Shattered Sanity Volume 2 :- New Chains And Pain.
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The Journal Of The Imperial Anatomist.
Entry One
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As a child, I once attended a lecture delivered by Scholar Aster Valen, a man whose name has since faded from the memories of most historians and medicine enthusiast’s, although I have long believed that the world would have been a very different place had more people truly understood the significance of his teachings instead of dismissing them as nothing more than philosophical musings unworthy of serious scientific consideration.
I remember almost nothing about that day, nor do I recall the faces of those seated around me, the hall in which the lecture was delivered, or even the season during which I first heard him speak.
However, there was one passage that embedded itself so deeply within my mind that the passing of decades has failed to dull even a single word of it.
"Blood remembers what flesh forgets. The greatest limitation ever placed upon mankind is not talent, nor intelligence, nor perseverance. It is blood.
Consider the construction of a house. A house built from straw may survive beneath clear skies for many years, although the first powerful gust of wind may reduce it to scattered debris before its owner even realizes what has happened.
One built from hardened earth may withstand both wind and rain, while enduring hardship that would have destroyed the straw dwelling many times over, however, if there is ever a true thunderstorm, it will fail and fall.
Which is why, over the years, we eventually kept experimenting with materials, until we realized that houses made with stone, brick, and mortar endure for generations, and that they survive storms that would erase every lesser structure from existence.
In all three cases, the builder of the house can be the same, and so can the quality of the construction, however, in the end, the builder does not determine how much punishment the house can survive. The foundation does.
And in my understanding, mankind is no different.
An ordinary bloodline may only endure so much before reaching its natural limit, however, a superior bloodline may withstand unimaginable pain, unimaginable adversity, and still continue thriving simply because it was born superior.
Those blessed with divine blood do not become legends because they worked harder than ordinary men. They become legends because the foundation upon which they were born was one that ordinary men could never hope to replicate."
That lecture changed my life, as only then did I truly understand that Ascension was never the process of creating greatness, but rather the revelation of what one’s blood had always been capable of becoming, while every breakthrough thereafter simply uncovered another layer of potential that had remained dormant since birth.
For many years, I struggled against those conclusions, convincing myself that relentless study, unwavering discipline, and sufficient experimentation would eventually expose some flaw in Scholar Valen’s reasoning.
However, every historical record that I uncovered, every bloodline that I examined, and every corpse that I dissected only reinforced the same undeniable conclusion.
Men of ordinary lineage repeatedly reached ordinary conclusions in life, while those descended from beings of higher existence accomplished feats that should have been impossible by every conventional understanding of anatomy and Ascension.
My fellow Anatomists accepted those observations, although they drew a very different conclusion from them than I did.
Believing humanity itself to be fundamentally inadequate, they sought to compensate for its shortcomings by integrating stronger biological components harvested from Aether Beasts, replacing organs that nature had fashioned with organs that evolution itself had already perfected over countless generations.
Some replaced human hearts with those of Crimson Horned Basilisks, believing the immense vitality contained within those organs would grant their subjects greater endurance during Ascension.
Others implanted reinforced skeletal structures harvested from Mountain Colossi, while several ambitious researchers attempted to graft functioning wings, venom glands, crystalline eyes, and countless other anatomical structures onto living human bodies, convinced that the future of mankind lay not in preserving humanity, but in abandoning it entirely.
Many of those experiments succeeded, at least by the standards through which their creators chose to measure success.
The resulting subjects grew stronger, faster, and considerably more resilient than ordinary humans, while several even surpassed accomplished Ascendants despite never possessing remarkable bloodlines of their own.
However, strength alone has never been an appropriate measure of success.
The men, women, and children who emerged from those laboratories were no longer truly human, as every additional modification slowly stripped away another piece of the humanity they had once possessed until the distinction between man and beast became impossible to define.
In the end, society feared them, kingdoms hunted them, and history ultimately remembered them not as pioneers of science, but as the creators of monsters.
And so, I chose a different path.
If blood truly determined the limits of Ascension, then replacing flesh could never solve the problem, as no matter how extraordinary the body became, it would forever remain constrained by the foundation upon which it had originally been built.
The bloodline itself had always been the true prison, and so I devoted my life not to replacing the cage, but to learning whether its bars could be carved away one impurity at a time.
I spent decades pursuing a question that many of my peers considered fundamentally flawed, as they believed blood to be an immutable inheritance bestowed at birth, incapable of being altered by any means known to mankind. I, however, refused to accept that conclusion, devoting my life’s work to understanding whether desirable qualities within a bloodline could be promoted, undesirable qualities gradually negated, and inherited imperfections carved away until only the strongest possible foundation remained.
Although thousands of experiments were conducted upon blood, flesh, bone, and Aether itself, every failure ultimately pointed me toward the same conclusion.
The body did not merely endure hardship, nor did it blindly reject it. Rather, it adapted according to the degree of pressure imposed upon it, responding to carefully controlled adversity in much the same way carbon responds to compression.
Apply too little pressure, and nothing changes.
Apply sufficient pressure, however, and the material itself begins to transform, becoming something fundamentally different from what it had once been.
Carbon may first become a tiny cluster, while greater pressure still may eventually produce a diamond whose brilliance bears almost no resemblance to its humble origin.
The human body proved remarkably similar.
A body sheltered from hardship remains unchanged. A body subjected to carefully measured suffering, however, does not merely recover, but rebuilds itself stronger than before, gradually accepting changes that would otherwise have been impossible under ordinary circumstances.
The challenge was never determining whether transformation could occur, but discovering precisely how much pressure the body could withstand before adaptation gave way to irreversible collapse.
It was from that realization that I developed the process I chose to name Section Carving, a method founded upon the belief that bloodlines should never be purified through overwhelming force alone.
Instead, every imperfection must be carved away in measured sections, allowing the body sufficient time to stabilize, adapt, and rebuild itself before the next refinement begins, thereby maximizing the likelihood of success while minimizing the probability of complete systemic collapse.
However, for this method to succeed, the subject must also be of the highest grade.
Ordinary bloodlines cannot survive sectional carving.
The minds of common man shatter under such strain.
Their organs fail.
And their heart stops pumping.
Section Carving must only be done on individuals with divine bloodlines, as in the end, the foundation is something that can’t be changed.
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Today, at the age of forty-three, I stand upon the threshold of putting those theories to the test.
The years preceding this day have been devoted entirely to observation, calculation, and refinement, while every formula recorded within my notes has been challenged repeatedly until I could identify no further flaws within my own reasoning.
Thanks to the patronage of several influential noble houses within the Valdrak Empire, I have finally secured both the funding and the authority required to commence human trials, although I am acutely aware that such generosity shall not endure indefinitely should my research fail to produce meaningful results.
It is for that reason that I have chosen to maintain this journal.
Should Section Carving succeed, these pages shall stand as the complete record of its birth, preserving every triumph, every setback, and every lesson learned along the path toward perfecting the craft.
Should it fail, however, I hope this journal survives long enough to reach another Anatomist, one possessing greater wisdom than my own, who may recognize the mistakes I overlooked, improve upon the foundations I have laid, and ultimately accomplish what I could not.
Knowledge has never advanced through the absence of failure. It has advanced because each generation was willing to build upon the failures of those who came before it.
Whether history remembers me as the father of Section Carving or merely another misguided fool who spent his life chasing an impossible dream is of little consequence.
Only the results recorded within the pages that follow shall decide that.