Chapter 373: Operation: The Improved Elaine X

First stop: The library. I was going to be laid up, potentially for weeks, and I wanted to have some light reading. What Marcelle had said about the Exterreri Empire was interesting, and I wanted to get some reading done on the subject. I didn’t want to be trying to work while I was convalescing, and the topic was interesting.

Ok, fine.

Everything was interesting to read about, if done well.

Second was home, where I’d previously bought a few pounds of powdered titanium. I was doing biological manipulations, and the skill didn’t extend towards conjuring up metal. The plan was to slowly drink a titanium-smoothie mix over the next few days after my biomancy operation, and let my body properly process and deposit it into the right places. It would also let me know if I’d done that part of the operation correctly, and if I needed to make adjustments. Far easier to make changes now, while I still had the biomancy class, than discover it wasn’t working in a few years!

It was one of the quirks of healing magic. See, the body continuously updated what it ‘should’ look like to the System, and healing magic checked on what the body ‘should’ look like when making repairs and fixes. It’s why normal healing magic didn’t handle age or starvation. The changes made to the body updated the ‘template’ to the new look. Fat people got healed back to being fat, and skinny people got healed back to being skinny.

It got weird with things like cancer not updating the template, but brain injuries did – after a short period of time. Seven different types of funky.

When I finished with [Biological Manipulation], my bones wouldn’t have any titanium, although my body would ‘know’ what to do with any ingested titanium. Similarly, my template would be updated to not have any titanium in the image. As I drank the titanium smoothies, and as the metal was deposited onto my bones, my image would get updated, just like it would if I ate thirty pounds of cake and gained a dozen pounds. If my arm got broken, [Dance with the Heavens] would restore my arm, metal hexagon pattern in my bones and all.

Speaking of cakes.

Third was the cafeteria, where I loaded up on food. I made sure Auri and Fenrir had access to everything they needed, and I was back at the hospital.

I quickly found healer Lippe.

“Hey Lippe!” I called out to the suspected noble.

“Elaine. Is something wrong?” She asked me.

“Eh, not really. I’m checking myself in.”

I got a skeptical look. Fair, because I hadn’t explained my plans to biomancy myself to the facility yet. I just hadn’t needed to make a big announcement ahead of time or anything. This was me letting them know about my plans.

“Why?” She asked.

“I’m about to biomancy myself, and I’m going to need the works. A healer in case I screw up and pass out with a bad build, living assistance, physical therapy after.” Biomancy changes on the scale I was performing always came with a significant amount of ‘how do I walk again?’ occurring after, as all the nerves got scrambled and rewired. It wasn’t a big deal, but it would make for a few annoying days. It was why Marcelle had suggested I plan on two weeks for recovery after performing the biomancy. The recovery in question was figuring out how to walk again, and the like.

Lippe shrugged.

“If the experience and levels are anything close to your earlier performance, everyone will be banging down the doors to participate. Can you wait a few hours to get a group together?”

I could push the issue, and just do it now, but why bother? I could help a dozen students level and learn, just by being patient.

Pun intended.

A hop, skip, jump, and two hours later, and I was in a bed next to Iona’s. We weren’t using the fancy arcanite high-mana room for this, since it was a self-operation, AKA it was only going to cost around 80,000 mana – and that was with a generous margin of error.

“Alright everyone, thanks for coming. I see a few of you are still around from this morning.” I winced. This was so much more awkward than directing things.

“Anyways, this is going to be a little different. All of my changes are going to happen at once. Nothing should go wrong, but you never know. I’m likely going to end up with a blinding headache, so if I scream and clutch my head, ignore that. After that? Well, I’ll be done, and hopefully I won’t need anyone to help. With that being said, I can’t hold onto my image once I’ve made it. It’s far too complex for me to get distracted by anything. I estimate two hours total to build everything, and you’ll know when I’m almost done when I get to the last page of my notebook.” I tapped the book in question. “You might want to find something else until that happens. Oh! If I pass out, get help from some of the other biomancers. They’ll be able to use my notes to figure out what went wrong, although I did have a number of professors sign off that the build should work. Although that was before the edit I put in.” I was rambling, and shut up.

Most of the healers wished me luck and walked away.

“You got this brainosaurus!” Iona cheered me from the other bed. “You’ll totally knock… uh… you’ve got this!”

I gave her a thumbs up, then focused.

I wanted to also use this time to make my new [Persistent Casting], but the issue with making my heals was I also included all the ways I could be harmed, and how to optimally fix it. That would make this take tons longer, and I couldn’t take up everyone’s time like that.

However, I did have the time to do this properly. I isolated my left hand, and focused on everything I was going to do to it. Bones, joints, tendons, ligaments, capillary system, blood, nerves, the whole works. It didn’t neatly tie back to the rest of my body, but that was alright.

I focused on building the image just for my hand, took a deep breath, and executed the change. My hand briefly writhed in front of me, but critically, [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom] didn’t level up. I immediately blasted a normal heal through my hand, reverting the changes.

Excellent. The System didn’t think I’d made any correctable mistakes with the design of my left hand. Time to do the left foot!

Round and round I went, slowly performing biomancy on a single part of my body, checking it for errors, then reverting them back. I started with my extremities, and slowly worked my way in.

I felt comfortable enough to do my – calling them minor organs felt wrong, but organs that I could survive going haywire for a minute or two – internal organs as well, ensuring that I hadn’t made any mistakes, that nothing had been critically overloaded.

I could handle some small changes with [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom], but if too many things went wrong at once, that was a message to me to go back to the drawing board and figure out what had gone wrong.

I had done my research. The skill wasn’t leveling.

After checking my lungs, then reverting them, it was time for the main event. I flipped back to the first page of my notebook, and started to build the full-body, full-system image required to completely transform myself. One piece. Two pieces.

Three pieces.

The hundred, thousands of tiny pieces that made up a single, functional human body. I pictured it all, in every detail I’d written down, all the modifications and changes. I’d been doing nothing else but working on this project for months now, and the picture came easily to me. Heck, I’d just formed the image for every single part of the puzzle!

Repetition was the mother of learning, even when I didn’t have the skill.

Time flew as I completed the image, and without fanfare or announcing it – every bit of focus on keeping the complex structure in my mind – I triggered [Biological Manipulation].

I was instantly slammed with a blinding headache. I was torn with a moment of indecision – to use [Permanence] or not. I erred on the side of caution, holding off on the skill. I gasped for breath, but it didn’t feel like anything was happening.

This was expected, but unwelcome. My blood was super thick, and my skills didn’t have much about creating oxygenated blood. My old blood was still there, simply transformed, but the relative oxygen saturation had dramatically dropped, due to the dramatically increased capacity.

It was rapidly reoxygenating, my lungs doing work, but it took time for it to reach every part of my body.

No, worse was the assault on my senses. I could hear everything, every pin drop like a cannon in my ears, the softly glowing lights like my attempts at blinding someone with Radiance. I could smell what someone three floors away and seven rooms over had eaten two days ago. I had sensory input I couldn’t interpret, that I’d need help understanding.

And all that was pain. Terrible, horrible, vicious pain. Like spikes going through my brain, like a hangover I couldn’t heal, like the worst migraine of my life.

I closed my eyes and just rode it out.

What else was there to do?

“Elaine?” A whispered word went off like a bombshell in my ears. Iona had noticed me stirring.

I tried to open my eyes, my arm shooting up towards the ceiling instead.

This was going to be harder than I thought.

“I can see you’re up. Good. Can you eat?”

I tried to open my mouth, and wriggled my right toes. I tried to lift my left arm up, and arched my back instead. I tried to lift my right leg up – figuring nothing was hooked up to the right thing anymore, and I should just skip my right arm entirely in my question to figure out how to do things again – and my eyes opened.

I tried to wiggle my toes, hoping to open my mouth.

I peed myself. In front of Iona. I wanted to die of shame.

Fuck me, this was going to be a long recovery period.

“Hey Elaine, you doing okay?” Iona plopped down next to me as she whispered. The heavenly scent of freshly cut mangos accompanied her.

I could also smell the slightly sour smell of the mango skin, now gone. Iona had been handling them herself, personally, and the faintest metallic scent came to me. I think it was steel, reacting with the subtle oils on her skin, telling me what type of knife she’d used to cut the mangos.

There was a depth and subtlety to scents and smells that I was learning, an aspect I hadn’t considered. I knew the coppery smell of blood – as a human. I was entirely unprepared for the raw depth of scent that simple copper had, and I needed to learn and catalog everything in multiple new scents now. A long trip to the Museum was in order. Maybe a dedicated class to handling powerful senses.

I groaned, and lifted a hand. I’d figured that much out.

I used [Mantle] to draw words.

Too much everything. Might’ve overdone it on the senses.

Iona shrugged her now extra-massive shoulders.

“Well, that’s easy. Just get a skill to help you out.”

I frowned, or tried to. I kicked the side of my bed instead. I then remembered the new way I needed to frown, and properly did it. I didn’t want to blow a skill slot just to manage my senses. That felt like a terrible idea, I’d lock a skill slot permanently. I was getting better and better at processing the world around me every day.

But, the idea had some merit. I should investigate it before dismissing it out of hand, especially since it came from Iona. I did have a practically free general skill in [Anatomical Drawing].

Alright, give me some time to work through it. I wrote to Iona.

“Cheers, enjoy!” I heard her relax against her chair, the wood creaking slightly as she readjusted. Not that anyone else would’ve heard it.

I took a deep, bracing breath, and mentally prepared myself for the incoming anguish. I then focused on my senses, on controlling them, and getting everything I could from them.

My headache spiked, like five pickaxes being driven through different parts of my brain – my main brain – and I was rewarded with a series of System notifications.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [Sharpened Senses]! Would you like to take this skill?]

Heck no.

Well, okay, maybe one day in the future I might. It was a fairly solid skill, but right now my problem was my senses were too sharp, and I was having trouble adapting.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [Dulled Senses]! Would you like to take this skill?]

Ugh. This was almost as bad. It’d be a crutch, and I’d either have to undo the crutch in the future, or just live with worse senses. It didn’t fix my problem. If I wanted to dull my senses, I didn’t need a skill. Blindfolds and earplugs would do it.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [The World Around Me]! Would you like to take this skill?]

It wasn’t obvious from the name what the skill did, and I dug a little deeper.

The World Around Me: You’ve dug deeper than most to extract every little detail of the world around you. You’ve honed and trained your senses, then brought them to the peak of performance. You’ve deepened the spectrum of colors you can see, you’ve given yourself the ability to see in the dark and underwater, to focus at great distances. You’ve improved your sense of smell beyond what any natural creature has, along with allowing your hearing to hit upon the full range of possibility. You’ve added new senses to yourself. Bring them all into a cohesive whole, and know what is going around you. Larger sphere of awareness per level. Awareness and details dependent on senses and knowledge. -222 mana regeneration.

Wow. I wasn’t sure if that would fix my sensory issue, but I was happy to see what the skill could do for me.

I took it, dropping [Anatomical Drawing] – no nausea!! – and the world… changed. For the better.

Before I was interpreting what I could filter out of my sensory overload to pick out details, like tuning into a single conversation in a busy marketplace. Yeah, I could hear everyone chatting, but I was only focused on one conversation, only operating on one bandwidth.

Now, in a small sphere around me, I knew everything that was going on, with perfect clarity. It was like I could hear every conversation in the marketplace, and tune into it, and somehow understand and follow what everyone was doing. Within the small sphere I had.

This was a powerful skill. My radius was small, for now, but I knew everything that was going on under my bed. I couldn’t see under my bed, but my skill, combined with my senses, could.

I didn’t know what type of wood the bed was made out of, but I suspected if I took the time to smell different woods, different oils and glues, that I’d get a fantastically detailed look at what was going on.

Outside of the sphere, it was the same mess of fishmongers yelling about the latest catch after a tsunami had dumped an ocean’s worth of fish into their stalls.

But the skill was taking the edge off of it.

“Everything alright?” Iona whispered to me, the noise now manageable and bearable.

Well, I just decided that I need to sniff glue. My [Mantle] told Iona.

Without looking, I could tell that she was putting on a pout.

[*ding!* Congratulations! [The World Around You] leveled up! 1->2].

Leveling the skill up had one of the more obvious effects of any general skill I’d used. My sphere of awareness expanded, and the floor was now included. I could tell every swirl in the wood, where the moisture was bending and warping things, how long ago it had been since it was last mopped, the fact that it hadn’t been cleaned properly since the last time a female human had bled on it.

I was far too intimately familiar with the stench of blood.

“Definitely feeling better.” Iona muttered. “Right, I need my cuddleosaurus back. The more you practice, the sooner you’re coordinated, and the faster you’re out of that bed and back into ours.”

I rolled my eyes – successfully – at Iona’s comment. I tried to stick my tongue out, but that was connected to the flail-bone instead.

“I invented a game!” Iona brought out the bag of mangos, like she’d had any hope of hiding them from me. “It’s called, we’re both going to practice moving!”

She plucked a mango cube out of her bag, and using her [Telekinesis], gently hovered it over my head.

“Good luck!” She cheerfully called out. I’d gotten practice eating, and I thought about the new, proper movements I needed to make. Shark-like, I snapped forward and up, only to watch with dismay as the mango cube floated away from me.

I gave Iona the mightiest pout I could.

She lightly tutted me.

“Going to have to work harder than that for your mango.”

Never had I been so motivated.

Recovery was slow and painful. Iona was done in less than a day, only needing a single session with a physical therapist to readjust herself. The changes I’d crafted were relatively small, after all.

Mine were not. I was like a baby, although I had quite a few advantages over one. I knew what the heck walking was, and that I wanted to do it, for example. I had a mature body, and wouldn’t get self-sabotaged by muscles not working.

A few days had gone by with no unexpected problems, and I felt comfortable enough to use [Permanence] on myself to lock in the changes.

My senses had been one of my largest stumbling blocks, but [The World Around Me] had neatly taken care of that problem, while also giving me a sphere of complete awareness. I was rapidly becoming a huge fan.

Lying in bed wasn’t helping me, and I spent every waking moment working on regaining control. There was no way to make titanium-dust smoothies taste good, and I simply elected to drink them in the most concentrated way I could, to just get it done and over with.

Unfortunately I couldn’t drink them all in one sitting, my body couldn’t process that much metal at once. Had to sip a little every day. It was going to be worth it.

There were more enjoyable exercises than drinking metal.

Reading books, for example, was great for practicing my fine motor control. Mmmmhmm. That was totally the reason, and not my need for a mental break from the frustrating betrayal my body constantly performed.

[Mantle of the Stars] could slowly move, and it was solid enough to hold a book. I could read as soon as I’d worked out how to open my eyes again, and how to focus with them.

I could even read in the dark, the tiny glimmer of light coming off the [Mantle] enough to see like it was bright as day!

The first few books were boring treaties on how the Exterreri Empire currently worked. Lots of vampires, predominately in cities, used clouds of ash over cities to prevent the sunlight from reaching them. Humans were the predominant farmers in the ashless countryside, and honestly the whole thing was dry enough that I nearly fell asleep.

A Nearly Complete History of the Exterreri Empire was written more like a novel, and dramatically more enjoyable. It started with their creation myth.

The one known as the Roadbuilder, Titanslayer, Faminevanquisher, Dragonfriend, and more has more titles and stories to his name than we can possibly describe. The gods blessed the birth of Maximus Atius Draconis, showering the humble cottage in which he was born with rainbows, an eagle alighting on his crib. For he was a direct descendant of one of the gods themselves, foretold to greatness.

I snorted – now connected to the fart bone – in disbelief.

Divination and prophecy didn’t exist. Full stop. Not even the gods could do it.

As a babe, he strangled a venomous snake that had slithered into his crib, demonstrating the strength of arms he would be known for. He was talking by the time he was six months old, and was writing poetry at nine. As a child, before his System unlocked, he cleverly designed a trap for an infamous man-eating lion. His first class was [Paragon of Perfection]. He joined the colosseum young, and boasted a record of 251 wins and 7 losses in his time there.

I remembered what my fellow Rangers had said about the colosseum. Someone was always ‘supposed’ to win.

When the barbarian invaders came, he led his fellow countrymen in fighting them off, campaigning across the land. He fell in love with their princess, but alas, cruel fate tore them apart. She was promised to another tribe, and his love moved mountains and diverted rivers. He fought the barbarian’s champion in single combat for her hand, and when their vile treachery caused his spear to break, an elemental of Lightning, said to have taken the form of the most beautiful woman in existence, gifted him the legendary spear Culexabri.

Barbarians, as a general rule, didn’t have the society or culture needed to have a [Princess]! Honestly.

He saved a dragon from certain death, and the creature, wisest and greatest of the god’s creation, who saw the nobility of his soul and entrusted his youngest child to be a companion to Atius.

I was smelling bullshit. Quite literally, the stables weren’t too far from the hospital, and the wind was blowing in the right direction. I bet with more practice, I could even figure out what the bulls were eating!

Having fought for the peace of the land, his fellow countrymen wanted to crown him king. Thrice did he refuse, for he was a simple man of the land, no great [King] or [Emperor]. Thrice more did the people of the land come to him, insisting he wear the crown, that he lead them and protect him.

Eventually, he bowed to their wishes, and accepted the crown, naming himself Emperor Night, First and Last of His Name.

My blood ran cold at the last sentence.

All this time, I’d been looking for hints of Night. For details, information. Anything.

All this time, it had been right in front of me, in the history texts of the Exterreri Empire. I knew they had a number of vampires. I hadn’t done more than a cursory glance at the current leadership structure, not seeing his name anywhere.

Finally, I was seeing his name – untranslated from the Creation original – in a textbook about the history of the Empire.

And I didn’t believe a word of the rest of it. Especially if Night was involved, head of the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ Sentinels. Now that I was looking for it, the fingerprints of his propaganda were all over the pages.

Not him, personally, but his brand.

I knew I had to go to the Exterreri Empire.

With Iona greatly motivating me, along with my physical therapist, and nothing being fundamentally wrong with me, I managed to regain my faculties in two weeks. It took another two – burning through the remainder of the quarter, along with the break between quarters – for me to get to an acceptable level of performance and control over my body.

What I considered acceptable wasn’t what most other people had in mind. I still thought of myself as a Sentinel.

“Ready. Set. GO!” Shirayuki called out, and I was off sprinting as she started to say go. My reflexes had been enhanced, the brain-ropes along with the kirin nerves getting me off the starting block in a time measured in hundredths of a second.

I was forced to dig into the ground as I ran, flinging clods of dirt behind me as I sprinted the length of the field.

The issue hadn’t been as pronounced earlier. The difference here was my fundamental speed had dramatically increased. It was like walking on sand, versus running on sand. I had gone from ‘walking’ on the dirt, to ‘running’ on the dirt, and my dexterity couldn’t handle the increase.

Putting it another way:

If I had no stats at all, if it was just my body running like this on dirt, I would be causing the same problem. Since my dexterity was slightly out of balance, forget negating the effect, it was getting amplified.

Traction was now an issue. Maybe I should get [Traction] as a skill?

If I was on stone, I wouldn’t have any of these issues.

For now, I sort of ‘skipped’ as I ran, the air blasting around me and causing significant drag. I closed my third eyelid, the membrane acting like goggles against the wind.

I had my sphere of awareness, but I was moving too damn fast for it to be useful. The sensory input was there one moment, gone the next. As the skill leveled, as I got used to it, I imagined it would become more useful.

Runes on the bottom of my feet were the first idea, but it had problems. All things for me to sort out after I was done with this dash.

And I was done. I put on the brakes, plowing a pair of long furrows in the dirt as I tried to stop myself.

“Time!” Shirayuki called out, then was silent.

I didn’t need to pant or catch my breath or anything. The run had been nothing, barely a light warm up.

What was taking her so long to announce my time?

“Elaine. 3200 meter dash, 18 seconds!” She eventually called out from across the field.

I mentally ran the conversions, then staggered as the implications hit me.

I’d been slowed down by a dozen physical factors. Poor traction. Wind drag. It was one of my first full out sprints since getting a handle on myself, and I knew as I got better at moving at high speeds, I’d shave off quite a few seconds. Three to five. A huge number.

I wasn’t quite there yet, but I was eyeing up the sound barrier as a target.

“Frankly amazing time, Elaine.” Shirayuki spoke from across the field, but I could hear her, no problem. “You’re faster than nearly any other physical classer I’ve seen in your age division. Work on your control, get a skill or two to manage the impact you have, and you’ll be unstoppable. I recommend enchanted boots. Ready for the next test?”

“Ready!” I called out. Shirayuki’s suggestion of enchanted boots made me feel like an idiot. Of course those would be the perfect solution to my traction problem! I focused a little too much on myself, and all the things I could do to fix my problems, forgetting that sometimes, other people had useful, powerful skills as well, and could simply make a solution to my problem.

It was an issue with my mind set. I needed to readjust my thinking, and consider reaching out a hand to others and asking for help, instead of insisting I do everything myself.

Physical stats weren’t linear. Doubling strength didn’t mean I could lift twice as much. There was quite a lot of research done on the topic, and best as the [Scholars] and [Researchers] had figured out, there was a cube-root factor to strength. It was mitigated by the physical stats multiplying each other.

My biomancy had done great things for me though. It had multiplied my baseline, so my strength stat had a better base to work off of, for example. Going from 5 times my normal strength to 10 times my normal strength would usually require getting my strength stat about 8 times as many stat points as it currently had invested.

But by dramatically improving the base, I got all those ‘stats’ ‘for free’, and they’d always stick with me. The biggest winner was my speed.

I was almost as fast as the physically-focused, vow-boosted Iona was.

Well, before I’d made similar changes on her.

3200 meter dash: 18 seconds.

3200 meter dash when flying: 19 seconds.

Obstacle course: 11 seconds.

Deadlift: 1200 lbs.

Bench Press: 900 lbs.

I could see an individual blade of grass from across the stadium. I could see the little patterns on an ant crawling up the stem of a clover.

I could rotate my head almost completely around.

Best of all, I felt like I was filled with energy. Like I could move and jump and run for days on end, and never slow down.

Frankly, I was thrilled. Operation: The Improved Elaine was an unqualified success, and the changes would stay with me for the rest of my life. I could now grab a different third class, and enjoy the best of both worlds. It was almost like having half of a fourth class!

First things first though – anti-friction runes on my skin. They were going to be skin-colored, and only light up when in use, which I thought was pretty cool. The ability to ‘slip’ through the air, and ignore wind resistance, would be a nice utility that could last for the rest of my life, and wasn’t exactly a good spell to stash in a spellbook.

I was back in the world of my soul, resetting my third class. Grabbing my real third class.

Librarian was smiling as I came, a single book waiting for me on the table. I shook my head as I looked at it.

“How did it take me so long to realize?” I asked her. “How could I have made any other choice?”

She didn’t say a word. She simply gestured around, at the tens of thousands of colorful books that surrounded us. That reminded me of the hours, the days, I’d spend doing nothing but perusing them, because reading books in the library was fun. Of spending hours curled up in a chair, reading about the adventures of maybe-Elaine.

Of the fact that my world, the inner me, was a library. That books were my thing, that they’d always been my thing. From reading extensively in my first life, to raiding libraries just to learn how to read, telling tales to Rangers for a chance at life, to writing scrolls and trying to invent books. When I’d found myself stuck in a dragon’s lair, the treasure I’d been most interested in were her books, not her gold or weapons. I’d spent hours browsing, desperately trying to find any book that I could crack open and read.

I was a [Bookwyrm], through and through.