The Year I Stopped Being His novel Chapter 226

The bottom of The White Lake, over 2,600 feet underwater.

Sloane pulled out Professor Harrison's map and held it up to her face.

The headlamp illuminated the waterproof paper, the pencil-drawn contour lines and the red-circled star gleaming faintly in the beam. Professor Harrison's voice crackled through her earpiece, laced with static but completely intelligible.

"Sloane, how are you feeling?"

"I'm fine."

Her voice was heavily muffled behind the regulator, but she forcefully enunciated every syllable.

"Good."

Professor Harrison's voice was steady and incredibly precise:

"Sloane, I need you to head north-northeast by fifteen degrees, roughly six hundred feet. The thermal vents should be right there. Keep a close eye on the rock crevices. If you spot the white biofilm, begin the extraction immediately."

"Copy that."

Sloane tucked the map away, adjusted her bearing, and kicked off the sediment-laden floor, propelling herself toward the northeast.

The lakebed's topography was far more treacherous than she had anticipated. It wasn't a flat expanse, but wildly undulating, like a piece of crumpled paper violently flattened out.

The black rocks were blanketed in grayish-white sediment, which billowed into a hazy mist whenever her fins brushed past, giving her the eerie sensation of trekking across a lunar landscape.

She swam roughly four hundred and fifty feet before the water temperature spiked drastically. The mild warmth shifted into a scalding heat, permeating right through her thick wetsuit. And then, she saw the vent.

A pillar of blinding white water geysered from a fissure in the lakebed, mimicking a smoking chimney. It billowed upward, rapidly diffusing as it violently clashed with the freezing lake, creating an expansive, chaotic wall of fog.

However, there were no rocks flanking the thermal spring. Only sediment. Ashy, grayish-white silt, fine as milled flour, stretching across the floor. She crouched down, digging her gloved hand deep into the silt—it was entirely soft. There was absolutely nothing solid beneath.

No rocks meant no biofilm. The White Microbe strictly required a solid surface to anchor itself.

"Professor, I've located the thermal spring, but there are no rocks around it. It's nothing but sediment."

Sloane reported into the transceiver.

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