A slow, dark smile carved its way across my face as I stared at the data flickering in front of me.
The silent blue status panel slowly dissolved into thin air, leaving me standing alone in the clinical dimness of the medical suite.
Even with the initial shock behind me, a residual, dull ache pulsed violently behind my temples. Managing two distinct streams of consciousness—a six-foot human body and a sub-microscopic entity—was like trying to play two different grand pianos at the exact same time with one brain. The sensory drag was utterly exhausting. My physical eyelids felt as heavy as lead plates, and every breath I pulled into my human lungs felt thick, warm, and sluggish.
I turned my head slowly, my human eyes fixing on Lina, who was sleeping soundly under the soft, rhythmic glow of the life-support monitors.
Her pink hair was scattered like silk across the white pillow. Under the faint light of the monitors, her face looked so fragile, so pale, yet deeply serene. In my past life, back on the cold, asphalt streets of New York, I had lost her in a heartbeat—a flash of blinding truck headlights, the screeching of burning rubber, and then absolute darkness. I had spent what felt like an eternity drowning in regret, tormented by the promise I had failed to keep. Now, by some impossible miracle of fate, she was here in front of me again.
Leaving this room right now was completely out of the question. Despite Chief Vane clearing the perimeter and taking Arthur and his loud-mouthed mob into custody, my paranoid instincts refused to let me put a single thick wall between us. In a world overrun by martial masters, magic powers, and scheming academy factions, safety was a fragile illusion.
I won't lose you twice, Lina, I thought, my chest tightening with an overwhelming, possessive warmth. Not to Arthur, not to the academy, and not to this fucked-up world.
Pulling a heavy, plush armchair over to the very side of her medical pod, I sank into the cushions. I reached out with my human hand, letting my fingers rest gently on the cool glass of her capsule, right near her resting hand. I leaned my head back, closed my human eyes, and let my breathing settle into a slow, rhythmic crawl. I forced my main physical body into a state of deep rest, intentionally dialing down my physical awareness while shifting ninety percent of my mental focus directly into my second body—the Bacteriophage Clone.
In an instant, the quiet, air-conditioned room vanished. The soothing hums of life-support machinery died away.
Swish. Thump-thump. Swish.
The roaring, rhythmic deluge of my own human cardiovascular system exploded into my senses. To a creature less than two hundred nanometers in size, my bloodstream wasn't just a quiet vessel of liquid—it was a terrifying, violent, cosmic highway.
I opened my microscopic vision, and the sheer scale of it nearly sent my mind spiraling back into a wave of severe vertigo.
Towering, crimson moons—my own red blood cells—tumbled past me in the golden-hued plasma like massive, smooth asteroids gliding through deep space. White blood cells, gargantuan and amoebic, drifted along the endothelial walls like slow, terrifying leviathans, constantly sweeping the terrain with chemical receptors that radiated a faint, electrostatic pressure.
Fascinating... and absolutely terrifying, I thought, a wave of profound awe washing through my dual consciousness.
I flexed my six protein tail fibers, feeling the subtle, mechanical twitch of my microscopic appendages. I was currently anchored to the outer membrane of a vessel wall near my heart, where the current was slightly dampened. But just standing there wasn't going to teach me anything. If I wanted to master this body, I had to learn how to navigate this chaotic inner universe.
I unclasped my legs from the collagen fibers and let the plasma current catch me.
Whoa!
The sudden acceleration hit my consciousness like a freight train. The fluid dynamics at this scale were wildly unintuitive. Water and plasma at the micro-scale didn't feel like a smooth liquid; because of surface tension, molecular viscosity, and Reynolds numbers, it felt like swimming through thick, turbulent honey.
A sudden vortex created by a squeezing capillary wall caught my tail fibers, spinning my twenty-sided crystalline head out of control. I tumbled wildly through the golden fluid, my microscopic vision spinning end over end. I caught sight of a massive, cratered disk of a red blood cell barreling straight toward me. At my scale, colliding with it wouldn't just knock me off course; the sheer kinetic energy of its mass would crush my structural integrity.
Panic spiked in my human mind, causing my heart rate on the medical monitor in the room to briefly stutter.
No! Calm down, Amar! Think! I roared at myself internally, wrestling fiercely with my six appendage fibers. You're a biotech engineer! You know how fluid forces work at the nanoscale! Don't fight the current—use the electrostatic charges!
I concentrated on the dark, icy energy humming within my crystalline capsid head. Firing the microscopic contractile sheath in my tail, I used it like a tiny, high-pressure jet to stabilize my momentum. At the same time, I tweaked the bio-electric charge on my tail fibers, using the natural negative charge of the nearby red blood cell to repel myself away from it.
BZZT!
The repulsive force snapped me away just in time. The giant crimson moon swept past me by a hairsbreadth, creating a micro-vortex that sent my tail spinning, but I kept my footing. I slammed my six leg fibers onto a nearby structural membrane, digging in deep until I came to a complete halt.
I hung there, suspended over the rushing biological river, gasping for mental breath.
I did it, I thought, a sudden surge of exhilaration cutting through my mental fatigue. I actually dodged it.
It was a strange, mind-bending feeling. In the macro world, my human body was resting quietly in an armchair beside Lina, barely moving a muscle. But in this hidden, microscopic frontier, I was fighting for survival against the natural currents of my own life blood.
I spent the next half hour experimenting. I learned that I couldn't move like a fish or a human. I had to move like a mechanical predator—using electrostatic repulsion to leap between cells, contracting my tail sheath to shoot through dense plasma pockets, and using my tail fibers to latch onto vessel walls with microscopic precision. Every movement required intense concentration, but with every successful leap, the heavy mental drag in my skull began to ease. My brain was slowly adapting to the dual-input reality, forging new neural pathways to handle my two bodies seamlessly.
Once I felt confident in my mobility, I unanchored my tail fibers and began navigating toward a quieter, low-velocity pocket near a cellular junction—a calm eddy near my upper respiratory tract.
Now that I had mastered basic movement, I turned my attention toward my clone's internal structure and true potential.
In my past terrestrial life, a bacteriophage was just a simple, unthinking biological machine. It landed on a bacterial host, injected its genetic material, hijacked the host's cellular machinery to replicate hundreds of times, and then burst the host open—a brutal process called lysis—to release the new wave of phages.
I concentrated on my clone's core, seeking out its dormant instincts. Immediately, the static blue status panel flickered across my microscopic vision, hovering seamlessly over the golden plasma landscape:
.................................
CLONE BODY (BACTERIOPHAGE)
Level: 1
Class/Rank: Z rank (Unknown??)
Active Bodies: 1
Genetic Mutation: None
Ability: Genetic assimilation (Passive), Genetic Hijack (Active)
Replication count: 1/1000000000
Evolution Level: 0
Evolution path: Locked
Evolution Requirements: To trigger First Stage Evolution & Unlock Talent Extraction, the host must build a Swarm Colony of 1 Billion Active Clones.
.................................
I stared at the floating text, my dual mind processing the staggering numbers.
One billion clones...
I let out a silent, microscopic laugh that echoed faintly in my human thoughts. Of course it wasn't going to be a walk in the park. A single, solitary phage couldn't just steal or copy complex martial talents like Lina's Dragon God aura right out of the gate. I needed a swarm. I needed a massive, terrifying microscopic army living in my system before I could unlock the true, world-shaking power of this Z-rank talent.
And to build an army of one billion... I need to start replicating immediately.
I unanchored my tail fibers from the vessel wall and kicked off, swimming out of the quiet eddy back toward the edge of the mucosal lining. I couldn't use my own healthy human cells for replication—destroying my own tissue through cellular lysis would defeat the entire purpose and cause severe internal organ damage. I needed an intruder. A parasite. A foreign entity.
I drifted along the outer mucosal layer for nearly twenty minutes, scanning the microscopic environment with my electrostatic receptors, searching for anything that didn't belong to my body.
Then, my sensory fibers picked up a strange, bitter chemical trail—a jagged toxin signature radiating from a nearby tissue fold.
Floating near a cluster of dead epithelial debris was an opportunistic intruder. It was a single, rod-shaped bacterium—a wild Streptococcus microbe likely inhaled earlier when the estate gate was broken down during the chaotic confrontation with Arthur and the police. To my human body, a single bacterium was utterly harmless, destined to be swept away by my immune system in a matter of hours without me ever noticing.
To my Bacteriophage Clone, however... it was the ultimate target.
The bacterial cell was massive compared to my tiny frame—a hulking, pill-shaped monster covered in thick, rigid peptidoglycan cell walls, lazily absorbing ambient nutrients from my plasma like a grazing beast.
A dark, feral thrill surged through my dual consciousness. My six tail fibers twitched with a deep, predatory instinct that felt entirely natural, almost intoxicating.
In the physical world, my human body subtly adjusted its posture in the armchair. My hand, still resting on the cool glass of Lina's medical pod, tightened slightly. Through the glass, I could see the soft, golden glow of her suppressed dragon aura pulsing in sync with her breath.
They think I'm weak, Lina, I thought, looking at her with my physical eyes while my microscopic clone locked its targeting receptors onto the floating bacterium. They think I'm just a useless, rich young master who got lucky. But while they train their martial arts and brag about their fancy elemental qi... I am going to build an army that no one in this world can see, defeat, or survive.
My six protein tail fibers flared with an icy, black light. Contracting my tail sheath, I shot through the viscous plasma, descending upon the floating bacterial monster like a silent, microscopic phantom executing its first hunt.