The day after the attack, Lin Feng woke to a body that felt both bruised and vibrantly alive. His forearm was bandaged, the deep gashes from the creature's claws a throbbing reminder of the fight, yet underneath the pain, an unfamiliar energy hummed in his muscles. It was a low-level current of vitality that made the morning light seem sharper, the distant city sounds clearer.
He stood in the center of his dojo, the splintered doors a testament to the night's impossible violence. He closed his eyes, trying to recall the exact sensation—the surge of desperation, the tingle in his veins, the snap of power erupting from his fist. He threw a punch at the empty air, then another, and another. Nothing. There was no spark, no crackle of static. There was only the whisper of his uniform cutting through the air and the frustrating, undeniable feeling that a door had been opened within him, only to be slammed shut again.
Giving up, he walked out into the city, seeking normalcy but finding none. At first, the changes were small enough to be dismissed. The ivy clinging to the side of his building seemed to have grown a full foot overnight, its tendrils thick and strangely possessive. A stray cat watched him from a rooftop, its posture not one of lazy observation but of a coiled predator, its gaze unnervingly intelligent. The air itself felt different, carrying a faint, cloyingly sweet scent he couldn't identify, like overripe fruit and static electricity.
He saw a delivery truck swerve to avoid a patch of road where the asphalt had been shattered from below by a cluster of thick, mushroom-like fungi that hadn't been there yesterday. People hurried past, their faces buried in their phones, oblivious or perhaps unwilling to see the subtle sickness creeping into the city's cracks. Lin Feng, trained to notice details that could mean the difference between life and death, saw it all. The world he had known was quietly, insistently, coming undone.
In the sealed-off ruins of his MIT lab, Jack Wilson was coming to a very different, yet parallel, conclusion. While Lin Feng felt the world's sickness through instinct, Jack was determined to quantify it.
He had created a makeshift gym amidst the wreckage. He methodically deadlifted a rack of servers, calculating the total weight to be just over 800 pounds—triple his previous personal best. He set up a motion sensor and recorded his sprint time across the length of the lab, a speed that would have put him on an Olympic track team. His reflexes were even more astonishing; he was able to activate and catch a high-speed drone he'd repurposed before it could travel more than a few feet.
His body was no longer a collection of inconvenient variables. It was a high-performance machine, and he had the data to prove it.
After documenting his physical enhancements with a clinical detachment, he turned his full attention back to Specimen 734. The crystal remained inert, a black hole on his workbench. But it was no longer a complete mystery.
"The energy released was a catalyst," he theorized, dictating notes into his phone. "Not radiation in the conventional sense. It's a form of exotic matter that doesn't decay, it... integrates. It seeks a host system to stabilize." He paced the lab, his mind a whirlwind of hypotheses. "It rewrote my biology, optimized it. But it also seems to have a symbiotic relationship with technology."
He held the crystal in one hand and touched the frame of a fried mainframe with the other. A jolt, not of electricity, but of pure information, shot up his arm. For a fraction of a second, he saw lines of code scrolling behind his eyes. He recoiled, dropping the stone.
He stared at his hands, then at the dead machine. The energy hadn't just charged him. It had turned him into a bridge, a living conduit between the strange power of the crystal and the world of human technology. He had hypothesized that the energy caused "selective evolution." Now, a more chilling and exhilarating thought took root: it wasn't just evolution. It was an upgrade.