An eternity of agony passed on. Rui had no idea how much time had passed since the commencement of the evolution procedure. His internal clock had completely been shot thanks to all the pain, and even metabolic phenomena were no longer reliable because of how much his body was rapidly changing. Due to that, things like hunger and thirst were no longer reliable indicators of how much time had passed since he had consumed any food.𝔬𝓥𝐿xt.𝚌𝑜𝗆
The procedure didn’t have a defined time limit. This was because everybody had different physiologies and metabolisms that caused the procedure to require different amounts of time to complete successfully.
The psychological effect this had on him along with the pain was not light. It placed an immense burden on his psyche. It wasn’t easy maintaining absolute mental fortitude in the face of an unknown amount of agony. This was despite his superhuman mental fortitude by virtue of his mind growing twice and him being a Martial Apprentice. He felt as though if he was an ordinary person he would have lost his mind by now, or at the very least be afflicted with severe PTSD
He gritted his teeth as the pain shifted to different parts of his body within him over long periods of time. He could even vaguely sense which parts of his body were undergoing the evolution process. After the evolution process was done with his bones, they moved on toward his abdomen.
(‘My digestive system?’) He wondered, through the pain.
He knew that the process acted system by system. If the pain was inside his abdomen, then there were a limited number of options it could be. By narrowing down all the possibilities, by eliminating possible systems that didn’t match up with the place he was experiencing pain in, he could more or less figure out which parts of his body were undergoing the evolution process at any given time.
He gasped as his throat felt like it was burning. He felt like he had gotten the worst sinus infection that could possibly afflict a human body. Every second, he was in absolute agony, struggling to breathe as he felt like he drunk a glass full of concentrated acid.
Thankfully, his lungs and trachea were perfectly functional, otherwise, he would be completely unable to breathe at all.
Time passed on and on, as he gritted his teeth, keeping track of the pain as it shifted after long periods of evolution.
From the digestive system to the circulatory system. His very veins and arteries underwent slow and delicate evolution. The process had to be deliberately slow, otherwise, the system would take too much damage and he would die. Blood supplied oxygen and the necessary nutrients to every cell, without which cells would begin dying within a minute.
The pain didn’t spread across all veins and arteries at once. Instead, it focused on one section of the circulatory system at a time. This made it easier to lower the risk of death during the procedure. The circulatory system was one of the most vital systems of the human body.
The pain traveled across his body step by step. Despite being focused, the net agony he experienced wasn’t less. If anything, it was even worse. The fact that it was hyper-focused merely meant that the pain was hyper intense.
He would rather have a little less intense agony spread across his body than an abysmal amount of pain coming from a singular location.
An unknown amount of time passed and the pain shifted from his circulatory system to the left side of his chest.
“AAAAAAAAAARRGGHRGRH!” He bellowed in pain as he felt his heart melting. He didn’t even need to employ any amount of deductive reasoning to know exactly what part of his body was undergoing the evolution process.
His heart.
Or more accurately, his cardiovascular system.
Had Rui not been under a tremendous amount of pain, he would have wondered whether the filtration processes for the circulatory system were the same as the ones for the cardiovascular system. After all, the two systems were so intricately connected. He had no idea whether the two were even considered to be distinct in the field of biology of Gaea.
An enormous amount of time passed as the remaining systems also evolved over a long period. The renal system, the endocrine system, the lymphatic system, and the exocrine systems quickly followed suit.
One by one, they all evolved one after the other.
Until only one organ was left.
The brain.
Or in Rui’s case, the brains.
Rui certainly pondered how the process of evolution would be affected by the fact that he has the Mindmirror Symbiote inside his skull. Thankfully, Squire Gunther had touched up on it. Symbiotes had an extreme amount of survivability, thus they were rarely in danger of dying due to the evolution process, which would affect the DNA of the Mindmirror Symbiote.
Thankfully, the Martial Union had made it a rule to develop the evolution process for each of the symbiotes that it offered to its Martial Apprentices, based on its DNA.
Thus, each of the symbiotes had its own customized evolution process. This included the Mindmirror Symbiote. Rui would be the first Martial Apprentice to be undergoing the procedure of the evolution of the Mindmirror Symbiote.
This had been a little scary but at the end of the day. There was nothing he could do about it. All he had to was wait and have faith in the high competence of the researchers and doctors of the Martial Union.
However, he had counted down and kept track of all the bodily systems that had evolved, and he knew that the most difficult part of the procedure was here.
The evolution of the brain.
This part of the procedure was the reason that normal humans couldn’t be evolved. Only the brain of a Squire candidate could possibly survive the procedure and ascend to a higher form of life. And he would be taking that final step now.