Chương 136: Biology Was Negotiable

Ronan had acquired a private carriage for the journey, along with two sturdy brown horses that looked considerably more dependable than the man currently holding their reins. While Ronan drove from the exposed front seat, Sieghart occupied the enclosed cabin behind him, surrounded by luggage, folded blankets, and several pieces of metal prepared as lightning targets.

The arrangement gave Sieghart privacy, protected ordinary travelers from accidental electrocution, and allowed Ronan to pretend bringing a ten-year-old into enemy territory qualified as responsible planning. Sieghart held one metal rod between two fingers and gathered Lightning Magic around his opposite hand, attempting to compress Spark without allowing the current to jump prematurely.

A thin blue arc formed above his palm, twisted sideways, struck the cabin wall, and disappeared with a sharp crack loud enough to startle both horses. Ronan pulled the reins immediately, causing the carriage to jerk hard enough that Sieghart's luggage shifted across the wooden floor.

"Could you stop doing that?" Sieghart looked toward the small front window, where Ronan's irritated face had appeared between the curtain and the rattling frame.

"Doing what?"

"Making noises that sound like the carriage is being struck by lightning."

"That would sound louder." Another Spark snapped between Sieghart's fingers and the metal rod, producing a brighter flash and another crack that made Ronan's shoulders jump visibly. Ronan twisted around far enough to glare through the open window while keeping one hand on the reins and the other pressed against his chest.

"That spell is bad for my heart. You scared the shit out of me." Sieghart inspected the blackened tip of the rod, deliberately avoiding the outraged expression visible through the opening ahead of him.

"Perhaps you'll think twice before trying to drag me away from the basement."

"I asked you to come."

"You offered restricted knowledge until I agreed."

"That is called negotiation."

"It is called understanding your target's weakness." Ronan faced forward again and sighed with enough force that the horses flicked their ears, possibly recognizing the sound after several hours of exposure.

"Why is looking after one brat this troublesome?" Neither horse answered, though the larger one tossed its head as if refusing responsibility for whatever decisions had produced Sieghart. Inside the cabin, Sieghart attempted Spark again, but the current divided around his fingers and shocked his wrist before grounding through the metal fitting beneath his seat. His arm jerked involuntarily, and the spell vanished.

The shock barely hurt beneath his Resistance, yet the failure confirmed Lightning Magic remained unusually unwilling to follow instructions. Sieghart could create flames, water, wind, earth, and ice with predictable structures, but lightning behaved like something constantly searching for a more convenient path. Even when the spell reached the intended target, smaller arcs often escaped around the main current, shocking Sieghart's fingers, wrist, or whatever conductive object happened to be nearby.

That volatility explained why Spark had remained underdeveloped. Infinite Mana provided unlimited attempts, but it did not prevent the element from punishing imperfect control. Sieghart tried shaping an insulated mana channel around the current, borrowing principles from Water Jet and Flamethrower while leaving a narrow route toward the metal rod. The current followed the channel for half its length, punched through the side anyway, and struck a door hinge with another explosive crack.

Ronan flinched outside and nearly pulled the carriage toward the roadside before correcting the horses with several hurried movements of the reins.

"I heard that."

"You were supposed to."

"I hate traveling with mages without common sense."

"You work for a mage guild."

"That is why I know better." Sieghart opened the side window after canceling the lingering electricity, allowing cold air to clear the faint metallic smell left by repeated discharges. The landscape had changed considerably since they left Seraphina, with cultivated fields and roadside villages gradually giving way to empty hills covered by pale grass.

No farmhouses remained visible, no smoke rose from distant chimneys, and the road narrowed until deep wheel tracks became the only reliable evidence that other travelers used it. Low stone ridges divided the hills, while patches of dark forest occupied sheltered valleys where the afternoon sunlight barely reached beneath thick branches. The isolation made sense if they were approaching an unofficial border route.

Anyone living nearby would become vulnerable whenever patrols, raiders, or altered creatures crossed unexpectedly. Sieghart rested both arms against the window frame and watched the empty land roll past, deciding that another Lightning Magic failure could wait until Ronan's heartbeat recovered.

"What exactly are Chimerians?" Ronan glanced backward without turning completely, keeping most of his attention upon the narrowing road and the uneven ground beneath the wheels.

"You read about them."

"I read histories written by Aura nobles who describe everything outside human territory as degenerate monsters."

"That is unfortunately accurate sometimes."

"It is also useless." Ronan adjusted the reins as the road curved around a hill, then remained quiet long enough that Sieghart suspected he was deciding which details could become nightmares.

"Chimerians replace parts of themselves with pieces taken from monsters and animals." Sieghart waited for the explanation to become less absurd, but Ronan's expression suggested that every additional detail would only make matters worse. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

"They remove arms, eyes, skin, bones, glands, organs, sometimes entire sections of their bodies, then graft replacements possessing traits they want." Ronan described warriors using beast muscles for strength, predator eyes for night vision, armored hides for defense, and monster glands capable of creating poison or flame. Some replaced lungs to breathe underwater, installed additional hearts to survive greater exertion, or reinforced skeletons using bones taken from creatures far heavier than humans.

Others pursued stranger combinations, adding sensory organs nobody understood completely, extra limbs controlled through spells, or cores designed to supply abilities ordinary biology could never support. Sieghart imagined a surgeon attempting to connect a monster's heart, nerves, blood vessels, and magical channels inside an unrelated human body without immediate rejection.

"At least they aren't using other people as test subjects." Ronan became suspiciously quiet, and Sieghart narrowed his eyes immediately after recognizing the familiar silence that always preceded an unpleasant correction.

"That silence was unnecessary."

"Some experiment on themselves."

"And the others?"

"Use prisoners, slaves, volunteers, debtors, criminals, relatives, rivals, or anyone their leaders decide can contribute to progress." Sieghart stared through the window again, deciding that his brief attempt to identify one morally acceptable detail had ended exactly as expected.

"How does any of that work?"

"Magic."

"That isn't an explanation."

"It is the explanation they use."

"Just because magic exists doesn't mean physics and biology become optional." Ronan looked back with open confusion, apparently encountering the word for the first time despite understanding nearly every magical principle surrounding it.

"I don't know what physics is."

"The rules controlling matter, force, energy, movement, heat, and nearly everything you keep pretending magic explains automatically."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It was a subject where people failed examinations… never mind." Sieghart ignored the insult to his previous education and returned to the actual problem, still unable to imagine random organs functioning merely because someone stitched them together. Ronan explained that Chimerian procedures involved weeks or months of preparation before any replacement occurred, beginning with drugs that changed blood, immunity, metabolism, and tissue growth.

Specialized spells softened the body's rejection response, preserved removed parts, connected nerves, and forced blood vessels to grow through foreign tissue before the patient died. Alchemists also brewed compounds using samples from both donor and recipient, gradually teaching the body to tolerate the magical signature carried by the new organ.

"Their biology adapts because they force it to adapt."

"That sounds like dying slowly until something useful happens."

"For many of them, that is exactly what happens." Ronan explained that successful grafts were studied obsessively, then repeated among relatives whose inherited traits made rejection less likely than unrelated candidates. Over generations, some tribes stabilized particular changes until children were born with scales, claws, horns, altered eyes, or internal organs descended from ancient grafts.

Those individuals remained Chimerians even without undergoing procedures personally, although many continued modifying themselves once their inherited bodies reached adulthood. Failure produced subjects whose tissues fought one another, whose organs demanded incompatible environments, or whose monster instincts became strong enough to overwhelm human reasoning. Some died immediately.

Others survived as unstable creatures kept beneath settlements, released during wars, or harvested later when individual grafts remained useful. Sieghart remembered Ronan mentioning whatever they kept underground and decided the phrase had become considerably more unpleasant after receiving context.

"So the kidnapped descendant would help stabilize conflicting grafts."

"That is what they believe."

"Would his ability actually work?"

"Probably, which is why Mira left immediately." The answer made the threat more serious. If Seraphina's descendant could harmonize incompatible mana, the Chimerians might combine grafts that currently destroyed one another. A warrior could receive armored skin, enhanced muscles, poison glands, improved senses, and multiple cores without dying before those powers became militarily useful.

Sieghart disliked how closely that resembled his System's ability to organize completely different magical principles inside separate paths without allowing most of them to conflict. The comparison was imperfect, but enemies rarely required perfect evidence before deciding someone's body contained answers worth extracting through unpleasant methods.

"Can they get Aura?" Ronan slowed the horses before a steep descent, allowing the carriage to roll carefully while loose stones clicked beneath the wheels.

"Not properly. Aura belongs to the whole living system, not one organ, though they can steal physical traits produced by Aura over generations."

"So they imitate the result."

"Usually." Some Chimerians implanted cores that produced reinforcement resembling Aura, while others grafted organs from monsters whose bodies naturally accumulated comparable power. The results could create tremendous strength, but they often carried instincts, hunger, aggression, or biological needs originating from whatever creature supplied the parts. Sieghart thought of the Orc King's endless rage, corrupted reinforcement, cannibalism, and body transformed far beyond the orcs he remembered from childhood.

"Could the orcs have used similar methods?"

"Possibly, though most Chimerian tribes would consider those modifications crude." Ronan guided the horses between two hills where the road became shaded by stone walls, lowering his voice despite nobody else being visible.

"The tribe we're approaching specializes in combining several stable bloodlines, then adding fresh grafts after testing which traits cooperate inside each candidate." Their scouts might possess predator senses, wings, camouflage, or hearing strong enough to detect conversations through walls. Their warriors could differ completely from one another. That variety made planning difficult because no single elemental weakness, fighting style, or physical limitation would apply across the entire tribe.

Sieghart looked at the metal rod inside the cabin and considered how useful a controlled lightning technique might become against creatures carrying additional hearts or exposed biological mechanisms. Unfortunately, Spark still shocked him often enough that using stronger electricity near an ally could become another method of simplifying the enemy's work.

"How far are we from Mira's last position?"

"If the horses keep this pace, two days."

"And the tribe?"

"Less than one day beyond that." Sieghart looked toward the increasingly empty hills while another question formed from the distance, timing, and lack of communication since Mira's message.

"If she already found them, why hasn't she rescued him?" Ronan did not answer immediately, and the silence carried more weight than every earlier evasion he had offered concerning Chimerian experimentation.

"Because something stopped her." The carriage continued downhill while Sieghart stared at Ronan's back, imagining the kinds of creatures, traps, or hostages capable of preventing Mira from acting quickly. He closed the window, returned to his seat, and lifted the metal rod again while blue sparks crawled impatiently across his fingers.

Lightning Magic remained volatile, dangerous, and irritatingly willing to shock its own caster, but their destination contained enemies whose bodies depended upon unnatural biological connections. Perhaps electricity was exactly the kind of answer those unnatural biological connections would hate once Sieghart finally controlled the spell properly. Another arc snapped through the cabin with a sharp crack, and Ronan nearly dropped the reins while both horses lurched forward.

"Damn it, Sieg!" The horses accelerated, apparently deciding that whatever produced lightning behind them deserved additional distance even if it remained attached to their carriage. Sieghart examined the cleaner burn carved across the rod and smiled faintly, because this attempt had traveled almost entirely where he intended.

"Progress." Ronan muttered something hostile toward mages, children, hidden tunnels, and every decision that had convinced him to combine all three inside one mission. The empty hills swallowed the carriage soon afterward, leaving Seraphina, familiar civilization, and ordinary human biology increasingly far behind both travelers.