Chapter 10: Lysis

Today is Labor Day. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday. I will try my best to update it and I hope you enjoy it.

Days after Qingming Festival, Northspire Haven finally saw sunlight breaking through the lingering overcast skies—a rare respite for the rain-drenched city.

A sedan crawled from the outskirts into downtown. Inside, a meticulously dressed woman touched up her makeup while chattering about their trip. “Who knew tea-picking could be this fun? Wasted years in Northspire Haven! Gotta pick the best photos for WeChat Moments!”

“Oh, Kai!” She snapped her compact shut, smacking her freshly glossed lips and turning to the driver.

The man—Kai S. Gao—wore casual attire and gold-rimmed glasses, his scholarly demeanor contradicted by the muscular frame straining his shirt.

“We harvested so much tea! I even hand-roasted some. Let’s gift Dr. Zhong! It’s the thought that counts, right?”

Kai glanced at her via the rearview mirror, amused. “Always thoughtful, Miomi. Let’s head straight to Dr. Zhong’s.”

“You’d never think of this! All you care about is research!” Miomi Guo wrinkled her nose, her girlish charm defying the stereotypical “female PhD” image. At thirty, she still radiated teenage naivety.

“Focus more on your studies, or you’ll never graduate,” Kai teased fondly.

“I’ve got you and Dr. Zhong!” She nuzzled his shoulder. “Drop me at the subway—I’ll deliver the tea. You check on your precious slime molds! They might’ve died of loneliness without you!”

“They’re heartier than that.” He paused, eyeing the traffic. “But fine. This jam’s brutal.”

“Pull over up ahead!”

The car halted. Miomi Guo hopped out like an eager bunny, then froze mid-sprint.

“The tea! You forgot the tea!” Kai called.

“Oopsie!” She tapped her forehead, cutely sticking out her tongue.

Dashing back, she leaned into the rear seat—her short jeans hiking up to reveal sunlit thighs—and retrieved a kraft paper bag.

“Have some decorum!” Kai sighed.

“Yes, sir!”

Adjusting her purse, she skipped toward the subway. “Bye!”

“Act your age…” Kai muttered, smiling as he drove off.

Kai S. Gao considered himself fortunate to have met someone like Miomi Guo. They shared the same academic lineage—he had graduated under Dr. Derek Zhong and now worked as a postdoc at the Northspire Haven Institute of Microbiology, while Miomi Guo was Dr. Zhong’s newest doctoral candidate. Despite being the same age, she retained a childlike innocence he’d never seen in a thirty-year-old, radiating kindness as if a lollipop could lure her away.

Missing a screw, he often joked. Yet her naivety puzzled him—how had she even gotten into the PhD program? Perhaps academia’s sheltered environment preserved her simplicity.

Now, during the Qingming Festival holiday’s final evening rush hour, Northspire Haven’s narrow roads choked with traffic. Kai S. Gao fretted over his lab’s slime molds. The ancient humidifier often malfunctioned; without constant moisture, the specimens—collected from pristine forests—might shrivel irreversibly.

Stuck in gridlock, he yanked the handbrake and checked his phone. A red notification dot led to Miomi Guo’s WeChat Moments: nine meticulously filtered selfies, conspicuously excluding him. He mindlessly liked the post.

An hour later, he reached the institute under dusk’s dimming light. Lab windows glowed.

“Back so soon, Senior Gao? Where’s Junior Guo?” asked Tao Hsu, a fellow PhD student clocking out.

“Busy,” Kai S. Gao replied, suiting into protective gear.

“Lucky her,” Tao smirked. “Skipping lab days like a pro. Wish I could suck up to you too—if I were a girl.”

Kai S. Gao grimaced. “Not my preference.”

“Relax, just kidding!” Tao waved dismissively. “Your slime molds… some edges dried out. Didn’t touch ’em—not my field.”

“The sprayer failed?!” Panic spiked.

“Nah. Check yourself.” Tao left.

After donning his lab coat, Kai S. Gao rushed to the incubator housing his slime mold samples. The mist sprayer hissed, emitting a fine mist to simulate the humid forest environment the organisms required.

Slime molds were notoriously delicate—heat- and drought-sensitive, as tender as the "soft young girls" Kai metaphorically compared them to. If half his mind lingered on Miomi Guo, the other half fixated on these organisms.

True to Tao Hsu’s warning, the petri dish’s edges showed blackened, desiccated slime mold, though not from dehydration—beads of moisture still clung to the shriveled regions. The surviving yellow protoplasmic mass sprouted new branches, a sight more unsettling to Kai than total extinction.

Slime molds, unicellular yet multinucleate, shouldn’t exhibit partial necrosis. This anomaly—never before documented—defied logic. After ruling out contaminated media, the fault lay with the organism itself.

Kai prepared slides and slid them under a high-powered microscope.

The blackened areas revealed lysed nuclei, chromosomes scattered in the cytoplasm, some even showing DNA uncoiling—a cellular meltdown.