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

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 referred to the tendency for our bodies to age. During this process, it was the very cells that aged with time. This tied back to how cells replicated. During DNA replication, a small amount of DNA was clipped off every time a cell copied itself. This was clipped off the end, known as the telomere.

The human DNA possessed 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 removed all the useless telomere and then started to cut into “useful” genes, causing the particular cell to stop functioning properly. This was, in a nutshell, at least one of the reasons we got older and our bodies slowly ceased to function. Even if it wasn’t 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 the replication of cells in my body, the more stress it put those cells under. Recreating my body from scratch repeatedly had the potential to decrease my lifespan, so I could only do this in emergencies. I had done it this time as a test of sorts, so that, in the future, if lives depended on it, I’d know what my capacities were. 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 thankful she hadn’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 evolved 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.

The teardrop necklace was currently cool to the touch, which meant that Erika was no longer putting energy into it. All the trinket told me was that 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 had 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 main body, and once my body left the appropriate range, they became like a comatose person taken off life support. As such, complete cellular death within hours was inevitable.

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. I doubted they had even lasted past a day without my presence.

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 properties of the stuff built by my precursors to hide their underground city, very little energy from the dead beast would leak away. I pulled out Eternal Harmony and used it to cut off chunks of tail before storing 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 the province got to enjoy such foods commonly.

As I headed out from the area, a pair of fiery eyes glowed 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 was excited, but it waited respectfully until I gave a nod, then it began wolfing down its meal. I patted its side as it hungrily consumed the meat.

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

The beast was pleased. The wagging of its tail and the appreciative glint in its eyes told me that. Naturally, the second it had detected the dead wyvern, 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’ve been enough to produce a few alphas and push the king further along in its evolution.

It was no fool, and it understood that this meal had only been given to it for its loyalty. That’s why after eating, it rolled over, showing me its belly.

My brow twitched. I knew that the wolf had long since submitted to me, but when had it 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 champion-level, 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 my farewell. It was time to check on Erika.