A Backbone of Soft Bone

In the year 5047, the UN Secretary-General stood before a stretch of charred ruins. Behind him lay the remains of skyscrapers that had once illuminated human civilization. It was the third year since the global nuclear war began.

No one could say for certain who had pressed the button first. But everyone knew that humanity's industrial civilization had turned to ash in just three hundred days. The explosions themselves killed only a third of humanity. What truly drove the survivors to the brink was the nuclear winter that followed. Fires in cities and forests sent around 150 million tons of soot into the stratosphere, blocking sunlight for years. Global average temperatures plummeted by around 7°C, a drop greater than during the last ice age, and food production in major agricultural nations fell by more than 90%.

More terrifying still were the nuclear power plants by the sea.

When Fukushima- and Chernobyl-style nuclear power plants were struck by missiles, their never-ending fuel rods continued to discharge highly radioactive wastewater into the ocean. The ocean, that vast body of water once regarded as the cradle of life, began to nurture a new and unpredictable kind of mutation.

Einstein once said on his deathbed, "I don't know what weapons will be used in the Third World War, but the Fourth World War will be fought with stones."

But he never said what would happen if the battlefield of the Fourth World War were the ocean.

Human civilization was not entirely wiped out. Only around five hundred million people survived on land, struggling to stay alive amid cold, darkness, radiation, and ruins. Yet in the depths of the sea, an even more violent evolutionary revolution was underway. Changes in deep-sea temperatures caused by nuclear radiation and nuclear winter, along with the restructuring of food chains, were rewriting marine life at a pace far beyond natural evolution.