Black on White

Thirty stage 2 Cors and two stage 3 Cors later, I stood wearing nothing but a white towel covering my waist as Numoral looked at the pulsating black on my body.

It looked like the roots of a tree as it wrapped all around my body, making me look strange.

"I can't tell what is happening."

You would expect disappointment from a statement like that, but that wasn't the case.

"How fascinating." Numoral eyes had a wild gleam in them as the visor faded away.

The black was pulsating every few seconds, and every time it did, it grew ever so slightly.

"With another 207 pulsations, your entire body will be covered by it... What will happen then?" Numoral muttered loudly enough for me to hear.

"Are you certain that you can't feel anything?"

Even with all this occurring on me, I couldn't feel anything strange on or in me.

So I simply shook my head to answer his question.

A woman walked up to us.

"No good boss, I can't find anything different from his initial readings, and the black still reads the same as before."

The both of us looked at her.

This was 'Queen'. Numoral's second in command. I hadn't met her before, and I didn't know her actual name.

"Even now?" Numoral didn't doubt her, and this only increased his curiosity about me.

He turned to a wall and spoke.

"What is the monitoring showing?"

A moment passed, and then a voice sounded all around us.

"Still reads like a stage 2 Cor with too much 'Da'. But there are possible traces of a forming whirl, we might need to open the valves to not cause any complications."

Numoral thought about what to do for less than a second before coming to a decision.

"Hm... Close the room off and empty it."

"Hn?" The voice seemed taken aback by that order. "Yes sir." But it did not hesitate to follow it.

A few moments later, the air seemed to dry up. It felt uncomfortable 

The pulsing seemed to slow down in its movements, and then the growth seemed to slowly shrink in size.

The voice sounded.

"The signature is fading sir."

"Open the room." 

The discomfort disappeared, but the black continued to shrink.

It shrunk till it was how it was before it started its pulsing. 

Numoral turned to Queen.

"Go get another stage 3."

She left silently as Numoral turned back to me and used many different machines to try to find out what was going on.

The stage 3 Cor was brought into the room, floating behind Queen with a number of long, glowing red sticks pierced into it.

She brought it within the reach of my hands and it dropped onto the floor, causing a loud booming noise.

it was thrice the size of the largest stage 2 I had seen, and its head resembled that of an owl. Its hands had three fingers and two thumbs. It had small streaks of white all over its body, similar to the other stage 3's.

I put my hand on and Queen waved hers, causing the red sticks to push themselves into the creature, killing it, before dissipating into the air.

Unlike with a stage 2, whose absorption was almost instant, absorbing a stage 3 took almost ten seconds, and I could see it being violently compressed as it compacted to the size of my palm.

When it was almost completely absorbed, the black seemed to be complete, as it started to pulse once more.

"Open the valves." I heard Numoral's command, but my attention was somewhere else.

The black increased the frequency, and soon it was pulsing wildly, multiple times per second as I heard the sound of soft hissing.

Once my entire body was covered in it, I started to lose my grip on consciousness.

The black started to spread to my towel, and the last thing I saw before losing consciousness was the sight of Numoral summoning his visor, along with the voice announcing something I couldn't make out.

As I started to fall to the floor, I was held up by a few ropes that seemed to materialize from nowhere.

The black now completely covered the one piece of clothing on me, and there seemed to be a wind picking which was weird since this was in a closed room.

The black seemed to liquefy on the edges of my body, and drops of pure black dripped from my nose, ears, and fingertips onto the ground, merging with the same liquid black that flowed from my toes.

The wind picked up.

"The readings are that of a stage 4 sir!" The voice spoke calmly. "But the gathered 'Da' is only a third of the average required!"

Numoral didn't answer, he took a falling drop and put it into a tube.

He then took a step back with the visor now glowing as the tube disappeared.

"Is this being recorded?" he asked no one in particular.

"it is."

"Yes sir."

Two answers sounded at the same time.

Numoral giggled, a smile on his face as he watched the spreading liquid.

A few seconds later, the black on the ground jumped up to the top of my head, forming a cocoon of sorts, closing me off from the outside, and destroying the ropes that were holding me up.

"It's a cocoon." Numoral spoke, as the wind started to die down.

"Hm?" The wind was still a little strong, making it hard to hear.

"A cocoon," Numoral repeated. "The anomaly is undergoing a metamorphosis Queen!"

His smile had turned into a full-blown grin.

"What do you think will emerge from it? Maybe it'll be a new species? Or maybe just an advanced Cor..." Numoral thought about the possible changes to me. "Maybe both, maybe his shell will fail to hold the negative 'Da' and just collapse. Deploy a holding pod and prepare a re-maker." 

By the end of that sentence, Numoral's voice had turned from glee to urgency. There was no way he would let an anomaly like me just disappear like that.

Queen vanished from her position to fulfill Numoral's order, leaving my cocoon and him alone in the room.

A minute passed, and the cocoon cracked, calling the attention of the scientist who was waiting.

He approached as the crack spread all over the cocoon, branching more than a dozen times.

After the cracks spread all over the cocoon, there was a moment of silence as Numoral waited with bated breath.

A moment later, the cocoon collapsed into fine sand-like pieces, leaving me standing motionless.

My hair was now long enough that it reached my waist. My skin had turned pure white, and my irises had turned a shining light silver.

My eyes widened a little as my thoughts returned, and my skin changed back to the previous sandy color.

I raised my hands a little and looked down at them, before coming to a realization.

'I'm naked.'