Chapter 387: The Acardi

Mid Morning - Late Fall : Acardi Laboratory | Siratha

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-Looks like everything is still working correctly...- Scanning through the field of cables with my aura while carefully swimming down to the laboratory's entrance, I cut my usual door into the hallway before changing to my humanoid form right as I came inside. *Flash* *tap-tap*

*Inhale* "Haaaah..." Letting out a satisfied breath, I looked back toward the entrance as Hera's colossal snout poked the barrier keeping the water out before changing to her humanoid form and coming through. *Flash*

*Tap-Tap* As the light finally subsided, two gentle taps echoed down the hallway before my eyes fell on a stunning, mature draconic woman with pale skin, long dark blue hair, and clothes adorned with gold that almost looked like armor, accentuating her curves while giving her an air of majesty that could only belong to a monarch. The only thing she was missing was a crown.

But the glow in her eyes was so youthful it made her look more like a princess than a queen. -I guess I should follow suit then...-

While she was occupied, I quickly tweaked my clothes to appear slightly more formal before I took note of her expression and gently set my hand on her lower back. "Don't clam up yet. You haven't even seen the cool stuff."

"Huh?" Immediately turning to look at me, I could see the countless thoughts ripping through the back of her mind. "Is this place really run only by that 'electricity' thing you tried explaining a while back?"

I immediately nodded as my smile warmed, and a gentle flick passed through my tail. "I told you electricity had many uses, did I not?" Motioning her forward, we started making our way down the hall before peeking into a few rooms to see the remaining, abandoned containment facilities.

"Wow... They really had all kinds of creatures stored down here..." Pausing to read one of the screens, she reached up and tapped it as if trying to scroll before I curiously tilted my head.

"Can you read their language? You seem familiar with it."

She gently nodded as she started reading the next screen. "If you don't know the language of your enemies, how are you supposed to get information out of them?"

She spoke incredibly bluntly, but in all honesty, it wasn't a response I expected. "Hm... I guess that makes sense..." But it made me wonder. "What did their race actually look like, by the way?" Although there was an image painted in my head, I wasn't exactly sure.

But as I asked, Hera paused to think. "Hm... I guess you could think of them like humans..."

My ears quickly flicked with curiosity. "Bipedal, soft-skinned creatures?"

"Haha, I mean like, if one was amongst a group of humans, they'd stand out, but they would still probably be called humans." Slowly walking to the next containment center, she paused to wave her hand to the side. "Actually, why don't I just show you..." *Vwoop*

Almost instantly, a wall of light magic appeared, depicting a man quite a bit taller than me, with a very muscular build and a grizzled look on his face.

"Their soldiers were quite tall, with the largest being a bit over two and a half meters tall, but the researchers were all much smaller..." The magic instantly flickered before a young man around my height appeared.

He was still fairly well built, but a little on the skinny side, and at best, he looked like an abnormally tall human. -At least that is if I don't look at his eyes...-

Instead of having normal, white eyeballs like the soldier, one of his eyes was replaced with a mechanical ball touting a lens of some sort.

"Did they all have modifications like that?"

"Hm?" Pausing to turn and look at her own light magic, she just looked confused. "What do you mean?"

"His eye."

"Hm..." She immediately paused. "I don't know if I could call them modifications, but yes." Quickly changing the image again, this time showing a man with mechanical hands and some sort of device on his head. "Depending on their job or purpose, they would have these weird.. 'modifications'..." Unable to find a word for it, she hesitantly used what I called them.

-But why is she so hesitant...- "What makes you want to call them something other than modifications?"

She immediately shrugged. "The mismatches were extremely rare, and while they look like metal, they were made of some type of bone, and seamlessly attached to their bodies."

"Huh..." -Interesting...-

From how I saw it, they looked almost like cyborgs. -Perhaps using cybernetic parts wherever it suits their profession...-

Considering they were the creators of an artifact that changed the genes of my entire body as a hatchling, extremely advanced genetic modification was possible as well. -But they do look eerily human...-

While closer to demihumans in terms of stature, they were undoubtedly human looking. "How much variation was there in things like eye or skin color?"

"It's hard to say..." She paused as she walked out in front of the wall of magic and waved at it, making the man vanish. "Most of the ones I killed looked like a cloud of dust afterwards, so." Shrugging her wings, she smiled, as if wanting to laugh before walking past me toward the hall. "I'm surprised you had to ask that considering you've explored so many wreckage though." Pausing, she looked back at me. "Have you not at least found a skeleton?"

Walking up behind her, I smiled. "Nope! But it doesn't surprise me too much." Seeing her tilt her head as we walked out into the hall, I continued with a somewhat annoyed tone. "From the data entries and stuff I've read, they seemed to be quite adept in surviving just long enough to get eaten by something..."

"Pft-hahaha!" She immediately burst into laughter. "That's so incredibly ironic." Seeing my confusion, she spoke with haste while trying to calm herself down. "S-So back during the war, we actually nicknamed them 'honeypots' because whenever they set foot outside a ship, all the monsters nearby would hunt them down. It was so egregious that we even followed wyverns to find some of their hidden defense installations and containment centers since they would hunt the Acardi down from hundreds of kilometers away."

"Haha, the world must have really not wanted them here, huh."

She quickly, passionately nodded. "Some people said it was the planet itself that signaled the wildlife to target them, but I still think it was something else." Looking over at me, she playfully tapped her nose. "Their smells were extremely distinct, so even if you were kilometers away from one of them, their scent would cut through everything else. Things with more sensitive noses could track them for some insane distances."

-How interesting...- "Was it a good scent?"

"Nope, not at all." She gave me a firm look as she shook her head. "It smelled almost like breathing air over acid would, but for most of the monsters here, the Acardi were easy pickings if they were away from their ships." Looking up at the ceiling light as we walked under it, her expression slowly darkened. "The issue was when they had their ships, anything under the class of an elder dragon would just get slaughtered like cattle..." She was clearly speaking on bad memories...

But as we came into the main room of the lab with the massive, glowing tube at the center, her gaze turned curious again.

*hhuuuummmm* Walking forward, I spoke casually toward the AI's tube. "How has the ETBM's update progressed?"

*Beep* It went to respond immediately.. but it didn't say what I expected. "Unable to operate with underqualified personnel in the room."

-Huh?- Glancing over at Hera, I saw the bright glimmer in her eyes before turning back to the AI. "Can I grant her appropriate permissions?"

"Indeed. Please register their mana signature at a computer."

-Perfect!- "Hera, come over here real quick."

Still staring at the glowing tube containing the AI, she hesitantly turned to start coming to me.

Gently moving the sensor toward her, I tried to shake off her hesitance with a warm look. "Just inject a bit of mana in here and it will register you in the system."

Somewhat nervously doing as I said, the computer instantly updated with an error message.

*Beep* "It appears that 'said user' is already registered in the latest update of the database. Their data has been marked as 'Maximum-Containment Research Subject', so I am unable to grant them any permissions. However, you may do so manually on any computer."

-What?- Hera immediately gave me an anxious look, but I was quick to try and calm her down. "It sounds like they registered you when you were still captive... Don't stress it..."

Quickly pulling out a chair and logging in, I asked the AI to guide me through the process before finding myself in a massive registry with more registries than I cared to count. -Holy shit there are a lot of people in here...-

It looked like an identification database, loaded with names, dates, and numbers I couldn't really make sense of, with at least a few billion entries.

"Your guest's registry number is one, nine, eight, seven, six, one, three. Allow me to find it."

*Flicker* The screen updated instantaneously before Hera's registry popped up.

It was a long document detailing everything from her name and estimated age, to scale hardness and inability to have children because of the heavy mana suppressing her body in the facility.

Leaning over the back of the chair, Hera and I immediately started reading it. -'However, it is likely possible that during evolution, if the eggs are purged in advance, and the reproductive organs are damaged, the eggs may regrow like how we observed with younger test subjects.'-

After reading it, a sudden light appeared in my eyes. "Does that mean dragons can have more than one clutch?"

Hera, leaning farther over the back of my chair quickly spoke while reading the report as well. "In rare cases... We spent quite a bit of effort in my era to try and figure it out, but we never did, so we just said it was impossible to do reliably.. but..." Reading the report clearly stated otherwise. "I wonder..." Pausing, she quickly tapped on my shoulder. "Change my permissions so I can ask the AI something."

Quickly continuing as the AI instructed, I found a panel on the report stating her permissions rank and containment breach protocol, which could be summed up to 'run for your damn lives until the mothership can assist', and edited her permissions to the highest I could give.

*Beep* "Permissions successfully updated. However, this will remain as a local change, as the main server is still disconnected, so please proceed with caution. If you reconnect the main server, it is possible to make the change globally."

-I need to ask more about how to do that while I'm out here...- But I had to save my questions for a moment.

The moment I updated her permissions, Hera spoke freely with the AI, hammering it with question after question related to the Acardi, and their study of life on this world, similar to the questions I had initially asked it.

But as time passed, her questions slowly shifted to their research itself. "What part of the female reproductive organ of a dragon needs to be damaged to reinstate a clutch of eggs?"

*Beep* "The ovaries. If they, with some of the surrounding tissue, are removed completely prior to evolution, colloquially known as a dragon sleep, there is a high probability that another egg will be produced with the reconstruction of the organ. However, the amount of tissue that needs to be removed largely depends on how old the dragon is."

Hera's excited look quickly calmed. "What do you mean?"

"Within the ovaries, there is something called the bicordial gland. It produces a chemical that turns into MSC1, a protein that strengthens the genetic makeup of the eggs and repairs defects, but it comes at the cost of permanently damaging the ovaries and surrounding tissue after the production of an egg. If the entirety of the damaged tissue is removed and rebuilt from nothing, the ovaries will naturally produce another egg, but if the surrounding tissue is still damaged and the organ repairs itself from it, the damage will remain and no egg will be produced."

Quickly turning to me, Hera's eyes gleamed with a fiery passion I didn't know she had.

"Haha, what's that look for?" Understanding how to drastically increase Bahamut's population was indeed something to be excited about.. however.. her gaze felt more predatory than excited.

"Oh, it's nothing." Slowly turning smug, her tail happily curled back and forth.

"How ominous..." As a warm smile came to my face, I looked at the joy in her expression and felt myself relax. -Who knew that 'big and scary' monarch had a cute side to her...-

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