Sorry for the slow updates. I ended up breaking three of my fingers and can barely type right now.
On top of that, the medical bills have been pretty overwhelming. If you're able to support me, I'd really appreciate it. My Patreon is $10/month, and you'll get access to 20 chapters ahead.
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Ren set the case on the table between them.
It was not an official file. Bone Saw had compiled it over the past two days at Ren's instruction, pulling from the clinic's own records, writing out each case by hand in the cramped precise script of a former military officer. The result was a set of patient documents organized chronologically, starting with Colonel Steven Bright: the Grafting procedure, the outcome, the post-procedure assessment. Then the others in sequence, one after another, each one documented with the clinical precision Ren applied to everything he worked on. Axel Krane. Wei Liang. Viktor Qin. Irene. Henry Hess. Old Han. Jiang Chen and his involuntary contribution to the dragon core research. Tara Farin. Sienna Hood.
Silas read everything.
He did not skim. He turned each page carefully, reading everything, and occasionally made a small sound that landed somewhere between admiration and hunger. When he reached the Tara Farin file he stopped and read it three times.
"You removed her head," he said.
"Yes."
"And built her a new one."
"With her own brain and facial tissue. New skull. Integration of the ocular blessing was through grafting circle compression."
Silas looked at the page for another long moment. "This old man spent two months trying to approach those eyes and was pushed back every time. You condensed them with Unform, Fusion, and Condense." He looked up. "How did you know the procedure wouldn't trigger a feedback collapse?"
"I didn't," Ren said. "Not entirely. I made a judgment based on what the diagnosis showed me about the entity's intent. It was a gift, not a trap. Gifts don't usually explode when you rearrange the packaging."
Silas stared at him.
Then he went back to the file.
He read through Sienna Hood last. The grafting process, the skin transfer, the transformation sequence, the class that emerged. He read the skill card twice. He set the page down.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he looked up at Ren with an expression that had crossed the boundary between scientific enthusiasm and something else entirely.
"Father," he said, "make me one of your children."
"That's the spirit," Ren said.
. . .
The grafting room was dim, the cardinal sigils quiet, the floor clean. Silas sat in the chair at the center of the room and looked around at the walls with the expression of a man who had entered many laboratories in his life and was taking stock of a new one.
"Any last questions?" Ren asked.
"This old man has several hundred questions," Silas said cheerfully. "But they can wait until after."
Ren looked at him. He had been thinking about the procedure for the past two days, working through the options, eliminating the ones that carried too much risk for a Mythical-rank alchemist whose biological systems were sixty-plus years of accumulated modification. The skin transfer had worked for Sienna because her body was young and the rejection threshold was manageable. For Silas it was different.
He had thought about his own explosion. Upper body gone, the mask falling, regenerating from below. The data that came back from Tara's diagnosis had been too large for the systems that processed it, and the result was detonation rather than absorption. But the absorption had still happened. The data was in him now. That meant the limiting factor was not capacity but rate.
Slow it down, he had thought. Control the intake. Put something in place that can handle the translation.
The brain.
His brain, specifically. The organ that had survived the void between bodies, that had been dragged through a world-crossing death event and had come out the other side intact. It had processed things that should have broken it. It was, by any measure, extraordinarily durable.
If he placed a portion of it in Silas, the translation layer would be built in. The new information arriving through the Father connection would have something capable of handling it.
"This will be strange," Ren said. "More than usual."
"This old man is not easily disturbed."
"You're going to be disturbed."
"Wonderful," Silas said.
Ren administered the Awakened Anesthesia. The needle found the neck, the paralysis spread from the cervical spine outward in three seconds, and Silas went still with the expression of a man who found this interesting rather than frightening.
The grafting circle activated when Ren stepped into it, the cardinal sigils brightening in sequence, the red mist rising from the floor channels. Twenty tentacles emerged: ten from his back, each one carrying an instrument from the Outer God Surgical Set, and ten from the crown of his head, spreading into position in the air above the chair.
He began at the skull.
The bone saw cut the coronal line clean, the same sequence he used every time, separating the anterior cranial vault from the posterior in a single continuous motion. He lifted the section free. The dura beneath was intact and grey-white, the cerebrospinal fluid catching the sigil light in the gap between bone and membrane.
He worked the dura open carefully and the brain came into view.
It was a normal brain. Healthy for its age, dense with the myelination of sixty years of intensive thought, the temporal lobes prominent, the prefrontal cortex thick with the structure of someone who had spent decades making difficult decisions. Silas Mordane's mind, laid open under the red light of the grafting circle.
Ren reached into the Outer God Surgical Set and produced the extraction instrument. Two tentacles retracted his own hairline, exposing the access point at the posterior parietal region. He had located it during the preparation: the transfer lobe, the specific cluster of tissue that had carried the most data from the previous crossing events, that held the translated knowledge of things that should not be translatable.
He excised it.
The piece was small, roughly the volume of a walnut, dense and slightly darker than standard neural tissue, the surface of it carrying a faint luminescence that had not been there before Tara's diagnosis. He held it between two tentacles and looked at it for a moment.
Then he placed it against Silas's brain.
The grafting circle responded. The red mist thickened and rose from the floor in a column, wrapping around the chair, the cardinal sigils pulsing in the sequence that meant the Father connection was opening. The tissue began to integrate, not with the urgency of a transplant taking, but slowly, settling into the surrounding architecture like something that belonged there.
The process took eleven minutes.
Throughout it, Silas was still. His skull was open, the brain visible, the new tissue bonding in real time. The red mist moved over his scalp and down through the open vault and settled into the tissue like fog into low ground.
Then it started.
Silas's fingers moved first. Small twitches, the involuntary firing of neurons recalibrating under new input. Then his whole arm, a single sharp contraction that the anesthesia couldn't fully suppress. His jaw moved. His back arched once against the chair.
Then something started to happen to his brain.
The new tissue pulsed. The pulse spread outward from the transfer lobe into the surrounding cortex in a visible wave, the grey-white surface taking on a faint gold-yellow tinge as the integration completed, the color of old bone, the color of something that had been changed at a level below the cellular.
The skull remained open.
The gold spread to the rest of the brain, slowly, over the course of about two minutes, until Silas Mordane's entire brain had taken that color, and the sigils above the chair blazed at full intensity, and the red mist pulled back from the skull and settled back to baseline.
Ren looked at him.
That worked, he thought, with the particular calm of someone who had not been entirely certain it would.
Scanning. Complete.
Abomination: No designation assigned. Pending Father's naming.
Class: Mythical — Transcendent Alchemist of the Ruin Gospel
Silas opened his eyes.
He opened them wide, the eyes of a man looking at something no one else in the room could see. His skull was still open. His brain was gold. He was sitting upright in the grafting chair with his scalp pulled back and the top of his head exposed to the air.
He began to laugh.
Not the mad enthusiasm of his normal energy. Something deeper and more genuine, the laugh of a person who has just understood something they had been trying to understand their whole life, arriving all at once.
"I've been reborn," he said. "I have never. In sixty-three years. I have never been better than this."
He stood up.
He walked to Ren and grabbed him in both arms.
His skull was still open.
The cerebrospinal fluid that had pooled in the open vault during the procedure splashed forward with the movement, landing on Ren's shirt in a cold wave.
Ren stood there.
"Thank you, Father," Silas said, still laughing, face against Ren's shoulder, the open skull very close to Ren's ear, the gold brain visible in his peripheral vision.
Ren looked at the ceiling.
"Close your skull," he said.
"In a moment. This old man is experiencing something."
"Close your skull."
"One more moment."
The fluid was cold.
Ren waited.