SSS Awakening: Starting With Infinite Soul Copy
Chapter 271: The Glorious Evolution (II)
The flesh.
Then came the blood.
His veins expanded first, trying to contain it all, but they barely lasted a second before immediately rupturing.
Millions of microscopic tears spread throughout his circulatory system as pressure climbed beyond anything a biological vessel should have survived.
The blood, whose color had once been red, had its composition altered by the brewing wave of energy.
Its density and energy content rose rapidly, forcing it to change into a deep blue, resulting in fresh rivers of blue blood to flood through his tissues.
Those tissues, of course, were unused to such force and could not resist it, so the entire network simply imploded before reconstructing itself larger and stronger.
While his circulatory system slowly learned to adapt, something else began to lag behind:
His heart.
For several terrifying moments, it simply couldn’t keep up, and the organ spasmed violently inside his chest, bringing a pain unlike any other.
It furiously attempted to circulate the increasingly powerful blood, its walls thickening, its chambers expanding, and its electrical impulses accelerating, but all of it proved futile.
Then, in a single moment,
BOOOOM!
White’s heart exploded into gore.
With nothing left to pump blood and oxygen through his body, he expected himself to die immediately.
But nothing happened.
He remained there, eyes closed, yet infinitely aware and fully alive.
The amount of life energy being birthed from his evolution was simply so great that even the implosion of his heart had become inconsequential to his life and death.
And so, he watched, just as the others had, the slow adaptation of what should have been his heart.
But the adaptation was something he couldn’t understand.
Instead of a new heart being formed from the tissue of the old, exploded one, something else began to happen.
The appearance of inexplicable, green-colored runes, where his heart ought to have been.
White felt a bizarre sensation, one that reminded him of runic laws, and he watched as his heart pieced itself together into a shape unlike anything he had ever seen.
At first, it resembled a pod.
A seed pod.
Then he watched that seed pod slowly blooms, and when it fully opened, what emerged was not a single heartbeat.
BAAADUMP!
BAAADUMP!
BAAADUMP!
Not one.
Not two.
But a total of three new hearts, each heartbeat releasing enough force to distort the cocoon surrounding him.
Such a thing should have brought elation, but it didn’t to White, because every pulse of those three hearts also threatened to destroy him before simultaneously becoming the very thing keeping him alive.
Slowly, like everything else, they continued to adapt, harnessing the enormous energy within him.
But there was still far too much left.
And that led to his nervous system joining in.
That was when the true horror started.
Pain had existed before, pain that he was barely managing to keep himself together through.
But now, with his nervous system evolving, he became even more capable of experiencing it.
The fact that he had fused with something of a higher essence, the Aether Pulse Orb, did not help his situation.
At this current level of power, it was not something even the Orb could simply shrug off, and it too was forced into adaptation.
Neural pathways multiplied throughout his body, Connections expanded, Signal speeds increased, and the capacity of his brain rose alongside them.
Every improvement made him even more aware of the evolution process, and when he truly became aware of it, his horror slowly morphed into quiet awe at what was actually happening.
He became capable of perceiving details he previously could not, but that also meant his numbness to pain diminished.
He didn’t fall unconscious, but instead, the opposite happened.
His mind became sharper, clearer, and more awake than it had ever been.
He could feel, with terrifying clarity, individual cells dying, individual cells being born, and he could feel blood entering capillaries, organs restructuring themselves.
And as his nervous system continued its adaptation, he began to feel beyond his own body:
Reality itself pressing against the boundaries of a body rapidly approaching a threshold it had never been meant to reach.
It seemed to be trying to erase him from existence, to prevent whatever he was becoming, and the sensation created a natural inclination to scream it out.
But nothing came for even his lungs were changing.
The organs collapsed entirely before rebuilding into structures capable of extracting energy from environments where oxygen itself might not exist.
His throat no longer functioned the same way. Neither did his tongue, nor the organs responsible for hearing, sight, and smell.
Everything was evolving, with nothing being spared.
The concept of a mortal body was not being strengthened.
No.
It was being systematically erased.
Piece by piece.
Organ by organ.
Cell by cell.
And ultimately, runic law by runic law.
And trapped within the center of that cocoon, unable to move, unable to resist, unable to escape, White experienced every microscopic second of that extinction personally.
It led him to understand a truth:
Evolution was not growth. It was death.
A death so slow, so thorough, and so complete that by the time it finished, nothing of the original creature remained except the memory that it had once existed.
And time and time again, it continued, seemingly forever, until the golden panel flashed.
[Status of Fusion with the Mallory Umbrawyrio: COMPLETE]
[Status of Evolution: COMPLETE!]
It had been a simple cocoon of blue energy at the start, standing just about two meters tall.
But it had grown larger, much, much larger, more than triple its previous size, until it stood at an exact seven meters.
Then, all at once, it began to shake.
RIIIIIIIIIIP!
The sound of something being torn apart echoed throughout the hall as a hand burst out from the cocoon.
One appeared at first. Then another emerged beside it, gripping the opposite side of the cocoon.
For a moment, it seemed that was all.
Then another hand appeared.
And another.
And another.
And another...