Chrysalis Chapter 1769 - Don’t Be Scared, He’s Unarmed

“I took no pleasure in this,” Brilliant snapped, repulsed by the entire ordeal. “For any other human, I would have refused to do this at all. Even so, I may have refused were there any other way to prevent your death.”

To stop the human from imagining she pitied him, she added: “I wouldn’t want my family to stain their mandibles with a creature like you.”

Grand Priest Alir Vinting, the human himself, showed no reaction. A being with such meager wits was doubtless struggling to comprehend the events that unfolded. Even after her utmost care, the extraction procedure proved brutally agonizing. Brilliant never aimed to bring torment to others, yet knowing her vanished sister had borne far greater agony for much longer eased her guilt considerably.

The Priest, soaked in perspiration despite her pokes, remained fixed on the empty space where his right arm had been. That limb was severed for good and wouldn't regrow without aid. The Church of the Path might hold secret arts to restore it, but she doubted he'd ever erase the memory of its gruesome loss.

“Hey,” she said, jabbing him with an antenna. “Are you awake in there?”

Brilliant faced the healers stationed nearby.

“Someone probably ought to check on him.”

Hesitation etched every segment of the healers’ carapaces. They recoiled from nearing this abomination, yet they approached anyway, examining him and administering cures.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“He’s fine,” one declared, “simply in shock. It’s a human condition that monsters don’t appear to suffer from,” she explained, spotting Brilliant about to inquire.

“Fascinating,” Brilliant declared, swishing a leg to and fro before the Priest’s vacant stare. “How long is he likely to suffer from this condition? I have a lot of experiments I need to get back to.”

“He should be responsive again soon,” the healer answered with a shrug. “His life is under no threat, nor is he injured in any way.”

“I suppose I’ll just wait then,” Brilliant sighed.

Patience wasn't something she relished or tolerated well in ordinary times. Averting her gaze from Alir's numb figure, she moved to scrutinize the elaborate enchanted array crafted for the ritual, its heart containing a tiny glass vessel brimming with lustrous golden liquid.

Close by, Experiment lingered, fixated on the vial, her antennae drifting lazily in the air.

“I can’t believe it actually worked,” she murmured.

“What do you mean?” Brilliant retorted, affronted. “Of course it was going to work! I designed it, and I’m–”

“Don’t.”

“BRILLIANT!”

“I did. But I looked at the schematics, the Church’s method only works because monsters are made of mana, and humans, need I remind you, are not. So how did you get it to work?”

Though Brilliant yearned to boast more, her accomplishment here left her far from pleased. In her view, it nearly counted as a flop.

“Barely,” she huffed sharply, a leg nudging the complex etchings gouged into the stone floor. Faded now, they had glowed fiercely and surged with might during the ritual, drawing mana from scores of cores set into the formation. “What I’ve done is a rough, hacked-together, brute-force method of replicating their technique. It’s inefficient, inelegant and doesn’t even explode. I’m dreadfully unsatisfied with it.”

Brilliant had zero desire to delve into it or even ponder it, but sensing her aide's determination for details, she exhaled and started highlighting the array's key aspects.

“You’re quite right to point out that even we, who were born rather than spawned, are still essentially formed of mana at our base. Our bodies are formed of Biomass, which can be created from mana, and returns to mana when we die. Humans are not.

“The Church’s ritual takes advantage of this to… liquify… us by converting monsters back into energy. Obviously I can’t do that to a human.”

“But you did!” Experiment pointed out.

“Ehhhh, sort of,” Brilliant replied. “Using a bit of trickery over here, and a bit of fakery over there, I was able to get the process to function by tricking it into seeing the human form as if it were a monster form. Flooding the arm with mana was part of the process, saturating it to a severely abnormal level, then using some rather detailed biomancy to force the arm to mimic monster biology. It’s crude and ugly, less than half as efficient as the Church’s method and requires an unreasonable amount of energy to work. All in all, I hate it, it’s deeply flawed, would never work at scale, fails to convert memories and experiences properly and I have no interest in ever fixing it. And frankly, I’m not even certain it’s possible.”

Experiment paused.

“You know how to do Biomancy? Haven’t we only discovered that type of mana?”

“Of course I know,” Brilliant scoffed. “I’m–”

“Please don’t.”

“BRILLIANT!”