Abyssal Raft: Blue Light Pulse

Five years after the world sank, the Rust Sea has swallowed ninety percent of the land. I, Ling Zhou, scrape by salvaging wreckage with half a mechanical prosthetic limb, until I find a chip containing an image of my sister, Ling Yue. Trapped inside spiraling metal and wrapped in a ghostly blue glow, she warns me: “Don’t come to Outpost Seven...”

That night, my prosthetic begins to mutate, leaking fluorescent blue fluid. Any active metal it touches instantly grows hot. The resource hunter known as “Hound” hunts me down like a madman: “That’s a Prometheus Core prototype. It could buy ten rafts!” The black-market technician Nora pries open the prosthetic’s core, and a “Abyssal Whisper Protocol” pops up. Its distress signal has the exact same wavelength as the energy core her father used to blow up the world.

We take a raft down 3,000 meters. Every time the blue pulse sweeps past, the mutated octopuses grow more frenzied. I keep hallucinating Ling Yue standing on a glowing altar, until Xuan, the “Abyssal Recorder,” appears and declares: “She was eaten by the Devourer long ago. The one calling to you is a biomechanical consciousness!”

The active metal is slowly turning my fingers into metal. Every upgrade to the raft drives the neurotoxin deeper. Thorium oxide can purify seawater, but it also draws the military’s electromagnetic cannons. When blue light stains the Rust Sea red and the geological bomb’s countdown begins, I clench my mutated prosthetic and charge toward the trench. Even if Ling Yue is only a stream of data, and resonating with her even once will assimilate me, I’ll still blow up the incubation pool.

“Go any farther and you won’t be human anymore.” Nora slips me the “Redemption Code.” “But if you turn back, this sea of blue light will turn everyone into feed.”