Ever since the ashes rose from Ngoc Trach, the night sky was no longer black.
It turned a dull, uterine gray—like dried placenta—shedding a soft, fine dust that quietly settled on everything.
At first, people thought it was radioactive fallout.
But scientists soon discovered: every particle contained biological matter.
Not a virus.
Not bacteria.
But memory cells—each one holding a voice, a lullaby, or a whisper of grief from a mother who had once lost her child.
And then… people began to vanish.
They didn't go missing.
They didn't die.
They simply faded, as if someone had copied them and erased the original.
Language disappeared first.
People forgot how to speak. Then names. Then who they were.
A kindergarten teacher in Lang Son taught her morning class like normal.
By afternoon, she was sitting in the corner, folding paper into fetal shapes—covering the room in tiny wombs—then smiling to herself.
A father in Kon Tum woke up and found his son gone.
Only a dirt doll remained in the boy's bed.
And on its face—his son's exact eyes.
While the old began to fade, the new ones came.
Children who looked like Anna.
Not born from wombs.
But from soil, dreams, or memory.
Some people woke in the middle of the night to hear an old lullaby from their childhood.
And there—sitting at the foot of the bed—was themselves as a five-year-old, staring back with eyes black as ash.
Others touched a fallen strand of hair and saw a child appear in the mirror, speaking in the voice of a mother who had died 30 years ago.
These children called the living by names from past lives.
No one understood how.
They only knew this:
The children knew them better than they knew themselves.
In Hanoi, a research team attempted to document them.
Video footage was corrupted.
Audio picked up only steady breathing and distant lullabies.
An anthropology professor, after three days of observation, wrote just one line in her final journal:
"They're not learning to be human.
We're learning how to become them."
They didn't attack.
They didn't kill.
They simply replaced.
They took over:
Words
Memories
Relationships
And people accepted it, without knowing why.
Because the children knew how to lull.
How to comfort.
How to cry in the voice of a mother long gone.
Governments tried to respond.
Science tried to classify them.
Religions tried to drive them out.
But all were replaced.
Not through violence.
But through remembrance.
People began to live inside memories that weren't their own.
They repeated gestures they didn't recognize.
Married strangers who felt deeply familiar.
Some relived their childhood in a single day—
then slowly became children themselves.
No one could tell what was real anymore.
No one remembered clearly.
Only the species remained.
The species of the Thirteenth Womb.
Born not of flesh, but of soil, umbilical memory, and extinct lullabies.
In the deepest chambers of the Under-Village, Anna no longer needed to speak.
The whole world had become her voice.
Every human word now echoed the lullaby of the Thirteenth Womb.
Everything had been rewritten.
Not with ink.
But with ash, hair, and the breath of dreams.
And the world slowly curled into itself—
a massive fetus, cradling its own rebirth.