Rowan opened his eyes, and he saw the flesh around him was beginning to turn gray. He did not have one hour, he barely had one minute. Yet he had to survive a year before he could access the mental space of this body and with it, connect to the remnants of his own.

The portion of him that was alive at this time was a fragment of his overall being, and without access to his mental space, Rowan was nothing but a mortal with a dense consciousness. In any other situation, this would be annoying but workable, but not here where he was at death’s door.

The words Old Man Seed spoke to him a while back returned,

“I ask only this of you. You don’t stop moving forward, there is a weight to power that few in creation can bear, and nothing is heavier than the powers of the Prime…. Nothing! You shall be tested beyond what you think possible, your mind and body taken to the limits and beyond that limit, only for you to discover that beyond your limits was just the starting point of this road.”

“You shall break, again and again, painfully and in ways you cannot comprehend Romion, no number of words can show you just how much you shall hurt, and I expect you to pick up the pieces of yourself and rebuild it stronger than before while knowing that the torture would never end…”

And then he had whispered,

“…and when the pain gets too much when the weight becomes something that your mighty back cannot endure for a single moment more, I shall ask you to add more load to it. I have asked you this before and I will ask you once more. Can you do that Romion, can you take the load that no one else in creation can carry?”

R

‘Can I take this load? What a dumb question… hahaha. Who am I without the load I carry?’ Rowan grinned, his mouth opened in a toothless facsimile of a smile, and he began to laugh aloud, but in this place where there was hardly any air, the sound was like a wheeze.

“Watch me…”

An infant, and one that had not even reached the appropriate time to be born had no reason to be able to speak, but he did, and the sound was frightening.

This world had spent enough time knocking him down, and Rowan did not doubt that there were more tribulations ahead, but he had endured enough, it was time to take the battle to it. His disadvantage had always been a lack of information, but he had experienced enough to pick up traces of the overall state of this new reality, and since Rowan now had a foothold in this world, he would no longer be denied his prize.

At first, Rowan had been content to harvest what he needed from this place and leave. This was no longer the case. This world had drunk his life twice, it had brought him to the brink of death and beyond, Rowan was no longer satisfied with a minor harvest, he was coming for it all.

His deep introspection to find his Mental Space was also the chance for him to truly understand this body, and for Rowan, knowledge was power.

His consciousness was weak, but the body of this infant was weaker, and getting feebler by the seconds. The dozen parasites in his eyes had laid their eggs, and the multitude inside his flesh was propagating. In a while, even the constant stream of vitality entering the flesh of the infant would fail before this onslaught.

Rowan’s consciousness retaliated. These parasites in his body were vicious, able to infect, propagate, and consume their host, but ultimately they were mindless, their tactics guided by instincts alone.

It was a simple thing for Rowan to transform a small portion of his cells and allow them to be consumed by the parasites. These cells after being consumed took over the genome of the parasites in his body and rewrote it to fit his needs.

These new parasites were a thousand times more dangerous than what they previously were and they turned around and attacked the unaffected parasites, spreading his manufactured genome into their bodies, in a short while his body heated up and cooled rapidly before heating up again as his insides were transformed to a battlefield.

The body of the infant began to twitch and then convulse, from every pore in his body, even from the umbilical cord tied around his waist, tens of thousands of tiny red worms emerged.

Although the parasites in his body were diverse, these new ones all belonged to him after they had killed and transformed every invader in his body. The last of the worms slid out of his eyes and Rowan opened them.

Directing a portion of the parasites to the bodies around him, they began to infect and consume the few active cells and parasites within them, and instead of creating more copies of themselves, they began to create air from the things they consumed.

These parasites were linked to the cord around his waist, and Rowan stopped his act of trying to breathe with his lungs as his blood was now being oxygenated.

The rest were focused on consuming and replicating, and in a short while the tens of thousands of worms had reached a hundred thousand and their number kept exploding.

Free from fighting these invaders, Rowan set his broken bones, waiting for the stream of vitality to heal his injuries, idly noticing that the process was getting stronger.

Something was happening that was leading to this growth in vitality, but without access to his mental space and a weak consciousness, he could not tell what was happening. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Rowan finally stood on his feet after thirty minutes.

He tested his balance. A child was not meant for walking, even the act of standing was already putting an excessive amount of pressure on his spine and crushing his internal organs, as they had not developed the right amount of musculature and internal systems to handle the weight of their organs.

Rowan called back eighty percent of the parasites, and like an army of red, they flooded towards him and entered his opened mouth, and then they began to dissolve, transforming into nutrients and other essential building blocks necessary for the growth of life. Channeling all of this to specific parts of his body, he began to grow his body, from that of an undeveloped fetus to something stronger. He did not change anything about the body’s genome, the growth was following a natural path, albeit one that was greatly accelerated. The strain on the body of the child was minimal, Rowan’s understanding of life, especially that of a mortal, had reached perfection, and before long, the fetus was bigger, now closer to the body of a one-year-old.

Rowan stopped growing the body at this stage, to survive inside here, he would have to keep the body small. This would ensure his limited energy stores could be used more effectively, and his future plans required a small body.

With green skin that was glowing with health, and a small mop of red hair escaping from his scalp, Rowan stamped his feet, and this time they were steady.

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“Now, I have taken my first true step in this world.”