I Reincarnated into a Single-celled Organism! - Chapter 222

From the moment I died and was reincarnated as a single-celled prokaryote, my sense of time became off. I leveled up and evolved in a desperate feat to survive, and each time I evolved, the next level became even harder to reach. It wasn’t until the Tanners arrived that I started to get a feel for the passage of time again. I suspected that my purgatory in that pond lasted millennia. That my last evolution before meeting Tanner might even be the reason this Province became known as the Lightning Province.

Either way, I thought I had developed an infinite amount of patience. I didn’t need to sleep, so my nights were spent going over the information I had acquired during the day. I would go over, organize, and reanalyze books and journals I read, refining the information into the most useful parts. Yet, even if I didn’t have that to do, I could just sit and stare at a wall for hours on end. Yet, I found myself becoming exceptionally bored as I waited for night to come.

Headmistress had put me in a guest bedroom within her mansion, and although the room was spacious and seemingly filled with passive energy, I wasn’t like other paragons. They meditated and tried to absorb the native passive energy of the world. However, for someone like me, that amount of energy was a drop in an ocean. At my current level, if I meditated every day for the rest of my life, which, for all I knew, could be millions of years, I still might not progress another level.

Instead, a thought suddenly struck me. There was one thing at the academy that I was very interested in. Those were the techniques located within the library. All of these paragons lived in families that had collected countless techniques over the years that helped solidify them as the top of the province. To them, the low-tier techniques of the library were meaningless. Only unaffiliated paragons would care about such a thing, and few of them would have the credentials to enter the academy’s library anyway.

It was a system that reinforced the strong and mocked the weak, but that wasn’t what I was concerned about. No one from the paragon families had any interest in the library techniques except casually, and thanks to my own lies about my origin, most people assumed I’d be the same. In fact, they generally believed I must have some kind of techniques, or I never would have made it so far as to win the local martial tournament.

Yet, in reality, I didn’t know any techniques at all, and it was actually one of the reasons I had to be so careful all the time. Without understanding how to use my powers, I was more like a wild animal who could potentially injure or kill people by using powers I wasn’t familiar with. This is why I have wanted to get into the technique library since the first time I came to the academy.

The Capala family also had martial techniques, but this particular branch only had a few alchemy techniques available. Apparently, the martial techniques were all stored in the main branch, and any disciple who wanted to learn them had to travel to make a pilgrimage to the main branch and beg to learn such techniques. This was just one of the ways the main line was able to maintain power over the branches.

Either way, I felt like I had an opportunity, and I’d be a fool not to take it. Of course, the headmistress did make me promise that I couldn’t leave her mansion, but she said nothing about my clone. After doing my best to make sure I wouldn’t be seen or heard, I began the process of splitting into two. This wasn’t an instantaneous process. It involved numerous skills, the first of which was differentiation. I had to take my cells and divide them into two, creating two halves.

As it turned out, the more cells I had, the harder it became. When I first did this to enter Schrodinger’s box, I had considerably fewer body cells available. My form was a mere shell of a human, a scaffolding that I further exhausted by breaking into two bodies. Since my human form was already more a mimicry than an actual human, the division process was rather simple, even if it did leave my body exceptionally vulnerable. This was fine because one of the bodies mostly skulked around as a ghost, following Mara and Tyler and doing calculations when needed. It actually hadn’t been that much more complex than the embryos I came to develop, with most of my energy focused on the body residing in Schrodinger’s box.

Of course, it was easy to judge these things in hindsight. At the time, I had merely assumed that this was what normal felt like. I had even considered both bodies equal, mostly because their physical body were equal. I only understood now that I had learned a bit about life energy and mana circuits, that energy was just as important in this process as the physical distribution of cells. The more energy I had, the harder it became to divide it.

It felt a lot like matter. The more matter you gathered, the greater the gravity became, and the harder it became to separate matter. If I cut a walnut in half and made two halves, it would be easy to pull them apart. If I cut a planet in half, no amount of pulling would allow me to pry them apart. It appeared like energy worked the same way.

Based on the difficulty of separating my body into two at the moment, I wondered if I’d even be able to make two bodies in the future. There might be a critical point where it becomes impossible for me. I didn’t think this would stop me from making sentinels or embryos. After all, even scientists can shoot off a rocket. However, it appeared like my cloning days were quickly coming to an end.

It also didn’t help that I had killed off all of my cells a short while ago. It wasn’t like these cells were weaker or anything, but there was an odd thinness that came with this kind of division, likely from their life energy not having fully recovered yet. Thus, after fiddling with things for a few hours, I finally settled on a body that functioned more like an avatar than a clone. It wasn’t free thinking like me, but I would be able to control it while I meditated in my room. The best part was that I could destroy it without causing an explosion of energy.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t create a clone, but that doing so would have taken so much time that by the time I was done, it would be too late to do anything with it in the first place. So, this seemed like an appropriate compromise. With a flick of my wrist, the puppet version of me immediately jumped out the window. Thankfully, seeing as it wasn’t me, it didn’t have my energy and was thus even harder to track than my true body.

It didn’t matter anyway, as I had already checked on where the headmistress was, and she was currently in her academy office carrying out administrative duties. Thus, I was free to escape the residential area and head over to the library. As I walked down the street, I kept my hood up and my head low.

“Spirit!” I immediately froze when I heard my name, but I realized it was someone speaking down one of the paths.

I deviated from the direction I was going to go, and then came across a scene of a half dozen boys surrounding a group of three. I instantly recognized the groups. The dozen boys were being led by Jordan Stride. Meanwhile, the smaller group of three had Ronald Sampson at the front. They appeared to be in opposition, but from what I remembered about Ronald, this confused me. The Sampson family was retainers for the Stride family. Why would they be fighting?

“I have nothing to do with him!” Ronald spoke with desperation in his eyes.

He looked a bit like a cornered animal, and his words seemed to be a response to Jordan using my name. I watched carefully from a hiding spot as they continued.

“Nonsense.” Jordan Stride sneered. “You two got along quite well when he was in the academy.”

“We just talked, we’re not friends or anything.”

“Why are you being so defensive?” Jordan chuckled. “Hasn’t your family loyally served mine for years. Are you planning on breaking that tradition?”

Ronald’s expression turned grim, but he lowered his head. “I wouldn’t dream of rising against the Stride family.”

“Good.” Jordan looks down on Ronald with his arms crossed. “In that case, I want you to try to further your friendship with him.”

Ronald looked up in shock. “Further it?”

“For nearly a week now, he’s been hiding in the Capala household like a coward. Although the Capala household isn’t what it once was, I still can’t risk trying to get to him there. However, if you reach him…”

“You… want me to hurt him?”

“No!” He shook his head. “I said you’ll befriend him. Once I learn more about the situation, well, we’ll decide what to do with him then.”

I scratched my chin, an amused expression on my face. It appeared like the Stride family wanted to play with me. Well, we could have a little fun, I suppose.