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.
https://www.patreon.com/cw/Thanarit
"FUCK DON'T SPLASH THAT DISGUSTING THING ON ME."
Ren stepped back. The cerebrospinal fluid had already landed on his shirt in a cold spreading patch and there was nothing to be done about it now. He looked at the stain and then at Silas, who had finally released him and was standing in the middle of the grafting circle with his skull still open, his gold brain visible, beaming.
"Hehe. Sorry, Father."
"You are not sorry."
"This old man is a little sorry."
Ren pulled his shirt away from his skin and let it go. He looked at the ceiling briefly. Then he collected himself.
"System. Scan."
Scanning. Complete.
Class: Neurochimera Apostle
"The shape of life is merely a suggestion."
An abomination that combines alchemy, neurosurgery, and soul manipulation. The Neurochimera Apostle treats every living organism as unfinished work. By extending living neural tendrils from their own brain, they can physically connect to any creature and rewrite its body and mind.
To ordinary people, they appear mad.
To themselves, they are evolution.
Passive Skill: Brain of the Flesh God (EX)
Your brain evolves into a living supercomputer. Thought speed increases thousands of times. Perfect memory. Complete understanding of all anatomy and neural structures. Instant analysis of any lifeform. Full immunity to mental attacks and illusions. Can process countless experiments simultaneously.
Active Skill: Cerebral Tendrils
Living vein-like tendrils protrude from the back of the skull. When physically connected to a target, the user gains access to their flesh, nervous system, memories, soul blueprint, and mana circuits. Once linked, all other abilities can be applied.
Active Skill: Idle Evolution
Reshape any connected target by altering its soul blueprint. Possible modifications include extra limbs, increased musculature, natural armor, regeneration, and structural redesign. Can also heal by restoring a target to its ideal biological state.
Domain Skill: Cathedral of Flesh
"Within this sanctuary, all life returns to my hands."
The local environment transforms into a living laboratory. Walls of pulsating flesh rise around the domain. Rib-like pillars support the ceiling. Veins spread through the floor like roots. Suspended brains hang from translucent sacs overhead and whisper.
Domain Effect: Universal Connection — all living beings inside are automatically linked to the Cerebral Network. Physical contact is no longer required. Any creature within the domain can be altered instantly.
Ren stared at the scan for a while.
What, he thought, the actual fucking cunt is this.
He looked at Silas, who was gently touching the edges of his own open skull with two fingers, testing the bone texture with professional curiosity.
This man is me, Ren thought. This is me but on steroids. His brain is a supercomputer and mine is just a brain that survived one interdimensional death event. His domain pulls everything into a biological network and mine summons tentacles. He can rewrite soul blueprints and I can graft and transfer tissue. He has everything I have, except bigger, except Mythical rank, except the kind of deep structural access that I have been building toward for four months while this sixty-three-year-old man just got it handed to him in eleven minutes.
He can connect to a hundred targets simultaneously inside his domain. I need to physically touch people. He can modify a soul blueprint like editing a document. I have to strip skin and spend three hours in a grafting circle and use Unform, Fusion, Condense, and pray the circle holds. He gets a passive skill that makes his brain run at thousands of times normal processing speed and gives him perfect memory and instant anatomy comprehension. My brain is just my brain. It survived one death. That is its only distinction.
Does this novel even need me anymore.
"System," Ren said.
What.
"Why does this man's class look like mine? Why does he have everything I have but stronger? If he exists, what am I for? I'll just go die. Someone kill me."
Ren.
"What."
Are you perhaps retarded?
"You want to fight? Say that again."
You transplanted your brain into him and you're surprised the class has overlap? It came from your brain. Of course the skill direction is similar. That is how brains work. Are you genuinely asking this.
"He's better than me at everything I do."
He is Mythical rank. You are equivalent to A rank. You expected to outperform a Mythical-rank class with your current build? Is that what you thought was going to happen?
"I can fight a Mythical-rank hunter. I've done it."
You can fight one because your Domain of Crawling Madness has an output ceiling that doesn't follow normal rank scaling. Without that skill you cannot kill a Mythical-rank hunter. You know this. I know this. The skill knows this. This is not a controversial point.
"So he gets a supercomputer brain and a domain that auto-links every living thing inside it and I get tentacles and a tongue that goes in ears."
The tongue is extremely useful and you underutilize it.
"That is not the point."
The point is that you gave him a piece of your brain and are now upset that his class reflects what your brain contains. You created this situation. You are angry at yourself. Take a moment to appreciate that.
Ren looked at the scan card again.
"He also doesn't have to strip his own skin off every time he wants to graft something," he said.
Correct. He uses soul blueprint access. You use the Grafting Circle. Different mechanisms, different results. His approach is generalist. Yours is precise. A surgeon and a biological reality-rewriter are not the same tool.
"His tool is better."
His tool is faster. Yours is more exact. You operate at the cellular and mana-circuit level in ways his class does not. A pause. You also have the fear point system, which he does not. And the Outer God Surgical Set. And CPR regeneration. And the Abomination network. And the Domain of Crawling Madness, which scales with your rank and which you have not seriously upgraded since you got here.
"So what am I supposed to do."
Collect fear points. Upgrade your rank. Evolve your existing skills past their current ceiling. A pause. This novel does not need an old man protagonist who has been outpaced by his own patient. It is bad for the algorithm.
"The algorithm."
The algorithm.
Ren looked at the scan card one more time. The Cathedral of Flesh. The brain processing thousands of experiments simultaneously. The soul blueprint access.
"Fine," he said. "I'll upgrade."
Finally.
"And to be stronger I need fear points."
Correct.
"And to get fear points I have to keep doing what I'm doing."
You are finally understanding your own story. Congratulations. This took longer than it should have.
Ren folded the scan card closed in his mind.
"Fine," he said.
He looked at Silas, who had located a small mirror from somewhere and was examining his own open skull in it with visible satisfaction.
"Close your skull," Ren said.
"This old man is looking at something."
"Close. Your. Skull."
Silas lowered the mirror and looked at him.
"Father," he said, "would you like to know what it feels like to have a brain that processes at this speed?"
"No."
"It is extraordinary. Every structure in this room. I can see all of it. The mana distribution in the circle, the integration residue in the cardinal sigils, the composition of the fluid that landed on your shirt—"
"Stop."
"It is thirty-seven percent cerebrospinal fluid and sixty-three percent—"
"I don't need to know the composition of what is on my shirt."
Silas smiled. He pressed the skull section back into place. The bone sealed with a soft click, the integration already active, the seam disappearing as Ren watched.
"Thank you, Father," Silas said. He was quieter now, the manic edge settled into something genuine. "This old man means it."
Ren looked at him.
The gold brain was sealed away now, invisible under closed bone, but Ren knew it was there. Sixty-three years of a brilliant, unethical, maniacal mind, now running on hardware that had been touched by something far older than either of them.
"Don't make me regret it," Ren said.
"This old man will try his best," Silas said.
"That's not reassuring."
"No," Silas agreed pleasantly. "It isn't."