Schedule Update
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"This is going to hurt," Ren said.
Axel sat on the table in the grafting room, kept his opinions to himself, and watched the cardinal sigils pulse at the four corners of the circle.
"Don't die, all right? Stay conscious."
Axel turned pale. "I can take it."
The syringe hit his neck before he finished the sentence.
The Awakened Anesthesia spread in under three seconds. His body went still, every muscle releasing. His eyes stayed open. His mind stayed present. His body was simply no longer available to him.
The red mist thickened at the edges of the room.
Ren stood in the center of the circle and was quiet for a moment. Three Abominations before this. Viktor, colon graft, S-rank result. Wei Liang, eye graft, Mythical result. Eon still being assessed. The pattern held: higher organ function, stronger outcome.
Axel was Mythical rank. The material had to match.
The brain was the obvious answer. He rejected it.
If I remove my brain I will be dead before it grows back. Pointless.
What do I have that is fundamental, high function, and regenerates fast enough that I don't become a problem in my own grafting room.
He looked at his hands.
The skeleton. Obsidian black since the transformation. That is not a normal skeleton anymore.
He made a decision.
"VRZZZZZZZZ."
CPR materialized, the chainsaw head spinning up with its familiar mechanical roar, four tentacles wrapping around the handle from Ren's back. The grafting room sigils deepened in response, the red of them pushing into the mist, the temperature dropping another degree.
Ren reached into his own side with one hand.
The first rib came out cleanly, pulled free from the cartilage with a wet tearing sound that Axel heard from across the room. It was obsidian black from end to end, the bone so dark it seemed to pull the light toward it rather than reflect it. A thread of tissue stretched between the rib and Ren's side as he raised it, snapped, and fell. He set the rib on the tray.
The hole in his side closed as he watched. Cartilage first, soft and pale, then bone pushing through it, the whole process visible through a gap in the skin that sealed itself last. Eight seconds. He was intact again.
He reached back in.
The second rib came out wetter than the first, trailing more tissue, the periosteum still attached in places, strips of it hanging from the black surface. He stripped them off against the edge of the tray. Third rib. Fourth.
Axel watched from the table, paralyzed, entirely conscious.
What the fuck, he thought.
Each rib left a sound in the room when it came free: the same wet separation, the same small snap of tissue, repeated and repeated. Ren worked methodically down the left side and then the right, twelve ribs pulled and placed, the tray accumulating a dark architecture while his own chest continued rising and falling without interruption. Between each removal, new bone formed through the open gap in his skin, white at first and then deepening to obsidian as it matured, the transformation happening in real time.
You are pulling your own ribs out, Axel thought. One at a time. Like you are deboning a chicken. You are deboning yourself and your face has not changed once.
The sternum came out in two pieces. Ren found the division point by pressing his fingers inward along the bone's natural seam, the pressure audible, and split it along that line. Both pieces went to the tray. Through the gap where the sternum had been, Axel could see the surface of Ren's heart, dark red and moving, before the tissue closed over it.
New sternum was forming before Ren's hands left the tray.
Axel stared at the ceiling and thought about his career, his rank, the forty-seven gate raids, and whether any of it had adequately prepared him for watching a doctor remove his own breastbone and then stand there breathing normally while a new one grew in.
It had not.
The skull came last.
Ren pressed both hands flat against his own temples and found the sutures by pressure, the faint seam lines between the cranial plates. The frontal plate separated with a sound like a knuckle cracking, except sustained, a slow grinding separation. He lifted it free with both thumbs hooked under the rim. The parietal plates came next, one and then the other, pulled back like the halves of a book cover. The temporal bones required more work, the sutures tighter there, and Ren had to work his fingers deeper to break the seal, the sound of it low and continuous.
His brain was visible through the open top of his skull, gray and folded, moving slightly with each breath. The dura remained intact, a thin membrane between Ren's bare mind and the air of the grafting room. His eyes stayed open through all of it, still reading the instruments, still reading Axel.
He set the skull in three pieces on the tray.
New bone began at the occipital base and grew upward, the cranium rebuilding itself plate by plate, fusing at the sutures in reverse order of how it had come apart.
Axel looked at the full skeleton on the tray, obsidian black, every piece present, then at Ren already turning toward him with CPR still running and a freshly complete skull.
You sick bastard, he thought. You pulled your own skeleton out piece by piece and regenerated it in front of me and your heart was visible and you are turning around now like that was a Tuesday.
"Now it's your turn," Ren said.
CPR shifted pitch, settling into the lower frequency it used for sustained regeneration work. The sound pushed through the floor of the grafting circle and up through the table, and Axel felt it as a vibration in his teeth even through the anesthesia.
Ten tentacles came out simultaneously, each one taking a different instrument from the Outer God Surgical Set. The set's black tools caught the red light of the sigils and gave none of it back. Ren looked at the obsidian skeleton on the tray, selected the ribs and sternum first, and turned back to Axel.
The first incision opened along the left side of Axel's ribcage without resistance, the eldritch blade parting skin and intercostal muscle in a single motion. Two tentacles peeled the tissue back, clamping it open with tools that had teeth designed for exactly this. The bone beneath was white and normal, Axel's own unremarkable human rib.
The extraction took thirty seconds per rib. The tool that handled removal was shaped for gripping bone at the periosteum, and it pulled with a steady controlled force that separated the rib from its attachments one end at a time. The sound was similar to what Ren's had sounded like, wet and deliberate, except louder inside the open chest cavity. Axel's ribcage reflexively tried to close around the absence of each bone and found only the clamps holding it open.
The obsidian replacement went in at the same angle the original had come from. Where black bone met living tissue the contact point briefly went dark, the color spreading outward a few millimeters before the body accepted the graft. Each rib fused within seconds.
CPR's roar covered most of the sound.
The sternum was where the anesthesia's limits showed.
"ARGHHHHHHH—"
The procedure required both removal and replacement to happen faster than normal because the sternum's connection to the ribs meant the cavity was exposed during the gap between them. Ren worked fast. The original sternum came out in one piece. The obsidian replacement went in, the attachment points connecting to the already-grafted ribs, the fusion sealing from the top down.
The pressure of the sternum seating was different from the rib work. It was internal and total and occupied the center of the chest and Axel had no framework for it.
"AGHHHHHH—"
"Ribs are done," Ren said. "Two more connections."
"AGHHHHHHHHH—"
"One."
Silence.
"Done," Ren said. "Skull next. This one matters. Hold still."
Axel looked at the ceiling and thought about Steven. He thought about what he was going to do when he walked out of this room with an obsidian skeleton and whatever ability the transformation produced. He focused on that. He held it in his mind like a light.
The skull replacement took nine minutes and Axel did not think about the ceiling once during it.
. . .
Down the corridor, in the Vice Guildmaster's office, Chu Xinghe and Lucy sat across from each other with the quarterly operational report open between them.
"Seventh month recruitment numbers are down four percent," Lucy said. "We compensate if the southern intake comes in above projection."
"When does that confirm?"
"End of the week." She turned a page. "The Dao Branch expansion in the third district is ahead of schedule. Framework complete, interior work starting next month."
Chu Xinghe made a note. "Good."
"ARGHHHHHHHHH—"
Both of them stopped.
Lucy and Chu Xinghe looked at each other.
"Which poor soul is it this time," Chu Xinghe said.
"I am going to pray," Lucy said, "that whoever it is still has their full mental faculties when they come out."
A brief silence.
"AGHHHHHHHHHH—"
They looked at each other again.
"Quarterly report," Chu Xinghe said.
"Seventh month recruitment," Lucy agreed, and turned the page.