36 A Sea Adventure And A Spear Boy's Experiment
(Cao Cao POV)
After leaving Luke to get chewed out by his dad and then simultaneously hugged by his mom, I went on a bit of a side quest for myself. Because you see, I entirely did not expect Luke, of all people, to immediately swear loyalty after doing one nice thing for him, so I decided to grant him another reward, the return of his greatest friend, Thalia Grace.
And while I could use my rooms to get her out of the tree, I wanted to analyze the Golden Fleece that is in the Sea of Monsters, and all it took was a couple of minutes flying over the Atlantic Ocean to reach the Bermuda Triangle.
After arriving in its vicinity, I now understand why gods avoid this place as I could feel my authority weakening, but a moment before my essence is killed, creation says no such thing.
It seems that this part of the ocean has some kind of divinity weakening field, which makes it the perfect place to hide from the gods, and as I decided to have some fun, I summoned a ship and created it using materials from the Land Of Shadows.
And when a person can summon clones of himself that he can control and loves to sing a certain type of song when on a ship while sailing the sea, this shit happens.
'I thought I heard the old man say."
"Leave her, Jonny, leave her."
"Tomorrow ye will get yer pay!"
"And it's time for us to leave her."
"Leave her, Jonny, leave her!"
"Oh, leave her, Johnny, leave her!"
"For the voyage is long, and the winds don't blow."
"And it's time for us to leave her."
Yeah, I may have also bought a singing skill for one thousand LP, but after these three weeks, my LP stores had risen back up to 31,104,000, and I am tempted to buy the next rank for LP generation at fifty million to make his LP per second go from 4 per second to eight per second as each successive purchase multiplies it by two times.
I can tell Cato and Celestine are having fun as, ironically enough, they were also fans of music. What makes it even better is that one of the other users was actually a pirate during his time, and while he never accessed the balance breaker, he did manage to unlock the spear itself. Wow, to learn that what I was singing was quite popular back then was an experience.
Cato even saw the old pirate shed a single tear as he remembered better times. But the song with my clones was interrupted by two rather rude monsters as Scylla and Charybdis had noticed me trying to enter.
And wow, were they ugly as one was quite literally a living whirlpool, and the other was a sentient giant squid monster who was once a lover of Poseidon, which gave me an idea,
Looking at my other clones, they dove into the water to lure Charbdis out of the sea as I flew up to the cave where Scylla waited for my ship to get closer. But as she saw me approach, the multiple living serpents that made up her body drooled in anticipation as she smelled my scent.
"You are a fool to approach me so easily. Do you not fear death?" The multiple mouths ask, to which I ready my spear and blitz toward her.
"Death can have me when it earns me, and I will not go quietly into that night just yet." My response seems to anger her as she tries to bite me with her multiple mouths as I experiment with a trick I have been trying to use with my spear.
As I use my observational haki and instinct, I devotedly weave my way through her multiple mouths. I stab my spear through one of them and de-summon it other than the spearhead, leaving it stabbed into her mouth.
The pain and presence of the spear cause her to writhe in agony as I proceed to stab her 12 other heads. The last one that actually holds her personality and mind screams in pain as I re-summon my spear and slam it on the ground, which causes the 12 spearheads to explode in holy light.
The explosions are small so as not to cause permanent damage but deadly enough to blow the heads clean off, and as she falls to the ground, I use my runes to bind her against the walls of the cave. As it was time to let my inner mad scientist out.
Walking up to her, I see the fear growing in her eyes as I then heal her wounds.
My actions cause her to pause as she asks, "Are you healing them? Why?"
"It's simple. I am going to try an experiment with you, and whether or not it succeeds depends on my success." My statement causes her to sigh in hopelessness as she stopped struggling.
"If you wish to finish me, then do it! I will be not harmed again by another god again !" Her screams echo through the cave as I begin to form runes on her skin, attempting to reverse the nostrification process done to her by Amphitrite, the wife of Poseidon, for when she fell for the god of the sea, his wife, realizing his infidelity, punished her by poisoning her bath with cursed bath spices and salts that made her a monster.
When Poseidon returned and found the woman screaming in fear of what happened and begging to be turned back or forgiven, all she found was disgust and apathy.
Poseidon sent her here to keep his shame from the eyes of the gods. By the time the news came out of what happened, it was already too late to turn her back lest they risk the ire of the god of the sea and earthquakes.
But I am not afraid, and besides, it is a good way to test my progress in runecraft. When I gave both my eyes to the Tree of Life, it granted me not only the known runes but also the ability to learn more than that and evolve my practice.
The best way to compare this magic to reality is to think of runes like coding and reality like a blank cyberspace ready to be filled with infinitely expanding numerations.
As I look into her being using my all-seeing eyes, I see the monsterification had overridden her human aspects and replaced them with corrupt code like a virus of some sort. Using my eyes and runecraft, I spend an hour in that cave while my clones have fun with the sea beast Charybdis.
I wonder how that is going? I sometimes like to disconnect myself from my clones so that they return to the normal means that shadow clones exist there and become aspects of my personality, but I was able to alter the jutsu using the essence of the archmage to make sure that they could never truly betray me.
Hearing the roar of the beast outside I smile seeing the clones riding the beast's multiple sea serpent heads. It is a bit odd as it looks like Osial from Genshin Impact and my clones were riding on the living water beast's heads like a horse.
All five heads tried to shake them off as the clones rode them, but as the heads went to collide with each other, my clones jumped off, and, using sorcery, they sent the beast into the mirror dimension for further study. Honestly, I am thankful that these beasts exist with PJO scaling for the most part and not DXD scaling other than for specific monsters and titans.
Or maybe they were stronger but faded with time and lack of presence in the current mortal world. It seems the degradations of time are truly frightening indeed.
Cato then asked (Cao Cao, what are you trying to do exactly? This beast is no longer human unless you are testing some kind of new technique?)
Smiling to myself, I see Scylla not even looking at me as I carve more and more runes on her, but her regenerated heads keep trying to bite at me, to which I simply bind them using chains of holy light.
I then began to use my magic and pseudo divinity from my authorities to try to rewrite the code, and as runes flowed from my being in waves and attached themselves to her, they began to burn on her skin as she screamed in agony, but I then use my other hand to use healing and numbing holy magics to keep her calm.
The code within her tries to resist me, but the strength within the curse has faded with time as my runic codes overwrite what was there.
But I am not attempting to get rid of her monster form entirely but to allow her to use it as a separate form while being human, similar to what Zeref did with Irene in Fairy Tail, but hopefully lacking the disadvantages of not being able to taste food or even feel.
Eventually, the initial pain makes her consciousness fade as her hands go silent with my clones in the mirror dimension having fun with Charybdis as they use human magic to create a spell made to absorb water into a pocket dimension and blast the water at each other.
Yes, my others are using water from a living water beast to blast each other with high amounts of water. I may have gone insane from all the training, even with madness and mental resistance.
Or maybe I was always insane, and I just didn't know it?
Intrusive thoughts aside, I also check on Luke as due to the oath he made with me, I can see how he is doing from afar, and while his emotions are in turmoil, his inner pain is slowly cracking as his healing begins. Let it be known that I would take in broken people, but I shall fix them my way.
Such is the way of the Brotherhood as while our work may have to take us into the dark, we would have each other to help pull us out back into the light.
But while I think such philosophical thoughts, I feel my mental barriers being pulled on by Scylla as I see memories flashing of her life as rearranging the code has seemingly made her memories begin to have a pseudo-bleeding effect.
This does make sense as I am quite literally rewriting her very existence from the ground up, yet as I refuse the memories, I refocus on my work as I do not need more baggage during this process.
Fixing this monsterification process is like trying to debug a very old computer that runs on dial up, and Comcast Internet. Simply put, it is very slow, but I also have to be very precise with this, as one mistake may cause irreparable mental and soul damage.
Yet as my work shows fruit, I see the heads beginning to fade into yellow sand, and her once reptilian to dragon-like features recede, revealing red hair and a rather buxom figure because DXD body logic is a thing. We can't have women without huge tits in a world like this, can't wait we?
The process takes at least three hours of painstaking precision, and I am only able to do this thanks to Solomon's crest and knowledge of biological manipulation. His knowledge of how he created his demon pillars is rather meticulous, to say the least. Even now, I have not unlocked all of his knowledge, and even at the basic level, there is so much.
Yet as the scales fell away to reveal human skin and rather naked human skin at that, I summoned some clothes sadly without using the clothes beam from DBZ, but as they attached themselves to her, I placed her against the wall of the cave.
At this moment, I have created a monster and human hybrid, and she herself is special as she technically has a form of immortality. As long as people know of the monster Scylla, she can always exist, at least in this universe; if she were to leave, all she would have is her infinite lifespan as a monster.
But I can still kill her using my abilities as a campione since she technically is a Divine Beast, but I wanted to see how this goes as the fleece and its life magics can wait for now as I see her wake up.
And as she wakes up, I begin to say, "Hey you, you're finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into a monster ambush, the same as me and my clones here." Sadly, my reference goes unnoticed as she looks at herself and falls unconscious again.
Oh, this will be fun to explain to Scathach later.
