I sucked a deep breath, genuinely surprised by how Rexerd’s confessions went from nervously worrying about what the Syndicate might do with his help to showing no remorse even after conducting experiments on children.
Someone said it right — curiosity kills more than just the cat.
Push it far enough, and it stops being noble. Stops being brave. It becomes something else entirely.
Obsession.
And Rexerd, according to his journals, had crossed that line a long time ago.
His passion was no longer about discovery. No longer about freeing humans from a predestined fate.
It was now about proving himself right. About feeding the hunger gnawing at his pride and pain.
I closed the journal, feeling a strange mixture of disgust and fascination churning in my gut.
He was a monster.
But he was also… onto something.
And that was the scariest part.
After taking a short break, I started reading through his logs again, this time more solemnly than before.
•••
Entry #72 — Divine Alchemy Theory
“I did it.
…I really did it.
There’s no going back now.
I committed the highest crime an alchemist can commit. I altered a living human.
Two of them, in fact.
With the help of Rusten Flower poison and Syrphid Slug’s toxin, I induced a comatose state in two C-rank Subjects. They weren’t unconscious, just put under a condition where the body forgets to struggle.
Then, I injected them with Shade Hound’s blood to keep their nervous systems hyper-aware, their hearts beating, their organs braced against the trauma. It stilled the bleeding, held their vessels in tension, and kept the flesh alive even as I began carving through it.
To strengthen their bones, I needed more than mere enhancement. I acquired Lunar Vire Roots, a forbidden flora that only grows in the glowfields of the Noctveil Wilds — under the light of no moons and all stars. Without it, the fusing would have shattered them from within.
Then I started cutting them open.
And stitching them together.
I melted their bones and fused them, marrow to marrow, and reshaped the body from its foundation.
Ligaments rewoven, nerves redirected. Joints that didn’t exist before now bent in ways no human spine should.
Many organs I had to replace, and some I had to… improve. Their liver, for example. I swapped it with that of a Titan Ratking, whose monstrous resilience to toxins would grant them an unnatural resistance to failure.
And finally, to force rapid adaptation and survival, I implanted a living Echo Wyrm embryo in the spinal root. Its regenerative factor forced the cells into overdrive, knitting tissue, rebuilding systems before death could catch up.
By the end of it…
Two people…
Two whole humans were fused as one.
I created a new being. A new creature.
I altered humans.“
——-—
Entry #73 — Bad News…
“I… have some bad news. But a good one as well.
The body fusion I attempted between two C-rankers was successful.
But neither survived for long.
I did everything right.
But when I forced ‘it’ — or ‘them,’ depending on how you define that creature’s identity — to summon ‘its’ Origin Card… something happened.
A malformed Card was manifested.
And then… it shattered into particles of light.
Almost immediately, the creature started weeping in three voices and bled from all its eyes.
It spoke only one word, over and over, in one of the languages I knew: “Return.”
Return… to what?
A prior self? The unfused bodies? The original form?
The creature’s brain was barely functional. ‘It’ should have had no memory of ‘its’ past self. So how did ‘it’ remember?
And what were the other languages ‘it’ was speaking in?
Perhaps… perhaps the soul remembers what the mind forgets.
A terrifying possibility.
And yet — an exhilarating one.
Because for a single moment… they fused.
Not only in bodies but also in souls, those two humans were fused together.
Two distinct Wills merged into one.
It means the soul can be manipulated. Can be molded. Can be forced to accept the most profane changes done to the body.
This was failure.
But also… proof.
I have found the first fracture in the shell of the soul.
The place where it bends.
The place where it breaks.
The place where it begins.
This is the dawn.
The first step toward the forbidden path.
The Alchemy of Souls.“
——-—
Entry #77 — Divine Alchemy Theory (Alchemy of Souls)
“Alchemy of Souls.
Its function is not to create gold.
But to create immortality.
And a perfected self.
Step 1. Find the right bodies. This is important. Alter them. Shape them for what’s to come.
Step 2. Fuse the bodies. The more alike the people, the greater the chance of avoiding backlash.
Step 3. Awaken the desired Origin Card. Hopefully.
This… this is the closest thing to divinity. At least, in theory.
This is the only way to mold one’s potential. To twist the threads of fate with your own hands.
This is how we take our destiny back from the heavens.“
•••
I had to take another break at this point.
Because Rexerd had not only begun describing his other human transmutation attempts in all their grotesque detail — but he also started attaching photos to the pages.
Each picture was marked ‘before’ and ‘after.’
And some creatures in those pictures were barely recognizable as humans anymore.
Twisted limbs. Discolored skin. Eyes that weren’t where they should be — or too many of them. Flesh that looked half-melted, half-grown from something else entirely.
But what unsettled me most wasn’t the failures.
It was the ones that looked perfect.
Almost too perfect.
Pale skin without blemish. Muscles so symmetrically aligned they bordered on the uncanny. Faces serene in their coma-like slumber, as if they were dreaming.
But none of those creations survived.
He was basically creating damaged homunculi.
Well, not exactly.
But I finally understood what the Alchemy of Souls really was.
Instead of creating artificial life, Rexerd was fusing human bodies — often while they were still alive. Later, he also started fusing humans with Spirit Beasts.
He was also modifying these fused beings.
And ultimately, he was aiming to manipulate the soul itself — to reshape the Subject’s Origin Card by altering the flesh.
I thought about stopping there. I already had an idea of what I wanted to know.
But some twisted part of me wanted to keep going.
I wanted to see how his experiments failed.
What did he do wrong?
And if he had uncovered something else.
So, I continued.
But the more I flipped through the pages and switched between journals, the more erratic his handwriting became.
Some pages were half-burned or torn.
Others were filled with scribbled nonsense.
Some were gouged with scratch marks, and some were water-damaged like he had clawed at the paper and wept over it.
I kept reading the ones that were still legible.