When a city’s water turns traitor, mutations rise like tide and the rules of life break. Sterling Vorobyov is a surgical prodigy—calm, brilliant, and painfully ordinary—until a midnight emergency mutates his fate. After cutting away a harvesting of parasitic eggs, Sterling wakes to a voice only he can hear: an embedded system offering knowledge, power…and a choice. Feed, resist, or fuse. Sterling buries a golden egg in a plant pot and, desperate and precise, grafts it into his own arm. The result is terrifying and sublime: a symbiosis that grants strength—and an appetite that draws monsters like moths to flame. He can heal the infected, swallow their mutations whole, and reshape how evolution plays out. But there are hunters, wards, and factions who’d rather weaponize or dissect him, and a fanatic cult that worships the new gods arising from the contagion. Apex Healer is a fast, visceral ride through a quarantined metropolis: surgical theatre horror, street-level monster hunts, and political chess among scientists and soldiers. Sterling must learn how to use his “whispering” system, pick allies—like the taciturn operator Cillian Johansen and the dazzling, ruthless Fabian Marchetti—and survive both human cruelty and biological wonder. He wants to save people. The world wants to turn him into an experiment. Choices will stain his hands. Evolution will call him king. Will he become humanity’s scalpel, its savior, or its apex predator?