It was almost immediate, the realization that Jesse had vastly overestimated his own abilities and underestimated the rot. Jesse had likened the rot to a rabid dog. Something that he could direct at a target and then reign it in with chains while disregarding the collateral damage.

He was wrong, not dead wrong but it was damn close. What Jesse released was more akin to a storm. Make no mistake the rot did what was requested. The storm of black particles eradicated Adam Frankenstein the Fifth leaving only scraps that luckily escaped the first pass through.

What happened next is a touch odd though. The rot condensed into a vaguely human form. Said figure looked upon its work. It had killed its “father’s” enemy repaying its birth. As for its “father”, if he died, then he was simply unworthy of being its relation. It had better things to do, places to ravage, people to hurt.

The rot opened a starry void in the air next to it and entered it.

While that was going on, Jesse was focused on the fallout of his “child’s” birth.

The second he gave the rot the slightest bit of slack, it rushed out of his body rotting everything in its path. Celestial Weaving. The Energy Vampire Progenitor mantle. His artifacts. His gestalt body.

His rings and what he called armaments were turned into scrap and that was the best outcome, which is quite telling.

When his mask shattered it created what Jesse would later call a conceptual pressure difference. The mask acted as a conduit for Jesse’s connection to the concept of the wasp jackal and with its destruction a vacuum was created in the metaphorical pipe. This vacuum sucked related concepts from both ends of the pipe leading to a distorted cloud of concepts. That cloud tried to form a wasp jackal according to its blueprints. Two problems with that were that the cloud was right next to Jesse’s head and the blueprints were inherently flawed.

The cloud had turned into a black wasp jackal head growing out of the left side of Jesse’s neck that had multiple trails of chitin trailing across his chest, shoulder, and back. Well, what could be best described as a wasp jackal as it had multiple distortions like five eyes, a half functioning mouth, and no nostrils. Taking even further from the traditional form were silver elk-like horns based on remnants of Jesse’s mask.

All that was just the outside as the cloud also formed a deformed wasp jackal body inside Jesse’s chest.

Jesse’s vampire mantle was also shattered leaving a jagged, flawed, hollowed out corpse in its proverbial port. This corpse shaped Jesse’s body to fit its new blueprint. This caused several large mouths full of deformed teeth to open up all across his chest. It also caused his inside to become even more jumbled.

This led to another problem as the vampire mantle had previously suppressed the remnants of his previous form, the bone apple tree. Without this suppression a bone apple tree grew throughout his entire body causing even more problems.

Celestial Weaving’s shattering showed why having concentrations of essences inside your body was a bad idea. With the tattoos shattering, all the essences were released into the open air and turned into the form Jesse had conceptual established as their form in that environment, crystal. Crystal growths shot from his back while also burrowing into his chest.

All this was compounded by the remnants of rot that would continuously break his body down causing the other forces acting on it to fill the new gaps with increasingly mutated filler.

Jesse had an idea that would at least get him through the next couple of hours and with any hope he could use those hours to get days. However, he really did not like what it entailed, but now was not the time for whining.

Jesse created several threads that pulled the metal remnants of Adam and the remains of the Frankenstein mantle towards him. His hope was that the metal, the mantle, and a boatload of phoenix fire would conceptually heal him by invoking the concept of cauterization.

“Nothing to it but to do it” Jesse gurgled out before weaving the mantle and metal into the huge red crystal growing out of hi right shoulder. Said crystal did not like that. Not one bit.

The crystal instantly turned into a conflagration that melted the metal and mantle infusing both into the flames. This turned them into a molten metallic substance. The molten metal spread throughout Jesse’s body following the internal latticework of phoenix fire crystal, bringing agony everywhere it went.

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The molten metal did heal the damage due to the cauterization concept backed by phoenix fire and bridged some of the gaps between the conflicting blueprints due to the Frankenstein mantle’s nature of harmony.

However, the phoenix fire was weakened due to the damage inflicted by the rot. While it could still heal, it lost its connection to the concept of the phoenix and healing. This meant that it could only heal what it recognized, namely: human and phoenix. My previous form was innately flawed and led to my current predicament so it could not be used as a template. All this to say that the molten metal was helping, but all it could try to do was jam human and phoenix pieces into the puzzle that was my body until something fit well enough.

The most visible of these pieces was a wing that formed in the crystal’s place. Well calling it a wing was being a little generous, it was more a cone of wing-like structures and feathers made up of molten metal.

While that beauty was forming, there was the painful vomiting of various odds and ends: bones, organs, muscle clusters, nerve clusters, crystal lattices, tree branches, teeth, and some stuff he could not even begin to guess the identity of. Some notable contents were the Beastly Heart that had somehow survived until now but was now quite dead, his old hearts that were quite deformed, and his mismatched eyes.

After a while the vomiting began to wane. Jesse then got to work cleaning himself up and smoothing out edges.

He used the hours he bought wisely and at the end of it all he had a functional body and a new artifact. The amulet hanging off his new form featured a circular kintsugi inspired piece of porcelain like material. The white shards were held together by veins of an orangish metal.

_

Disparate Unity

“When you look past the surface, it’s all connected. Or at least that was my crazy uncle’s theory about the moon landing.”

Rank: Low

Primary Concept: Harmony

Secondary Concepts: Metamorphosis, -

Tertiary Concepts: -, -, -, -

An amulet that stabilizes mutations and allows for controlled metamorphosis

_

Ok so before we move on with Jesse’s new form, we should probably explain what’s going on with his new classification system.

The choice to change from tier to rank stemmed from the fact that both were arbitrary assessments of an artifact’s power based on his opinion, and he figured three levels are simpler than nine. So, he created the low, medium, and high ranks with more to come as encountered.

As for the concept thing, that was due to a discovery that changed everything and showed how stupid Jesse was all this time. The Mentalism Ring was destroyed but left a small green spark made of distilled time concept imbued with the aspect of psychometry. This meant that all this time Jesse was not even refining his materials. All the waste and lost potential caused the mother of all headaches in him.

It was the height of arrogance that his was the only craft in all of existence that did not require refinement. While he saw no flaws in his materials, he was using sand not glass to make windows.

Now let’s move on to how human Jesse could get. The answer was a T-shirt, some excuses, and black smoke would get the job done.

Jesse’s entire body was a map of scars with the largest being the thick scars covering where his chest mouths used to be. He also lost his beautiful, luscious hair. So sad. In its place was a scalp full of scars. Such a downgrade.

The left side of his neck, his left shoulder, and some of his chest were covered by thin black chitin with a silver vein pattern.

His left shoulder, including the scapula, was covered with thin metallic feathers colored a molten orange.

A series of interwoven thin branches and white flowers made its way up his spine.

His left shoulder blade had a circle of rotten flesh.

The last of his mutations was that the entirety of his upper back, barring the places already taken up, was a stony white with several white gems imbedded inside it.

With all those beauty marks squared away, Jesse made a sweep of the rooftop grabbing everything that could maybe be of use for rebuilding. Cause Jesse was going to rebuild and be better than ever. He had learned the hard lesson that the world had been trying to hammer into him for a while now. His hardware was obsolete, and it was time for an upgrade.

Artifacts:

[Disparate Unity]

Materials:

[Nascent Energy Vampire Progenitor Mantle (Remnants)]

[Empowerment (Remnants)]

[Frankenstein’s Lightning (Remnants)]

[The Black Wasp Jackal’s Face (Remnants)]

[Emotive Fire]

[Emotive Ice]

[Time Seed]

[Olivia’s Friendship (Remnants)]

[Beastly Heart (Remnants)]

[Murder Weapon (Remnants)]

[Various Utility Artifacts]

[Various Articles Of Clothing]

[Death Dogtags]

[Leech Muscles]

[Leech Teeth]

[Chimeric Essence]