I Reincarnated Into A Single-Celled Organism! - I Reincarnated into a Single-celled Organism! - Chapter 122

“So, there I was, battling against a two-headed tiger… and then then a giant came crashing through-”

“Oh, so there is a giant now.” The bartender said with amusement in his eyes.

“It was a giant… six feet tall…”

“I’m six feet tall! Are you saying I’m a giant?” Another man broke into laughter.

“No…” The man lifted his mug taking a sip seriously. “It was a dwarf giant…”

The group sitting at the bar all broke into laughter. Their expressions were unkind, but the drunk man seemed oblivious.

“So, you single-handedly fought off a two-headed tiger and a dwarf giant.” One of the men declared. “Old man, you’re speaking like you’re evolved, but I know evolved don’t get drunk as easily as you. That just makes you an old fool.”

“Whatever, believe me, don’t believe me.” He seemed to grow somewhat unhappy when they mentioned the evolved, standing up unsteadily with his mug in his hand. “And maybe I am an evolved.”

“This idiot says he’s a paragon!” One of the men declared, causing the others to break into laughter.

He shot them all a glare before stumbling away. Their laughter and jeers followed him. Many of their words were cruel and cutting, but he didn’t respond. Instead, he found his way to a table on the far side of the bar. He stumbled into a seat. Unfortunately, the table was already taken. A man in a cloak with his head down was sitting in the corner. He didn’t react to the drunk old man’s appearance.

“You know… I’ve seen you hear every night for the last two weeks.” The drunken old man’s eyes sharpened as he spoke in a low voice. “You only ever buy one drink, yet by the end of the night, you’re always stumbling out drunk, and I believe you genuinely are. If you’re going to be spying for information, you could at least make it look less obvious.”

I lifted my hood slightly as I met the man’s eyes. “You also come into this bar every night. Despite being a Flawless paragon, you also seem rather susceptible to alcohol, but your drunkenness appears real. However, that mug isn’t where you’re getting drunk. Rather, it’s the flask. I see you pouring it into your drink every time you get a refill. I suspect that’s the harder stuff.”

He smirked slightly. “You’re not wrong. Mortal alcohol can’t get me buzzed anymore. Guys like us need immortal wine to truly get buzzed. May I?”

He held out his container and I nodded. He then poured it in. I lifted and took a sip. I fake a cough as if I found it surprisingly strong. In truth, it was a lot stronger. I imagined for someone with his constitution, it was enough. For me, regrettably, it didn’t do anything. Instead, my drunkenness was a byproduct of my experimentation.

I hadn’t spent the last two weeks just listening to gossip. I had another plan as well. It involved the plants I had found. The alchemists had said that they were too old and worthless to sell to anyone who wasn’t a grandmaster. However, I hadn’t lied when I said I still had a plan for them. I still had the plants, and the plants had their genetic makeup. Thus, I copied their genes.

After some careful experimentation at the molecular level, I was finally able to create clones of the plants. Why settle for dead plants when I could just bring them back to life? Unfortunately, I had only managed to construct seeds. Getting them to grow was different. Most of these plants had exotic backgrounds, and the little bit of information was able to glean from the grandmaster’s plant book was that these plants all had strange backgrounds.

For example, the heavenly lightning stalk existed in a place with a great deal of lightning energy. To grow properly, it needed to be struck by lightning daily. Since I was capable of generating a current with Electrogenesis, this wasn’t the difficult part, it was the incubation time. It took ten years of these daily lightning strikes just to reach the lowest tier. Then, there were 100-year, 1000-year, and 10,000-year lightning stalks.

I wondered how the Capala family was able to grow plants with such restrictions, but it turned out that most of the plants they cultivated did not have nearly as stringent of a growth process. Of course, they were also a lot cheaper and only made money if you sold them in bulk. This led me to the next part of my strategy, grafting and crossbreeding. This also had its challenges, and it also led me to develop my next biotool.

The sentinel was the first tool, a sensory organ that I could leave to spy on others. It could be detected by paragons with a high enough level, but I was also working on perfecting that. The second tool was called a terrarium. It was a small space designed to aid in the development of a plant. It was built out of calcified cells, designed to suck nutrients out of the ground, rapidly exchange gases, and maintain a consistent temperature, pressure, and whatever other conditions the plants needed to thrive. They were only the size of a small plant, and they could be modified with experimentation to do anything necessary.

If these things had a prototype, it’d be the device I had constructed to house the egg. There was just one problem. They used quite a few cells to function, so I was only able to construct five before I reached my limit. I was already in a state where I wouldn’t be able to split into two again. If I made any more, it’d start affecting my ability to heal.

Although I could currently make ½ trillion cells, a normal human had 36 trillion cells. It was already a miracle I was even able to maintain an adult human form. I had several cells closer to a toddler, and I was using almost half of them to maintain external projects.

“Are you a noble?” I asked after I finished coughing.

“Might have been… once.” He shrugged. “Now, I’m just a wondering hedge knight.”

My eyes sparkled. “So, you do requests on the request board?”

“Sometimes.” He smirked and shrugged as he took a sip of his own after adding more to his bottle. “Sometimes, I do other things. I came here to win the tournament next week.”

“I’ve heard of this.” I nodded. “They say you can win the hand of a noble beauty.”

He waved his hand. “I have no interest in her. I just want to see how I match up to those in Stormberg. You should try to compete.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Me? A mere mortal.”

He chuckled. “The way you hold yourself isn’t the way of a mortal. Plus, I forgot to mention, that immortal wine is… deadly to mortals. Had you been a mortal, you would have already been unconscious.”

I frowned, looking at the glass, causing him to grin. I would have known if he tried to poison me, but thinking about the alcohol content it delivered, he was correct. The alcohol content was several fold higher. A normal human would have died from alcohol poisoning with just a sip, and that was already diluted down from the contents of the bottle. That meant that the alcohol in that cup someone contained more than 200 proof.

Alcohol could either be a percentage or proof. A 200-proof alcohol meant it was 100% alcohol. Even in my world, such alcohol was so dry that it would pull water out of the air. This is why most pure alcohols were 95%. To get 100, one needed to use other organic solutions, which meant it wasn’t truly 100%. As an aside, 100 proof was the point at which alcohol became flammable, which was also 50%. So, to calculate the percent alcohol from proof, just divide by two.

Either way, somehow, this alcohol contained more than 100%, a statistical impossibility. This world did give me some surprising things sometimes.

“Immortal… mana?” There had to be some kind of magical component.

He seemed to be amused by my pondering as he dumped more into the glass. “Well, you don’t have to enter the tournament if you don’t want to, but the least you could do is accompany me for the evening. I haven’t had a good drinking party in some time. The immortal bars are too stuffy and pretentious, but the company here… could also use some work.”

He eyed the bar people, who were whispering and giving the pair of us some questionable looks. I knew from my previous spying that they saw me as suspicious. Thankfully, my hearing was at a level that I could listen in on conversations from the other side of the room, which is mostly what I had been doing.

“I don’t have any money,” I warned him. “That’s why I only get one drink.”

He blinked in surprise and then burst out laughing. “It’s on me! On me.”

“Then, I’ll join you.” I agreed, feeling that it wouldn’t hurt to know this Hedgeman.

He nodded and yelled at the bartender for refills. As he got us both a fresh glass topped off with his mysterious elixir, she glanced at me.

“You know… if it’s money you need, the tournament also pays. I heard the top prize for first place is 50,000 kilojoules.”

My eyes flashed. “You have my attention.”