Sight
When Alice woke up, it took her only a few seconds to go straight into work mode.
In point of fact, as her body rested and her consciousness floated in the dark room in her mind, she had used that time to brainstorm possible upgrades for her body.
Having the protection of the spiders is good, sure, but it won’t last forever. She had thought.
I need to get harder to kill, better prepared, faster and stronger. I guess I just need to start the process… even if it means straying even further away from being human…
By the time the tugging sensation of awakening had started, she knew how she could use her newly enhanced powers to improve her chances of survival.
While many options had come to mind, two in particular had caught her interest the most, mainly for the quality-of-life changes they would bring to her current situation.
The first, and more difficult of the two, was the reconstruction of her arm, something that would require a lot of time and that she wasn’t even sure she could yet do. The second one, instead, was an eyesight upgrade, an improvement she had already aimed to make a few days before and, in the end, had decided to attempt again.
Firstly, however, she would need to load up on the nutrients that would sustain her during her experiments, which meant eating the screechlings she had caught while escorted by the swarm.
A few minutes later, after a quick cleansing bath and a tasteless, cold meal of raw meat, Alice got up on her feet and headed towards the antechamber where Skitter was standing guard, her brainpower focused on how to explain what she needed from the clever spider for her plan to succeed.
It took a bit of time, but in the end, she managed to convince the monster to offer her a subject that would stand still for as long as she needed. In exchange, she would provide another healing session to the rest of the swarm, something she had already been meaning to do.
Why not get something out of it? she smirked to herself.
Finally, she spent more than half-an-hour to ask for a particular object she claimed would be extremely important for her work; in exchange, she promised to move as soon as she was finished with her preparations.
A couple of days and then I’m off to the unknown once again. Yay.
Once everything had been agreed upon and the rest of the swarm got to work, Alice was left staring at the spider Skitter had volunteered.
Given the condition of the guinea pig she had in front of her eyes, the clever male’s thoughts on the nature of the experiment must have surely been skewed towards the ‘blood sacrifice’ route more than anything else.
“As if I’d kill it… I’ve had enough of that kind experiments for the moment” she sadly murmured while staring critically at the injured spider in front of her.
It was, unsurprisingly, the same one she had first healed the previous day. Its injuries had reopened, probably during their trips to and from the nest, and the wounds sometimes leaked dark blood that gently pattered on the floor.
A pang of guilt struck the girl responsible for those expeditions who bit her lip before coming to a swift decision.
“Okay. Let’s try not to have you keel over while I’m doing my things uh?” Alice gently placed her hand beside the lacerations, hearing the wounded creature softly hiss in pain as she did so, and cast an empowered Hemostasis that, far quicker than before, formed a new layer of chitin on the weeping gashes, stopping the bleeding once more.
After letting her ‘model’ fill up its now low reserves on all but one of the remaining screechlings, and after having collected what she thought could be the final step of her puzzle, the young woman finally stared at the work of art sitting on the ground in front of her.
In religious reverence, she sat down on the 30 centimeters-high pile of soft, pearlescent sheets of silk the spiders had carefully sewn together into a futon capable of keeping her away from the hard ground. She couldn’t stop a moan from escaping her mouth as she was enveloped in the smoothest softness she had ever felt in her life. After the ground? It felt like paradise.
It took her a few minutes to take notice of the ‘lab rat’ beside her, but when she did, the feeling of comfort was lightly marred by the knowledge of being stared at by a huge sentient spider.
“You aren’t needed yet. Got something else to do first” she said, waving it away before finally closing her eyes, stopping only a moment to once more appreciate the smooth silk she was laying on before jumping straight into her eye, through the optic nerve and into her retina with its thousands of receptors.
The previous night, as she kicked around in the void, floating between flaming letters, Alice had thought hard on how to improve her eyesight, asking herself how to do it as she reviewed her basic knowledge of the human eye. Until a single thought had stopped her on her tracks.
Why only human?
She had then spent more time thinking about the many animals with a better eyesight than her species. Why not an eagle? She had finally asked herself.
As far as she knew, the shape of their eyes was not so far away from her own, so the reason for their visual capacity must have been related to the quantity of their receptors and not to lenses or other larger structures, at least partially so.
She could work with that.
Therefore, it was without hesitation when she dove straight into the retina. Following the hints of her Basic Biological Instincts skill, she searched for the highest concentration of cone-like receptors, easily finding it in a tiny depression close to the optic nerve, the fovea, the part of the retina she knew is specialized in visual acuity.
In the small indentation, starting from the center, cones were tightly packed in a hexagonal pattern, slowly growing more distant the further they were from its center.
Almost each one of the more central cones was connected to a single nerve, able to send a distinct signal when light hit its target; once again, however, the further she strayed from the center, the more receptors were connected to a single nerve, gradually reducing its accuracy.
She smiled as her mind was filled with hints and suggestions on how to solve her problem.
After a bit more inspecting and planning, she quickly left the eye, following the optic nerve back to the thalamus and from there, straight into the primary visual cortex in the back of her brain.
In the grey expanse of her cerebral cortex, she quickly located a particularly large neural cell surrounded by many normal ones and, after breaking through the veil holding back her power, she quickly flooded it with magical energy, forcing the lone stem cell to split, producing a new neuron.
As soon as the newborn cell was complete, she had it form connections with its neighbors before sending its long axon to link to the main neural pathway and, through a series of connections, back to the eye itself where she formed a new conical receptor to connect it to.
After confirming that everything worked correctly, she smiled, her eyes now focused on the entirety of the fovea.
This was only the trial run she told herself as her mind shredded the entirety of the barrier.
Alice felt the wave of power flood across her brain, moving through her nerves until it found the correct visual pathway, entering it and illuminating the cells it soaked in its wake.
Flowing through many links and synapses, the tide of magic finally cascaded into the eye, each cell basking in its own light as Alice further directed it toward its goal. A ripple shook the entirety of her brain, every connection fired up at once as thousands of newborn neurons moved their way towards the visual cortex. In the eye, the density of the retina doubled as every single one of the receptors and nerves connecting them to the encephalon split, squishing themselves together as they searched for living space.
On the outside, her body twitched and swayed as her brain checked back every single connection, overwhelmed by the appearance of so many new cells.
On the inside, she smiled as a huge mass of information coursed through the newborn cells.
This is only the start. Saddle up body, I’m going on a trip.
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As soon as her body felt normal once more, she brought back her consciousness, only a small headache and sore muscles confirming something had actually changed.
She opened her right eye, the one she had yet to modify and, as expected, it felt normal under her scrutiny.
Alice took a deep breath, her hand slightly trembling in fear and expectation. Slowly, she raised her eyelid and literally witnessed the changes.
Her vision was perfect, more than perfect, she could easily see the details of a barely illuminated pebble three meters away from her, she could distinguish the tiny hair on the spiders’ palps, see the tiny droplets of venom on their fangs.
She exulted, a huge smile on her face as she sang her victory to the unamused spiders.
“Now the next eye and then darkvision! Maybe. We’ll see. This is already fricking great!”.
A small skip in her step, she took a quick break from the experimentations to start healing her eight-legged protectors, starting from her future ‘model’.
Over the course of a few hours, after a quick snack of more raw bat, and a short nap on the futon, she managed to cure every spider in the cave, with more trickling in as time went on, sometimes bringing various degrees of horrifying dinners together with them.
Her day was coming to a close when she thought herself ready for the next eye, delving deep within it and replicating the feat of a few hours before, the brain reacting in the same, excessive way.
Once she was done twitching, most of the spiders in the cave had dropped down to sleep, their bodies on the ground.
Alice, not feeling an ounce of fatigue in her body, dragged her favorite, softest possession until it was close enough to the now fully healed test subject, placing her palm on its carapace and closing her eyes to concentrate.
Through chitin, flesh and blood, Alice travelled across the body of the spider, once again feeling the creature’s anatomy down to its basic components.
What before had been a general sense of comprehension when witnessing the inner workings of another being, now was a pinpoint focus on each of its many organs and cells, on how they worked and why.
She stared at its tubular heart, pumping blue blood that continuously irrorated every organ, filling them with the precious oxygen extracted by its two set of lungs, each formed by thin stacks of folded air pockets and hemolymph.
Ignoring the rest of the organs in the large abdomen, Alice entered the arachnid’s heart and started going against the blood flow, marveling at the absolute lack of blood cells within it. The hemocyanin simply floating in the hemolymph, freely binding with oxygen molecules as they appeared.
From there, reaching the thorax was an easy task and soon, she was jumping straight into the large brain of the creature.
The command center of the spider was far different from her human one. The main hub was located behind its eight eyes, completely filling the frontal part of the head. From there, however, it also ran along the entirety of the thorax of the creature, dividing in two thick strands of nerves that frayed into many smaller ones dispersing towards the monster’s legs and abdomen.
Therefore, it wasn’t surprising that it took her a bit of time to find the correct pathway that, out of the many thousands present, lead to the eyes of the creature.
I could have gone straight in there, sure, but it’s always so cool to travel through the body.
As soon as she found herself in one of the eyes, however, her mind sharpened and she was all business as she closely observed the iridescent tapestry behind the monster’s retina, the light-sensitive tissue perfectly mirrored by the thin, reflective layer of pigmented cells.
Absorbed, the girl moved further in to inspect the cells composing the opalescent sheen as she had done a few days before in far less relaxed conditions.
What she found, were thousands of small, pigmented cells, each containing within itself an extremely thin and reflective plate made of some sort of crystal.
While the cells themselves were impossible to recreate for her at the moment, mainly due to the fact that they were completely different from any she actually had in her body, the crystalline substance they contained was instead composed of one of the most easily found substances in her body: guanine, one of the four main nucleobases of DNA and RNA.
Not that she had actually remembered it, only thanks to the magnificent skill that was Basic Biomagical Instincts did she have an idea of what to do.
Her class ability working at full swing, she tried and tried to understand how those plates had formed and were oriented.
For hours, the Biomancer of Symbiosis worked on the crystals, sometimes moving back to her own body to attempt different combinations and processes, until, after many trials and mistakes, something clicked into her mind, as if a door had just been opened and she finally understood how the crystal, and much more, worked.
In a rush, Alice left the spider’s body once more and, when back to her own, she dove straight into her left eye, where she ordered the first layer of cells behind the retina to stop getting rid of the waste materials they produced and to instead break them down into guanine, an action she knew was usually done by the liver.
With a deep breath, she then moved straight into the first cell and started working on the pattern she had finally managed to replicate.
After another hour of patient layering, adjusting and correcting, the first, human crystalline plate was finished and oriented in its cell-host to perfectly reflect the light coming through the retina back to its receptors.
Alice didn’t let herself get cocky at her previous successes. Where before she was simply copying human cells, now she was forming an entirely new one, something that felt impossible without magic. Only a small smile unconsciously appeared on her face as she proceeded to focus on the next platelet.
That time, it took her only a bit more than forty-five minutes to complete the reflective structure, her movements and orders already more refined. She now really knew what to do.
It was only the start.
Over the course of many hours, she proceeded to streamline the whole process, for each one of the tiny mirrors she produced, her speed and precision increased to the point it would only take her a minute to finish a single cell.
Only then, did she feel comfortable enough to speed up the process with her well.
In small bursts, closely following every second of the operation, she followed her skill’s hints and formed a wide, reflective ring of crystalline mirrors behind the external parts of the retina, angling it so that loose beams of light would bounce back to the more densely packed zones of receptors in the fovea.
Just as the structure finally stabilized in her eye, the girl saw a thin beam of light particles speed past the outer retina, passing through the gaps in its structure and heading straight towards the newly formed ring.
When the photons connected to the lucid sheets, part of the beam passed through unhindered while the rest bounced back, flying straight towards the fovea which, once hit, started sending visual information to her brain.
Alice’s smile faded at the sight. That was not enough.
While somewhat successful with the creation of the crystalline ring, it still didn’t offer enough returns for the amount of effort she had put in to create it. The plates, while reflective, were also still translucent and, as she had just seen, a lot of the light managed to pass through.
For a bit, she thought of going back to the spider’s eye and try to find a way to actually copy its pigmented cell, which she knew were much more reflective on account of their iridescent platelets, able to send back a much higher amount of light.
She was, however, very tired and already her power and attention were beginning to wane under the continuous strain. Her state of flow was rapidly deteriorating as the body started sending signals of distress to her brain.
Therefore, she decided to risk it.
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As soon as she searched for them, Alice could feel the strange, alien powers coming from the two cores she carried, each one offering a different feeling to the intrigued Biomancer, her magic trying to mingle with their own, to fuse and coalesce into something else.
The first, smaller core’s magic came out in wave-like patterns ever changing in frequency and length. She had only been able to attune it to her own body after accepting its sonic nature, fusing the aural waves to her own hearing receptors.
The new one, instead, was bigger, stronger and older; a deep bore exuding darkness as it stared straight into her soul even when she simply held it.
As she finally stared back into the pitch-black abyss of power, an equally tenebrous memory flashed before her eyes.
Alice is behind the monstrous creature as it weaves its shadowy tendrils, controlling the Jumping Spiders as a puppeteer does with his dolls. Silently moving them to encircle, harass and slaughter the rapidly weakening Spears.
She is close now, so close she can smell its oily scent, she can see each one of the thin hairs on its head, sublimating into dark mist as they reach the ground, feeding the swirling shadow enveloping them. She is so close she could touch it. If she had the guts to do it.
She is stuck there, frozen, staring at the unaware creature as it raises one arm or the other, its movements both fluid and unnatural at the same time. Her hand keeps tightening and loosening again the grasp on Band-Aid’s fang as she attempts to break out of her terror.
Her pinky finally slips, slides on the sharp surface. She winces as a trickle of her blood moves down her hand, a single drop falls on the ground.
It echoes in the bubble of silence.
She is frozen as the creature turns towards her, its shadow-dripping hair parting like curtains to present her four, enormous white eyes, like shining full moons in the darkness, staring at her, unfeeling.
It opens its mouth, rows upon rows of long, needle like teeth move on their own back and forth as if welcoming her to the bite.
She screams an inaudible scream as her dagger sinks into the top of its head. Once. And then more. She keeps stabbing it over and over again, feeling the body twitch around her, trying to catch her, to end her, even in death. She stabs. The eyes keep staring.
Alice quivered, the memory fading and leaving her alone with her thoughts as she carried a small tendril of her own energy towards the cold and inky surface.
She felt a connection establish itself to the core, a creeping and silent black mist slithering through the link, wriggling into her body and extending its own feelers as if to explore it.
Repressing another shiver at the intrusion, the girl gingerly pushed back the tendrils, further reducing the link to the dark core, feeling its power press against the barrier to break through once more.
She kept up with the pressure, only allowing the tiniest of strands of energy to pass through and meticulously escorting it through her body until they reached the retina.
Following her skill’s hints, she gently brought the line into the first crystal she had made, trying to weave it inside its structure.
As she worked, her mind was set on those four, luminous white orbs, their shadowless appearance. If the shadow mana ate light, couldn’t it spit it back out?
She focused on the unnatural feeling of clarity those eyes gave her and tried to infuse that feeling into the strand she was weaving.
Slowly, as it fused with the crystalline mirror in the cell, the line of mana started changing in consistency, becoming an inky liquid that flowed on top of the plate, coating its surface in a hardened black lacquer.
It didn’t take long for another beam of light to impact with the enhanced mirror. The moment the first photon hit the surface, its void-like hue turned into a perfect mirror, sending the beam to the retinal light-receptors, activating a torrent of signals to her visual cortex.
With a jubilant cry of victory, Alice jumped up in the air, and promptly and painfully fell on the ground on account of her completely numb legs.
With a groan, she proceeded to wait until they felt normal once more, ignoring the accusing stares of the spiders she had once again scared with her sudden noise.
Expectantly, she turned off almost every light in her body and opened her eyes once more, her large smile somehow growing even wider.
After weeks of stumbling and fearing the unknown things hiding in the darkness, she wasn’t blind anymore. The entirety of the antechamber she had worked in was visible at the same time! She could see from one side to the other without having to shine like a streetlamp!
Her world was painted in tones of grey and green, somewhat fuzzy even with her enhanced eyesight, but she could see!
She swayed a bit, her eyes growing heavy as a huge yawn finally made its way out of her mouth, Alice laid back on the futon and curled up like a cat, sighing in contentment.
After a long day, Alice finally slept.
You have broken through your previous limits, the skill Basic Biomagical Instincts has been improved to Biomagical Instincts. Your knowledge on the arcane and the biological runs deeper and spreads further.
You have reached Level 17 in the Biomancer of Symbiosis Class.
Through trials and time, you have changed your eyes to rival those of the most perceptive predators. You have learned the skill Eyes of the Eventide Hawk. You will be able to perfectly see in darkness and light.
Behind the eyelids of an unaware, slumbering Alice, glowing veins of silver invaded her hazel irides.
She started lightly snoring after a bit.
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This chapter is officially sponsored by Ryan U.!