Raising Beast Cubs to Find a Husband-Chapter 66: The Glitch in the Deep

The world wasn’t ending. Just the room.

The ivory-white walls of the laboratory weren’t crumbling; they were dissolving into raw, colorless mist. The seamless floorboards were evaporating into geometric motes of light. Gravity lurched, flipping sideways, then upside down, as the artificial laws governing the chamber failed.

"SECTOR PURGE INITIATED. LOCAL REALITY UNMAKING IN PROGRESS."

The voice boomed from the vibrating walls, cold and devoid of mercy.

"It’s deleting the room!" Primrose screamed, clutching the Sun-Pearl to her chest as the floor beneath her feet turned into vapor. "Caspian! The Core thinks we’re foreign agents! It’s scrubbing the timeline!"

"What?! Why?!" Caspian roared.

He slammed his black crystal sword into the floor—or what used to be the floor. Instead of hitting stone, the blade sparked against a grid of hard, invisible light that sizzled with arcane energy.

The Void Residue—the black, shifting sludge—lunged. It didn’t move like a liquid; it moved like a tear in a painting. Where it passed, the air simply ceased to exist.

SCREEE.

It swiped at them with a claw made of nothingness. Caspian raised a shield of high-density water magic, a barrier strong enough to stop a torpedo.

CRACK.

The shield didn’t break physically. It unraveled. The blue water turned into purple, geometric shards and vanished into the void, erased from existence.

"Mana doesn’t work on it!" Primrose realized, watching the magic dissolve. "It consumes the energy signature! It’s a Null-entity!"

"Then we use physics!" Caspian growled, his eyes narrowing.

He looked at the pressure seal—the airlock door they had entered through. It was fifty feet away, across a room that was rapidly losing its cohesion. The white light was being eaten by the creeping darkness.

He grabbed Primrose by the waist. "Hold your breath!"

Caspian didn’t run. He launched himself.

He kicked off the dissolving console with the force of a cannonball. They flew through the air, dodging floating chunks of white stone that turned to dust upon contact. The Void Sludge lashed out, a tendril of jagged shadow whipping toward Primrose’s head.

Caspian spun in mid-air, throwing his body in the path of the strike.

HISS.

The slime struck his armored shoulder. There was no clang of metal. There was only a sickening silence as the volcanic glass armor simply vanished, leaving behind a patch of grey, dead skin that looked like cracked stone.

Caspian grunted, a sound of deep, jarring pain, but he didn’t stop. Momentum carried them across the gap. He slammed into the pressure seal.

"Open!" he commanded, slamming his hand on the silver panel.

"ERROR. SANCTIFICATION IN PROGR—"

"OPEN!" Caspian roared, channeling his immense physical strength into his fist. He didn’t hack the door. He didn’t use magic. He used the brute force of a Leviathan.

CLANG.

The ancient "Star-Metal" buckled. The delicate internal circuitry sparked and died. The seal broke.

WHOOSH.

The ocean outside, held back for three thousand years, realized the barrier was gone.

Millions of gallons of freezing, high-pressure water exploded into the room. It hit with the force of a collapsing mountain. For a normal human, it would be instant death. But Caspian wrapped his body around Primrose, turning his broad back to the torrent, taking the full, crushing force of the impact.

They were blasted backward, tumbled like ragdolls out of the dissolving laboratory and into the dark, cold silence of the Old Palace ruins.

Behind them, the blinding white light of the lab flickered once, then imploded.

"PURGE COMPLETE."

The massive stone door between the Fox Statue’s paws slammed shut. The glowing silver veins on the surface turned black and dull.

The "Glitch" was trapped inside. The room was gone, scrubbed from history.

Silence returned to the deep.

Primrose floated in the dark water, gasping into the air bubble Caspian had instinctively reformed around her. She was shaking, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

"We... we made it," she whispered, clutching the Pearl so hard her knuckles were white. "We got the data."

She looked around the gloomy ruins. "Caspian?"

The King was floating a few feet away. He had shifted back into his merman form. His long, powerful tail swished lazily to keep him upright in the current.

But he was leaning heavily against a broken marble pillar, his posture wrong.

"Neighbor?" Primrose swam over to him, dread pooling in her stomach. "What’s wrong?"

"I am fine," Caspian said, his voice tight and strained. "Just... a scratch."

"Let me see."

Primrose swam to his left side. She gasped, her hands flying to her mouth.

His shoulder—the one that had taken the hit from the Void—looked horrific. It wasn’t bleeding red blood. The wound was glowing with a sickly, pulsating violet light. The scales around it had turned grey and brittle, cracking like dry mud. The corruption was moving, tracing geometric patterns down his arm like a living circuit board.

"It’s corruption," Primrose whispered, her hands hovering over the wound, afraid to touch it. "It’s rewriting your biology. It’s like a virus."

Caspian winced, his usual stoic mask slipping to reveal raw agony. "It burns. Like cold fire running through my veins."

He tried to push himself off the pillar, but he stumbled, his tail fins spasming uncontrollably.

"Caspian!" Primrose caught his arm. He was heavy—pure muscle and dense bone—but in the water, she could support him.

"We need to get back to the City," Caspian gritted out, sweat (or water?) beading on his forehead. "I need... the Royal Healers."

"No," Primrose shook her head firmly. She checked his pulse; it was erratic, skipping beats. "You can’t swim all the way back like this. The exertion will pump the corruption straight to your heart. We need to stabilize you first."

She looked around the ruins. The Kraken—the Guardian they had treated earlier—was hovering nearby in the shadows, watching them with its giant, intelligent yellow eye.

"Hey, buddy," Primrose called out to the monster, waving her hand. "We need a ride. And a safe place to hide."

The Kraken gurgled a low, mournful sound. It extended a massive tentacle, cupping it gently to offer a seat.

The Kraken carried them to a small, hidden cave near a thermal vent on the edge of the ruins. It was warm inside, and the walls were lined with glowing blue mana-crystals that provided a dim, serene light.

Caspian slumped against the sandy cave floor, breathing heavily. The violet veins were spreading down his bicep now. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

Primrose opened her dimensional bag. She pulled out her cooking supplies, her medical kit, and the bioluminescent herbs she had gathered from the royal gardens.

"I don’t have anti-virus software," Primrose muttered to herself, her hands shaking as she crushed glowing blue leaves in a mortar. "But I have purification herbs and a lot of cooking intent."

She knelt beside him.

"This is going to hurt," she warned, dipping a cloth into the glowing blue paste.

Caspian chuckled weakly, his head lolling back against the stone. His teal eyes were half-closed. "You always say that."

"Because usually, I’m right."

She applied the paste to the burning purple wound.

HISSS.

Steam rose from his skin. Caspian arched his back, a guttural growl of pain escaping his throat. His claws dug furrows into the stone floor.

"Breathe," Primrose commanded, placing a hand on his chest to hold him down. "Fight it, Caspian. You are the King of the Deep. Don’t let a little bad code delete you."

"I... am trying," he gasped, his jaw clenched tight.

He looked at her through the haze of pain. Her hair was floating around her face like a halo. She looked fierce, terrified, and beautiful. She looked like the statue in the hall.

"The recording," Caspian whispered, trying to anchor his mind to something other than the fire in his arm. "My ancestor... Emilien. He loved her."

"Yeah," Primrose said, her voice soft as she worked the magic into his wound, pushing the violet light back. "He loved the Fox. And she loved him enough to leave him. To save him."

"They were... Operators," Caspian tested the word. It felt foreign, yet familiar. "What does that mean, Primrose? What are we?"

Primrose paused. She looked at the man from Seoul. The man who wasn’t supposed to be real, bleeding for a world that was supposed to be a game.

"I think," Primrose said carefully, "That our ancestors were the ones who built this world. Or... the ones tasked to keep the engine running."

She finished bandaging the wound. The angry violet glow faded, replaced by the soft, steady blue of the healing herbs. The grey scales stopped spreading.

"There," she sighed, wiping sweat from her forehead. "The spread has stopped. You just need rest."

Caspian slumped back, the tension leaving his body. He felt weak, drained of mana, but the burning cold was gone.

He reached out with his good hand. His large, webbed fingers wrapped around hers.

"Primrose," he said, his voice drowsy but intense.

"Yeah?"

"If the Fox left to save the King..." he murmured, his eyes drifting shut. "...then the King was a fool to let her go."

His grip tightened on her hand, possessing it.

"I will not make the same mistake."

Primrose’s breath hitched. Her heart did a traitorous flip in her chest.

She watched him fall into a healing sleep. She looked at their joined hands—one massive and clawed, one small and human. She looked at the Sun-Pearl sitting safely in her bag, holding the secrets of the past.

"You’re not a fool, Caspian," she whispered to the sleeping King. "You’re just a transmigrator. Like me."

She curled up beside him on the sand, borrowing his warmth against the deep sea chill, and waited for the darkness to pass.