The Amazon rainforest swallowed the sun whole.
A thick, eternal dusk clung to the canopy, and below, where the tangled roots strangled stone and sky alike, something far older than man stirred again. It was not death, but something crueler. A beginning made from endings.
Mei Sato—no, that name no longer belonged to her. Mei Argwan now. Queen of the buried. Mother of the monstrous.
She stood knee-deep in a pitch-black river whose surface reflected nothing. Her violet skin shimmered beneath fractured rays that bled through the leaves above, each droplet running down her arm like molten mercury. The water should have chilled her, should have made her shiver. But she hadn't known cold since the change. Not truly. Not since the serum—the same cursed gift Ren had once begged her to refuse—had rewritten her bones and carved her humanity away.
"Again!" barked a voice from the bank.
Her eldest son, Ryu, watched from the edge of the river. He stood nearly two and a half meters tall now—only five months old, but physically a man of eighteen, his musculature grotesquely defined, his eyes molten gold. At his feet knelt a poacher, bound at the wrists, face bleeding from the underbrush.
"Breathe deep," Ryu commanded.
The man whimpered, trembling as he lowered his face into the bucket filled with rainwater. Mei didn't move. She simply watched. The seconds stretched like centuries.
Thirty. Sixty. Ninety.
The poacher's body began to convulse, lungs begging for release. Ryu let him suffer, then finally yanked him up by the hair with a flick of his claws.
"Three minutes," Ryu said coldly. "My youngest brother did seven last night. You think that makes you worthy?"
The man choked and collapsed.
Mei's claws—long, curved talons shaped from keratin and guilt—dug into her palms until she felt the sting of blood.
This isn't what I wanted.
But what she wanted no longer mattered.
Back within the twisted stone arteries of their underground hive, the Den pulsed with sickening life. Dozens—no, hundreds—of purple-skinned figures moved in unison. Male and female, child and elder, though few were more than a year old. They carved weapons from scrap metal, wove body armor from shed skin and iron moss, assembled drones and silencers from scavenged military tech. They didn't speak unless necessary. Words were inefficient. They learned from the blood.
At the heart of it all, the main chamber glowed with eerie bioluminescence. Crystals harvested from the deep jungle's ruins gave off a gentle, fungal pulse. There, surrounded by his sons and their half-born offspring, stood Kaito—Mei's husband.
Ugly, misshapen, perfect Kaito.
His face, still crisscrossed by the acid burns that had exiled him from the human world, smiled at her as she approached. The other Argwan looked to him as a prophet. He was not powerful, not like her or the boys—but he believed. And belief had become more dangerous than teeth.
"They're evolving faster," he said, handing her a steaming cup of mushroom-bark tea. His voice rasped like sand in wind. "Last brood reached maturity in four months, not five."
Mei turned her eyes to the nursery hollow, where three newborns—barely days old—were already crawling with predatory grace. Their golden eyes tracked her every step. No crying. No confusion. Just… awareness. Cold and unblinking.
"We need to slow it down," she whispered.
Kaito chuckled. "Tell that to your sons."
Speak of demons and they appear—Ryu ducked into the chamber with a jagged bruise along his jaw.
"Outsiders at the northern ridge," he said, wiping blood from his knuckles.
Mei's heart sank. "How many?"
"Six. All female. Three from the oil village. Three hunters. Strong hips. One's already ovulating." He bared his teeth in a smile too wide to be human. "Prime stock."
The temperature in the room seemed to plummet. Mei's tail, long dormant, twitched at the base of her spine. Her vestigial spikes—flesh-covered ridges where once there might've been wings—ached under the weight of her guilt.
"Bring them to me," she said softly. "First."
Ryu's grin deepened. "Of course, Mother."
That night, the cave whispered secrets she could never erase.
In the deepest chamber, she sat alone in what they now called the Chrysalis Womb. The walls pulsated with sickly green light, courtesy of the bioluminescent fungi they'd cultivated on old bones and synthetic mesh. Chains clinked softly in the dark. Twelve women lined the stone wall—villagers, hikers, smugglers—each one rounded with impossible pregnancy.
Three weeks in, and their bellies were swollen with triple gestation.
One lifted her head as Mei approached. Her lips cracked, her voice a splinter. "Please… kill me. Before they come again."
The words echoed off the stones, lingering like a prayer in a dead church.
Mei opened her mouth—but the woman screamed before she could answer. Her stomach convulsed violently, her limbs locking. Blood and fluid spilled in a sickening flood. Mei caught her, kneeling into the mess without hesitation.
Three infants slid free, violet-skinned and golden-eyed. They didn't cry. They didn't blink. They crawled.
The mother wheezed, eyes wide. "What… what are they?"
Mei didn't answer immediately. Her hands trembled as she held one of the newborns close to her chest, its claws already sharp enough to draw blood.
"The future," she whispered.
She meant to sound proud. She didn't.
Outside the chamber, the others celebrated. A chorus of shrieks and howls echoed up the tunnels. Another dozen had matured that night. Another dozen would hunt. Another dozen would breed. The cycle continued—accelerated. Controlled. Divine.
And above them all, cloaked in jungle shadows no satellite could pierce, rose the first Argwan Spires—natural towers of twisted bone and living tissue designed to launch meteor-shaped dropships into orbit. The sky thundered not with weather, but with preparation. The first pods were nearly complete.
The world above had forgotten Mei Sato.
But soon, very soon, they would remember.
And when they did… they'd beg for Hollowing to return. Because what came next would not bury them.
It would replace them