I shut the door and cried out of sheer frustration, a sudden wave of collapse washing over me.
My roommate, who had just vowed to protect me yesterday, was the one leading the charge in scaring me.
It was terrifying. Even though I knew it was him, I felt like I was being stalked by a perverted monster.
It was insane! If you’re going to bring a late-night snack, can’t you just deliver it normally? Can’t you?! If you want to keep watch, then keep watch properly—don’t act like a lunatic! I don’t want to be in this kind of horror-romance anymore! My heart is exhausted, my mind is stifled; I feel like I’ve lost the capacity to love.
I cried for a long while until I got hungry. I walked back out, picked up the still-steaming bowl of duck blood vermicelli soup, and finished it. With a warm stomach, I finally went to bed.
Soon, however, I developed a much deeper fear of the world around me, all because of Lu Daoshi’s research on that scale.
The following evening, while I was busy dodging the neighborhood cats and dogs lunging at me, Lu Daoshi called. He sounded agitated, his words rambling and incoherent. I told him to stop talking and that I’d head over to his place. He said no, he couldn’t wait; he had to tell me right now, he couldn't hold it in for another second. I told him to go ahead, and he gave me three words:
"There are no enzymes."
I gave a calm "oh" and hung up. I didn't understand what that meant anyway.
Lu Daoshi met me at a roadside food stall. This surprised me; I thought he’d have me come to the Archaeology Department’s lab. Instead, he was sitting there with a thick stack of documents serving as a coaster for a plate of peanuts, gulping down beer. He looked like he’d pulled an all-nighter.
I asked him to explain what "no enzymes" meant. He gave me a look of pure disdain and said that for any living thing to undergo biological reactions, it needs enzymes. Respiration requires enzymes, photosynthesis requires enzymes—they are catalysts. Didn't I learn this in high school? I nodded and asked what it meant if there were none. Was it dead?
Lu Daoshi didn't answer directly. He changed the subject, mentioning that the scale was incredibly hard—so hard he couldn't even cut a piece off—but there was some mucus on it. He asked if I knew about it. How could I not? I’d spent ages washing it. When Lu Daoshi heard this, he smacked me hard on the head. "You washed it all away! You washed it all away!"
It turned out that since he couldn't do anything with the scale itself, he had extracted the mucus from its surface and isolated some proteins and even cells. Those cells were still alive, moving slowly under the microscope, full of vitality.
But they had no enzymes.
He had used various methods, but he couldn't detect the presence of any enzymes within their cell membranes. He asked if I understood the implications. I shook my head, and he smacked me again. He explained that this meant the life mechanism of these cells was different from every known cell in existence. All known life is composed of cells containing enzymes.
I still didn't feel much of an impact. I figured discovering an unknown organism was fairly normal, especially after encountering that monster that ate menstrual blood. I had known for a while that whatever was haunting me was anything but ordinary.
Lu Daoshi continued, "We’re always talking about telomerase, telomerase, telomerase—the thing that protects cells from being damaged by division. Why do cells get damaged? Internally, it’s still because of enzymes. When their lifespan is up, certain enzymes within the body decompose the cells, and the cells die. But these cells have no enzymes at all, which means they have no enzymes specifically designed to trigger death."
I realized what he was getting at. "So... these cells aren't just 'not dead,' they *can't* die?"
Lu Daoshi nodded. "Immortality."
A living being composed of such cells would be immortal.
My heart finally gave a heavy thud. In the middle of a summer night at a food stall, I felt a chill run down my spine.
He said this was just a hypothesis for now because the creature didn't seem to belong to any known biological system, so it couldn't be judged by conventional logic. However, he felt that our research into the fountain of youth might have been headed in the wrong direction entirely. Why study telomerase when we should be studying the absence of enzymes? Those cells were currently thriving in the culture medium. He was planning to hand them over to some classmates or professors specializing in biology to see what they thought. Maybe they could even breed more for deeper research. He was currently debating whether he should go for a Nobel Prize. As if the Nobel Prize was like a Guinness World Record you could just apply for.
I thought that was the end of it—the creature I was looking for was immortal. But then Lu Daoshi let out a loud burp and pulled that thick stack of documents out from under the peanut plate.
Things were only just beginning.
He pushed up his glasses and said, "This scale is very famous. When you gave it to me, I thought it looked familiar. I went back, checked the records, and remembered. I’d seen a feature on it in a very obscure journal. It has a specific name: The Lias Mystery."
I never imagined that the "stone" I found inside my shirt actually had a name!
I flipped through the materials Lu Daoshi gave me. Most were in English, dense with text and newspaper clippings I couldn't understand. But in the few black-and-white photos, I could vaguely make out something that looked similar to my scale, though these looked more like stones—heavily weathered and worn. Lu Daoshi told me there were three such scales in the world. The first was discovered in the Lias Group in 1934. Its discovery sparked a debate, but because they couldn't determine if it was a biological fossil and because World War II broke out, the research went dormant.
I asked him what the "Lias Group" was. He told me it was a geological layer from the Lower Jurassic, nearly two hundred million years ago. I nearly lost it right then and there. Immortality was one thing, but two hundred million years! I had been slept with by something two hundred million years old! Fuck! Did it have to be that impressive?!
The thing that can trigger the deepest horror in the human soul is always the vastness of time.
However, horror aside, if a two-hundred-million-year-old object had appeared in my shirt, I was sitting on a fortune.
Lu Daoshi told me to look closely at the records from that time. The most important part was the journal of the person who found it, a French aristocrat named De-something-or-other, referred to in later texts as Friwest. He was the first to discover the scale. At the time, Friwest was excavating the remains of a Majungasaurus in central France. While using a brush to clear the dust from the skull, he found this scale wedged in the Majungasaurus's teeth. The dinosaur's neck had been snapped.
Lu Daoshi stared at me again, seemingly hoping for some brilliant insight. I truly had no clue, so I could only say that it sounded like a very significant archaeological find. He scoffed. "No one believed him. Everyone thought Friwest was a fraud."
He broke down why.
First, the Majungasaurus was a predator, averaging seven meters in length, at the top of the food chain. Even a Tyrannosaurus Rex wouldn't have the strength to snap its neck like that—partly because a T-Rex has short arms. A collision wouldn't do it either; the Majungasaurus had a short neck.
Second, and more importantly, a T-Rex would never even encounter a Majungasaurus.
He had been drinking and was very excited. At this point, he pulled a world map from somewhere and started folding it into a mess.
"Look, two hundred million years ago, the continental plates looked like this... These southern parts—South America, Antarctica, India, Africa, and Australia—were all joined together as one supercontinent. We call it Gondwana. The northern pieces were also joined, called Laurasia. The Majungasaurus lived in Gondwana, near what is now Madagascar in Africa. The northern continent was entirely the territory of the Tyrannosauridae."
I quickly caught the main point. "Europe was part of the northern continent, so that De-whatever guy couldn't possibly have excavated the remains of a Majungasaurus—which lived in the south—in central France."
Lu Daoshi nodded, confirming my thought. "The scale was also dismissed as a hoax, and it fell into obscurity. Only Friwest himself remembered it, writing many manuscripts about the scale. Unfortunately, after he died, his descendants tossed those manuscripts into a local library, which was tragically destroyed in a fire in 1983."
I felt like he was straying too far. I had come to him to find out who had slept with me, and he was telling me about the death of a Majungasaurus. I didn't see the connection. He told me to listen patiently. He personally loved these kinds of bizarre, unsolved mysteries. He had read that journal long ago and thought there were too many suspicious points that didn't connect. But after hearing about Old Chu, he suddenly felt a spark of inspiration. He made a bold hypothesis and realized these two events might not be unrelated. Even with two hundred million years between them, he could faintly smell the scent of a serial killer.
To prove his point, he showed me another black-and-white photo. It showed a mess of prints scattered on the ground in an irregular, elongated shape. Due to time, they looked like patterns carved into a carbon mold. I asked what it was. He told me to look closer. I stared for a long time and realized each print was similar—oval-shaped with leaf-like veins in the middle. "...Are... are these feathers?"
Lu Daoshi showed a hint of approval. "It’s a pile of feathers, scattered twenty meters away from the Majungasaurus." He showed me another aerial shot. With a standing Frenchman for scale, I realized that pile of feathers was massive. Each one was nearly half a meter long. Looking at it for too long made me feel a bit nauseous.
I asked him what it was. Feathers from the two-hundred-million-year-old immortal monster?
"No," Lu Daoshi said, looking frustrated by my lack of insight. "Feathers from the Majungasaurus."
"What?! Dinosaurs had feathers?"
"Dinosaurs all had feathers. Didn't you know that? How else did they turn into birds later?" He told me to stop being stupid, organize my thoughts, and tell him what I came up with.
The Majungasaurus's neck was snapped, its feathers were piled twenty meters away in an irregular, elongated shape...
"You’re not telling me that two hundred million years ago, a Majungasaurus was brought thousands of miles from home just to be skinned, are you?!"
Lu Daoshi slapped the table. "Bingo!"
I stood up to leave, but Lu Daoshi grabbed me. "Why don't you believe me?"
"Believe your sister!"
"Sit down! Let me ask you: if it were you, why would you skin someone?!"
Holy shit, I would never skin anyone! Lu Daoshi realized it was a bad question, coaxed me back into my seat, and asked again, "When do you think a human would skin another creature?"
"When they're cold? To make a coat."
"The thing that skinned Old Chu didn't take his skin with it. Think again. Skinning is a highly technical task. Whoever does it must be an intelligent life form; you can't do it without sufficient IQ. And any intelligent being usually has a purpose for what they do."
How was I supposed to know?
Lu Daoshi then asked me how I felt when I learned Old Chu had been skinned.
Wasn't it obvious? "I was terrified. My hair stood on end. I’m afraid that one day I’ll go to the bathroom and get skinned myself."
"Exactly. In biology, this is called empathy. It successfully triggered empathy between you and the deceased Old Chu. Strategically, this is called deterrence. It uses a cruel method to make certain things—including humans—stay away or be afraid. You should know that skinning appeared in many religious rituals in ancient times to demonstrate the power of gods and shamans."
He pointed to the photo of the Majungasaurus. "That area in central France was actually a flat rainforest. During the Jurassic period, it was lush with ferns. Below the Lias Group, the number and variety of dinosaurs were staggering; you can imagine it was a vital link in the ecological chain. But above the Lias Group, within a hundred-mile radius, no other dinosaur fossils have ever been excavated. It’s as if they all evaporated overnight. The last dinosaur fossil in that region was a giant predator with a strange scent that no northern dinosaur had ever encountered—a Majungasaurus. And it had been skinned and hung up. What do you think?"
"So... you mean... the owner of this scale killed and skinned a Majungasaurus two hundred million years ago, and then skinned Old Chu on September 20th, just to... scare us?"
***
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My Roommate is a Non-Human | Chapter 28 | The Lias Mystery | Novela.app | Novela.app
