The Fusion Monster Race

Yin Shen did not care in the least who became the next King of Wisdom. He paid the trilobite men any attention at all only because of Redlichia, and only because Redlichia was their king.

Upon the altar he seemed to have turned to stone in earnest, sunk deep in thought.

A single pause in consciousness, a drowsy blur of half-sleep.

Outside the temple the sun rose and set, rose and set again, and yet time and its passing years no longer held any power over him at all. They were a breeze slipping through his fingers.

Once, he had thought a hundred years an almost unbearably long stretch of time. Now, it felt like no more than the blink of an eye.

He had lost all sensitivity to time, and he understood at last that he was no longer some short-lived species whose life ran out before a hundred years.

He was a being who could swim upstream against the current of time itself, standing above the great river of passing years.

"So I am no longer human either. I have not been for a long time now."

"What am I, really?"

There was no answer.

He looked toward the Fusion Monster Shelly, seated beside him. So much time had passed, and still she looked exactly as she had at the very beginning.

Yin Shen could sense that she would simply never grow old. However many years it might take before age so much as touched her, the number lay far beyond anything he could imagine.

He pressed a hand to Shelly's cheek, and tilted her chin upward.

Yin Shen looked into her green eyes.

"Why do you never grow old?"

Shelly would never answer him. He could only ask himself, and answer himself.

"Is it because your power is life itself?"

"Or because your Blood of Myth lies somewhere different within you? Or does it stem from something else entirely?"

Since the blood of myth alone had been enough to give him one more anchor point, it followed that more anchor points could be made from it as well.

He even found himself wondering.

A few myth-like cells were enough to grant someone extraordinary power. A few drops of the blood of myth were enough to turn someone into a myth-born life.

With enough of this Mythical Matter, could he not build a body able to hold him, and descend into this world once again?

Now that he had a direction to pursue, Yin Shen took the next stage of his experiment forward inside the temple, drawing on the power of the fusion monster's shell.

This time, he was no longer making ordinary life, but life born of myth, possessed of extraordinary power.

The mythical shell filled with warm seawater, a vast womb nurturing life after life within it. Yin Shen took out every strange, misshapen creature he had made before, and set new life growing inside it instead.

Failure was the norm. Success came only once in ten million tries.

But even as he made new life, he uncovered some of the secrets of the blood of myth.

The power and authority carried in Redlichia's Blood of Myth and in Shelly's were entirely different from one another, and yet the two overlapped in places.

The blood of myth could not be destroyed. It was a substance that existed almost eternally, much like Yin Shen himself.

Beyond passing down to the next generation, it lingered on inside the corpse even after death, until the body rotted and broke apart at last and scattered it into the earth, the sea, and the air.

The power and authority of Redlichia and Shelly could be passed on to others through their bloodline. The blood of myth divided and multiplied whenever new life was successfully born, though only a small portion of it ever split away, and only at the very start of that life. Once a life had fully formed, the process stopped and the blood settled into its shape.

But even now, he had yet to succeed in making a single life that inherited myth-like power. The difficulty of nurturing it naturally, he supposed, must be even greater.

Finally, one day, Yin Shen completed his experiment.

Through the glowing, translucent surface of the shell, several hard spheres could be seen drifting up and down in the water within, brown as stone.

Shelly stood beside him, bending down to peer into the shell.

Gurgle gurgle~

It seemed she could sense that the power within those brown embryos sprang from her own. With no more than a thought, she could command them.

She was their progenitor.

Which was to say, the King of the Fusion Monsters.

Yin Shen stood before them, watching closely as these myth-born lives prepared to emerge.

"Did it work?"

He shook his head. "Only half of it worked."

He had made new fusion monsters, but he had found no way to let them inherit the full power of Shelly, the very wellspring of their strength. All they had gained was a small, weak fraction of it, the part called fusion, and none of the power to create life.

These new fusion monsters could fuse with other lives, stealing their organs and their gifts, and they possessed a power that was almost impossible to destroy. They were difficult to kill.

But they could not quite be called immortal.

Once every few centuries, they underwent a cycle of rebirth.

Every ordinary cell in their bodies was wiped away, leaving only the myth-like cells, which fell back into an embryonic state and began to grow all over again.

First they died. Then they were reborn.

But once it had grown again, it was an entirely different fusion monster, one that bore almost no relation to what had come before.

Only the King of the Fusion Monsters at his side truly held power and authority that could neither die nor be destroyed, much like Redlichia's own authority as the King of Wisdom. Within this line of Mythical Blood and power, that kind of strength could exist in one alone.

Yin Shen raised a hand, and the embryos broke free of the shell and flew out of the temple.

Screech~

The object tore through the air, letting out a piercing shriek.

The stone ripped through wind and wave, and plunged into the sea.

Hatching. Birth. Growth.

All of it happened in an instant.

One after another, terrible giant beasts with shapes almost wormlike thrust their heads up out of the sea and roared at the sun hanging in the sky.

After the trilobite men, the fusion monsters too had become a race of their own.

By the sea, a white-hued trilobite woman tumbled through the water like a fish, and turned to look back toward the shore. "Yesael, hurry up and jump down here!"

"Sister, I'm coming down!"

Yesael stood on the huge stone, then leapt into the swamp with a cheer.

His sister dove down with him into the depths, chasing after the shoal of fish.

When they surfaced, each of them had caught an Ancestral Fish.

"Look, quick!"

"It's such a big one!"

Yesael was thrilled to have caught so big a fish, and happier that his sister had come fishing with him.

His sister told him, "There are bigger ones than that out in the sea. Father once caught one bigger than this rock, with claws longer than you are tall."

"God said so!"

"That's called a bizarre shrimp."

A longing look came into Yesael's eyes. The deep sea called to him, and all those places no one had ever explored or reached.

The ocean was so mysterious, so dangerous, and yet the longing it stirred had no limit.

He wanted to go and see that distant place for himself, to conquer the deep sea that every trilobite man feared.

Beyond that boundless sea, was there a land a thousand times, ten thousand times larger than the God-Given Land?

The noon sun blazed overhead, dazzling beyond measure.

At the edge of his vision, a few blurred black shadows streaked beneath the sun and plunged into the sea.

The sight caught the attention of many trilobite men along the shore at once, Yesael and his sister among them.

"What is that?"

Boom! A massive shape burst up out of the sea's surface, and the water exploded apart around it.

A terrifying monster roared upon the surface of the sea. Its dreadful form and overwhelming power filled Yesael's eyes.

While the other trilobite men cried out in terror and fled the shore, Yesael stared at the monster without so much as blinking.

If he had power as strong as that, he thought, he could surely conquer the sea.

He could sail to the very end of the sea, and go find that legendary continent at last!