I Reincarnated into a Single-celled Organism! - Chapter 220

[-4,000,000, 000,000 HP]  

I had shut down all of my pain receptors before initiating Apoptosis. I also knew the release of energy would cause a great deal of local damage. This is why I set up an environment, and it took me a bit of time meditating before I activated it. This wasn’t something I could just do at random.

Yet, even with all of my preparation, the destruction of all of my cells at once felt like a slap in the face. It was definitely stressful and just a bit horrifying. I knew that it theoretically should work, but I definitely had my concerns. Thankfully, I set about several precautions, and in the end, they weren’t even necessary. I found my consciousness reappearing in an embryo I had left behind before going on this trip. It was my last chance, should the trip go south, although I ended up using it as a fast travel of sorts.

I wasn’t sure I should use this fast travel too often. Cells had a pre-programmed limit to them. This was known as a planned senescence. Senescence is the tendency for our bodies to age. For a human, it isn’t just a physical body that ages, but also the individual cells. This goes back to how cells are replicated. During DNA replication, a small amount of DNA is clipped off every time a cell is copied. This is clipped off the end, known as the telomere.

Humans have an extended string of nonsense DNA at the end designed to be cut off with every replication. Over the lifetime of a human body, clip after clip of DNA eventually removes all the useless telomere and then starts to cut into real genes, causing the cells to stop functioning properly. This is, in a nutshell, at least one of the reasons we get older and our bodies slowly cease to function. Even if it’s not 100% the cause, science discovered that the longer someone’s telomere usually coincided with the longer their natural life.

I didn’t know how long my telomeres were, but I did know that the more I forced my body to copy my cells, the more stress it put those cells under. Recreating my body from scratch repeatedly might decrease my lifespan, so I could only do this in emergencies in the future. I did it this time to make sure I could when lives depended on it. After all, Erika was in trouble, but if her life was in jeopardy, she would have broken her locket and teleported right to me. I was a bit thankful she didn’t, as appearing right in front of the naked Fate and I would have required some finesse.

Of course, I wasn’t a mortal human. The more one evolves their body, the longer their life. I didn’t really know how long my current body would live. On the one hand, I went through nine evolutions. On the other hand, I started as a bacterium that, by all accounts, might have died in a few months. For all I knew, my lifespan was no greater than a typical human’s, which was already quite the progress for a single-celled organism.

Once I regain enough cells to rebuild my body, I will pull out the teardrop necklace. It was currently cool to the touch, which meant that Erika was no longer putting energy into it. The teardrop necklace told me she was in trouble, but it didn’t give me a direction, nor was it capable of passing messages. As a result, all I knew was that someone intentionally inserted mana into it.

Throwing it back around my neck, I also pulled out my clothing and got dressed. I couldn’t help but glance at the corner of the cave, where an egg was still incubating, the dragon egg. This seemed like the safest spot for me to put my embryo. Unlike the sentinels that were small and hidden, the embryo took a bit more. This was because it needed to function even when I wasn’t around.

Typically, my detached automatism had a range, and that range was only about a few hours’ travel. If I went out of the range of a sentinel, it went dead, and if I didn’t return shortly, that death would become permanent. In short, the sentinels were being supported by my body, and once my body left the appropriate range, they became like a comatose person taken off life support. Just like if you cut anything else off from your body, they would experience cellular death within hours of the separation.

For my embryo to function, I had to create a life-support system allowing it to survive. In short, my embryo could remain living for at least a month based on what I provided. It wasn’t at the level of cloning or separating my mind, but merely a backup should the worst-case scenario happen. This was one of the reasons I decided to put it in the dragon egg area. The heat helped maintain the embryo as well as my regrowth. Unfortunately, all of the sentinels I had placed all over town had since died in the last week. They would have been unlikely to even last a day.

As I was looking at the dragon egg, a thought came to me. I summoned the wyvern from my luminal space. Its body barely fit within the cavern. Thankfully, whether it was the fact that it was deep underground or the stuff built by my precursors to hide their underground city, very little energy from the dead beast should leak away. I pulled out Eternal Harmony and used it to cut off chunks of tail before putting the wyvern back away.

If the prince who originally owned the sword saw me using it to cook, I wondered what his expression would be like. However, I needed a blade that strong to be able to cut through the wyvern’s hide. Even a dead wyvern had skin and bone that couldn’t be compared to the materials from my world. This is one of the reasons dead prestiged were sought after. Weapons and armor created from such beings outclassed most common materials. Once I finished extracting several hunks of meat, I created a small pool of blood around the egg.

The blood began to boil from the extreme heat of the heat vent and lava underneath, but what was a wyvern if its parts could be boiled away so easily? The blood pool persisted and began to soak into the egg. While this happened, I used the information the wyvern had given me on birthing eggs and began to make alterations to the preexisting incubator.

Finally, once I was satisfied with all of that, I cut strips of meat and hung them high above the vent. The dry heat would slowly smoke the wyvern meat into jerky. I had cautiously asked Lucky before I left what the best way to eat high-level creatures was, and he said that this method preserved the most potential energy. Whether I would hand these out as presents or they would end up feeding the red dragon fledgling when it woke up, I didn’t know.

When I was finally satisfied, I grabbed the last bit of tail. The wyvern was quite large, and even the piece of tail I had taken equaled as much meat as a cow. Apparently, high-level evolved, developed techniques that would shrink and compress food so that larger sage beasts could be eaten. Naturally, such high-level evolved beings who specialized in cooking were rare, making such prepared delicacies even rarer. Not even the lord of this province got to enjoy such foods commonly.

As I headed out from the area, a pair of fiery eyes appeared in the darkness. I pulled out the last strips of tail, still raw, and dropped them on the floor. The massive form of the Infernal Wolf King came out of the shadows. It excitedly walked up, but waited until I gave a nod before it started eagerly eating its meal. I patted his head as he happily and greedily consumed the meat.

“You’ve done well to watch the egg,” I told him, dropping the rest of the meat. “You can distribute what you want to your pack.”

The beast couldn’t talk, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t intelligent. Not only did it understand what I told it, but it nodded its head, its eyes filled with appreciation. The second it had detected the prestiged dead beast, it had immediately come to watch out of curiosity. The other wolves were too cowardly to even approach, but they all desperately desired such high-quality meat. Even these few strips might be enough to produce a few alphas and push the King further along in his evolution.

It was no fool, and it understood that this meal was only given to it through loyalty. That’s why after eating, it rolled over, showing its stomach. My brow couldn’t help but twitch at the sight. I knew that I had gotten the wolf to submit, but when did he become a trained house pet? With a wave, I left him the body of another sage beast I had snatched during the fighting on the mountain. It was only a champion, but it still was a meaty beast filled with passive energy.

The wolf jumped around excitedly, looking more like a puppy, even though it stood about the same height as me. I shook my head and bid it farewell. I needed to check on Erika.