Chapter 101
101 The Reckoning
43.81%0
+8 Pearis
Taylor remained composed, casually looking up at Scarlett with a subtle smile playing on his lips. His gaze softened, growing warm as he watched her.
Scarlen had already stepped forward. Once she confirmed the USB was in place, she bowed to the panel of experts and the audience before beginning in a calm, steady voice. “My research focuses on labeling cancer cells. The approach is as follows…” She clicked the remote in her hand and pointed to the screen behind her. But at that moment, the entire screen went blank.
Rebecca’s heart fluttered with joy. This had to be Oliver’s move. She couldn’t wait to see Scarlett humiliated. From this moment on, Scarlett would fall from grace, mocked by all, and eventually become her personal toy–someone she could break at will. The rest of the Joyner family smiled smugly, all except Stanley, who looked concerned and tried to rise, only for Eugene to stop him.
“Eugene!” Stanley whispered urgently. Even he could see this was one of Oliver’s tricks–there was no way Eugene hadn’t noticed. But Eugene’s eyes were fixed on John in the panel of experts, a storm of thoughts swirling behind them. Helping Scarlett now might carn John’s goodwill, but to the rest of the academic world, it would look like unprofessional bias. Even with John’s support, it could cost him everything. This was a high–stakes gamble he didn’t dare take.
“Just wait,” he said under his breath.
Stanley reluctantly sat back down. “I’m worried Scully can’t handle this.”
“If that’s really the case, I’ll step in,” Eugene replied, clenching his fists and taking a deep breath.
“Eive more minutes,” Stanley said, nodding.
Across the room, Micah looked uneasy as well. But the moment he saw the smirk on Calvin’s face, he stayed quiet. He didn’t have the power to challenge someone of Calvin’s level. Not yet.
The screen remained white. Whispered murmurs began to spread across the room.
“Did she forget to prepare? Maybe she’ll blame it on the AV system.”
“She asked some good questions earlier, but now? Can’t even get her slides up.”
“Makes you wonder if those questions were even hers to begin with.”
“Gross. What a scam.”
“Is this really the best that school can do?”
“Thank god I didn’t enroll there. I didn’t know theater was part of the medical curriculum.”
The room filled with snide remarks and smug amusement. Everyone was ready to see Scarlett fail.
But then the screen flickered–and her presentation came to life.
Everyone fell silent.
Oliver shot to his feet in disbelief as Scarlett smiled and began calmly explaining her methodology and experimental data. Her voice was soft, yet somehow magnetic. But Rebecca couldn’t hear a word. She kept looking to Oliver for answers, but he gave her nothing. How had Scarlett pulled this off? She shouldn’t have been capable of this. It was over. Everything was over.
1/4
12:48 Thu, 7 Aug
101 The Reckoning
+8 Pearls
Next to her, Calvin had started off uninterested, but as the presentation continued, his expression tightened. Then, it turned to shock. Eventually, he was frozen, unable to move.
Thirty minutes later, Scarlett finished speaking. The question session began immediately.
“Using pig genes to mark viruses?” someone laughed. “What is this, a sci–fi novel?”
But Scarlett didn’t flinch. She smiled and clapped her hands.
A team entered, bringing several containers. Her fingers paused briefly over the passcode of a case. The crisp sound of gloves against metal echoed in the hall. When she turned around, three stacked Petri dishes shimmered under the lab lights, glowing faint blue.
Most of the audience, made up of medical students, recognized the setup instantly.
Scarlett spoke evenly, explaining each layer. “The bottom holds nude mice with tumors. The middle contains lung cancer cells freshly extracted from a patient’s pleural fluid. The top is sealed with a batch of NDV–GT viral solution recombined just last night. The golden liquid carries visible helices from pig gene fragments.”
“If anyone still doubts the data, we can replicate it here.”
Her voice, cool as a scalpel dipped in ice, sliced through the whispers. Sᴇaʀch Thᴇ Findηovel.ɴet website on Gøøglᴇ to access s of novels early and in the highest quality.
The room was stunned. Who had the resources to transport a mini–lab and conduct live experiments on site? And the confidence to do it, in front of a room full of experts? Was she out of her mind?
Then John stood up.
“I think you should go ahead and demonstrate it–to teach a few blind fools a lesson.”
He glanced at Calvin deliberately. He already knew Scarlett had something impressive in store–but even he hadn’t expected this much. Her earlier explanation had already swayed several cancer researchers. All they needed now was proof. And now he was giving her the perfect platform–while irritating an old rival for fun.
As expected, Calvin’s face turned black. He still couldn’t admit he had misjudged her. All he could do was pray that Scarlett would mess up on her own.
But Scarlett had practiced the protocol endlessly to achieve perfection. Her hands moved with the confidence of muscle memory. There was no mistake to find–only wave after wave of astonishment from the room.
“She actually knows what she’s doing!”
“This is incredible!“,
“I’d call those hands divine!”
The Joyner family stared in disbelief, their faces darkening by the second. Connor, who’d been expecting Scarlett to fail, was completely stunned. It was his first time watching her work in a lab. Her slender, pale fingers moved with precise, practiced control. Sunlight spilled through the floor–to–ceiling windows, dust motes catching gold in the air. That warm light wrapped around her, making her eyes gleam with breathtaking brilliance. There was something magnetic about her–drawing attention, commanding stillness. His heart began to race uncontrollably, admiration and something deeper shining in his eyes. For the first time, he realized just how far out of his league she truly was. And for once, he wouldn’t have to
2/4
12:48
Aug
81 %
101 The Reckoning
48 Pearls
worry about her being “presentable.” Clutching his chest, he took several deep breaths to calm himself.
At that moment, Scarlett used a pipette to introduce the viral solution into the third Petri dish. The clear liquid inside began to shimmer with fine silver–blue bubbles. A researcher rushed over to peer at it up close.
“That’s an optical reaction from the virus envelope binding to the cancer cell surface receptors!”
The room’s monitoring screen exploded with data.
Calvin jumped to his feet, his chair screeching across the floor. Under the high–powered microscope, pig- gene–marked cancer cells were being surrounded by antibodies from the patient’s serum–visible to the naked eye.
“Look at that!” someone narrated. “The a–Gal sugar chains on the cell membranes are lighting up like beacons. Swarms of IgG antibodies are attacking from all sides, and C3b protein deposition is flaring red and gold under the fluorescent stain.”
“Check the live imaging on the left–it’s even more dramatic!”
“The tumor on the nude mouse is shrinking by 0.3 millimeters per minute!”
“The cancerous tissue is collapsing at the edges–those honeycomb patterns are the result of complement storm–induced vascular blockages.”
Professor Reeves frowned. “Is this your show, or are you going to let Scully speak?”
The others backed down.
Scarlett finally continued. “The key to converting cold tumors into hot ones…”
She slid her fingers across the touchscreen, revealing an updated map of immune cell activity. The CD8+ T- cell curve spiked like a rocket.
“…isn’t making the immune system see the tumor–it’s making the tumor wear a foreign skin.”
She picked up the virus sample bottle and tilted it gently under the overhead light. The suspended gene vectors glittered in fine golden strands.
“These pig–gene–modified viruses turn cancer cells into neon targets inside the body.”
Then the second dataset appeared.
Silence swept the hall.
It was from a liver cancer patient’s ascitic fluid. Under the microscope, NDV–GT–infected cells were bursting apart. The released tumor antigens ignited a firestorm of dendritic cell activity. These sentinel immune cells devoured the shattered cancer cells, their MHC molecules raised like flags claiming victory.
No one dared blink.
And then, finally, Scarlett looked straight at Calvin.
“Professor Miller, in your Nature paper three years ago, you wrote that anti–a–Gal antibodies in humans were too weak to produce an effective immune response.”
She pulled up comparison data–serum from treated patients showed antibody binding activity had surged
-318
12:48 170, 7 Augu
u, 7 Aug ‘
101 The Reckoning
by 37%.
+8 Pearls
“That’s because you never tried expressing dense sugar chains directly in cancer cells. When each cell grows twenty thousand a–Gal clusters on its surface, what you called an ‘ineffective concentration‘ becomes a precision–guided warhead.”
She paused, voice softening just slightly.
“And to be honest, I should thank you. You were the one who gave me this question to think about in the first place.”
476