Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

Chapter 366: Operation: The Improved Elaine III

The days flew by as I continued to work on my project.

Muscles were next. The first part was the design, and A Collection of Useless Organs and Muscles, and Proposed Forms and Functions, along with notes from old biomancers who’d worked on the human system in the past were invaluable.

Humans had a few useless muscles. Occipitalis Minor. Palmaris Longus. Pyramidalis. Latissimus Dorsi – although I just flat out didn’t have that muscle. The Plantaris muscle in the leg brought back some fond memories – almost half the students in my anatomy class had misclassified its tendon as a nerve!

While not quite a muscle, humans also had extra focal fat mounds on the torso, where nipples might’ve gone if elvenoids had more than two mammary glands. Similarly, humans had what I was calling ‘whisker anchors’ on the face.

I drew those in bright yellow, marking them as something I was including for the moment, but was unsure about. There were distinct pros to including tiny, nearly invisible whiskers on my face, along with significant cons. I was planning on tackling that more when I got to the senses.

The muscles themselves were a bit of a curious mix. I’d gotten it hammered into my head that insects were a terrible basis, and the only reason they were able to perform so well in a mass to weight ratio was they were so tiny. Trying to scale their muscles up to human size always ended in disaster.

I’d looked for other places for inspiration instead, and the notes of biomancers past came in handy. After checking their work, cross-referencing different designs, and just plain looking them up on my own, I ended up with an interesting mix of giant, vampire, and elven muscles over the majority of my design, with some minor centaur inspiration on my legs.

I’d done some research on fast twitch versus slow twitch muscles. My natural inclination had been to make nearly all of my muscles fast twitch. Those were the quick, strong muscles without staying power or endurance. [Sunrise] would fill in that gap! Whenever I started to flag, whenever I got tired, I could just use the skill to energize myself, giving myself the best of both worlds.

The problem?

It didn’t work.

Unless I went deep into screwing with my muscles, and only let my body grow fast-twitch muscles, I’d just equalize back to however I used them. I’d only done medium research on how to ‘fix’ my muscle ratios before realizing I’d need to make uncomfortable sacrifices in other areas. I didn’t want to need to rely on mana to run for more than a few minutes either – I’d spent too many years working on my physical fitness to nuke that.

The other aspect worth noting was when I examined myself with [Elvenoid Visualization], most of my muscles were slow-twitch. I was built like an endurance runner, not a sprinter.

I was willing to listen to my body on this one.

I hadn’t forgotten that I was also helping Iona improve her body, and her main focus was on power and maintenance. I ended up with a similar mix on her design, sacrificing a hair of performance to let the body know that, no, she didn’t need to degrade her muscles if they weren’t always in use, while also drawing them as large and as compact as I reasonably could. I leaned a little towards fast-twitch muscles for her, while still keeping a strong layer of slow-twitch muscles.

Hey, if I could help my girlfriend skip literal years of bulking at the gym, why not?

I estimated that she might be able to lift almost 1,000 lbs before stats kicked in once I was done. She’d need a similarly reinforced skeleton, but I was going light on the rest of the modifications. Mostly because I needed to do it ‘right’ on her – no cheating with skills! – and I was already making some changes to accommodate the skin changes she wanted. Otherwise, she’d be human, through and through, on everything else.

Just like she’d requested.

I then needed to work on connecting the muscles to the bones themselves. The design wasn’t entirely the same. There were small, subtle modifications that I made, allowing for increased performance. Like athletes of old, from Earth. The material was the question. There were a dozen creatures with different and interesting tendons and ligaments, although arachnids consistently floated to the top, and they were the most-represented ligament used in the notes of other biomancers I’d found, although they only made up about a third of total ligaments used.

They were a tough, black material that could stretch and twist, while being practically impossible to break. Like a biological spider silk.

I briefly entertained the thought of having some way to generate and sell the material in bulk. Some sort of cow, with enough internal organs rearranged to make the spider silk?

I started to doodle the design when a cold wave of terror washed over me.

At best, I was designing a chimera, which the School would expel me for.

At worst, I was designing a new species, which the Inquisition would take a dim view of.

Okay, if nothing else, I needed to replace biomancy with something else before I became tempted to… experiment. I knew enough to be dangerous, and potentially invite divine disfavor.

It’d suck if Iona got marching orders from her patrons to eliminate me.

I crumpled the paper up, then incinerated it myself with Radiance. I’d take getting yelled at for starting a small fire in the library over potentially getting smited.

[*ding!* [Anatomical Drawing] leveled up! 19 -> 20]

“Only” drawing in safe conditions didn’t exactly promote rapid leveling. Better than nothing!

The heart was the last muscle, and it was special in more ways than one. To start, it had its own muscle type, and it wasn’t easy to modify the heart without considering the arteries it was connected to. Everything in the body was connected.

My musings and logic on a second heart had never been fully refuted. I’d heard strong arguments against it though.

Primarily, the heart was there to move blood around the body, and blood existed to provide nutrients to everything. The critical one was oxygen.

My primary heart was located near my lungs, and if my heart got blasted to pieces, there was a strong chance my lungs were also in serious trouble. No lungs, no air repository for blood to grab and continue circulating with.

There was also the massive drop in blood pressure I’d experience with a blown heart, but the blood-related modifications should help.

The thing I was hoping to do with the second heart, if it came to that, was to keep pumping the remaining thick blood – I had plans for that – around my head, dramatically expanding the amount of time I’d remain conscious, and able to extract myself from the latest monster trying to kill me.

Nor had I ever found a reason not to use a second heart. The first one was in my chest, and my second one I located in my lower abdomen, right near my belly button.

It sucked that I couldn’t protect it with a second rib cage, but I’d lose too much flexibility if I did. Gut punches were going to hurt more than before, but I’d have a second heart. Didn’t matter if someone cored me like an apple, and somehow stopped my healing. Heart number two was there to save the day!

Normally, rapidly dropping blood pressure would be a major issue after getting cored. The blood would just… drop right out of me, like someone splitting a barrel of mango juice in half, and with how blood pressure worked, it would leave my head and brain first, causing me to pass out.

The modifications I was making to my blood would make that a long, slow process, letting my brain remain oxygenated long enough to make a difference.

I’d thought it would be super cool if I had two different hearts, but that logic rapidly fell apart. There was an optimal heart configuration, and it’d be foolish not to take it.

Two leviathan hearts, sized down to fit inside my body, was my heart selection. While I didn’t have the size ratio of a leviathan body-to-heart, I had shenanigans planned for my blood that would make it difficult to pump. It roughly balanced out, but I’d need to start running extensive calculations once everything was in place to properly balance everything.

One tricky one I dreaded was the relative oxygen uptake. Both second chambers needed to pump blood to the capillaries around the lungs, then both third chambers needed to reuptake the oxygenated blood, before the fourth chamber pumped the blood around the body. Except the different hearts had different volumes to handle, but the same circulation to work with, and the third chamber had the same problem.

I marked the problem in red. I needed to work with Marcelle on this problem. None of my research into other animals had similar systems to work off of. At best, creatures with multiple hearts tended to have dedicated gill-hearts, on top of main circulatory hearts.

Speaking of gills – the math behind them didn’t work, not with the other modifications I wanted. Lungfishes had been good inspiration, but the size and ratio constraints, along with my planned shenanigans, had made gills a net loss of oxygen.

Gills worked by osmosis. They exposed oxygen-poor blood to water with high oxygen concentrations, and let the oxygen pass through.

My blood shenanigans included taking inspiration from beaked whales, of all creatures. Part of the reason whales could dive for so long was they used their blood as an oxygen repository. The rest of my shenanigans were around the exact composition of blood, along with the red blood cells. Hence the unicorn marrow. While I was modifying the composition – technically, I would be modifying the bone marrow to produce what I wanted – I cut down on platelets and eliminated white blood cells, increased red cell production, and cut down my plasma as hard as I felt I could. My blood would be thick and sluggish. It wouldn’t want to clot easily, nor would it be good at fighting off diseases. It was going to be a harsh strain on my hearts to pump. Which looped back around to why I’d wanted leviathan hearts. They were strong enough for the demands I wanted to put on them.

My blood was another area where my skills came into play. My own healing would handle cuts and injuries – I hadn’t had a scab in years, no matter how many scrapes I got into. Similarly, I purged my body of any disease or toxin the moment I was infected. Designing an immune system that worked, and didn’t attack my own body, would require huge amounts of work, and force me to make performance compromises in other areas I didn’t want to.

I wasn’t entirely axing an immune system, that’d be stupid. But I was only going for a basic, simple front-line system, like what crocodiles had. I didn’t bother with an advanced system like gnomes. Nothing I ever got hit with ever reached that part of my immune system in the first place! The only thing it could do was make mistakes and attack me.

Best of all, I’d only need the smallest trickle of mana – a few points a day – to keep everything running properly.

It wasn’t pure upside. If I ever got entirely cut off from mana, if a powerful canceler got to me and held me in their grasp for days or weeks on end, I wouldn’t be able to fight off any infection that made it past my meager front-line defenses. At the same time, that was just a pointlessly elaborate way to kill me. Anyone that could keep me powerless, with no access to mana for weeks on end, was strong enough to kill me anyway.

There was a minor concern about getting trapped in the fae lands for years on end again, but I was determined not to let that happen.

There wasn’t a single fairy tale that involved anyone getting so much as a cough while in the fae lands. Disease worked differently there, just like everything else.

Artery and vein design was up next. This one I was practically writing from scratch. The circulatory system was an excellent example of ‘good enough’, nowhere close to an optimized design. Vessels looped all over the place, came too close to the surface in some areas and crossed organs awkwardly in others.

None of that here.

The main vessels were designed close and tight to bones, while steering clear of joints that might pinch them shut. I arranged an extra artery to go to the circle of vessels at the base of the skull, wrapping near the spinal column. I was overengineering a bit here – I was confident that I could heal a slit throat, and even if I was prevented from healing, the extra oxygen in my blood would keep my brain working for dozens of minutes, instead of seconds, and that was before my redundant brain plan came into play.

I did cheat on drawing the capillary design. Plain and simple, they needed to be everywhere. It was a given.

I’d investigated a few pseudo-heart designs, but none of them worked well enough to incorporate. They came at a performance cost, and didn’t add anything. I didn’t want a blood cushion in my feet like a horse, as interesting as it sounded.

For the arteries and veins themselves, thunderbirds happened to have a fantastic design, although rocs were a close second. The magnificent birds subjected themselves to some of the highest forces of all the creatures I’d studied in Zoology. The Museum of All Things had a wonderful set of them that I could study, and I was anticipating more than a few trips to the Museum once I had my designs set to properly examine and [Analyze Organ] every piece I wanted to use.

It was possible that another creature had better veins, but if there was, I didn’t know, and no biomancer had ever made a note of it. The same was true of most everything I was doing. I’d never studied the thousands of different species of flies, for example. I simply had to trust that I was standing on the shoulders of giants, and that what they had brought forward was the best.

I wanted to continue onto the torso-related organs, and I cursed as I immediately needed to redo my circulatory system design. I needed additional blood-brain barriers. I needed to reroute an artery to go through the singular kidney. I needed to… do a ton.

Biomancy design was an iterative process. I debated redoing the circulatory system now, but decided against it. I’d see what other compromises and redesigns I needed to do, and make multiple all at once.

The brain came first. I’d studied mine extensively, and I knew for a fact – my brain was screwy. I didn’t pay attention properly, and bounced around more than normal.

It was also me. If I wasn’t bouncy and flighty, was I even Elaine? Who would I be if I did extensive brain surgery, all in the name of becoming ‘better’?

Heck, there were advantages to being bouncy and flighty. My attention snapped to different things more easily, I made decisions faster.

I didn’t know who I’d be, but I knew I wouldn’t be me anymore. I wasn’t touching my brain, even though I knew my norepinephrine was deficient. Or maybe my dopamine.

With all that said, I was willing to clone my brain, and create multiple ‘backup’ brains throughout my body. Very, very small backup brains, with as little as possible to ‘count’ as a brain. I was going to play this carefully.

The only thing I needed the backup brains for was to count as “still alive” if my head got obliterated. While I was “still alive”, [Persistent Casting] was active, and it would regrow my head, keeping me alive.

If my head got obliterated with [Persistent Casting] off, that was it, game over, I was dead.

The worst-case scenario was each brain would spin off into their own person and consciousness, and there’d be five people in a single body. Even worse would be if each one gained their own unique System.

That would be one hell of a mess, and I drew red skulls all over the diagrams to MAKE SURE I’d double check this with Marcelle, and anyone reading my notes in the future would know what I was looking at and thinking was dangerous.

The best-case scenario was all the brains seamlessly integrated together, multiplying my thinking and processing speed by five, while removing my vulnerability to headshots entirely. Indeed, getting decapitated would only cost me a fraction of the mana to restore, as I could simply regrow my head, as opposed to needing to regrow my entire body!

Best case, of course.

The backup brains I was a little more willing to be… experimental… with. I didn’t need sensory processing, for example. I did need a brain stem to connect to the rest of the nervous system, along with higher functions.

It frankly terrified me to make the proposed changes.

As for storage? I just knew I was asking for trouble with everything I wanted to cram in my body, and my torso and head were already stuffed. There wasn’t a lot of storage space left in my body. The only thing I could modify were some of my fat stores, and to hollow out a small cavity for a miniature brain. Places close enough to my spine to cleanly hook up into the rest of the nervous system.

The more I looked at my diagram, the less I liked it. I did not want to carve out some fat in my butt to store extra brains.

I hunted down two fat textbooks on brains, and started reading. After three days of research, I had a tentative solution.

I could rearrange the pseudo-brains to be more like braided rope, and thread them through my torso. I’d go down to two extra brains, but that would have to be enough.

Brains led to nervous systems, and drawing the nerve diagram was just as fun as everything else had been. It did give me a chance to fix issues such as the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve, which started at the brain, looped down around the heart, and went back up to the voicebox. For no good reason.

I got seven strokes into the nerve diagram before calling it quits. I needed the rest of the organs in place before I could start hooking everything up together. I’d just leave the nerves trailing off the brainstems for now.

I did want to use kirin nerves, and I was going to ask Reinhard if she’d be willing to give me a hand with that. [Elvenoid Visualization] wouldn’t work on her, she wasn’t an elvenoid. I didn’t need to dissect her or anything… just… chop a few pieces off, heal her back, and examine the bits I’d chopped off. Much better than an old sample from the Museum!

On second thought, she might not be too willing to let me study her. I put a star next to kirin nerves.

I’d also have to loop back to the bones, and make sure they properly stored the elements required for nerve transmission.

It never ended!