April, 2012. 

The lone, curly haired man offered his companion the diary, tapping on its weathered cover twice. "Read it," he whispered, voice hoarse and subdued (it was obvious that he hadn't used his voice in years), "You'll find the answers there." The hunched man looked to the other hesitantly, then back to the book, running his hand over the cover before cautiously cracking it open. T

Shifters were a mistake. 

It had been an extensionpursuit for me, sequencing the human genome to the best of my abilities, and nine years ago, I had succeeded with my group of fellow scientists. However, they abandoned me after a horrific explosion in my laboratory- all our research was stolen, and my son, working for me then as an assistant, was permanently blinded. They blamed me for not taking better care of things, and another group of scientists procured our results and gained worldwide fame. 

I chose to seclude myself away from civilisation- discovering Poluo, a quiet island town with little bustle off the shore of Taiwan. With that, I threw myself headlong into further research and experimentation, attempting to fuse humanoid DNA with the stem cells of animals to restore my son's vision and once again make him whole.

This would prove to be my first mistake. 

As I perfected the serum- thusforth named 'Serum Z' after myself, I made the decision to inject it into myself first, and at the start...nothing happened. Perhaps it was because there was nothing to regenerate, I had mused, until I began to transform and contort into a form unlike no other.

It didn't take long before my limbs thinned and tapered off into hooves, my neck growing longer and longer as my facial features stretched along a skull now too long to be human. Within seconds, I stood in my laboratory as a fully grown giraffe. Despite this, however, willing my transformation back to my human form was fluid, and caused me no pain whatsoever, and I was able to switch back and forth between forms. 

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My studies proved further that Serum Z had evolved far beyond my wildest imaginations. While I could only transform back and forth between forms, I discovered that I could willingly pass on the gene causing this inside me by touching another through making first contact with my son, and they would also gain the ability to transform into a unique creature that was randomly assigned by their own genetic makeup. Furthermore, certain people could also obtain strange abilities that would only tangentially be related to their animal form. 

My analysis soon informed me that the shifted form (as I now coined) would replace any missing body parts or limbs in the original form, and would be the 'ideal form' the person chose to be.

It was difficult to put in words what happened next. 

When I published my research openly, in the hopes that this breakthrough would aid others, I was labelled an absolute monster for attempting to play god. I was hunted across the world by greedy megalomaniacs who saw this as a chance to create a super army, and once more retreated to the safety of Poluo, where I now knew that a bounty had been put on me for illegal genetic exploitation.

By then, it was too late- the entirety of Poluo were all now the same as myself, having eagerly embraced what they saw as a gift to them to aid them in expanding and flourishing the town. Contact had also been made in other lands through them, which could cause even further mutations unique to that particular type of human. The final straw came when the boat I was travelling on to return to Poluo got bombed, and everyone on it passed away, including my dearest son. After my rescue and return to Poluo, I sought to leave everything behind. 

I knew that I couldn't continue to show myself or endanger them even further, so I now decide to isolate myself in this cottage, away from all civilisation. Hopefully, nobody will ever find me again. It's better that way. 

With a nod and bow, the moustached man offered the diary back to the other, suddenly understanding of the other's plight. "My name is Seonwoo," introduced the moustached man, placing a hand over his chest as he stood, "You..." 

The curly-haired man's face contorted in a mixture of self-deprecation and amusement. 

"I am Zhixian. They call me the father of all shifters."