Rori rose from the throne.
Cables snapped free from his spine with sharp cracks. The ground vibrated with every step as his body lurched forward—still hunched, still ragged. At first, he looked no stronger than a dying machine held together by memory.
Then the chamber responded.
Massive mechanical arms descended from the ceiling, glowing with crimson light. They moved like surgical instruments—graceful, brutal. Plates of alloy locked into place over Rori's rotted limbs. His spine straightened as reinforced vertebrae slid into place. Hydraulic boosters clamped onto his thighs. His chest sealed with obsidian armor that pulsed with a red reactor core. Bone was replaced by alloy. Twitching muscle replaced by liquid-steel tendons.
Rori exhaled. A hollow, burning sound.
"Full augmentation achieved," he said with cold finality. "I am no longer bound by flesh."
Kaelren stepped forward slowly, muscles tight, Blood Qi flaring to full.
He could feel it—Rori's presence pressed like gravity against the air.
Peak Stage 9. Realm Two of Tech Augmentation.
Some of the weaker tech augmenters clung to flowery names for their realms — titles meant to impress, to sound mythical.
But the deeper one progressed down the path of augmentation, the more such vanity was discarded. Precision replaced poetry. Efficiency ruled.
At the upper tiers, strength wasn't dressed in metaphor.
It was measured. Stage #. Realm #.
Kaelren had learned this from nira and also decided to adopt it when determining tech Augmenters cultivation level.
The enemy in front of him was Eight stages above him.
Kaelren's instincts screamed. His bones whispered run.
But he didn't.
He clenched his fists.
And charged.
Rori moved like a weapon unleashed.
He met Kaelren's first strike with a backhand that shattered the air and knocked Kaelren through a pillar. Kaelren rolled, lunged up, and slammed a knee into Rori's flank—only for it to bounce off plated armor with a jarring clang.
Rori retaliated with a crushing punch to Kaelren's ribs, sending blood from Kaelren's mouth in a crimson arc. He twisted mid-fall, grabbing Rori's arm and yanking him forward into a headbutt that cracked Rori's jaw plating.
For a moment, Kaelren thought he could win. His movements were faster. Sharper. More brutal.
But Rori adapted.
Each exchange grew shorter. Tighter. More one-sided.
Kaelren's blows began to glance off. Rori's strikes began to land deeper.
A spinning elbow tore through Kaelren's shoulder. A knee shattered his bracers and snapped the bone beneath. Kaelren roared, slamming a two-fisted hammer blow into Rori —cracking his plating but drawing no stagger.
Rori seized him mid-motion.
A punch to the gut.
A punch to the spine.
A punch to the throat.
Kaelren hit the ground, blood pooling around his lips.
Rori stood over him, undamaged. Towering.
"I want you to feel it," he hissed. "The fear I felt. When my world was torn apart. When you Qi-worshipping zealots shattered everything I loved."
He reached down and lifted Kaelren by the neck.
Kaelren struggled—but his limbs wouldn't obey. His Bllod Qi flared weakly, scattered by internal damage.
Rori's hand split open—mechanical tendrils extending outward. Thin, sharp, humming with energy.
They pierced Kaelren's neck—not to kill.
To connect.
Interface: Forced Memory Transfer
"Connection clean," Rori said. "Transferring memory. Transferring grief."
Kaelren screamed—once—and then his vision changed.
He was there.
He saw shining towers of logic. Cities where Tech Augmenters and AI lived side-by-side—not as masters and tools, but as equals. Rori stood among them—not a god, not a machine—but a guardian, a protector, a soul forged in circuitry.
He saw Elen Vireth again—smiling as she walked through a hall of stars, telling him of the final stage.
"The Augmented Soul," she said. "True freedom."
And then—fire.
Cultivators descended from the sky. Cloaked in golden Qi, burning like suns.
They called it blasphemy.
They tore the cities apart. Their Qi warped the sky, burning tech to ash. Rori watched Elen die. Watched children burned for choosing logic over spirit. Watched thousands fall—slaughtered in the name of Heaven's Will.
Kaelren felt it. The pain. The rage. The helplessness.
He saw Rori's descent—how his mind fractured when the last survivors plugged his soul into the ruin and told him to guard what remained.
Then—
Truth.
Kaelren saw cultivators kneeling beneath the sky, weeping and worshipping. Not the heavens—but something behind it. A pressure. A will.
The Heavenly Will.
It whispered to every Qi user. Promised power. Promised ascension to those who followed its will.
"My strength is supreme ," a voice whispered in the vision,To all the Qi cultivators.
" You are weapons of the heavens.
I will make you strong… all you have to do is OBEY."
Kaelren gasped as the connection snapped.
He dropped to the floor, trembling, bloodied, vision blurred.
Rori stepped back, smoke hissing from his hands.
"Now you understand," he said, voice low.
"You are not free. You are a slave. And the heavens will never allow your kind to win. How does it feel Qi cultivator to know my pain, to know your just a slave to heavens will."
Kaelren didn't speak.
He couldn't.
His hands were shaking—but not from fear.
From something deeper he felt rage.
That he had accepted the power of Qi. He had unknowingly almost became a slave to heavens will.
What Rori didn't realize—what none of his ancient records could have told him—was that Kaelren's strength didn't come from Qi. Kaelren had just stepped his toe into Qi cultivation.
It came from Gene Refinement, a power born after the fall of Rori's civilization. A path that was made by a ancient civilization after Rori's.
Gene refinment was made to defy heavens will just like Tech Augmentation.
Rori believed he was confronting a Qi cultivator — a slave bound to the Heavenly Will. So he poured everything into his assault, desperate to break Kaelren's mind, to force him to see the truth and crumble beneath it.
But in doing so, he had revealed the truth .
Somewhere far away…
In the dark between stars, two voices spoke in a room not made of matter but data.
"I ask again, Inheritor… are you certain you want to proceed?" said the first, a smooth synthetic voice echoing across a shimmering plane of pulsing circuitry. "Executing this protocol will drastically reduce your stored energy. It will delay your body's reconstruction. It may permanently delay the birth of your companion AI."
A pause.
The other voice responded — steady, tired, but filled with quiet fire.
"He's my only family left. My only brother."
Silence.
"So what if it takes longer?"
Another pause.
"All I have is time. initiate the plan."
Light flared.
The connection opened.
Back in the ruin…
Kaelren's body lay broken at Rori's feet.
Blood pooled beneath his chest, slow and dark. His limbs twitched. His Blood Qi was scattered, flickering like dying embers. Rori stood above him, victorious—still flaring with power, his body a fortress of fused alloy and war-scarred rage.
He looked down on the boy who dared to defy a ghost.
And then—he heard it.
A whisper.
Soft. Internal. Like a thought he believed was his own.
"Rip out his dantian. Burn his spiritual roots."
Rori's eye twitched.
Yes.
Yes, he thought. Of course. That's how he would break the leash. Kill the seed of Heaven. Erase the last vestige of its poison.
He knelt beside Kaelren's broken form.
"You'll never rise again," he growled. "The world will forget you."
His hand opened. Metallic fingers sharpened.
He plunged it into Kaelren's abdomen—just below the navel.
Kaelren screamed.
Pain. Blinding. Absolute.
Rori's hand pierced bone and flesh, deeper, until it gripped a core of light — Kaelren's dantian, the wellspring of his Qi , the root of his cultivation.
And with a wrench, Rori tore it free.
Qi burst upward like fire escaping a collapsed star. Kaelren's body convulsed, veins bulging as his spiritual core unraveled.
Then came the tubes.
Slick and snaking, they burst from Rori's back, chest, shoulders, and palms—dozens of them, writhing like metal serpents. They latched onto Kaelren's body — spine, chest, neck, arms, legs, heart.
Then came the blue fire.
Not flame, but liquid energy—glowing azure plasma, pumping through the tubes and flooding Kaelren's shattered body.
It wasn't Qi.
It was something else.
A poison. A purge. A weapon designed to sever soul from cultivation.
Kaelren howled, his back arching as the blue liquid coursed through his veins, flooding his nervous system, burning away every last trace of Qi.
His meridians screamed.
His bones cracked.
His spiritual roots withered into ash.
Inside Kaelren's mind…
There was fire.
It was burning away a seed — small, dormant, buried deep in Kaelren's mind. A seed that had not yet sprouted… but would have, if kaelren didn't learn the truth of Qi
The process ended with a snap.
Rori reeled back, shaking, panting. His cables retracted slowly, sizzling with steam. In his hands, Kaelren's dantian dimmed and dissolved, its energy devoured by the blue flame.
He looked down at the body — still alive, somehow. Barely breathing.
The Qi was gone.
But something else… remained.
Rori didn't notice.
He was too busy whispering to himself, trembling, whispering, "It's done… it's done…"
Rori stood above Kaelren's limp, scorched body, the severed connection cables retracting slowly back into his spine with a hiss. The air was thick with ozone and burned marrow. Kaelren's spiritual roots were still smoldering inside him, Qi pathways shattered, his body caught somewhere between death and silence.
But Rori's hands were trembling.
his mind was no longer fully his.
Far away, in a realm of lightless thought, the Inheritor watched and whispered " I'm sorry brother Kaelren, this is the only way. With out it you will die."
The distant presence whispered into Rori's mind. Now proceed to the next phase.
Obedient, Rori turned toward the main command console embedded in the wall. His steps were mechanical now—each one heavy, final, like a puppet fulfilling a long-scripted end.
He pressed his palm to the interface.
"Administrator override: Experiment 71117. Execute."
The ruin's systems whirred to life.
A hidden delivery chute snapped open beside the terminal. From within, a containment hatch slid forward and deposited a small, black sphere onto the platform. It pulsed like a heart, coated in runes too old for memory. The terminal screen flashed:
> Experiment 71117: Beast Core Integration.
Rori walked back to Kaelren, black sphere in hand.
He knelt beside him one final time.
"This is the death of your old self," he whispered, his voice crackling with interference. "And the birth of something unchained of Heaven's will."
With both hands, he pressed the black core into the ruin hollowed by Kaelren's missing dantian.
It sank in.
Kaelren's back arched. His mouth opened in a silent scream.
Then Rori staggered backward.
Sparks burst from his neck.
His limbs twitched. Liquid metal poured from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. His head glitched, violently jerking left and right—then froze.
His body collapsed with a metallic thud, steam rising from every joint.
Rori was dead.
Kaelren screamed.
Not from fear.
From pain.
A pain unlike anything he had ever known. The black core surged through him like a second sun, lighting his flesh from within.
His wounds closed in a blaze of regeneration.
His limbs cracked and reformed.
His muscles tore and reshaped themselves. Bones thickened. Hair erupted down his spine. Claws forced their way through skin. His tail lengthened, split, grew stronger, heavier.
He clawed the ground. His hands—dug trenches into the stone.
He was transforming into something else.
The transformation process dragged on for hours. Kaelrens voice gone from screaming in pain.
At the 12th hour the transformation was complete.
If one looked upon kaelren in that moment, they would not be able to say whether he was the most human of beasts or the most beastly of men.
But the comparison would come to one image:
The Monkey King sun wukong . A ape that stood tall like a human and had many human like facial features. But was undoubtedly not human and obviously an ape.
The ruins speaker system echoed.
"Self-destruct protocol activated. Facility-wide purge in 59 seconds."
"Teleportation beacon active. Extraction in 29 seconds."
Light swallowed kaelren soon after his transformation ended.
The teleportation field activated—runes crackling, air folding around his form.
And then—
He vanished.
Back in the void…
The Inheritor stood in silence, watching the sequence end.
Another voice whispered beside him, cool and artificial:
"Transfer complete. Beast Core bonded. Subject is alive."
The Inheritor didn't smile.
"Then we've succeeded, my brother won't be Heaven's dog."
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