'Connors built this to regrow a missing arm,' Peter thought. 'Slow, controlled, targeted regeneration. That is not what I need. I need it to hold under combat stress, to activate fast, and to not fight my existing spider-based enhancements for control of the same cellular pathways.'
"The bottleneck is here," Peter said, highlighting a cluster of binding sites near the serum's regenerative trigger. "It is competing with my existing healing factor instead of layering on top of it. Two systems trying to run the same repair process at the same time."
"That would explain the compatibility ceiling," FSIS said. "A resolution would require rerouting the lizard serum's activation trigger to defer to your existing Spider-42 healing pathway rather than override it."
"Can we model that?"
"Processing."
Peter did not wait idle. While FSIS ran the simulation, he pulled up a second screen and began sketching an entirely separate modification, a buffer sequence that would slow the serum's integration rate just enough to let his adaptive mutation trait analyze it properly instead of absorbing it all at once.
'If my cells get the whole thing in a rush, they might miss the parts worth optimizing,' Peter thought. 'Feed it to them slow enough and they will actually improve it instead of just accepting it.'
Two hours in, the first simulation results came back. A four percent improvement, not enough.
Peter adjusted the buffer sequence. Ran it again.
Six percent.
He kept going, testing variation after variation, discarding failed configurations as fast as FSIS could simulate them. By hour five he had run through over two hundred separate sequence adjustments, each one informed by the failure of the last.
'This is the part people do not understand about intelligence,' Peter thought. 'It is not knowing the answer immediately. It is being able to fail fast enough that you find the answer before the clock runs out.'
At hour seven, FSIS flagged a configuration that held steady through three consecutive simulations.
[Compatibility rating: 98.7% → 99.4%]
"That is the highest stable result across all tested configurations," FSIS said.
Peter leaned back and looked at the number for a long moment.
"Run it one more time," he said. "I want to see it fail before I trust it."
FSIS ran it again. It held.
"Good enough," Peter said. "Prep it for integration tomorrow."
He spent the remainder of the session on something smaller, refining the taser web formula, cutting the degradation window down from six hours toward something closer to ninety minutes without needing help to get there.
[Skill Progress: Biochemistry — active research updated. Cross-species integration protocol refined.]
He left the dimension at 10:14 PM, the finished protocol saved and ready.
---
Thursday night. Medical bay.
Peter lay back on the exam table while FSIS ran a final biometric sweep.
"All baseline readings normal," FSIS said. "Compatibility rating confirmed at 99.4 percent. Proceeding will initiate Phase 2 integration."
"Do it."
The injection took four seconds. For the first hour afterward, nothing seemed to happen at all.
Then his skin started to feel warm from the inside out.
Peter closed his eyes and let it happen instead of fighting it. His muscles ached in a way that was not quite pain, something deeper than that, like his body was being taken apart at the smallest possible level and reassembled slightly differently.
Hour four. His heart rate spiked and FSIS flagged it immediately.
"Elevated, but within the range your models predicted," FSIS said. "Continue monitoring."
Hour seven. Peter's vision sharpened without warning, the dim medical bay suddenly became very clear in every corner despite the low lighting.
'That is new,' Peter thought. 'I can see the whole room like the lights are on.'
In the twelfth hour.
The process was finished.
[Phase 2 Integration Complete]
'Status'
[Physique: 29.1 → 42.7]
[Healing Rate: 5x baseline → 18x baseline]
'Woah...'
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