Frost immediately reported the situation to the elders.
In the conference hall, the oil lamps still burned with that same quiet glow, illuminating those aged faces. Yet the elders appeared remarkably calm in the face of this anomaly—calm to the point of being unsettling—as though they had long known what they would encounter, even what lay sealed beneath that sheet of ice.
Alpha said nothing. He merely raised his withered hand and passed over a document.
Frost accepted it with both hands and opened it. It was a yellowed file, its paper edges already brittle. The words had been typed on a typewriter, carrying the clumsiness and simplicity of that era. It recorded an incident from the past—one concerning this far northern sea.
From the winter of 1943 to the spring of 1944. That was the most stalemated period of World War II. The world's attention was focused on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific Ocean, and no one noticed what was happening in the Norwegian Sea.
But biologists detected an unprecedented explosion of biological evolution. A red tide swept across the Norwegian coastline, turning the seawater blood-red for hundreds of kilometers. Seen from above, it looked like a gigantic artery had been cut open, blood spilling into the sea.
A previously unseen strain of crimson tide algae had appeared—cold-resistant, salt-alkali-resistant, and possessed of vitality beyond reason. Ordinary crimson tide algae would die off in great numbers at low temperatures, but this new strain thrived recklessly in the waters of the Arctic Circle, as though it had found its own paradise.
And it was not just the crimson tide algae. Crabs and shellfish reproduced in excess as well. The seabed was carpeted with mussels and oysters, so densely packed that trawl nets could barely haul them in. Fishermen could