[SHENXIANG CITY HOSPITAL - Lab 7]
Wang Tianlong's hands trembled as he stared at the humming, black blood in the collection tubes. His heart hammered against his chest, the familiar golden fire now churning like a furnace inside him.
"This isn't happening," he whispered, his voice cracking. "Tell me this isn't happening."
Dr. Liu set the second vial on the counter, her hands shaking. "Tianlong, I have to tell you something. I've been a doctor for thirty years and have never seen anything like this."
"What does it mean?" Wang Tianlong's eyes were frozen in horror. "Am I going to die? Is it a type of cancer?"
Nurse Zhang backed away from the counter where the two blood samples glowed with an otherworldly light. "Dr. Liu, should I call a specialist? A hematologist?"
"And say what?" Dr. Liu exploded, his normally serene demeanor unraveling. "That we have a patient with starlight blood?"
Wang Tianlong doubled over with a sudden cramp, his hands clutching his chest as the golden heat boiled into searing pain. "Something's wrong! It's burning!"
"What's on fire?" Dr. Liu leaned over to his side.
"The object in my chest! It's always been warm, but now it's hotter than molten metal!" The blood samples on the counter began to vibrate, creating a low harmonic frequency that caused the laboratory windows to shudder. Electronic equipment around the room swayed unsteadily.
"Tianlong, what object in your chest?" Dr. Liu held him by the shoulders. "You have to tell me everything now!"
"I don't know!" Wang Tianlong screamed as another wave of pain washed over him. "There's always been something there! My mom and dad said it was a defect in my heart, but I've always known it's there! Like a warm rock against my heart!"
The frequency of the harmonics grew stronger, and in an instant, a golden light burst from Wang Tianlong's eyes.
Characters began to manifest, suspended mid-air before his eyes—not illusions, but real characters hanging like holograms.
[CLEOS STONE FRAGMENT - EMERGENCY ACTIVATION]
[HOST: WANG TIANLONG - COMPATIBILITY VERIFIED]
[CRITICAL SURVIVAL THRESHOLD DETECTED]
"See it?" Wang Tianlong gestured with a trembling finger at the suspended text.
"What are you looking at?" Nurse Zhang looked in the direction he was staring but saw nothing.
"The words! Golden letters drifting in the air!"
Dr. Liu looked where he was staring into vacant space. "Tianlong, there's nothing there."
[FUSION PROTOCOL INITIATED]
[ESTIMATED COMPLETION TIME: 60 DAYS, 0 HOURS, 0 MINUTES]
[WARNING: INCOMPLETE FUSION WILL RESULT IN CARDIAC DETONATION]
Wang Tianlong's blood chilled even as flames burned in his chest.
"Sixty days," he gasped.
"Sixty days?"
"It says I have sixty days to complete something called fusion, or..." He gulped hard, his mouth drier than sand. "...or my heart will burst."
Dr. Liu looked at him in horror. "Tianlong, you're scaring me. What do you actually think is happening to you?"
Before Wang Tianlong could answer, the golden fires within his chest exploded in a blaze unlike anything they had ever witnessed.
Stellar power streamed out in waves from his body, and all the electronic equipment in the laboratory began to emit smoke and sparks.
"Get back!" he roared as computer screens erupted in cascades of sparks. "I can't hold it back!"
Nurse Zhang screamed as the central computer terminal burst into flames. "The whole system is overloaded!"
Dr. Liu blinked, shielding his eyes from the blinding radiance pouring from Wang Tianlong's chest. "What is this light?"
"I don't know!" Wang Tianlong convulsed on the operating table as starfire seared burning designs into his flesh. "It hurts so much! It feels like it's reprogramming my whole body!"
[PHASE ONE: CARDIOVASCULAR RESTRUCTURING INITIATED]
[STELLAR ENERGY INTEGRATION: 23.7% COMPLETE]
[HOST VITALS STABILIZING]
As pain swept over him, Wang Tianlong felt his heart shifting.
The beat was becoming something other than a human cadence.
His blood, too, was different—thicker, warmer, full of a strange life that coursed through him like electrified fluid.
"Dr. Liu!" he cried between spasms of pain. "Something is happening to my heart! I can feel it changing!"
"Changing how?"
"It's no longer beating like a normal heart! It has multiple rhythms, like it's becoming something completely new!"
The cosmic energy reached its maximum strength, and Wang Tianlong felt his mind extend out of his body.
In a flash of awareness, he could sense energy patterns over vast distances—four other places scattered across the world where the same patterns of stirring were taking place.
But there was more in that enhanced awareness: something dark and immense was traversing the emptiness between stars, attracted to the power he was projecting like a lighthouse in space.
"It knows," Wang Tianlong panted as the momentary threat began to fade. "Oh god, it knows I'm awake now."
"What knows?" Dr. Liu insisted, watching the scorch marks on Wang Tianlong's chest settle into fixed geometric designs.
Wang Tianlong slowly sat up, testing out his new body.
The years of chronic weakness that had afflicted him since birth were gone, erased without a trace. In their place was a boundless and frightening strength.
"The thing that destroyed whatever world this fragment came from," he whispered. "And it's here."
Nurse Zhang gazed at the ruined lab, smoke rising from a half-dozen incinerated pieces of equipment. "Tianlong, you're not making sense. What fragment? What destroyed world?"
Wang Tianlong pointed to the geometric symbols now seared into his chest—symbols that resembled star charts or wiring diagrams.
"This thing in my heart isn't from Earth. It's from somewhere else. Somewhere that doesn't exist anymore."
[PROXIMITY ALERT - MORE THAN ONE HOSTILE ENTITY RECORDED]
[VARIOUS APPROACH VECTORS AND ARRIVAL TIMES]
[RECOMMENDATION: IMMEDIATE CONCEALMENT ADVISED]
New text scrolled across his enhanced vision, and Wang Tianlong felt his blood freeze despite the stellar fire still warming his veins.
"Dr. Liu," he said, his voice deadly serious. "I need you to destroy all records of what happened here today."
"Absolutely not. You just experienced some kind of spontaneous genetic transformation. We need to study—"
"No!" Wang Tianlong's eyes burned with golden light. "If anyone learns what I'm transforming into, they'll hunt me. And once they catch up to me, everyone in my inner circle is going to die."
Dr. Liu took a step back, too late to realize that the frail boy he had been caring for all these years had transformed into something new. "Who will hunt you?"
Wang Tianlong strode toward the laboratory door, his movements fluid and determined.
"The hunters. The ones who razed the fragment's homeworld and all its inhabitants." He paused at the doorway, glancing back over his shoulder at the two who had seen him change.
"I have fifty-nine days to become powerful enough to defeat them," he said matter-of-factly. "And if I don't succeed, Earth perishes with me."
The door closed gently behind him, leaving Dr. Liu and Nurse Zhang alone, besieged by the smoldering ash of their equipment and the horrific truth that their universe teetered on the brink of irrevocable change.
Far, far away, something very, very old and very, very hungry altered its course for the solar system, having caught the scent of disrupted stellar energy.
The clock had started ticking.