The concept of "hitting rock bottom" gains a new perspective when the bottom has cartilage teeth and smells like gastric juices.

  The fall through the dining room sphincter wasn't a free fall. It was a descent down a colossal esophagus. The muscular walls contracted around me, trying to crush me and push me down in a violent peristalsis.

  I didn't scream. Panic is a luxury my biology no longer affords me.

  I raised my left arm. The Black Crystal glowed with lethal intensity.

  I dug the volcanic glass fingers into the wall of flesh swallowing me.

  SHLACK.

  The friction tore the organic tissue, and the crystal's freezing power turned the warm muscle into brittle black ice. I slowed my descent, leaving a trail of crystallized necrosis down the tower's "digestive tract," until I landed with a dull thud on a spongy floor.

  It was dark. A humid dark, illuminated only by phosphorescent veins pulsing with a sickly yellow light on the walls.

  I stood up, shaking a puddle of digestive enzymes off my lab coat. The Parasite boiled in my liver, neutralizing the acid before it burned my skin.

  "Environmental analysis," I muttered to the darkness. My left eye (the residual digital interface of the Babel Code) calibrated to the low light.

  The place wasn't a normal basement. It was a slaughterhouse of genetic failures.

  Around me stretched rows of cylindrical tubes made of a translucent membrane. They looked like giant insect cocoons, hanging from the ceiling by thick umbilical cords. Most were empty, ruptured from the inside.

  The smell was a mix of formaldehyde, old blood, and something sickeningly sweet. The smell of failed birth.

  Suddenly, I heard the sound of ragged breathing. A shuffling of feet on the fleshy floor.

  I turned, raising the Mithril scalpel in my right hand and readying the crystal arm on my left.

  From the shadows of the ruptured cocoons, figures began to emerge.

  They walked hunched over, with trembling, uncoordinated movements. They wore rags of surgical cloth.

  When the yellow light of the veins illuminated the first of them, my stomach contracted with a violence the Parasite couldn't stop.

  It was me.

  Or rather, a crude caricature of what I am.

  The face was identical to mine, but asymmetrical. The right eye drooped lower; the jaw was prominent and animalistic. There was no intelligence in his gaze. Only an empty hunger and a blind obedience stamped in his dilated pupils.

  Behind him came five more. Ten more.

  Some had arms that were too long. Others had malformed bone plates protruding through the skin of their chests—failed attempts to replicate my Parasite's chitin armor.

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  [SECURITY ALERT: MULTIPLE IDENTICAL DNA SIGNATURES DETECTED.]

  [CLASSIFICATION: DEFECTIVE CLONES. BATCH 1 TO 41.]

  They were the "raw material" for the Gardeners. Hélio Veras's genetic trash.

  The lead clone stopped. He opened his mouth, and the voice that came out was mine, but distorted, like an old cassette tape being chewed up.

  "Faa-ilure... Trash... Father wants clean..."

  They had no individuality. They were lobotomized echoes of my own being, programmed to recycle whatever fell into the pit.

  "You are not my brothers," my voice came out cold, echoing in the underground. "You are my nightmares. And I am the doctor who came to cure the insomnia."

  The first clone threw himself at me with brutal force, raising a piece of sharp bone like a dagger.

  I didn't hesitate. I didn't retreat. Disgust turned into surgical precision.

  I dodged the strike, spun my body, and drove my Black Crystal arm straight into the clone's chest, exactly where the liver (and the supposed Parasite) should be.

  The purple energy exploded. The clone gasped. His body began to crystallize from the inside out, turning the cloned flesh into a black glass statue in the blink of an eye.

  I withdrew my arm. The statue fell backward and shattered on the floor. Hundreds of pieces of "me" scattered.

  The others advanced in unison.

  It was a self-inflicted massacre. I cut, dodged, and crystallized faces I knew from my own mirror. Every time my scalpel slit the throat of a Batch 30 or a Batch 12, a piece of my sanity cracked. I was killing myself repeatedly to survive.

  The Parasite, however, was ecstatic.

  [COMPATIBLE BIOMASS ABSORPTION. MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY. NO REJECTION DETECTED.]

  The symbiote was devouring the residual mana of the fallen clones, recovering the energy I had lost in the war against The Piper. The irony was disgusting: I was growing stronger by devouring my own assembly line.

  Meanwhile, dozens of meters above me, the surface was in flames.

  The sound reached the underground like muffled thunder.

  Up above, Valéria threw the Dreadnought Truck into heavy gear.

  "Gristle! Fire in Eden!" she shouted through the cabin radio, as she ran over a fence of living thorns.

  Gristle, atop the turret, laughed like a maniac. The harpoon cannon had been modified to fire incendiary charges of refined Ether.

  She aimed at Hélio Veras's gigantic biological greenhouses—the cocoons where future clones were being generated.

  "Tell the head gardener autumn came early!"

  BOOM.

  The blue fire projectile tore through the air and hit the central cellulose and glass greenhouse. The explosion wasn't just fire; it was a thermal storm that obliterated the walls of flesh and incinerated thousands of corrupted embryos instantly.

  The red sky of the Cerrado lit up with flames.

  Hélio's Gardeners (the finished clones wearing masks) tried to surround the truck, firing poisonous thorns.

  But Luna was already on the roof of the vehicle. She raised her baton, now glowing with the heat of battle.

  She didn't sing a chaotic note. She sang a perfectly tuned note, the exact resonance frequency of the city's organic glass.

  The sound traveled like an invisible shockwave. The tower windows "blinked" and shattered simultaneously, raining deadly blades down on my father's troops.

  The team wasn't just following my orders. They were dismantling the empire of Genesis brick by brick.

  Back in the darkness.

  I severed the leg of the last attacking clone and crushed his crystal skull with my boot. The floor was covered in blue shards and puddles of blood identical to mine. I was panting, not from exhaustion, but from the emotional weight of that slaughter.

  The underground was cleared of the patrol.

  My digital eye scanned the enormous cavern. Behind the main cocoons, I found what I was looking for: the Central Axis.

  It was a colossal spinal column, wide as a house, descending into the depths of the earth and rising to the pinnacle of the tower where Hélio awaited me. The spaces between the giant vertebrae formed natural steps, bathed in spinal fluid that smelled like ozone.

  It was the tower's service elevator.

  I wiped my scalpel on the sleeve of my lab coat, walked to the titanic spine, and dug my crystal hand into the porous bone.

  "I've dissected monsters, shut down supercomputers, and emptied an ocean," I muttered to myself, looking up at the darkness separating me from my father.

  "The time has come to do an autopsy on the family tree."

  I began to climb. The city of flesh burned outside, but the real hell was going to happen upstairs.