Agora Nocturna — The Academy of the Black Web

Chapter 3: The Wet-Market Auction Hall

At eleven that night, Do-yun returned to his third-basement laboratory.

He unlocked the dual-biometric deep freezer and swung open its heavy door. White mist spilled out like fog from the liquid-nitrogen tank at minus 196 degrees Celsius. With insulated gloves, Do-yun reached deep into a rack and pulled out three cryovials stamped with red barcodes.

Frost coated the glass surfaces; printed in tiny type beneath it read `K-GBM-07 / Passage 4 / Savant-Phenotype`.

A pale pink suspension sealed inside frozen glass. To an untrained eye it looked like any ordinary cell culture, yet inside lived the most twisted vitality of 'Jung Min-woo,' an eleven-year-old boy who had already been cremated into a handful of ash a year ago.

Do-yun pulled an active culture plate from the incubator beside the microscope to check its progress. Co-cultured alongside hippocampal neurons, the `K-glioma-07` cells extended long, star-shaped processes, coiling tightly around the neuronal axons. Across the multi-electrode array (MEA) monitor, high-frequency gamma spikes firing eighteen times faster than a normal neural network burst upward like green fireworks.

Before killing its host, the cancer had been remodeling the host's brain into a computational engine verging on the divine. What if these cells were united with immortalized artificial fetal tissue, or an endlessly perfused ectogenesis system?

Just then, a low, crystalline chime sounded from the workstation.

It was the signal that the auction session in the Galileo client's `[Bio-Foundry & Wet-Market]` channel had begun.

Do-yun slipped on his headset and engaged the multi-layer voice modulator. On screen, a dark-mode virtual seminar room evocative of black velvet opened. Neither the faces nor the real names of the participants were visible. Only each scholar's academic credentials and Black Web H-index—the Black H-Index, calculated not by citation count but by replication success rate and degree of transgression against existing ethical norms—floated like medals beside their handles.

A high-resolution holographic stream flickered to life at the center of the seminar room.

What appeared on screen was a cylindrical bioreactor built of glass, titanium, and hundreds of silicone micro-tubules. Floating at the center of the cylinder, bathed in slowly circulating amber amniotic-like fluid, was a biological entity at once grotesque and sublime.

Deprived of arms, legs, and torso, it was a Pure-Neural Fetus consisting solely of the upper spinal cord, the cranial base, and two completely exposed cerebral hemispheres accompanied by ocular stalks.

Roughly the size of a grapefruit, the cerebral cortex had already formed distinct gyri and sulci, while oxygen-rich artificial blood pulsed rhythmically through a delicate web of capillaries. Most chilling of all were the two immature eyeballs mounted at the front of the brain. Devoid of eyelids, those eyes darted rapidly back and forth inside the amniotic fluid.

REM-sleep eye movement.

The brain inside that glass cylinder was seeing something—dreaming something. A lump of living tissue that had never been born, never glimpsed daylight, never kicked against a mother's uterine wall, was dreaming solely through archetypal synaptic circuits etched into its genome.

A mechanically neutralized voice issued from the speakers. It was the consignor, `Dr. Vesalius_Neo`.

"Ladies and gentlemen, and fellow scholars exiled by the cowardly hypocrites of the establishment: welcome to tonight's presentation of Lot #9941-B."

In the participant list, thirty-two top-tier researchers connected from across the globe held their breath and watched the feed.

"The specimen before you, 'Eunomia-19,' is a mutant human embryo precisely 154 days post-fertilization—gestational age 22 weeks, 0 days. On embryonic day 12, my team succeeded in spatiotemporally silencing the mesoderm- and endoderm-forming genes TBXT and SOX17, channeling all metabolic energy into ectodermal and neural-tube differentiation."

Gasps of awe and rapid-fire questions flooded the chat window.

`[Dr_Korsakoff_RU]`: "Without a heart or liver, how did you develop the cerebral cortex to 22 weeks free of necrosis? A heart-lung machine alone cannot replicate placenta-derived growth factors and exosome signaling."

"An astute question, Dr. Korsakoff." Vesalius's voice rose slightly with excitement. "The secret lies in the Living Placental Matrix coupled to the base of this bioreactor. Through conflict-zone and informal obstetrics networks in Eastern Europe and South America, we isolated and immortalized chorionic villi and decidua basalis from forty healthy mid-trimester hysterectomy specimens. In short, this child is not nourished by machinery, but by a living carpet of functioning human placental tissue."

Do-yun felt sweat bead across the palm gripping his mouse.

While developmental biologists in the outside world grew mouse embryos for ten-odd days, published in Nature or Science, and tiptoed around bioethics committees, the scholars of the Black Web had already immortalized excised human uteri and were cultivating limbless human brains atop them for five months at a stretch.

"Now, allow me to explain why I have placed this priceless Eunomia-19 up for auction."

The display shifted, bringing up Eunomia-19's EEG spectrum and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) profiles.

"Upon crossing the twentieth week, an intriguing bottleneck emerged. Grown under total sensory deprivation, synaptic plasticity hit a critical threshold and began collapsing into a spontaneous apoptosis loop. This brain now craves purpose and structured stimulation. Raw electrical pulses are no longer sufficient. What it requires is a biological catalyst capable of forcibly detonating and rewiring this pristine blank-slate neural network—along with a precise human cohort blueprint specifying which genetic loci to edit, and how, in order to manifest specific modes of higher-order consciousness or extreme behavioral traits."

At that instant, Professor Baek Seung-hyun (`Phreno_Soc_88`) pinged Do-yun over a private encrypted channel.

`[Phreno_Soc_88 -> Neuro_Promethean (Han Do-yun)]`: "Now, Dr. Han! Upload our joint proposal combining your K-glioma-07 data with my neural crest behavioral determinism matrix!"

Do-yun hesitated for a fraction of a second.

Pressing Enter now meant stepping past the line of secretly analyzing discarded blood samples—becoming co-conspirator and lead actor in the most grotesque piece of mad science in human history, injecting a dead boy's brain cancer into the living brain of a fetus.

Yet in Do-yun's mind, the twitching eyeballs of Eunomia-19 inside the hologram overlapped with the dead boy's cancer cells pulsing with lonely green electrical sparks inside his own incubator.

'What if the one environment where Jung Min-woo's tumor can enter symbiosis without destroying a healthy brain is that fetal brain right there? If we implant Min-woo's neural-tumor hybrid cells into a mind that immature and infinitely plastic, what kind of intelligence will awaken inside it?'

Curiosity was always half a beat faster than ethics. And to every human logged into the Black Web, curiosity was a commandment mightier than religion.

With trembling fingers, Do-yun uploaded the pre-compiled encrypted package `[Proposal_Promethean_Lombroso.enc]` to the auction hall's central server.