Inside a vast space made entirely of steel, countless enormous iron chains crisscrossed one another like a spider's nest.
Dozens of oversized floodlights shone directly on a platform atop a central steel pillar.
A white-haired girl knelt on the platform, the countless chains converging on her and holding her firmly in place.
Several long spikes had been driven through the bones in her legs, pinning them securely to the platform so she could not move an inch.
Chains pierced her hands, shoulders, and spine without mercy, pulling her taut like a lifeless marionette.
The girl, too, was like a soulless puppet. She showed no expression at all, not even coldness-only a vacant stare.
Below the platform's steel pillar, more than ten armed personnel stood guard in shifts, while four cold, heavy machine guns trained their dark muzzles on the girl.
A window made of special tempered glass stood out on the steel wall directly opposite her.
Behind the window were more than a dozen researchers in white coats and a middle-aged man in a suit whose eyes remained fixed on the girl.
He stared at her intently, his eyes revealing not a trace of sympathy, only endless gravity and anger.
"'Super Aberrant'-class aberrant, [HeLa Cell]!" A deep voice rang out over the loudspeaker, filling the entire space.
"Two years ago, you slaughtered the entire population of City C, one million people! And not long ago, you indirectly caused the deaths of almost every member of the special investigation squad!" The middle-aged man in the suit gripped the microphone so hard that his knuckles turned somewhat white.
The girl's vacant eyes trembled slightly when she heard his words.
"You are about to undergo your first interrogation by the Great Xia Nation! You must tell us the truth!"
The armed personnel below also aimed their guns at the girl. Behind the man in the suit, a researcher sighed softly and placed a hand on a blood-red button, ready to press it at any moment.
The girl seemed to have heard the man in the suit as well. Slowly, she raised her vacant face.
"Creak, crack, crack-"
The girl moved gently, but the enormous chains on her body shifted all the same. The sound of bones breaking came from her petite body, crack after crack.
Yet her expression did not change in the slightest, as though she could feel no pain. She merely stared blankly at the man in the suit, separated from him by a pane of glass.
"Now! Tell us your past! Your experiences, everything you know-tell us all of it!" The deep voice came from the cold loudspeaker.
The girl's lips moved, and then she slowly opened her mouth.
"I... just born... cell... others... like me." A chain had pierced the girl's throat as well, so her words came out in broken, very strange-sounding syllables.
A female researcher wearing earrings stood beside the man in the suit and immediately recorded every word the girl said as she spoke.
The girl continued speaking with difficulty.
"Learned... to breathe... survived."
As the girl spoke, word by word, her memories slowly returned to two years ago, to the time when she had just been born.
Her memories of when she had first been born were very vague. It was not that she could not remember clearly; rather, back then she had not even possessed a sense of touch, which was why the memories were so vague.
[HeLa Cell] only remembered that, within seconds of being born, its life had already begun to slip away.
It did not know why, nor did it want to know why. It only wanted to live, though it did not know the reason for that either.
A "mouth" appeared on [HeLa Cell]'s surface. It used this "mouth" to suck in water, absorb the nutrients inside, and then spit it back out, repeating the cycle.
It survived, but this only let it live for less than half a minute longer before its life quickly began to slip away again.
It began to breathe in great gulps, trying to prolong its life this way.
But suddenly, it had a strange feeling, as though its "mouth" had been blocked.
It paid that no mind and sucked in whatever was blocking it as well.
By a twist of fate, it survived once again. It also felt that it had changed: it seemed to be bigger than before, and it seemed to have some strange sensations as well.
It seemed able to sense the things around it. There were many cells just like it nearby, but within seconds of being born, they slowly died, only to be born again, as though they had left nothing behind in the world.
But [HeLa Cell] could not spare a thought for any of that. All it knew was that if it sucked in the other cells and ate them, it could go on living.
Thinking about it now, it really was pathetic. She had eaten her own kind to stay alive, but... she seemed to still be doing the same thing now.
[HeLa Cell] kept sucking its own kind into its belly and turning them into energy, until it grew so large that eating his brothers and sisters was nowhere near enough.
Then [HeLa Cell] began to move. It did not know what it was going to do; it only knew that if it did not do something, it would die.
As it moved slowly along, it seemed to bump into something and was forced to stop.
It seemed to be a wall, a wall made of cells.
[HeLa Cell] discovered that it could also eat the cells in this wall, and there were plenty of them, more than enough to eat.
It stopped and ate, and ate.
It did not stop until it had eaten through the "wall," breaking it in two.
It was then that [HeLa Cell] realized it no longer seemed to be a single cell, but a black lump of flesh made up of many cells.
And what it had thought was a wall was nothing more than a strand of seaweed.
It prepared to eat the rest of the seaweed, but before it had eaten even half, a wave slapped it away and washed it ashore.
At first, [HeLa Cell] could not move at all on land. Only after it learned to wriggle could it barely manage to move.
But it had not gone more than a couple of steps before it encountered the first land creature it had ever seen.
It was a very large ant. When it saw [HeLa Cell], it immediately bit it twice, nearly biting it to death.
[HeLa Cell] wanted to flee, but at the speed it moved, the ant might as well have been watching it stand still.
The ant apparently thought [HeLa Cell] did not taste good either, and then turned and left.
[HeLa Cell] noticed the other creature leave and stopped wriggling, instead beginning to think for the first time.
Its thoughts were very simple. It was really just thinking about the creature called an ant, and as it thought, [HeLa Cell] began to change.
It slowly turned into a pool of black liquid, then gradually took shape. Ant limbs and mouthparts slowly grew from it, until it finally became an ant.
It was just much smaller than the one that had bitten it.