Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Springtail

By the shores of the Witchwater Lake in the Heavenly Capital, deep beneath the earth in an endless abyss, a decayed figure slumped upon a throne built from the bones of thousands, draped in a tattered royal robe. The phosphorescent light of fungi retreated before the tide of darkness, which surged forth as a living thing, awakening bit by bit from the corpses and gradually filling the entire underground space.

A gentle rasping sound came, scales softly gliding. It approached the throne with docility, lying prone without a head, awaiting the king's command.

Yet the king remained silent, endlessly so.

Just as he had through millennia past.

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A faint thought rose from the depths of a passerby’s heart, leaping like a lively frog from a lotus pond into another mind, then again, and again.

It moved as swiftly as thought itself, skipping across the hearts of thousands in an instant.

Until it reached a desolate, uninhabited snowy mountain.

It leapt from a hunter’s mind, traversing the sparse life force there like current through a conductor.

Yet, deprived of human hearts to nourish it, the thought quickly faded.

At the final moment, it arrived within a wondrously sculpted ice cavern, jumping through the minds of a thousand more—resentful, tense, carefree, or open—until, in one final bound, it plunged into a coffin made of solid ice.

“Awaken, Zhang Liaoyuan. We have gathered all the catalysts.”

In darkness, a pair of sun-like eyes opened, blazing beneath the ice, and a tiny crack split the frozen coffin.

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Many ancient or otherworldly beings, stirred by Adonsa’s arrival, began to awaken, yet Adonsa himself now stood at a critical threshold between life and death.

He looked at his trembling palms, his muscles shuddering so violently that even speech was a luxury.

His skeletal muscles spasmed uncontrollably, every organ twisting and deforming, even his once-docile blood cells battering the vessel walls in a frenzy of mutation.

“Mutation…”

Yes, the true face of the second stage was mutation—endless, ceaseless genetic change.

In higher organisms, the mutation rate is between one in a hundred thousand to one in a hundred million, meaning a mutation occurs once every hundred thousand cells. Yet, with their gene mismatch repair systems, only about one to two hundred mutations accumulate per generation, most of which are inconsequential.

Prokaryotes, on the other hand, undergo a marked mutation almost every generation, for their RNA-based genetic material is inherently unstable.

But now, in Adonsa, every cell was undergoing hundreds of millions of mutations each moment. His entire chromosome set was in total disarray, the nucleolar region nearly devouring the entire nucleus, metabolism accelerating towards destruction.

It was as if billions of years of evolution had been condensed into this instant; every cell in Adonsa’s body screamed in both joy and agony, breaking free of their former bonds, savagely battling one another.

His once-unified body became a brutal battlefield, and Adonsa collapsed in convulsions.

So did all his clones—every one of them experiencing the same transformation.

At that moment, thousands of out-of-control clones lay scattered throughout the city, surrounded by curious onlookers.

None of them knew that the most terrifying thing in the world was slowly being born.

On the street, a woman convulsed as if in an epileptic fit, drawing everyone’s attention.

“What’s wrong with this lady?”

“She looks like she’s in pain.”

“Should someone give her mouth-to-mouth?”

As the crowd murmured, strange lumps swelled over the woman’s body. Suddenly, her eyes flew open, scarlet and ferocious, glaring around her.

Her atavistic cells endowed her with unmatched savagery. With a roar, she pounced on the crowd, tearing fresh flesh with monstrous claws.

Similar chaos erupted across the city—Adonsa’s clones were utterly out of control.

Arthur collapsed in agony, trembling. “Damn it, what is this…?”

Angus, sweating from convulsions, stammered, “Adonsa… it’s trying to evolve… No, this isn’t evolution at all!”

Even those who retained their original personalities—Arthur and Angus—could not escape the influence of the second stage and collapsed as well.

“Damn it, taking such a big leap—aren’t you afraid you’ll break something?”

“I don’t have anything to break,” Adonsa replied quietly.

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Arthur howled in pain as his entire arm suddenly swelled and, before his horrified eyes, burst apart, revealing masses of grotesque dark-red tissue pulsing in the open air.

These things were bizarre and shapeless, like a child’s wild scribbles or a chaotic pile of blocks, yet they were unmistakably the embryonic forms of new life.

Angus beat the ground in distress. “Our bodies are splitting apart… They want independence—they want to evolve into separate living beings!”

He, too, was terrified; his abdomen bulged as if something was about to break through.

Yes, mutation.

Adonsa gazed impassively upon all these aberrations.

Every clone now displayed hideous transformations—some were riddled with tumors, others sprouted strange limbs, and some even reverted into ancient life forms.

Some clones, drained of all ability, were dying, while others, driven by the wildness buried deep in their genes, hunted humans mercilessly, causing horror after horror.

But directionless mutation prevented these solitary cells from ever evolving a complete structure. Without intelligence, the cells had no means to repair their own frenzied genetic damage; their previous repair mechanisms were utterly deranged under the second stage’s influence.

To expect random mutation alone to produce true evolution was as fruitless as hoping a meteor would wipe out every scoundrel on earth.

Adonsa struggled to command the chaotic cells, trying to rein in the mutation—only to provoke even more violent backlash.

The unchecked mutations rapidly exhausted the limited nutrients and energy of all the clones. These cancerous tissues could not sustain the body, only devour life force endlessly, until all withered and died.

At this critical moment, the Bloodline Codex within Adonsa’s mind began to flip rapidly, equations, laws, and data flowing and deriving across its pages. Like a Rubik’s Cube, it spun and combined information, absorbing all mutation data and producing streams of filtered information.

Adonsa funneled every cell’s mutation data into the cube, the Bloodline Codex swiftly recording and formulating solutions at high speed.

For the first time, there was hope of controlling the runaway mutations.

But Adonsa felt his computational capacity waning; his vast power came from his clones, and now, with their mutation, it too was draining away.

The first dead, shriveled clone had already appeared, its body entirely consumed by redundant cancerous tissue, rotting away like a fish left out for three days the moment life fled.