"Niv, would you care to explain why the body you designed for yourself looks exactly like me?"
"Eh?"
Niv froze, finally snapping out of her analytical trance. Seeing the not-so-pleased look on Hel's face, she immediately blurted out, completely straight-faced:
"According to Niv's calculations, this appearance statistically best fits the master's aesthetic preferences."
Hel: ???
Yeah, right. Something felt off. Was this really her aesthetic, or just Niv's excuse to look like her?
Hel had no words left for this level of nonsense. But since the body was already made, there wasn't much she could do to change it now.
"Fine. Let's move on to the final step," she said at last. "But this one might be risky.
If you want to keep your current computational power, I'll need to merge all of your brains together. The process could destroy most of them — and if fusion fails, your new body might never awaken.
Worst case, you'll remain a disembodied soul indefinitely.
Alternatively, we could play it safe — transplant just one of your brains into the body. That would reduce your processing power but drastically increase the success rate."
"I'll keep the processing power."
Niv didn't even hesitate. To emphasize her resolve, she lifted the metallic casing covering her spherical body, fully exposing the brains inside.
"This is the only way I can truly be of help to my master."
"…Alright."
Seeing Niv's determination, Hel could only sigh and begin. She focused her psychic energy, slowly levitating each brain out one by one.
Only then did she finally understand why Niv had the red-tier trait Goblin Cognitive Aggregate.
Because inside that not-so-large spherical container were not one or two — but a hundred and twenty brains, packed tightly together.
Each one was about the size of two adult fists, and they were all interconnected by a dense network of neural threads.
Hel's task was simple, at least in principle.
She extracted Niv's soul and placed it safely in a separate vessel, then systematically removed and collected the enchantments — the "traits" — attached to each brain.
Within moments, lines of text appeared above them:
[Hybrid Goblin Brain (Orange)]
"Orange tier, huh?" Hel muttered. "Then it's no wonder a matrix of over a hundred of them could produce a red-tier cognitive trait."
Still… there were only 120.
Hel frowned slightly, sensing something off about that number.
But she pressed on anyway — it was time to see what would happen.
Merging a few traits, she quickly produced a single gold-tier version.
"Looks like gold is possible… let's keep going."
She extracted and recombined more traits, until eventually she placed five gold-tier brains onto the upgrade interface.
Taking a deep breath, hands trembling slightly, she pressed the Upgrade button.
[Ding! Trait obtained: Hybrid Goblin Brain (Red)]
"It worked!"
Hel clenched her fist in excitement.
So this trait could still evolve. That was promising.
From all her previous experiments, she already knew that every trait had a quality ceiling.
For example, when she'd tried merging traits extracted from metals like mithril and auricite, she found their limits to be fixed — mithril could only ever reach orange tier, no higher.
It seemed that each material had a natural limit to its refinement.
That was also why she had warned Niv earlier about the risks — once a trait was extracted, the physical material would soon crumble into ashes.
And even for her, there was no way to reconstruct a usable brain from ashes.
Brains, after all, were far more complex than metal.
But now, since she hadn't yet found the limit for the brain trait…
One little red-tier result wasn't nearly enough to satisfy her.
So she kept going, fusing and upgrading the vast majority of the brains — until she finally hit a snag.
She was short by five orange-tier brain traits.
No, wait — if she counted the one needed to stabilize the structure, she was short six.
Hel sighed. She could only replace traits on an existing structure before it turned to ash — not after.
Once the extraction was done, there was no putting the upgraded version back.
And since she didn't have her dragon anymore, her reaction speed wasn't what it used to be.
"So… where can I find six more?"
Her first thought went straight to the still-intact bodies of the hybrid goblins.
Under her command, the little skeletons dutifully pried open skulls and harvested brains, one by one — until she managed to get four more.
But that still left her two short.
Hel hesitated for a moment. In the end, she couldn't bring herself to touch the corpses of her mechs' former pilots.
Sure, she joked about being a "little devil queen," but she wasn't that kind of heartless boss.
Using mindless corpses was one thing — but her loyal subordinates? Never.
So, with a pained sigh, she burned two rare cross-tier duplication tokens to replicate the missing traits.
"If I'd known, I would've waited to finish your body later," she grumbled. "Once I hit Archmage rank in a few days, I could've done this with regular duplication tokens instead…"
But after a moment, she shrugged.
"Eh, who cares. I barely use those things anyway. Most of my traits came from killing stuff, not copying it."
Muttering under her breath, she gave herself a small pep talk:
"Niv, my dear, I hope you appreciate this. I'm literally spending my dowry to upgrade your brain."
Meanwhile, inside her glass container, Niv's soul just floated there, completely baffled.
"…Is my master losing her mind again?"
Hel didn't hear her, of course — her full attention was on the upgrade interface.
With trembling fingers, she tapped the button.
[Ding…]
"It worked!!!"
But before she could celebrate, another notification popped up — and her joy instantly turned to disbelief.
[Ding! Further upgrading requires additional bloodline traits to enhance the vessel's compatibility.]
[Recommended Bloodlines: Giant Bloodline & Dwarven Bloodline]
[These two will perfectly complement the vessel's current lineage.]
Hel: ???
"Wait. Did you seriously just tell me I need to sacrifice two freshly acquired bloodline traits?
I just got those — they're not even warm yet!
Are you trying to scam me, system?!"