The Martial Unity

Despite the greater difficulty and the complications associated with her strange biology, Ria managed to return her to the moment of death. Ultimately, she wasn’t relying on her knowledge of biology exclusively; she was also relying on the information that she had gathered using her father’s technique, the Angel of Laplace. This made it easier for her to fill in the blanks whenever she ran into a problem she didn’t understand.

Eventually, Misha’s dark skin grew richer and lusher, growing more supple and moist, as a living person’s skin would be. Ria gently guided her cells and molecules to the starting point of life, triggering the same metabolic kickstart that she had done with Runark.

She beat her heart. She made her breath. She forced her blood to transmit oxygen across the body, and she forced cells to accept the oxygen and to conduct the chemistry of life.

BADUMP

BADUMP

BADUMP

”Huff…” Misha inhaled, causing Ria to heave a sigh of relief.

Like Runark, her brain quickly became autonomous and brimming with neural activity. Even though her neurons had been dead for longer than Runark’s had, far too little time for neuron plasticity degeneration to occur, preserving the essence of her memories and her mind.

Two bodies that had been corpses were now back to living beings once more.

”I can do this…” Ria grew more and more certain. ”I can undo what has happened. I can make it all go away!”

She eagerly moved on to her next two friends who had died earliest, Sternon and Siliscia. They had died within seconds of each other, and had been dead the longest. Their bodies had also been torn apart, rather than just wounded.

Weaving the pieces of Siliscia back together had been a very traumatizing process for Ria. But she gritted her teeth and made it through the entire way, restoring their bodies in whole.

With Siliscia, there was the Inner Realm for the Nature Path with the internal flora tissue that she had that Ria had absolutely no idea how to deal with. Sternon’s biology was easier to deal with, even if his cell structures were very different from the cell structure of any other race.

Regardless, the bit of experience she had gained with Runark and Misha helped her understand what needed to be fixed, what could be fixed, and what couldn’t. She didn’t need a way to figure out what to do with the elven biotechnology that Siliscia had in her body. Once she revived her, the elves would undoubtedly be able to heal her.

The same was true for Sternon.

Once alive, the path back to perfect health was wide and ample.

The most important part was to heal the core functions of their body.

Everything else was secondary.

Thus, she cut through the unnecessary complications, eventually restoring the vital systems of their body and a large swathe of the cells in their body back to the brink of life.

And as she had with Runark and Misha, she kick-started their metabolism across their entire body. She beat their heart, she pumped oxygen into their lungs, she forced blood to circulate across their body.

She did so with the confidence and certainty of success.

It had worked out with Misha and Runark, then it would surely work out with Siliscia and Sternon. Yet, when she transmitted the oxygen to her the neurons in their brain, nothing happened.

Unlike with Runark and Misha, their brains didn’t light up.

There wasn’t a surge of neural activity. Neurons didn’t fire and right, and the brain didn’t boot up the way a fixed computer would have.

Instead, there was simply silence.

She gritted her teeth, trying again. This time, she was more deliberate and heavy-handed. Literally using her electromagnetic tractor beams to force molecules to undergo the chemical reactions that she wanted of them. She forced the oxidation of ATP molecules, getting them to release energy that she then guided the systems of the neurons of her cells.

And yet, while the cells worked like they were supposed to, the system did not.

Neurons didn’t fire electrical signals along neural pathways.

The system of bioelectricity that constituted consciousness simply didn’t work.

”No no no…” Panic crept into Ria’s amber eyes as her expression grew horrified. ”No, this can’t be. I must be missing something!”

She was confident that she had gotten all the information about their biochemistry at the moment of death. Her Martial Body was an extremely potent sensor, and she had deployed some of the best information scrubbing techniques to gaze into the past. On top of all the information that she had already gathered on her friends’ bodies.

She gritted her teeth, trying to force neurons to deploy electrical signals along neural pathways. And certainly, while she exerted effort, she could detect electrical signals flashing about.

But the moment she stopped to try and let the brain take over, all activity died down.

The neurons remained alive momentarily, but there was no system of bioelectrical signals flashing across the web of neurons in her brain.

There was simply silence.

”Why…” Her voice was shaky. ”Why isn’t it working? I had everything just right! It should work!”

What was she missing? She browsed through all of her memories regarding the mind, skimming through all the information she had stored in her neural inlay, trying to figure out where she had gone wrong.

Most of the information she had on the mind and consciousness in her neural inlay didn’t help her.

That was when she remembered a recent conversation she had had with her father after returning to Gaia Prime.

’Consciousness is integrated information, Ria,’ he had told her. ’It’s an emergent phenomenon that doesn’t exist independently. It’s not empirically measurable. It’s fleeting, and it’s a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.’

Her conversation with the Psyker had also touched up on similar notes and had conveyed to her just how abstract consciousness really was.

When she applied that knowledge to the situation she was in, the truth finally clicked to her.