My hands sweated, I tapped on the table. “Do you think the merge will be successful?” I asked even though I already knew the answer. The anticipation was worse than the fear.

  “I don’t know.” Steel shrugged.

  I turned to Kory. She just sighed and looked away.

  To make a properly strong trait, I needed a baron rank core, but not just any baron, a peak baron. Just under 500 SE. Steel and I relentlessly cleared the onyx and sapphire dungeons, and now we were going to reap the fruits of our labor.

  The clerk came back with a giant core. It was a meter in diameter, and darkness oozed out of it. It glinted with blue, and I swore I could hear a weeping coming from it.

  “Magnificent.”

  The clerk placed it on the counter. Her expression didn’t hide disgust, but dragons obeyed the rules, and so she was powerless to stall my progress.

  Actualized Potential (489 SE)

  Rank: Baron

  Affinity: Onyx-Sapphire

  Source: Combined Essences of the first floors of Onyx and Sapphire dungeons.

  Description: Perfectly merged core from similar types of geists. Contains intensified eternal thirst for power, unending ambition, and forbidden memories. 45% compatibility with God’s Flesh Ritual. Maybe we shouldn’t have added the Sapphire parts.

  “Thank you!” I grabbed the massive gem, and with great effort, I pushed the core into the bag. My eyes flickered between everyone in the room – if the Betrayer wanted to set me back, this would be the perfect time. “Kory, Steel, let’s go. Fast.”

  Steel grabbed Kory in a princess carry, and together we ran. It must’ve looked absolutely ridiculous. I was beyond caring.

  “Magnus, s-stop giggling,” Kory said.

  “This is a month's worth of life-threatening effort. Let me celebrate!” My smile was missing teeth, and that made some passing dragons go pale. Apparently, healing magic worked weirdly with baby teeth.

  The last ingredient that I needed was something easy to acquire. The laboratory of my personal biocrafter, who, for the most part, relegated his duties to Melissa, shameful.

  “I’ll stay outside,” Steel said and put Kory on the ground.

  “H-he’s not that bad…” Kory looked away. “I guess you can wait.”

  Steel nodded, her puppy eyes worked again.

  “Avennture!” I opened the door.

  The lanky man was messing with some potions. He boiled them in his hands. “You? And you brought Kory.” Despite the annoyed tone, he smiled. “What is it again? I’m not making you more-”

  “It’s not that. I have something really important I need.”

  “We need.” Clarified Kory.

  My eyes were magnetized to the glass-pod, where the black sludge resided. Avennture put it to sleep. “It’s time. Cough up some flesh.”

  Kory slapped my head. I didn’t even feel it. “Magnus didn’t mean that. We really need you to make some neutralized flesh, Avennture. Please.” She bowed. That face told me she expected the same from me.

  I sighed and bowed too. “Please.”

  Avennture cackled. He threw the vials into the air, and they floated into the vial racks. Show off. “Since you asked so nicely, I’ll risk the lives of everyone in this whole learning facility.” His grin grew wider. “Let me get my gear.” He disappeared behind one of the storage doors.

  He came back wearing a black hazmat suit, specifically an artifact made to protect against any sort of contamination. A muffled voice rang out from beneath the suit, “If I get infected, make sure to catch my soul.”

  “I don’t know how to do that…” I sighed.

  I was nearly certain that beneath that respirator, he was grinning. “Your flesh, please.”

  My hands shook. I let a part of VITA recede from my leg and conjured a scalpel. This wasn’t exactly a pound of flesh, but even if it was, I was willing to pay the price.

  One swift slash – and there the chunk was. Blood seeped out of my leg. I ate a pill and gave the chunk to Avennture.

  “Damn monster…” He shook his head.

  “Well, sorry, Siege made pain tolerance mandatory. I think it’s bullshit too.”

  “I don’t envy you.” Avennture took it and turned his eyes towards the pod. “Make a barrier, I don’t want to risk contamination.”

  There was no need for another warning. Within a second, I had a barrier ready. The Necroplague wasn’t a joke.

  Avennture moved with confidence. The massive glass pod contained the black sludge. It was in stasis, but not for long.

  He snapped his fingers, and the liquid bubbled. All restraints were off – it morphed into different shapes, shifting from one to another like an anatomical kaleidoscope. Mouths, eyes, noses, hair, scales, each flickered and morphed into one another.

  The biocrafter started performing a ‘taming’ technique – a lost art among humans. Popular craft with demons. Between the plaguemorph and him, a little thread appeared, then it grew larger and larger. The abomination stopped. Avennture suppressed it through the familiar contract.

  To infect some flesh, one needed but a simple touch. That’s what he needed to do.

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  I held my breath. Avennture passed a starpower-infused finger across the glass, and a part of it vanished.

  He didn’t waste a second. Nimbly, he dipped the little chunk, took it out, and summoned the glass back.

  It was wriggling. Pulsing. I swallowed uncomfortably.

  Avennture waited for five seconds. I couldn’t make my lungs contract. Kory put a hand over my shoulder. The blackened chunk of flesh pressed tightly against his suit.

  He gripped it tightly in his hand with the other, he formed a disinfection technique. Ultraviolet light shone from the palm, covering the entirety of the room. The chunk of flesh started glowing. Avennture was not about to give it any more time.

  The best way to deal with soulless infected matter was to overload it with starpower. Sun killed the illness. Between his fingers, starpower jumped like electricity. All of Avennture’s aura gathered in one point – my mutated flesh.

  In another two seconds, it stopped wriggling.

  Neutralized Flesh

  Description: A piece of plaguemorph’s potential – killed. But the infection makes it so that death is impossible. The flesh still lives, if you consider its cells continuing to function as living. No longer spreads the Necroplague. Can absorb, change, adapt to any genetic material. Connected to the repository of biological information in the spiritual dimension that’s bigger than the Archive.

  “Done,” Avennture said and shone another pulse of disinfecting light.

  I dispersed the barrier surrounding myself. “Thank you.” I couldn’t stop staring at the black chunk of flesh. This little part of myself was still alive… Though it was no longer me.

  Kory bowed again. “T-thank you.” She was probably terrified of what her trait showed her.

  “I don’t need your thanks, especially not yours.” He sighed. “You still owe me elementum, kid.” He made a force form. From the drawers, a jar flew out and another vial with a preserving mixture, not that it was needed.

  “And you’ll have it once my education is complete.”

  With dashing speed, he dropped the chunk into the jar, filled it with the mixture, and applied a fortification imbuement. A muffled chuckle resounded from him. “Whatever you say.”

  The final ingredient lay on the table. Beckoning me. I was not one to decline an invitation.

  “See you, Avennture.”

  “B-bye, knight Avennture.”

  “Don’t die out there.” He peeled the suit away.

  We went to our next destination. The final destination.

  The training room was as unremarkable as always. There was that one permanent mark on the wall, but the workers promised to fix it as soon as possible.

  “What are you waiting for? Do the trait and then do mine… Oh, I hope my trait will be easier to make.”

  “It probably will be. I was looking over orcish traits, and they seem like a good way to make an emerald power accelerator.”

  Kory coughed. “Just get on with it.” Both Steel and I looked at her unblinking. There was no blood.

  “I don’t think you should cough to bring attention.”

  “Don’t do that,” Steel said sternly.

  “Sorry…”

  “Give me some time.” I looked over my collection of potions. Willpower and focus were the most appropriate, so I drank them. Clarity flooded my mind; the willpower did nothing as usual.

  I started preparing. It was not enough to just make a good trait; I needed a perfect one. In the middle of the room, I spread my hands, twisting the fingers into appropriate forms, and conjured a barrier.

  This one was different than usual – it restricted the flow of starpower. I flared, and the energy flooded the isolated area. “Perfect control.” I smirked. It was one of the neat concepts Azzurra mentioned, one that wasn’t that useful, not until you reach the highest levels of standing emissions.

  With starpower filling the area, I felt everything that happened within, every flow, every wriggle. I could even sense the ‘life’ within the neutralized flesh. Or maybe it just seemed like that.

  “Is the focus potion not working? Why are you looking around like that?” Kory said with a frown.

  “I’m reaffirming the concepts I need to smuggle in. Let me do my magic.” My mind was racing. I built a lexical chain to connect my desire for omniscience with the ritual that promised omnipotence. Apparently, lexicology was similar to the spiritual dimension.

  The more correct words I could fit between those things, the smoother the transition would be, and the easier I would be able to add one little form to the God’s Flesh Ritual.

  I practiced the movement, practiced flaring starpower in that way, repeated the actions in my mind. Ten, twenty, forty, fifty times. Enough times. My nerves were jittering with heat, my heart was already howling for me to start.

  I pushed against that desire and remained meticulous. Rushing would bring disaster. “You two, be absolutely silent.”

  “We are,” Steel mumbled and slapped her mouth.

  Kory snorted.

  “Okay, okay. Seriously now.”

  I opened the core bag wide and pulled out the massive core, and on top of it I placed the jar. I took a deep breath. I was ready. This was going to work.

  With light steps, I circled the core. Starpower flared strong, the energy reached my feet and my hands; the first movement was done with my entire body. Within a sea of my own starpower, it was far easier to do. It required seventeen forms, but really, they were conjoined into three stages.

  I weaved the construct exactly as the memories described. It was a web of information stretching from my toes to the tip of my head, and it contained the entirety of myself.

  A data bomb. Once the construct settled, I shifted into the second stage – breaking it all down. With tiny movements of my eyes, muscles, and hands, the flow of starpower itself shifted in ways more complex than I could’ve imagined.

  With mathematical rigor, each little datum of information was spliced, opened, and rewritten for one purpose. Universality and adaptability. The creator of this ritual was smart; instead of trying to change the trait to accommodate the self, he decided that infusing the self within the trait would do the trick.

  It was a sludge of information. It contained everything about me, but it was also cut down into such tiny chunks that they became impossible to comprehend. My ambition got split into a million components and then blended into a fine metaphysical mush.

  The third and the most complicated stage started. I grabbed the jar, and by cycling through three forms, I pushed the informational mush into the chunk of flesh. It was like trying to empty the ocean through a straw.

  Yet the flesh never rejected this information. Usually, when you alter the primer’s metaphysical data within the noosphere, there is resistance; the meaning breaks down, becomes incompatible.

  The mutations inflicted by the Necroplague made that impossible. It took my genetics, my past, my memories, my desires, my plans – everything that was ‘I’.

  I didn’t want to have just ‘I’. I knew there was barely any data left, so I smuggled something in.

  “Knowledge is Power. Knowledge is Power. Knowledge is Power.” I stopped the ritual for just a second; mind acceleration helped. Metasurgical extraction aimed at the concept behind those words, undoubtedly an onyx-sapphire concept, and it snipped it right out of there.

  Information doesn’t affect the real world, and so the sounds passed through the room, yet their meaning was lost. Like a barbarian, I shredded the idea into pieces and attached it to the end of the line.

  The ritual resumed, and soon it ate everything I had to give.

  The last forms used a modified version of trait harvesting, one that took everything. Almost everything.

  My starpower lifted the all-encompassing totality of the information behind the flesh, cut out the concepts of infection, insanity, suffering, hatred, illness, plague, undeath, and many more that would make a person go insane.

  I shoved the massive clump within the core. It shone so bright I might have gone a little blind. I scouted the compatibility – 78%, that was as good as it got.

  Most of the concept engulfed the potential within the core. Those parts that couldn’t be engulfed, were annihilated. That means light and heat.

  My hands scorched, my eyes burned. I didn’t care. The methodology behind the ritual wasn’t about maximizing compatibility; it was about violently rejecting all that didn’t belong.

  The fiery crucifixion continued. It burned my flesh, burned all the impurities until only one thing was left.

  “H-help.”

  My fingers couldn’t move; I burned off all the muscle. Screaming hurt more than it did good.

  Someone put a pill into my mouth and thrust it into my throat. I resisted the urge to cough and gulped it. My body went numb; Kory must’ve used a technique.

  The agony lasted for a good ten minutes. When I could see again, tears were coming from my eyes.

  Kory and Steel stared at me with worried expressions.

  “Did it work?” I asked, my voice dry.

  Steel chuckled. “See, he’s fine.”

  “Your face melted…”

  “Who cares?! Did it work?”

  They stepped aside. God’s Flesh was as dark as the night sky, but to me it was the brightest star.

  My ascension begins here.