I Reincarnated Into A Single-Celled Organism! - I Reincarnated into a Single-celled Organism! - Chapter 114

I held my hand out toward the heat vent, the eggs carefully held in my hands. However, I started taking increasing amounts of damage as I grew closer.

[You have lost 10 HP.]

[You have lost 129 HP.]

[You have lost 5,092 HP.]

[You have lost 132,123 HP.]

My hands were where most of the damage was coming from. They were burning drastically, and my high defenses were not able to resist the extreme heat damage completely. I finally pulled back, seeing the numbers going up exponentially. Plus, I was worried a bit about the egg, but upon pulling away, I realized it still felt cold to the touch as if all of that heat was meaningless to it.

The wolf king only watched with curiosity, but when it saw that my hands began to instantly grow back from black back skin at a visible rate, it could only shake in fear. Such a healing rate was monstrous even for sage beasts, although it wasn’t healing. I was just remaking new cells and shedding off the ones that died. Every cell seemed to be roughly 1 HP of health, so I had lost around 140,000 cells in that brief exposure. Since I had billions, they were able to regenerate very quickly after a single round of regeneration.

In reality, it took over an hour for me to completely regenerate the lost cells, although my HP recovered faster than that. This was likely because I had excess cells that could be specialized at a moment’s notice. Normal multi-cellular animals had cells known as stem cells. These were the progenitor cells that multiplied and then specialized into other cells. So, any given cell could be turned into a skin cell or a stomach cell based on the needs at the time. Every human had small patches of these cells, particularly in areas where they’d need to replace cells throughout the organism’s life.

For me, I had far more of these cells. Since I was able to form an adult body by stripping out and streamlining various human functions, there was no point in specializing in these cells unless my existing cells were damaged. When I lost a hand, all I had to do was activate these unused cells and then redirect them to replace the dead hand tissue. This was also how I was able to create another body, although doing so limited my available stem cells and severely limited my ability to regenerate.

Typically, a prokaryote could take around twenty minutes to divide while a eukaryotic cell should have taken closer to ninety minutes. Since my cells were eukaryotic, they seemed to lean on that time. However, this ninety-minute limit didn’t seem to change whether I lost a thousand cells or a billion. I reckoned I’d need to lose almost half of my body mass before this limit was reached. That’s because if every cell in my body went through my mitosis at once, I could double the number of cells in a single cell cycle.

That said, not every cell in my body was capable of mitosis anymore, and if I experienced a great deal of damage to my stem cells in particular, this could cause my regeneration to be significantly slowed. So, my seeming invincibility did have some weaknesses. However, the wolf king didn’t know that, so it had grown even more reverential. After all, even it didn’t dare approach the vent much closer than that, and it was a fire-type creature.

I looked over the egg thoroughly and was able to confirm that the lifeform inside was still alive. If anything, I had a feeling that it wanted far more heat. It wanted to be in the heat vent. However, I had a feeling that even this much heat wouldn’t be enough to incubate the egg. Even if I threw it into the crack, besides being unrecoverable, it probably wouldn’t be as hot as a dragon’s breath. There was a reason dragons were considered top-tier beasts only a step below gods.

Thus, I was in a dilemma. I needed something that could carry the egg and hold it over the vent, capture the heat amplify it, and not be destroyed by the intense heat itself. I checked the things in my inventory, but there was very little thereof practical use. I had stored food and bedding but it wasn’t like I had the supplies to build a house or something.

“Supplies…” That reminded me of the stuff that Mara’s family had put in the cart.

Mara had been forced to abandon the cart when Tyler increased the speed to try to save his sister. I hid the cart the best I could on the side of the road, but I had no choice but to abandon it. I wasn’t willing to leave Mara unprotected with Tyler and his knight, and I couldn’t reveal my existence. In retrospect, I should have just placed it in my Luminal Space, but hadn’t been confident I could put things larger than myself in my Luminal Space anyway.

Well, it didn’t matter. There was nothing in that cart that would be useful for the current situation, although I would go fetch the cart after I was done. Instead, I sat down and then started to reflect. Specifically, I began to experiment with my own body. First, I would mutate some cells, and then I would place them on the tip of a tendril and send it toward the fire. If the cells survived better, I would keep the cell line and further mutate it. If they died at the same or quicker, I wiped them out. It should be possible to come up with something that could handle the heat. After all, there were extremophiles on our planet that could resist heat vents at the bottom of the ocean or inside volcanos.

Although this seemed complicated, I was able to send out hundreds of mutations a second. With my Parallel processing, I could manage all of the experiments at once. To the wolf king, it looked like my body was growing tentacles which immediately darted to the fire before burning away. This continued for a dozen hours before I finally had a line that seemed to resist fire slightly better than before. I then multiplied that line and began to mutate it further, although I still kept 25% using the original line just in case I discovered a better mutation.

Time flowed by, and the wolf king seemed content to just lie at the entrance, effectively guarding me while absorbing flame mana from the vent. Wolves would occasionally come with food for the wolf king, who would take the offering and consume it. Although, he would even offer me some. My luminal space had tons of food, but the food the wolf king brought seemed to come from hunted sage beasts. They had mana in them, and my body seemed to crave it in ways that normal food no longer satisfied, so a tentacle immediately grabbed the meat and sucked it into me. The wolf king could only wince slightly before sitting back down as some kind of protector.

I did keep track of the time. I had established an eternalized clock by carefully synchronizing certain cells to a death cycle. Thus, I had a good idea of how much time I was spending. It was about a week later when I finally came up with a mutated cell line that was highly resistant to the heat. I had already developed heat resistance in my entire body, but compared to my old line, this cell line could handle unbelievable amounts of heat.

This time, my tendrils came out, and although they grew black with scorch marks, they did not break apart. I then began to construct a lattice out of modified Fibrinolysis with Calcification. I tied that into the Encapsulation skill, allowing me to create a barrier around the egg that wouldn’t just protect it, but also allow it to continue and gather heat. By the way, I developed one that could keep out the heat first, so if I ever fell into an extreme heat, I could protect my stem cells by encapsulating my body. Just because I could make extreme tentacles didn’t mean that my entire body was not fireproof. If attempted to make my entire body out of such cells, I’d be effectively unable to move at normal temperatures as I would be too rigid.

Unfortunately, there was no such thing as being great at everything. Every improvement I made often came at the cost of something else. I could mitigate these costs with careful work, but they could take years to develop, especially when the only methods of use were Mutation and Adaption. Either way, I was satisfied with my gains at the moment. As I thought about what needed to happen next, I couldn’t help but think of Mara. It had already been a week since I left her. If she had been in any danger, I had left a means of knowing, but she also might have heard I was dead. If she believed such lies, it would be very painful for her.

I had to go back to the city, but first I needed to make a stop. This meant I needed to go to several places in quick succession. Of course, I could break into two again, but after understanding the weaknesses that gave me, I was less enthused to do such a thing. What I needed was a lot of speed. That’s when an idea suddenly came to me. I glanced over to the wolf king who had been patiently guarding me this entire week, or maybe it was easier to say he was watching after his home and making sure I didn’t do anything to it.

I put the egg away in my space and then turned to the wolf king. I was checking out his physique. He cocked a head, realizing I was staring at him.

“About how much can you carry on your back would you say?” I asked.

“Aroo?”

“And what is your maximum sustainable land speed over forested terrain?” I smiled.

The wolf king cowered back, apparently getting an uneasy feeling from my look.