I Reincarnated into a Single-celled Organism! - Chapter 219

“Haaah… mmm… Spirit…aaaah… oww! Ouch!” I was just about thrust in when Fate suddenly pushed away from me, grabbing her chest.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Your necklace burned me.” She frowned, rubbing a spot on her chest which now had a slightly red, tear-shaped mark.

I reached down and grabbed the necklace hanging around my neck. There was a sizzling noise when I put my hand around it.

[-10 hp]

The necklace had been given to me by the immortal inside the Schrodinger’s box. I had put it on and hadn’t bothered to take it off, though there was no particular reason for that. Yet, it had a matching necklace that had been given to another. Supposedly, one could insert mana into the necklace to alert the other when they were in trouble. It could also be destroyed to initiate a powerful teleportation, allowing one to escape to their lover.

If it was hot, that meant the other person was sending a cry for help. “Erika.”

“What about Erika?” My hair stood on end when I heard Fate’s cold shift in tone. She looked at me in the eye.

She had been extremely hot and tempting a second ago, but all the lusty exuberance had disappeared instantly. I coughed, realizing I had said the wrong thing at the wrong time. Of course, I wasn’t a fool. If I tried to explain myself, she would only get angrier. There was only one way to get out of this situation without escalating things.

“It appears we’ll need to part ways, my love,” I told her, keeping my face completely straight.

Her cold eyes flashed with just a hint of emotion. “What do you mean? You’re leaving?”

“I won’t be able to travel back with you. It turns out there is something I need to take care of.”

“Is that something, Erika?” she asked flatly, her expression becoming cold again.

“How could that be? She’s in Stormberg, isn’t she? That means if I needed to see her, traveling with you would be the best course of action.”

Her eyes flickered with doubt for a second. “Is that so?”

I gave her my best smile. “You’re not becoming jealous, are you?”

She looked away to hide the blush on her face. “Who would ever be jealous about you?”

I let out a chuckle as I started to back away into the deeper water. “Let Uncle Fortune know that I appreciate his hospitality. I’ll leave the eggs with you. You can deliver my payment to Abigail when you return.”

“W-wait!” she cried out, splashing after me.

“What was that, Sister? Ahhh!” Lot looked over the hedge after hearing a commotion, only for a water reed to strike him in the eyes with the precision of a champion. “Why?”

“Don’t look!” She huffed at him as he collapsed on the shore.

She glanced back the way I had come, but I was already back in my watery form. I only remained long enough to leave the eggs, and then I left on the opposing side of the pond. As soon as I reached the forest, I picked up my speed, moving off the trodden path and heading deep into the forest. I was about to do something I had never done before, and I wasn’t sure how things would turn out. It was something I had only worked out in theory, so I definitely had my concerns.

I ran for some time, not exactly sure of the distance I needed. Without having to worry about Fate’s safety, I could move much faster, and so I managed to get a few hundred kilometers away before I finally stopped on a nearby hill. Looking around, I was still worried, so I began to construct a cave. I actually spent more time constructing the cave than I did running away. Once it was deep underground, I found a spot on top of a rock and I sat down.

My mind worked through the scenario a few more dozen times. I was pretty confident this would work. I was just about to initiate it when I stopped and let out a sigh. I really thought I was in the middle of nowhere, but after only being here a few hours, I already had company. I could hear their voices at the entrance to the cave.

“Did you remember a cave being here?” someone asked.

“Who cares? This is super convenient. We won’t have to sleep outside,” another responded. “We don’t want the authorities finding us with all this stuff.”

“Seriously, though, how many years did we spend in Goldtooth putting our lives on the line. I’ve made more coin robbing people in the last week than I made in a month of mercenary work.”

“Heheh, Boss dying and the group falling apart pretty much did us a favor. As soon as we can turn these goods into coin, I’m going to buy myself a beauty.”

“Why buy what you can steal for free? That village a few hours back? Remember that tavern wench?”

“Wasn’t she married to the tavern owner?”

“Who cares? The strongest man in that village was an evolved. Can they even stop a group of flawless? We can enjoy every woman in the village while making their men watch!”

“Hahaha, you know, I like your style. I see us going places. We should give our bandit group a name. We can be the Golden Bandits… no… how about the Toothy… no, that’s even worse.”

“Huh? There is someone in this cave.”

I listened from my stoop as the group of three men walked down to me. They finally reached the end, their torches revealing where I sat on the stone. I looked up at them, and they looked back at me.

“Who the hell are you?” one of the men asked, cautiously.

“Can’t you feel his mana? He’s just some weak evolved.”

“That’s right, hey, you, give us everything you own or we’ll kill you.”

I let out a sigh. “You know, I was going to leave and find a new spot, but after listening to your words, I think I’ll keep your company for just a moment longer.”

“Eh? Kid, I don’t think you know what situation you’re in. We’re former Goldtooth mercenaries. We’re all trained killers.”

“Don’t tell him that, now we’ll have to kill him.”

“Weren’t we going to do it anyway?”

I chuckled, causing the three men to look my way as I stood up. “It doesn’t really matter; none of us is going to survive what is about to happen next.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Enough of this, kill this bastard.”

“Full-body Apoptosis!” I shouted.

Every single cell of my body destroyed itself at the same time. The energy had to go somewhere, and without a body, it went outward. The explosion turned the three men to ash before they even knew what happened. As for the village some three hours away, there would be stories passed down for generations about how night suddenly became day, and a bright fireball rose into the sky, and how the ground shook with a great tremor.

Some had suspected it had been a fight between immortals. Others believed an ascended being landed on this plane. When the day arrived, they sent out a party of their best men to investigate.

By the time they arrived, the fires had all gone out. A mile-wide path had been carved out from the trees of the dense forest, and at its center was a deep crater and nothing more. Neither the cave, the hill, the bandits, nor my body remained. Thus, it all just became history passed down. As for the beauties of the town, such as the wife of the lucky innkeeper, they would never learn how close they had all become to being humiliated and ruined by a certain group of overzealous former mercenaries.

As for me? The Law of Conservation of Energy states energy can’t be created or destroyed, only transformed from one type to another. The Law of the Conservation of Mass states that mass cannot be created or destroyed, although this is only true for chemical reactions. In nuclear reactions, mass and energy are actually interconvertible. By destroying my body, I turned a great deal of mass into energy, but I couldn’t see another way to do this easily if I wanted to teleport.

Most people liked to think teleportation would be able to turn matter into energy, move that energy at the speed of light, and turn it back into matter. Such an application was theoretically unlikely to ever be realized. In reality, it was far more likely that the best someone could do was clone themselves. You would copy a being down to their molecules, then send the information somewhere else, destroy the original, and remake the copy in another place. This was the more practical form of teleportation. Anyone who has ever been teleported is then essentially just a copy, while their real body died long ago.

I didn’t know where my mind existed. It didn’t exist within my brain. I had full cognitive function long before I had evolved into a human. Each cell couldn’t quite maintain my consciousness either. This meant my consciousness existed somewhere outside of my body, and that also meant that I didn’t need to worry too much about sending information. Instead, all I needed to worry about was the cloning part, and thankfully, that was something I had mastered easily with my abilities.

In the event my body was destroyed, I had left a primer. If I called my spies sentinels, then we might as well call these my embryos. In the event I died, one of my embryos would be triggered, and it’d start replicating. A normal mammalian cell took about a day to replicate. Yet, I wasn’t a normal mammal. In fact, my entire replication period was closer to an hour. Within 24 hours, just two of my cells could replicate 16 million times. I put far more than two cells in my embryos. As a result, within six hours, my new body would have already recovered all of the cells I had killed off with Apoptosis.

It might not have been instant transportation, but by the time day broke, I was already back in Stormberg. Now, why had Erika called for me?