"You do not need to do anything," Ren said. "That part is mine."
He turned away from Wei Liang. Facing the wall, he dropped his hood back into place and let his face shift, not to Kael's features this time, but all the way back. His own face. Ren Hector's face, late twenties, reconstructed from perfect memory, the one that had looked across operating tables before any of this had happened to him. He held it for a moment, making sure the reconstruction was exact, and then he reached behind his head with one hand, and a single red tentacle emerged from his back, curled around to his face, and held steady.
He pressed the tip of the tentacle against his left eye socket.
"Agh." His voice came out flat. "That fucking hurts."
He turned back around. The mask was back on his face, white and featureless. In the tentacle's grip was his own eye, dark and trailing fine threads of tissue, still faintly luminous with the red that bled from anything that had been inside him long enough to absorb it.
Wei Liang stared.
"Relax," Ren said.
The eye in the tentacle's grip began to glow. The red in it deepened, and then runes surfaced across the surface of it, fine lines that pulsed outward in slow regular beats like a second heartbeat. Then the glow spread, mist pouring from Ren's body in thin red threads, curling toward the floor and pooling there before drifting outward.
"What are you doing," Wei Liang said. His voice was steady. His body still could not move. "What is that."
Ren did not answer.
He crossed to Wei Liang in three steps, crouched, and held the scalpel from the Outer God Surgical Set in a second tentacle. The black instrument caught no light. He positioned it above Wei Liang's skull, angle exact, depth calibrated.
"This will hurt," he said. "I am telling you in advance because I find surprise screaming to be unpleasant."
Wei Liang had time to inhale once before the scalpel moved.
The incision was a single point at the crown of the skull, small and exact. The bone separated cleanly. Then the tentacle holding his eye moved, and Ren fed it through the opening directly into brain tissue.
"AGGHHHHH."
Wei Liang's body did what it had not done through the entire Awakened Anesthesia: it convulsed. Not because the paralysis had lifted. Because what was happening was happening at a level below muscle, below nerve, at the cellular foundation of what he was, and that level had never agreed to be still.
The convulsions ran through him in waves. His teeth clenched. His skin went the color of wet ash, grey and wrong, pulling tight across the bones of his face. His eyes, both of them, went red. The capillaries first, then the iris itself, the color bleeding inward from the edges until there was no white left.
His canines sharpened slightly, just past the point where they had been before.
Then everything stopped.
The convulsions stopped. The color stopped changing. Wei Liang sat on the floor of the abandoned house, grey-skinned, red-eyed, very still.
He reached inside his robe with one hand and produced a short dagger, the kind kept in an inner pocket for close-range emergencies. His grip on it was stable.
Ren went still.
System, he thought. You said they would be completely loyal. What the hell is this.
Just watch. It is not finished.
Wei Liang raised the dagger.
He pointed it at his own forehead.
System.
Watch.
Wei Liang drove the blade into the center of his own forehead.
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
The laugh that came out of him had nothing to do with pain. It rang off the bare concrete walls and the bare boards of the ceiling and went nowhere, contained entirely in the room.
He pulled the dagger out.
The wound in his forehead was roughly twelve millimeters across, and it did not bleed. It pulsed once. Then the edges of it separated, not tearing, opening, and from inside the wound something looked back.
An eye. Set in the center of his forehead, bloodshot and wide, the iris shifting through colors that had no stable name, red into gold into a green that was too bright and then into something that had no color in the spectrum Wei Liang had been born with.
"I can see," Wei Liang said. His voice was his own. The laugh was gone. What replaced it was quieter and more serious and completely overwhelmed. "I can see through everything. I have never seen this clearly. In my entire life I have never seen this clearly."
He lowered the dagger.
Then he folded forward, both knees on the floor, both hands pressed flat against the wood, his forehead nearly touching the boards, the new eye blinking slowly in the center of it.
"Thank you, Father," he said. "Thank you for giving me a second life. I will serve you with everything I have."
Ren looked at him.
The transformation was not what he had pictured. He was not entirely sure what he had pictured. Something less immediate, maybe. Something that did not involve a man stabbing himself in the forehead and laughing.
What, he thought.
What the fuck.
System. The skill description said the Abomination form is determined by the host's existing aura and body. Is this what that means.
Yes. The fragment intersects with what the host already is. Wei Liang cultivates Righteous Qi and has spent his adult life trying to see through what everyone around him refused to examine. His body expressed that as an eye. This is accurate.
I was not prepared for a forehead eye.
There was nothing in the skill that suggested you would be. You read the description. It said the form varies by target. You chose to find out what that meant by doing it. Now you know.
He stabbed himself.
The eye needed to open. He opened it. The method was efficient. I would also note that he seemed pleased about the result, which is more than most people can say after you operate on them.
Ren looked at Wei Liang, who was still in a full bow on the floor, the forehead eye blinking slowly at the wood grain, the iris cycling through colors that did not correspond to anything Ren had a name for. His grey skin had settled, already looking less alarming than it had thirty seconds ago, moving toward something that simply looked like a particular complexion rather than a symptom. The red eyes were the same. Not glowing, not dramatic. Just red.
The third eye was not settled. It looked like it was reading something.
"Father," Wei Liang said again, without lifting his head.
Ren's brow twitched.
He keeps saying that.
Yes. That is the loyalty architecture functioning as designed. He is using the most accurate word in his vocabulary for what you now are to him. I understand this is uncomfortable. I am not going to apologize for it working.
He is thirty years old. I am in my late twenties.
The skill does not check identification documents before bonding. This is a known feature, not an oversight.
He crouched down. The third eye swiveled to track him immediately, which was worse than if it had stayed still.
"You can get up," Ren said.
Wei Liang lifted his head. The two red eyes found the mask. The third eye sat at a slightly different angle in his forehead, its iris now settled on something between gold and a color with no name, doing what it apparently did, which was look through things.
"Your aura," Wei Liang said. "I can see it properly now. The Righteous Qi was always registering something it could not name. Now I can read it. You are not human. You have not been human for a long time."
"No," Ren agreed.
"And you are the one who will help me become strong enough to change things."
"That is the arrangement."
Wei Liang touched the forehead eye with two fingers, briefly. "It is a strange gift."
"Yes."
"I can live with strange."
System, he thought, the skill description said the form varies by target. I did not think it meant this.
You did read the description. It said the form is determined by the intersection of your nature and the host's body and aura. It said results vary per target. It said the unique ability would be unpredictable in form but always functional. Every single line of that description was accurate. He emerged grey, red-eyed, with a third eye that he opened by stabbing himself, and then he bowed and called you Father. I am not certain what additional warning would have changed your expectations.
Put your sarcasm somewhere it will not see daylight.
Noted. Moving on. Scan results?
Yes.
Scanning. Stand by.
The interface appeared in Ren's vision, and he began to read.