A man shook a test tube.
It was filled with a red liquid that sloshed gently against the glass.
He drew up that liquid with a micropipette.
With practiced hands, he transferred small amounts of the liquid into other test tubes.
Red drops fell into the reagent-filled tubes one by one, each producing its own reaction.
Watching the results, the man moved on to his next task.
His hands never stopped.
The place where he worked resembled both a laboratory and a hospital room.
Since it served both functions, either label would be correct — but if forced to choose, the room was a laboratory.
After all, what lay on the bed was not a patient, but a test subject. An experimental animal.
The man,
It was the look one gives a laboratory specimen — devoid of all warmth.
Even if she was his own daughter.
The reactions in the row of test tubes told him the red liquid had not changed from the previous day.
But that did not mean nothing was abnormal.
A trace amount of toxin had been detected in the red liquid.
From the blood of the girl on the bed.
Potimas was not poisoning the girl.
The girl's own body was producing the toxin.
But that was a function no human body was supposed to have — and the toxin it generated mixed into her blood, corroding her from within.
Because her body had been invaded by this poison since birth, the girl was forced into a life where she could barely rise from her bed.
Even if she had been healthy, though, would she have been able to live an ordinary life? The answer was no.
Her father was Potimas. The moment it became clear that the girl was not a proper human being, any semblance of a normal life was out of the question.
The girl was an experimental animal.
Even if she was genetically Potimas's daughter, born through improper means, she could only live as a test subject.
And with a body eroded by poison, there was no telling how long she would last.
She was a chimera.
The product of a madman's work — splicing human and animal genes together.
One of the very few successful cases.
She was born from a fertilized egg that had been modified, an experiment that attempted to graft animal characteristics onto a human.
She looked no different from a normal person on the outside, but within was something warped and twisted.
The girl had no name.
She was simply called Taratect, a mangled version of the spider species name she had been crossbred with — like a mere designation.
☆ Potimas Harifenas had been different from the people around him from the moment he became self-aware.
He could not understand them.
Why could people laze around so carelessly?
Humans die.
It was an inescapable fate. Whether a great person or an evil one, death visited all equally.
Potimas was terrified of this beyond words.
He was constantly afraid of death, always thinking about it.
That was precisely why he found it incomprehensible — unbelievable — that people gave death no thought in their daily lives.
Why were they not afraid?
Why did they not fight back?
Potimas did not want to die.
From childhood, he had lived in constant dread of the day it would come.
How could one avoid that absolute end?
Even as a child, he had been turning this question over and over in his mind.
And so he threw himself into every field of study he could find.
Hoping to discover a path to survival there.
The conclusion, in short, was that no field of knowledge contained an answer for how to evade death.
That was only natural.
If such a thing were possible, people would already have known about it.
Immortality was a dream cherished by all — and precisely because it was a dream, it had never been realized.
Moreover, it belonged to the world of fairy tales and legends.
It was something so far removed from reality that few people seriously pursued it — an event half-buried in myth and folklore, with no credibility to speak of.
And yet Potimas refused to give up.
If he did, he would have to sit and wait for the death that was surely coming.
No thank you.
So Potimas resolved to create it for real.
The secret of immortality.
He advanced his research using scientific methods grounded in cell biology.
Before the age of ten, he skipped ahead to university. Before twenty, he had published numerous discoveries and made his name known across the world.
But the key research bore no fruit.
Sensing the limits of science alone, Potimas finally turned to forbidden research.
To magic — a field beyond human comprehension.
The world was home to strange creatures.
Their ecology was riddled with mysteries that human wisdom alone could not fully unravel.
Among those creatures, the one most shrouded in the veil of the unknown was the dragon.
Dragons inhabited only the most remote mountain regions, cutting off all contact with humanity.
If you tried to approach one carelessly, you would触 — no. You would provoke its wrath.
In the past, every human who had attempted to unravel the mysteries of dragons had been met with a devastating backlash.
Because of this, very little was known about dragons.
What was certain, however, was that they possessed the ability to perform phenomena that science could not explain.
People called that ability magic.
Potimas focused on it.
Because dragons were long-lived.
According to legend, they were said to be immortal — they lived for extraordinary lengths of time.
He would study those long-lived bodies.
And the unknown field of magic.
With knowledge of both, he could move closer to completing his research on immortality.
Convinced of this, Potimas embarked on his study of dragons.
And that, it turned out, was the prelude to ruin.