My eyes darted, helpless, between the pulsating, wobbling rice-cooker the blob had become and the main attraction: the grain itself. It lay in the sand, its three eyestalks now drooping, the fine cilia covering its body twitching in a frantic, irregular rhythm. It looked less like food and more like a dying, phosphorescent spider.
Before I could overthink it, a cold, slick pressure wrapped around my right wrist. The gelatinous blob's pseudopod had lashed out, gripping me with the firm, insistent squeeze of a sopping wet dishrag. It didn't ask. It yanked.
My hand was pulled upward, toward the two halves of the broken whalebone mortar hovering in the air like hungry jaws.
Mr. Fin's gills rasped, a sound of dry hinges turning. "Now."
The mortar halves descended.
They didn't fall; they clamped.
CRUNCH.
The sound was wet and final. The three eyestalks vanished, pulped into the grain's core. A shockwave, silent but tangible, rippled out from the point of impact, making the sand jump and the bubble membrane wobble.
Then came the steam.
It wasn't a wisp. It was a geyser, erupting from the sealed mortar with a furious hiss. It shot upward, hitting the top of the bubble membrane and cascading back down in a hot, oppressive fog. The smell hit me first: a cloying, nauseating sweetness of fermented honey, immediately undercut by the sharp, sterile sting of hospital disinfectant. It was the smell of something organic forced into a process it never wanted.
The STAUST text above my chest flickered like a broken neon sign before solidifying into a glaring, urgent message:
[ASSIMILATION IN PROGRESS]
[DO NOT REMOVE MORTAR]
[(OR DOORS WILL NOT SEAL)]
The parentheses felt particularly threatening.
The blob, still attached to my wrist, trembled. Its main body, the rice-cooker form, convulsed. The thick, vein-like cord it had buried in the sand began to pulse, pumping something up from the depths. Iridescent, oily fluid—the same pearl-white secretion from before—traveled up the cord and into the blob's body, making it swell and glow with an internal, nervous light.
I did the only thing I could think of. I held my breath. My cheeks bulged. My lungs burned almost immediately in the thick, sweet-sterile air. I clenched my free hand into a fist so tight my nails bit into my palm, anchoring myself against the urge to move, to scream, to interfere. The STAUST had banned movement. I would be a statue.
The gelatinous blob's grip tightened further, a cold, living bracelet. The steam continued to pour out, now condensing on my skin, in my hair, making everything damp and smelling of wrongness.
My breath-held stillness seemed to amuse the darkness beside me. Mr. Fin's gills rippled with muffled, watery laughter, a vibration I felt through the soles of my feet in the sand.
The STAUST text fractured, updating:
[ASSIMILATION: 12%]
[STEAM QUALITY: BRACKISH]
[MORTAL COMPLIANCE: ACCEPTABLE]
A single drop of sweat, born of effort and fear, finally broke free from my temple. It traced a cool path down my cheek, hung from my jaw for a moment, and fell.
It landed directly on the blob's pseudopod, where it gripped my wrist.
The reaction was instantaneous and violent. The blob recoiled as if scalded, its grip loosening for a split second. Where my sweat had landed, a tiny crater appeared in its gelatinous flesh, hissing and smoking. The scent that rose was unexpectedly familiar yet alien: the specific, sugary burn of a marshmallow held too long in a campfire.
The blob made a sound—a soft, pained glorp—and re-established its grip, more gently this time.
The whalebone mortar, containing the crushed, steaming grain, began to groan. It was a deep, wooden sound, full of strain. From within its sealed halves, a new noise emerged. A low, rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum, like a heartbeat heard from the other side of a thick aquarium wall. It was slow. Deliberate.
Thrum-thrum-thrum.
It was not my heartbeat. Mine was a frantic, trapped bird.
Thrum-thrum-thrum.
It was something else's. Something being born, or unmade, under pressure.
A tremor started in my legs. A fine, uncontrollable shaking born of exhaustion and terror. I tried to stifle it, to be the statue, but it was like trying to stop a seismic shift from inside the fault line. The trembling traveled up my body.
Each tiny vibration from me traveled through the sand. The gelatinous blob, pressed against the seabed, rippled in perfect, sympathetic unison. Its pseudopod tightened around my wrist again, not in punishment, but in a weird mimicry of a hug—a living tourniquet of solidarity.
The mortar' groan escalated to a shriek. The ancient spirals etched into its bone began to glow, not with cool bioluminescence, but with a hot, warning crimson. Inside, the grain was reacting. It swelled against its prison, pressing against the whalebone from within. With a wet, tearing sound, the mortar halves bulged. A crack appeared, not enough to open, but enough to reveal a glimpse.
The grain had split open like a fruit. But instead of pulp, its interior was a cluster of tiny, perfect, pearl-like nodules. They glowed with a soft, milky light. And they pulsed.
Thrum-thrum-thrum.
In perfect, horrifying time with my own racing, panicked heartbeat.
The STAUST text shattered into frantic, blinking glyphs:
[WARNING: COSMIC PRESSURE BUILDUP]
[DO NOT RELEASE FIST]
[DO NOT CEASE COMPLIANCE]
Mr. Fin's dorsal fin, usually twitching with irritation, stiffened into a jagged, black crest. His gills flared open so wide I could see past them—not into lungs, but into a swirling, star-dotted void where his ribcage should have been. A glimpse of the cosmos he contained. He was leaning forward, all amusement gone, his galactic eyes fixed on the straining mortar.
The blob's rice-cooker body began to convulse. The vein-cords pumped the iridescent fluid furiously, causing it to bulge and distort. From its seams—where pseudopod met main mass—thin jets of steam began to leak. The scent changed again. The overbearing sweetness and sterile sting were now underpinned by a new, dark note: something metallic, coppery, and ancient. The smell of blood left in a cast-iron kettle over a long-extinguished lighthouse fire.
The pressure wasn't just in the mortar. It was in my head. Behind my eyes.
I started to see stars. Not the beautiful kind in Mr. Fin's eyes, but the ugly, exploding white pinpricks of oxygen deprivation and sheer, overwhelming strain. The crimson glow from the mortar etched itself onto my vision. The thrum-thrum-thrum of the pearl-heartbeat filled my skull.
My clenched fist ached. My lungs were screaming caves of fire. The world began to tilt, the edges of my vision tunneling into a narrow, throbbing pipe of light.
I can't. I can't do it forever. Please, STAUST, hurry up…
The thought was a feeble prayer. My knees, already trembling, gave out.
The back of my skull hit the bubble floor. The impact was a soft, deep thud that resonated through the membrane. I saw concentric, rainbow-colored ripples expand across the curved wall above me, beautiful and strange.
Then, the tunnel of light collapsed. The stars winked out.
Blackness. Cool, silent, and absolute.
I hope Chiari did good. Please be enough. I do not want to disappoint Mr. Fin and STAUST… the only friends I ever had.
The thought floated in the void before me, my final, pathetic spark before the dark swallowed it too.
Time didn't exist here. It was a soup of nothing. I was a thought dissolving in the broth.
A sensation returned first: a tight, cold pressure around my ankle. Then, a rhythmic, throbbing light against my closed eyelids.
I sucked in a breath so sharp it was a gasp. "PUHHHH! AHHH!"
My eyes flew open.
I was still on my back. The world was a blur of shimmering, watery light. I blinked, grit and salt stinging my eyes.
The pressure on my ankle was the gelatinous blob. It had wrapped a pseudopod around me, a loose kelp-like band. Its surface was no longer smooth; it was patterned with a network of glowing, blue veins that pulsed in a familiar, erratic rhythm. My rhythm. It was mirroring my circulatory system, a bioluminescent echo of my panic.
Above me, the scene had changed.
The whalebone mortar was gone. Not opened. Shattered. Its fragments hung suspended in the thick water, drifting lazily as if caught in invisible currents of jelly. They turned slowly, catching the light from the central attraction.
Floating in the middle of the bubble, at the heart of the drifting bone-shards, was the grain.
It was no longer a grain. It was an ovum. Swollen to twice its original size, perfectly round, and now translucent. Within its clear membrane, the labyrinthine, shifting patterns I'd glimpsed before now filled the entire space, constantly rearranging—fractals of gold and milk-white, swirling like captured galaxies. It pulsed with a soft, warm light, a lantern in the deep.
The STAUST text flickered weakly beside it, pale and drained:
[ASSIMILATION: 47%]
[STEAM QUALITY: ACCEPTABLE]
[MORTAL COMPLIANCE: …RECOVERING]
The ellipsis before "Recovering" felt like a judgment.
A vast shadow fell over me, blocking the gentle light of the grain. I didn't need to turn my head. I knew the smell of deep trenches and ozone.
"Land-grub."
Mr. Fin's voice was a wheeze, stripped of its usual theatrical boom. His dorsal fin was twitching in a sharp, staccato rhythm that somehow matched the slow pulse of the luminous rice-ovum.
Something drifted down through the water and landed on my forehead with a soft, damp tap. A single, hair-like cilium, severed from the original grain. As it touched my skin, it dissolved instantly. A final message from the ingredient: a phantom taste spread on my tongue—the vague, bland flavor of overcooked supermarket sushi, underpinned by the crisp, empty static of a dead television channel.
He had flicked it onto me. A garnish. Or a baptism.
I lay there, on the abyssal floor, ankle held by a worried blob, stared at by a cosmic shark, beneath a floating egg of semi-assimilated cosmic rice.
I was alive. The process was… halfway. I had survived the scream.
A weak, wobbly smile touched my lips. I'd done it. I hadn't been made into a pity snack.
Not yet.
"Teacher…" I croaked, my throat raw. "What… what is it now?"
Mr. Fin's starry eye regarded the pulsing ovum, then drifted down to me.
"Now," he rumbled, the hint of a familiar, needle-filled grin returning to his maw, "it's hungry. And it wants the rest of you."