The Year I Stopped Being His novel Chapter 294

In the wrecked office, documents littered the floor, and drawers hung half-open.

The glass door of the clean bench was ajar, and petri dishes were stacked crookedly on the counter.

The cello lay broken in two. The neck was snapped cleanly off the fingerboard, the four strings dangling limply. The thinnest broken string curled against the body, like a final sigh that could never be undone.

Garrison squatted on the floor, gently cradling the body of the cello as he reached for the severed neck. He ran his fingers over the fracture, desperately trying to piece the jagged edges back together, but they wouldn't align. No matter how hard he tried, they just wouldn't fit.

His hands began to shake. It had only been two hours. Not even two hours!

And the cello was already destroyed. Was it... was it because Sloane still refused to forgive him?

Did she not want him touching her things?

Especially her most prized possession, the only thing her mother had left her.

Just then, the office door pushed open.

"Dr. Foster, what... what happened here?!"

Assistant Dawson stood in the doorway, clutching a folder, frozen like he was nailed to the floor. He pushed his thick, black-rimmed glasses up his nose, his mouth dropping open in shock.

"Did those guys come back?!" Dawson's voice was a mix of sheer panic and furious indignation. His free hand curled into a fist. "Those absolute parasites!"

Garrison didn't turn around. His hands hovered over the ruined cello, wanting to fix it, but too afraid to touch it.

Dawson knew exactly what he was asking.

From Metropolitan General Hospital to now, he had been by Garrison's side for five years. He knew that the Vitas Strain had already cleared the strain synthesis, cultivation, and target recognition phases. The only thing left was the final, critical step: Nano-Encapsulation.

But it wasn't as simple as just stuffing a bacteriophage into a pill capsule.

The Vitas Strain consisted of live bacteriophage particles. Injecting them directly into the human body would cause the immune system to flag and destroy them immediately, likely resulting in a half-life of less than twenty minutes. They had to be encapsulated in a liposome vesicle less than a hundred nanometers in diameter. The outer shell would trick the immune system, allowing the payload inside to be delivered precisely to the target.

However, this encapsulation process demanded incredibly advanced technology. If the encapsulation rate fell below ninety percent, the drug's efficacy was nothing more than a pipe dream. The equipment in their lab was far too outdated, and Garrison's previous manual attempts had all ended in failure.

That was why he had asked Dawson to reach out to external manufacturers.