Chapter 367: Operation: The Improved Elaine IV

For the life of me, I couldn’t work out a way to practically harden the nerves against electrical shock. Fundamentally, a weak enough shock playing over my nerves looked exactly like a normal transmission, making various muscles contract or relax. Nerves were simple. They received a signal, they passed the signal along. I worked out a few designs that would analyze the length and intensity of signals, then throw them out. Technically, it would work.

It would also murder my reflexes to dust, and make it feel like I was moving through life on a half-second delay. Imagine. Wanting to lift up a mango to take a bite, and watching my hand perform the action an eternity later.

Starting to dodge half a second after seeing an arrow. It wasn’t a feasible design.

Another thing to ask about. It wasn’t the end of the world if I couldn’t manage it, although the ‘hardening’ design might be useful at the nerve endings…

I was slapping things together without checking full-body integration. That came after the initial designs.

I started with the lungs. I’d waffled between whale and mosasaurus for some time, but currently the wind was blowing towards mosasaurus. Both helped deep dives, and while I wasn’t interested in taking up deep sea scuba diving, between my blood, my air spell, and now my lungs, I’d be able to survive hours without an external air source. I wasn’t planning on needing to use it, but right now suffocation was my biggest weakness. I would be shocked if I didn’t become immune to suffocation next class up.

Which would be weird. Being able to mostly survive on pure mana? That just felt… wrong. There wasn’t anything I could point to, and it didn’t include still needing to eat and drink.

I’d always be vulnerable to having a large enough rock dropped on me, even if it eventually needed to be the size of a mountain. That small reminder of my mortality was weirdly comforting.

Also, globally it seemed useful. If a forbidden Miasma classer attacked me with deadly gas, I could hold my breath for an hour, use my air bubble spell, and get at least another hour or so.

The only shame was the creatures I was emulating were able to spend nearly four hours underwater with a single breath. I wasn’t willing to make the compromises needed just to spend that long underwater, but I could get to an estimated respectable hour, no problem.

After searching far and wide, I’d landed on the vicious deinosuchus, a crocodile relative, for my stomach. Critically, its stomach acid was powerful enough to dissolve metal, which was needed for my titanium bones. Also, being able to melt metal meant it was strong enough to digest anything else I could eat. It was a bit of a shame in a way – I was making myself nearly immune to ingested poisons, toxins, and foodborne illnesses at the same time, but I simply didn’t need the protection.

Pairing nicely with the stomach was the deinosuchus’s liver. It produced the right type of neutralizing enzyme, letting the rest of my digestive track go to town. The only downside?

Absolutely terrible alcohol neutralization. I was already a bit of a lightweight, and I was going into the featherweight category. Not the end of the world, not when I could purge myself into sobriety with a moment’s notice, and needing less alcohol to get drunk wasn’t exactly a loss. Harder to walk the fine line between ‘tipsy’, ‘buzzed’, and ‘sloshed’ though.

I consulted Metallurgy and Meat in a perfunctory manner, simply checking that I wasn’t getting thrown any twists. Unfortunately, according to the text, I was going to be in for a fun time.

When stomach acid dissolved titanium, the metallic titanium would become coated in an oxide layer, and that oxide layer was called “sapphire”, which was completely insoluble. I needed to reverse the process, get the titanium back into a useable form without it binding to anything else, then having it pass through the digestive track.

I suspected the liver wasn’t going to be recognizable by the time I was done with it.

The small intestine was where nutrients were picked up, and deinosuchus was entirely wrong for that task. It was fundamentally a meat eater, and its digestion showed.

Humans and other elvenoids were weirdly good at digesting food, but we were second to the king of eating, the biggest hog on the block.

Pigs.

I made a little purple star next to ‘pig small intestine’, noting that I’d need to confirm that I wouldn’t develop an allergy to onions as a result of using their small intestine. Biology was weird at times, and I needed to look up the mechanism of pig allergies to onions to make sure I could still eat them.

I couldn’t develop allergies without white blood cells, but there was always a chance the professor who’d mentioned it once off-hand in a lecture hadn’t used the proper technical term. An entire species being allergic to something sounded like an intolerance, not an allergy.

My large intestine was performing some of the same function as my kidney, and my search for the right one had led me down a bizarre path.

The large intestine was primarily for water uptake, and frankly, almost everyone absorbed water just fine. There were almost no important differences between any animal, or how they handled it. The only fun part was the colon, where I could do something like grab a wombat colon to poop cubes.

Thinking about it from a water uptake perspective had led me down a different path. Who drank weird water?

Practically nobody. Animals drank freshwater, and saltwater fish had their own mechanisms for separating water out. Even sea snakes and similar animals didn’t drink seawater! They swam to the top of the ocean when it rained, and drank out of the ‘puddles’ on the surface of the ocean!

Sea otters and sea lions were almost unique in the animal kingdom for being able to drink saltwater. I happily stole their design for both my large intestine, and for my singular kidney.

One kidney, because sticking an entire second heart in my stomach needed to shove other organs out of the way somewhere.

Speaking of my kidney, it was my biggest weakness by a long shot. I was shoving a ton of different organs and body parts together. Everything gave off different waste products, and it was the job of the kidneys to scrub everything out of the blood and move it to the bladder.

Problem was, I was generating a lot of waste, and there wasn’t much overlap between the toxins generated. A proper set of kidneys that could handle everything coming in was one of the major sticking points of any chimera.

Exceptionally clever biomancers could find ways that one organ’s waste was another’s input, allowing internal self-cleaning, a modest efficiency gain, and importantly, lower stress on the kidneys.

I was cheating.

My healing properly recognized what was a waste product, and what belonged. As long as my healing was going strong, as long as I had [Persistent Casting] up or remembered to heal myself once a day, I was fine. The mana cost was tiny. Single digits a day, I wouldn’t even notice the drop. It did loop back around to the immune system problem. If I found myself denied the System for extended periods of time – like, half a weekish at my initial estimate – renal failure would kill me.

The list of symptoms for normal human renal failure was a real treat. Swelling was the mildest symptom, quickly escalating to internal bleeding, confusion, seizures, coma, and death. Fun stuff.

It was the price I paid for the absolutely fantastic, out-of-this-world performance the rest of my body would get. Otherwise I might as well go full elf and be done with it.

It was a risk, but everything in life was. I looked at my life, at the world around me, and the criteria needed to be utterly screwed.

I went back to the skeleton design and added in a note.

Find a place to insert arcanite. Protected? Hard to lose? Possible to reinsert after dismemberment.

Can use multiple spots!!!!!

There. With just a few grams of arcanite scattered around my body, I could always pull a tiny trickle of mana to perform dialysis, and keep myself alive. I’d still end up sick as hell, but I’d live.

That’s if I managed to survive whatever captivity was denying me mana.

I snorted.

I was taking the smallest, babiest steps towards becoming a magical creature. It was roundabout, but fit the broadest definition.

The only awkward part about places and locations was, politely, replacing the arcanite when it inevitably got obliterated. My skull was out, but my hipbones worked. I’d just need to knife myself, crack open the bone, shove an appropriately-sized crystal in, then wash healing over it.

Hmmm. I’d have to check if [Oath] was cool with that. It’d require a meditation session or two, but it was far better than nothing.

Since I wasn’t using my kidneys for their primary function, water extraction and management became the key feature I had them for. This looped right back to the sea lions, and something I could use kidneys for.

Salt management. Not a toxin, not something my healing would easily or properly manage. Sea lion kidneys were the second part of the puzzle that would let me drink salt water like it was normal water.

Everything in the body was connected, and I was reluctant to modify my brain. All of my instincts would scream at me when I drank salty water, saying it was bad. My stomach might even rebel, my little lizard brain convinced that it was bad for me. I needed to override that with my sure knowledge that I could drink the water safely.

Retraining myself wasn’t going to be fun.

On the kidney note, I was unsure if the sea lion kidney would be able to properly process the extra-thick blood I was aiming for. Another place for extensive math and calculations.

[*ding!* [Anatomical Drawing] leveled up! 24 -> 25]

My kidneys drained into my bladder, and there weren’t any modifications I wanted to make here. The short urethra women had resulted in higher than expected instances of urinary tract infections, but my healing reared its head again.

There was no need to make any changes. It worked just fine. I didn’t need a super sized bladder, an extra stretchy bladder, and heaven help me if I decided to go for a small bladder.

I didn’t want to be an old lady going to the bathroom every other hour at 25. No way.

On the organ reduction note, I had no desire to have kids of my own. None at all. I could make some careful trimming to my ovaries and the rest of my reproductive system. It was the other piece of the ‘how do I make room for the second heart?’ puzzle.

There were more organs, many of which were either kept the same, or upgraded to the elven equivalent. My esophagus… okay, fine, that one needed an upgrade to handle the new and improved stomach acid I was dealing with. Just another example of how everything was tied together. Gallbladder. Lymph nodes were part of the practically-defunct immune system and I didn’t need mammary glands if I wasn’t going to have kids. My pancreas was going to need an entire overhaul into something brand-new to help regulate the concoction my blood was turning into, and my pituitary gland was going to require careful, careful calibration.

If [The Stars Never Fade] trolled me and I massively overshot, I needed to make sure whatever young body I turned into could survive, and grow back into adulthood.

I flipped back to my skeleton diagram and crammed a note into the margins.

Growth plates.

My spleen was once again part of the immune system, and I made sure to show it crossed off in my notes. I didn’t want to accidentally include it, then have it faithfully produce an immune system that would go berserk on my new body.

Dozens of glands.

The pituitary was another place for angry red circles, for the same reason as growth plates. I was fine with its current status, but I needed to ensure it’d work if I ever became a kid again. Again, I had no plans on using [The Stars Never Fade] hard enough to become a kid, but the skill had shown targeting an age was tricky. I’d be damned if the dice rolled and I became eight years old again, and I had no way of growing up.

That would suck.

I was tempted to play with the adrenal gland, but I couldn’t figure out what direction I wanted. If I increased adrenaline production, I’d go fight-or-flight more often and harder. When it worked, it’d work well.

At the same time, I’d go into fight or flight more easily, in inappropriate situations.

If I tuned it down, I’d keep a cool and level head in all situations. I’d also lose the benefits of adrenaline flooding my system and helping my strength and reflexes in do or die situations.

I mentally shook my head. I was thinking of a human body with that. The new body I was designing wouldn’t need adrenaline to make full use of everything I had. There wouldn’t be an adrenal boost to my performance.

I added in a tiny muscle that could directly stimulate the adrenal gland, letting me control it when I wanted to, but otherwise left it untampered with.

I was slightly putting off the next step, and I turned to my skin to keep delaying.

My skin was interesting. I’d gone over dozens of variations and possibilities. Poison dart frog, for bright colors and deadly poison? Chinchilla to have the softest fur in the world?

I went with standard human skin for the epidermis layer. One of my goals was to keep looking almost entirely human, and my skin looking like it should was a major component of that. No matter what clever tweaks I thought I was making, it just didn’t look human anymore. At a glance, elven skin was the same as human skin, but I suspected the longer someone looked at me, the more wrong I’d appear. Better to take no risks with the external appearance.

The remaining layers I was going to have fun with.

The shade of skin was another topic of debate. There were pros and cons to every shade possible, from skipping melanin entirely to be albino, to packing it in as densely as possible. None was objectively, measurably the best possible combination.

In the end, my own vanity carried the day. I liked how I currently looked. No need to make any external changes.