Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day

Chapter 498: Men And Curiousity [I]

You have no idea how elated I was.

The applications of organic matter manipulation were practically endless!

Sure, I couldn’t directly hurt any man or beast capable of wielding Spirit Force. I couldn’t just touch an A-ranker and make their body explode, for example.

If I wanted that, I needed to overpower their Spiritual Pressure with my own.

So I had to wear them down until even their instincts couldn’t maintain the protective layer of Spirit Force surrounding their body.

In simple terms, my new power wasn’t particularly useful for direct confrontation. But, on the other hand, the utility potential was insane! Insane!

Because if I could shape organic matter, it meant I could shape my own organic matter!

My own flesh!

That alone had made killing me so much more difficult because I had gained a pretty strong regenerative factor.

As long as I wasn’t immediately decapitated and blown apart, and as long as the damage was not done to my soul, I could recover from almost any physical injury.

But this was still only scratching the surface.

Because if I could manipulate inhuman flesh as I did with my graft, then I could manipulate the flesh of any lower-ranked Spirit Beasts.

And that opened up an entirely new set of theories and possibilities.

For starters, I could probably mold the flesh of any weaker Spirit Beast to my liking.

Claws and fangs, scales and horns. If I found a beast with useful traits, I could integrate those traits into my own body. It would be the same as getting more grafts, only this time the foreign flesh would truly be a part of me.

I confirmed this theory by morphing my left hand into the vampiric limb that used to be my right hand.

Yep. This confirmed it.

Once I understood the properties and structure of a particular piece of organic matter, I could reproduce it to change my own body any way I saw fit.

The implications of that were staggering. I could make claws, fangs, wings, gills.

Even entirely new organs, provided I understood what they were supposed to do and had enough biological material to work with.

Actually…

Why stop at living creatures?

I could manipulate corpses, too. Dead flesh was still organic matter.

And if my understanding was correct, then the fact that something was dead didn’t make it any less malleable.

That meant the corpses of Spirit Beasts were fair game. Even high-ranked ones.

But of course, it wasn’t all so easy. I wasn’t all-powerful. While I was definitely unbound by the restrictions of my flesh now, I was still bound by the limitations of my soul.

I’ll try to explain it in simple words.

You see, a creature’s soul and flesh were intrinsically connected on a deep, metaphysical level.

The flesh was the vessel and the soul was the blueprint. Or, to put it more accurately, the soul was what gave the flesh its limits.

Every living creature had a natural threshold determined by the strength and quality of its soul.

That threshold dictated things like how much Spirit Force its body could withstand, or how much physical strain it could endure before breaking down.

That’s why Spiritual Pressure was called the pressure a soul exerted upon reality. As your soul grew in rank, it grew in size and power. And so grew its weight on reality.

That weight was what the Spiritual Pressure was.

Anyway, I’m digressing.

Basically, there was a reason why Soulmancers like my aunt were needed to create grafts.

It wasn’t enough to simply attach the flesh of one creature to another.

The foreign flesh had to be convinced that it belonged to its new host. That was the difficult part.

Otherwise, the graft would reject the host, decay, mutate unpredictably, or be a fashion accessory without any of its original properties.

A Soulmancer could manipulate the soul directly, forcing the foreign flesh and the host’s body into harmony.

But with my new power, I could simply hop over that process. I didn’t need to convince the flesh that it belonged to me. I’d just change the flesh itself.

I could alter its structure until it naturally conformed to my body’s existing blueprint.

So what was the problem? The problem was my soul.

Even if I could turn my arm into the arm of an S-rank Spirit Beast, my soul wouldn’t magically become S-rank just because my flesh did.

And if the flesh of an S-rank creature was capable of withstanding forces my soul wasn’t, then sooner or later, my own Spiritual Pressure would become the bottleneck.

The body could only go as far as the soul allowed.

Which meant I couldn’t go and turn myself into some unstoppable abomination by stacking the strongest traits I could find.

My soul was still the ceiling. No matter how powerful I made my body, I couldn’t make it withstand forces beyond what my soul could support.

And there was another problem.

The problem of energy.

I could reshape flesh all I wanted, but biological matter didn’t come from nowhere, right?

Let’s say I wanted to grow a pair of wings.

I’d need the material to make those wings. If I wanted to regenerate a missing limb, I’d need mass to replace the mass I had lost.

My own body could provide some of it, but there were limits to how much biomass I could redistribute without… you know, crippling myself or something worse.

In other words, I couldn’t just keep making myself bigger and stronger for free.

Matter was still matter. Conservation of mass wasn’t something I could simply ignore.

At last, there was the risk of messing up my body. I still only had one body, you know?

What if I tried modifying something and accidentally rearranged something important?

What if I misplaced an artery or changed the structure of an organ and forgot one tiny detail?

What if I created a new muscle but attached it to the wrong fucking bone?

I could die. Or worse, I could become brain-dead!

I didn’t have a medical degree. I also wasn’t some master anatomist who had done hundreds of experiments on the human body.

“Actually,” I murmured while molding my right arm back into its previous form. So now I had two sets of grotesque vampiric limbs. I flexed all twelve of my fingers a few times before reverting both arms back to their human shape. “It would do me good to experiment on others. I’d learn a lot about how to safely manipulate human anatomy on a much deeper level and get a lot of practice in that way.”

Yeah. Human experiments, always such a fun way to spend an afternoon.

But jokes aside, maybe I’d get some chances in the upcoming war.