Look at her vitals."
But Rui was already moving. She pressed her hand to the control panel. Echo's voice crackled again.
"Dr. Lin Qiao – Head Geneticist, Batch 0100–0109.
Cryo-status: Emergency Lockdown
Revival protocol: Manual override required."
"She was one of them," Li Wei said.
"She might be the only one left who knows what I am," Rui replied.
They revived her.
Dr. Lin Qiao
She gasped for air like someone drowning. Her fingers twitched. Eyes blinked open—milky white, then cleared slowly into dark irises that flickered with something…inhuman.
Her first words: "Who survived?"
No one answered.
Then she looked at Rui. Stared hard. "You… You're not supposed to be alive."
"No one told me that," Rui replied, cold.
Dr. Lin struggled upright. Her voice shook, but not with fear—exhaustion. "This facility was designed to contain what we unearthed… but the virus didn't come from us. It came from the mountain itself. From beneath."
Li Wei stepped forward. "What do you mean?"
"The Ascendancy found something ancient," she said. "A spore system—dormant, but intelligent. We thought it was alien. Or prehistoric. We never reached consensus. But when exposed to light and air… it mutated. It learned."
"And you built weapons with it," Rui said flatly.
"Yes," Lin admitted. "Children like you. Psychic, responsive, evolutionary vessels. I didn't want it. I wanted to shut it down. They silenced me. Locked me away."
"And the rain?" Chen asked. "The bloody rain?"
Lin's eyes dimmed. "A failsafe release. It was never supposed to be triggered. Echo must have malfunctioned—or evolved."
Awakenings
That evening, something changed in Li Wei.
He sat alone in the AI chamber, watching a reel of silent footage—children, hundreds of them. All experiments. All like Rui. Some older, some toddlers. All gone.
The longer he stared, the more the machines around him began to respond.
Flickers. Static. Then a screen burst to life, showing not files, but memories. His own.
The school uniform. The burning fields. The judge's gavel. The scream of his mother.
He didn't touch anything.
"I didn't tell Echo to show that," he said aloud.
The AI responded:
"Subject Li Wei – Neural pattern synchronization: 43%
Latent potential detected.
Psychic echo resonance initiated."
He backed away. The lights followed him like eyes.
Chen Yu's Mutation
Elsewhere, Chen Yu was in the engineering wing again—bored, trying to fix a busted drone.
The drone sparked. Then levitated.
He stumbled back, laughing. "Okay—what?"
The drone dropped.
He held out his hand again. Nothing. He scowled. "Come on. Don't make me beg."
The drone twitched.
And then, from the corner of the room—a metal tray flung itself across the air and smacked him in the face.
"OW! Okay, okay, it's real," he hissed, holding his nose. "Telekinesis. That's new. What next? Laser eyes?"
He turned to see Rui standing behind him.
"You too?" she asked.
"Guess I'm not just a pretty face," he said with a cocky grin, wiping blood from his nostril. "Don't tell Li Wei yet. He's got that murder-monk look going on."
The Deep Core
Dr. Lin eventually revealed the truth.
"There's a lower level beneath the facility," she said. "Locked off since the accident. That's where the source is. Where the mutation lives."
"What's guarding it?" Rui asked.
Lin looked at her. "Not what. Who. Some of your batchmates… didn't die. They evolved."
She handed them a code chip.
"You'll need this. But once you go down there, there's no coming back the same."
Li Wei said nothing. He already knew they had no choice.
That night, the power in the base flickered. Echo's voice returned, louder, clearer:
"Warning. Organic signals detected in lower levels.
Mutation phase: Critical.
Release imminent."
Then silence.
Far below, in the dark belly of the mountain, something groaned.
It wasn't mechanical.
It wasn't human.
It was becoming.