Shrouded Seascape

Project 96121: Sparkle Replication Program—Exploring the Possibility of Integrating Charles’ Genes with Other Projects.

Preface:

"Colleagues, I'm C7 from the Technical Services Department. I believe you all know about Charles' daughter, Sparkle. You should have all flipped through her file until it's all worn out.

"To be honest, when that mutated 1189-1, Anna was urgently looking for ways to combine monsters and humans in the Subterranean Sea; I was the one who gave the order to contact her through the Haikors of the Foreign Affairs Department.

"We used molecular embryology to ultimately produce 96121. In other words, Sparkle can be said to be my brainchild. Charles and Anna are my petri dishes.

"At first, I didn't really place that much importance on this matter. I simply treated it as a normal interaction experiment. But now, I'm sure all of you have seen the immense potential within 96121.

"The Project Bio-Splicing Technology of Dr. Hanks from the Department of Science has indeed allowed the Foundation to make tremendous progress in its overall development, but don't blame me for being too straightforward when I say this—he is moving in the wrong direction.

"His technology has great limitations, and he cannot overcome those limitations no matter how hard he tries."

"I'm sure some people in the Foundation do not agree with me, but I have the same belief as Dr. T6. We can make use of the projects born from 002's radiation for as long as we want, but they will never belong to us. They belong to someone else.

"I believe that we, humans, should make use of our own strength."

"Mankind's power isn't just mathematics. We also have a high capacity for adaptive evolution."

"We started from the earliest chordates—Haikouichthys, Psarolepis, Ichthyostega, Archaeothyris, Ianthodon, Thrinaxodon, and Purgatorius. Then, Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and finally Homo sapiens.

"However, human evolution has yet to end. Even now, we are still evolving.

"There is a massive potential in the evolution of humans, and how do humans evolve? Through reproduction. Only through reproduction can we, humans, evolve.

"For this program, we need more test subjects to produce new projects, and we need them to reproduce to produce more mutant subspecies."

"I have a feeling that this program will lead humanity to the light! My team and I are confident in cultivating a human species that is not fearful of any project!

"We, humans, are the overlords of Earth, so we must trample everything under our feet, including the gods!"

Keyword Search: Formative evaluation; summative assessment; assessment system; Biochemistry…

Charles turned around slowly, and he stared blankly at the grotesque monsters just outside the office. Every single one of them had his genes inside of him; they were technically his children.

All of a sudden, he remembered the day when the Foundation had sent him to the operating table. Back then, they hadn't just torn apart a huge chunk of his skull and his entire scalp; they had also extracted some tissues and flesh from him.

Clearly, the Foundation had used what they had extracted from him on that day to create these monsters. Fury flooded Charles' heart upon recalling the truth that he had just discovered. He was so angry that he felt like going mad.

Back on Hope Island, Charles gnashed his teeth until his teeth seemed to be teetering on the edge of breaking beneath the pressure. He lifted his prosthetic right hand and slammed it on the wooden table in front of him, shattering it to pieces.

Charles' reaction was not exaggerated at all. Anyone would react the same upon discovering that someone was using their genes to breed with monsters, producing vile abominations as a result.

To make matters worse, the Foundation was even making those abominations mate with each other.

The abominations before him were technically his children; the realization rendered Charles unable to make up his mind on how he was going to face those monsters.

Just as he became engrossed in his own thoughts, the wooden doors that led to the exit opened slowly, and multiple squadrons of the facility's mobile task force charged into the containment floor with weapons in hand.

Their arrival wasn't strange; it would have been stranger if the Foundation had yet to notice the containment breach.

The arrival of the mobile task force attracted the attention of Charles' children. They opened their bizarre-looking mouths and roared before charging at the members of the mobile task force.

The mobile task force had a huge variety of relics at their disposal, but they were still utterly useless against Charles' children.

The grotesque monsters charged at the mobile task force members like a deluge; they swarmed the elevator, shattering it into pieces in the proverbial blink of an eye. There were so many of them in the elevator shaft that it appeared to have expanded to twice its size.

The elevator shaft was covered in thorns, but they couldn't deter the grotesque monsters at all.

Soon, the sound of gunfire and explosions echoed all over the island as the island devolved into chaos.

Clearly, the staffers of this facility had never imagined that the contained experimental subjects would breach containment at the same time.

After all, the containment floor was the most heavily guarded place throughout the facility; the chances of a containment breach were slim, let alone the containment breach of all experimental subjects.

Charles' plan could be considered to be a resounding success, but he was far from happy. Charles' expression was complex as he turned to a monster next to him that didn't run rampant along with the other monsters.

The monster resembled a snake, but it wasn't covered in scales. Instead, it was covered in a layer of what looked like charcoal. The snake-like monster moved, revealing two charred human corpses embedded in its belly.

The snake-like monster seemed calm, and it seemed to possess a certain level of intelligence. It didn't rush out blindly, like its brothers and sisters.

Charles pondered for a while before moving the spider toward the snake-like monster. However, the snake-like monster's reaction was beyond Charles' expectations. It coiled up and opened its rotten-looking mouth to spit a viscous liquid that resembled tar toward Charles.

Sparkle pulled the spider away, allowing it to dodge the snake-like monster's attack. Upon seeing Sparkle, the snake-like monster immediately froze before quietly prostrating on the ground.

"Shouldn't we leave now, Dad?" Sparkle asked.

However, Charles had no intention of leaving just like that. Together with Sparkle, he proceeded to do some tests on the snake-like fellow before them.

After a few tests, Charles' mood improved. He had just discovered that these monsters didn't find him particularly familiar, unlike how Sparkle felt during their first encounter. Rather than familiarity, these monsters seemed to be instinctively wary of him.

It was true that they had their own special ability, but they were still far inferior to Sparkle.

In other words, C7's program had failed—he failed to replicate Sparkle and had instead produced these befuddled abominations.

Charles brought with him a portrait of Sparkle drawn using spider silk as he crawled across the ceiling. His destination was where he had last seen the Haikors.

There was chaos underground. The members of the mobile task force were in the middle of a fierce battle against the experimental subjects.

Charles' children truly looked bizarre, but they had a variety of special abilities. Invisibility was just one of their basic abilities, and some of them were even capable of exuding the maddening aura of a god, forcing the Foundation members to retreat one after another.

Since Charles himself didn't have those special abilities, they had to have inherited them from their mothers.

"Dad, what are you going to do with them? Are you going to save my brothers and sisters?" Sparkle asked.

Hesitation appeared in Charles' eyes, but his gaze soon became determined. "We are not going to do anything about them. We're going to let them fend for themselves here. I don't acknowledge them as my children. They're just a group of mad, deformed abominations."

"Oh..." Sparkle's hundreds of fluorescent green eyes looked down at the same time. She seemed to have fallen into her own thoughts, pondering over something.