Fighterman481

Hey all, letting you know that towards the end of this chapter there are some descriptions that get decently mature, after the second line thing. I know I already put a gore warning on the series, but there hasn't been much yet so I figured it'd be best to remind everyone!

Mae busied herself with her preparations while her mistress was looking over the changes that had been made to them. While she loathed to break her rhythm for even a moment, there were still things to do, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. Her little leveling session had started with picking a Class and while she didn’t really want any of them but one, she took a few precious moments to obtain each class and then immediately reset it and grab another, just so her mistress would count as “the first” to have the Class if she ever wanted it. Once she had finished, she settled on the Mathematician Class. The overview given by King’s Knowledge showed some tantalizing Skills, and its secondary experience gain condition was simply to solve math problems, with more difficult problems granting more experience. That meant it would be simple and quick to level up, especially as she was able to skip straight to the really hard stuff with her Omniglot Skill.

Which brought her to the main point of her endeavor. She had found that her mistress was sorely underutilizing certain abilities, and she was going to remedy that. The first big area they could improve in was Omniglot. That was an absurd Skill, and it was being used as an automatic translator. She had to admit that was a valid use of the Skill, but that was like user a supercomputer just to perform the job of a handheld calculator – wasteful. People communicate with each other in a lot of different ways, and as such the Skill applied in a variety of ways that might not be immediately obvious.

For instance, as a code breaker. What’s the difference between a code and a language? Not much – they both communicate concepts in ways others can understand, it’s just that one has a lot fewer people who “know the language”. But even that is still just scratching the surface. Technical jargon is just another way of communicating a concept, so logically that information would somehow be “translated” as well, even if it’s just making it so that she understood whatever was being expressed to her.

And those were the “concrete” uses of the Skill. Music, math, body language, anything a person could use to communicate concepts is caught by the skill, making it quite the asset if used correctly.

And while it may be unassuming, math was probably the most valuable of the aforementioned ways of communicating – most scientific disciplines trace back to math in one form or the other, and the basic way the world operates can be broken down into simple math. If she was right, that could be used and abused to a ridiculous extent, if she had the proper hardware for it.

She didn’t. Yet. She’d look into fixing that later, but she was saving that for when she had the Skills and knowledge to make that work. So, for now she had just focused on getting Mathematician leveled up. Calculus and experience from Siph had skyrocketed the Class level, at least until she unlocked the Skills. The Skills were quite handy, as training them would also train the Class if she did it manually. Aside from Computation, the Skills would result in a slight drop of experience to the Class level as she wouldn’t be solving as difficult of problems, but that was fine.

When training the Skills, she didn’t bother actually using any of them (once again excluding Computation), as they were simply too slow and wouldn’t contribute to leveling Mathematician at all. So, instead she just mentally asked Omniglot for a way of expressing the angle/speed/force applied to an object, and dutifully received a formula for that, which she would proceed to solve. Rinse, repeat, level up. Soon, she maxed out Mathematician, and decided to hold off on picking a new Class to let experience pile up in her storage while she leveled her Skills.

For the Skills themselves, speed was her priority. There was no point in using a Skill that was slower than doing it normally, and while she couldn’t get the time down to instantaneous with just the Skills, she could get them pretty close. That was really just a side benefit, though. The main benefit was the Skill King’s Knowledge was telling her it’d give her if she would hold off on evolving them right away and got the Savant series of Skills all maxed out. Namely, it would fuse the Savant Skills and Computation, and tie the efficiency of the Savant Skills to how much faster Computation was making them.

It was called Eye of Laplace, and Mae was practically salivating over the possibilities. She was fast now, but give it some time for her to get the proper hardware? The Skill would live up to its name, that was for sure. Still, that was a way off, right now she was waiting.

Kali was busy getting some equipment for her, and she had sent her mother off on a killing spree to get a feel for just how much experience she would be getting from that. After she had a good enough idea of what the experience rate would be like, she would be comparing it to her current rates to decide whether or not to switch to the next Class straight away or store up experience in Mathematician and just blast through the Class in one go.

She was leaning towards switching sooner rather than later, though. She already had a decent amount of experience stored up, and even if she would take a slight dip to her Class experience, the Skill experience would more than make up for it.

Her reverie was interrupted by her mistress calling for Kali. She gathered up the instruments Kali had left behind and took over the spare avatar, moving it over to a table and placing it there before returning to her body. She went over to the door and opened it slightly, putting Kali within visual range of her telepathy. May I resume work now?

“Yeah, go ahead.” Her mistress said, and she shut the door, smiling. She selected a scalpel from the tools gathered and advanced on the spare avatar, slicing it open without a trace of hesitation. She poked around inside for a few moments, identifying bones, sections of muscle, organs, and other viscera until she got a notification telling her that she had unlocked the Biologist Class.

The Skills were nothing special, but that wasn’t what she was aiming to get from this Class. Well, at least not in the short term. Perhaps they could become something better later down the line, but that wasn’t the point. What she was aiming for was Arcanobiologist and Parasitologist. Mostly Arcanobiologist, but if she was right Parasitologist would prove itself invaluable as well.

She quickly reset Mathematician and picked Biologist, her stored experience enough to catapult her level into the mid-thirties. She instantly dismissed the messages she received upon doing so; none of them were worth the time it would take to look through them, and she had a good enough idea of what they were anyway. Species Identification would give her the species name of whatever organism she was looking at. It was pretty useless, although she was guessing somewhere in its evolutions it would let her look into the organisms Racial Classes as well, which she had to admit was tempting. Still, not a priority. Behavior Analysis allowed her to better intuit the lifestyles of organisms – how they hunt, sleep, mate, anything in that vein was fair game. Another Skill that had potential in its evolutions but was pretty useless to her now.

Dietary Advisor would just let her figure out what foods would be good for the thing she’s looking at. Barely worth consideration. The only Skills that actually held some immediate promise were Organ Identification and Diagnosis (Minor). Organ Identification would let her figure out what an organ is and what it does and could probably be used as a sort of weak-point targeting given a little practice and an evolution or two. Diagnosis (Minor) was the big one, giving her a ballpark impression of the current HP of what she was looking at. It was horribly inaccurate at low levels, but it was certainly better than nothing.

After taking her new Class, she resumed the dissection of her own…corpse? It was still alive, she had made sure of that. It would be frustrating to have to get her mistress to make a new avatar after every single autopsy, and she had a lot of autopsies to go. Fortunately, Eldritch Abomination provided a lot of ways for her to keep that body alive, and it barely took any effort to use if she knew what she was doing.

A few levels later, she was satisfied in her progress, and transferred herself into the avatar. She had disabled the pain receptors in it during her first shift, allowing her to transfer her consciousness into it whenever she wished. It wasn’t something she would do to the main body of any of the Parallels, pain being too important of an indicator for her to safely ignore, but in a situation where she knew exactly what was going on it was little more than an annoyance. She quickly transformed the avatar into a rabbit before once again exiting and resuming her dissection.

Her mother…her thought process derailed for a moment. “Mother” was now too much of an ambiguous term for her. She needed a way to specify which mother she was talking about if there was ever doubt. Birth mother and adoptive mother? No, that didn’t seem to fit their relationship closely enough. Human mother and dragon mother? It had potential. She’d go with it for now, but she’d need to broach the subject with her mistress soon.

Anyway, her mother had made her Assimilate every single creature they had come across while hunting, and it was paying dividends now. She had a veritable zoo of animals for her to experiment on for this Class, and her experience gain would only be supplemented by Siph’s hunting.

She methodically worked her way through the autopsies, not even pausing once she hit level 100. She let the experience accumulate as she worked, keeping an eye on the total. She wanted to jump straight to maximum level in Arcanobiologist, grab the extra experience for analyzing her few forms that had some sort of inherent magic, and then jump straight to the next Class. She’d need roughly thirty thousand experience to do so once she reset Biologist, so it was going to take a few minutes.

But that came soon enough. Constant work on learning about the animals she could turn into and the steady trickle of experience from her mother saw to that. Well, in fairness, it was her experience enhancers that were doing most of the heavy lifting there, but that was just a multiplier, not the underlying cause of the experience. She gave Arcanobiologist a quick once-over before resetting and picking the Class up.

The Skills for this Class, though few, were far more enticing than those from Biologist. Being able to see what any given thing resisted and had extra bonuses to was huge and being able to see an opponent’s Mana was nearly as important as being able to see their HP. Something to put on the ever-growing list of things to level up, for sure.

After the messages came in, she got back to dissecting herself. She only had a few forms that had some sort of built-in magic, so it didn’t take too long to work her way through all of them. When she was done roughly fifteen minutes later, she had only built up around ten thousand experience, most of which had come from her mother. She would have had more, but unfortunately Siph was between hunting grounds at the moment, and she wasn’t willing to wait for her next experience drop to get started on her next line of research. This one promised to take quite a bit longer than her previous endeavors, but the return on investment would be absolutely massive if it panned out like she hoped it would.

She took a breather to size up the Class as she opened up a word processor on a nearby computer, readying it to take notes on her findings.

Most of those were just variations on other Biologist Skills adapted so they’d actually be usable on eldritch beings. Full Diagnosis worked for HP, Mana, and Stamina, Vitals Analysis let her identify vital spots on eldritch beings, and Behavior Analysis was the same was the one from Biologist. What she was actually after here was Eldritch Understanding and Organ Identification. Eldritch Understanding would give her the toolset needed to know why the things worked the way they worked, and Organ Identification would let her better understand those organs that seemed flat out incomprehensible. Sure, she knew about them and what they did, but she needed to know how. And once she knew that, she was in business.

Before all that, though, she had to figure out exactly how her transformations worked. She never seemed to have a change in intelligence when transforming, despite the fact that most of what she transformed into had no business being as smart as a person. So, she transformed the avatar back into a rabbit, and left it there for a moment. She then went over to the laptop and got a series of randomly generated math problems and opened up a timer. She started the timer with a telekinesis spell, solved the series of problems, stopped the timer, and wrote down the result. She repeated this several times before she jumped into the avatar and did it several more times.

There was no significant change in her times. She had looked at the brains of her transformations before, and they seemed no different to a normal animal of their species, so it wasn’t that the brain itself was different. So, she drew her first conclusion. Somehow, magic compensated for differences in how brains worked to keep someone transformed in the same state of mind.

Still, she didn’t think the brain and consciousness were completely separated while transformed. Either that, or the compensation also extended to handling new sensory inputs for her. She was leaning towards the former, though. If that was the case, it would explain why she had such a hard time sharing her senses between Parallels; they didn’t have the necessary tools to process that much information at once.

She couldn’t be sure that eldritch abilities worked under the same logic as other abilities, but she also had no reason to assume they didn’t, so she was tentatively working under the assumption that in this respect they were the same.

Which brought her to her next avenue of research. She was able to use any sensory organs made with Eldritch Abomination just fine, and she was hoping to figure out the reason why.

A bit of dissection around a severed appendage quickly revealed what was going on. At the base of each new organ was a cluster of nervous tissue, which her Skills were telling her was likely a sort of processing hub for turning the data from the organ into something actually usable without mentally overloading the main brain. She carefully scooped out an eye and the tissue surrounding it, placing it on a separate table, severing it from the body when she felt the tissue was starting to connect things more than it was actually processing.

Unfortunately for her, she didn't have anywhere close to the required background knowledge needed to properly determine how exactly the chunk of tissue was handling input and output. Fortunately, she didn’t really need to at the moment, she was more interested in the names of parts of the cluster, which she reasoned would give her a headstart on figuring out how to reliably replicate it.

Through this, she was able to find that while this cluster of nerves did indeed help with processing, it was actually useless in the state it was currently in. It seemed to connect to a central hub of sorts, while this was just pure processing. She followed the cut cord of flesh back to the “central hub”, removed it, and put it down on the table so she could poke around it.

It seemed that this was where connecting the new sensory input to her original sensory input took place. Something about calculating where to stitch together the input and then sending commands to the other clusters of tissue?

Mae frowned. This wasn’t working like she had hoped. She could theoretically figure out what was going on here, and she wasn’t totally sure she was right, but she had no way to pick apart the design and change it to suit her needs. She’d try and grind out the Skill levels and see where that took her, but it was starting to look like she’d need to pick up some sort of Neurologist Class if she wanted to make any real headway, and she hadn’t unlocked one yet. Either way, though, she had a lot of work ahead of her.

Mae set down her tools, frustrated. There’s no way things were going to work the way she had been going about it. It’d been two or three hours at this point and, as it turns out, attempting to design a secondary way of processing information with basically no prior knowledge was going to be close to impossible, even with the assistance of magic.

So, she just had to get that knowledge. She’d worked her way through all of the unlocks derived from Biologist, leveled her Racial Classes up thrice, and had about thirteen thousand experience stored up. Her mother had come home thirty minutes prior to rest and search for a new hunting ground, so she whatever experience she was going to get would come from her own efforts at this point.

Unfortunately for her, she hadn’t unlocked any sort of Neurologist Class yet, although she had a feeling that she was close. Well, feeling likely wasn’t a strong enough word. It was more of a certainty, and she was pretty sure that was coming from King’s Knowledge.

It is. Kali mentally said. Normally it’d just outright tell you when looking for the Class, but it doesn’t “really” exist until you or someone else is able to “directly” see the unlock requirement. But, for now, you’re only missing a Class or two and then you’ll be ready to get it.

And those are?

Something in the Student/Scholar line. Not sure which, but you would probably want to take that line anyway. It’ll help with your little project. Speaking of, you need anything else for it?

Just any corpses mother brought back with her latest kill.

Yeah, she’s been bringing back one of each type of thing she’s killed. You’re not gonna get any Skills off of them, though. Since Assimilate has been ported over to the new system, it’s only going to copy stuff from the new system. Even if we wait, the system’s not gonna retroactively apply to corpses unless they get raised, and these aren’t exactly in a good enough condition for that.

That’s fine. I just need their mass.

Let me know when you need the corpses, I’ll direct you to them.

Thank you. I will not require them for a while yet. I will contact you when they become necessary.

Mae sat down in front of the desk with the computer. She took the Student class, nodding in approval as most of her stored experience was drained and the Class reached maximum level. She reset it, took Scholar, and pulled up some online learning resources, focusing on stuff about the brain.

Look, great idea and all, Kali interjected, but I think you’re forgetting that I’m the world’s foremost expert on the brain. I had to do most of the stuff you’re looking to do now when making my magic system. Give me a second and I can create a dump of my knowledge for you to look through. It’ll probably be more helpful than whatever you’d find online.

Really?! Mae said with barely repressed excitement, that would be extremely helpful!

Kali chuckled mentally. Yeah. Just hold tight for a few minutes, alright?

Mae grinned, and then paused. Wait, why did you contact me anyway?

You stopped gaining experience for the first time in hours. I was just looking to see if you were going to need help.

Understood.

Mae waited for a couple of minutes, and was soon brought a small, glowing ball. “Just put your hand on it and you can mentally browse through the knowledge contained within. If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll clarify, so go nuts!”

Mae nodded. I will, thank you. She grabbed the orb and began pouring through the contents. Kali smirked and slipped back through the door.

Mae looked down at her body, flexing her hand experimentally. All seemed well, so she went through a series of rudimentary stretches and exercises, making sure everything was working as it should. Satisfied, she switched back from the avatar into her main body and went through the same series of stretches and found that it also could move unimpeded. She nodded in satisfaction, making a note to thank Kali again when she next saw her.

It was roughly six hours after Kali had given her the sphere of information. The first bit had been slow going, but once she unlocked Neurologist and then Neuromancer, her progress had quickly sped up. It sped up even more once King’s Knowledge let her fuse a few of her knowledge gaining Skills into one that would let her comprehend this sort of thing much better.

She opened the door and walked to where her mistress and Kali were still watching television. Mistress, she said, prompting the two to pause the television, I have finished my experimentation and I would like to implement my results.

“Experimentation?” Lilith asked.

I was looking for a way to increase my processing power, as well as allow us to share our senses all the time. I have succeeded, but I will need permission to alter your body.

Lilith looked towards Kali.

“I’m not going to weigh in on this decision. Or much of any decisions, really. Unless it’s directly related to me, I refuse to grant any permission related to what you do. Remember, you are the highest authority. Just take all the facts into account and I trust you to make the right choice.”

Lilith mulled things over for a moment. “Alright, I’ll let you do what you need. What’s the procedure?”

Mae laid down on the floor and retreated to the main body. She switched off the pain receptors, and went back to the avatar, standing back up. I’ve turned off your sense of pain. While what I’m doing shouldn’t cause any pain by itself, there might be some portions that cause pain as a side effect. All I’ll need you to do is not resist anything I’m doing. It’s going to look frightening, but I promise this’ll increase our capabilities drastically.

Lilith raised an eyebrow. “Alright. Ready when you are.”

Mae walked over to her, and then disengaged her avatar and the spare avatar. The avatar’s skin dropped from its body, exposing the muscle and bone to air. She quickly jumped from her body, the pile of flesh on the floor, back into the spare avatar and regrew the skin and organs she had replaced so no one had to look at it while she worked.

Please grab the pile of flesh on the floor, mistress. Mae instructed. Noticing Lilith’s horrified expression, she continued. That’s my body. I’ve made it into one that’ll replace unnecessary parts of one of our avatars and replace them with something useful. Mostly brain matter to expand my capabilities, but also a few other things to generally improve the efficiency of the body. It’s all perfectly harmless. Well, for us, anyway.

Lilith hesitantly reached down and grabbed the lump of flesh, flinching as it slithered up her arm. Mae hopped into the main body and began to work towards integrating her body with it. First, she replaced the skin with that of her own body, and then got to work internally.

I’m replacing most of your digestive system and reproductive system. She explained as she worked. I found that not only can we get nutrients by consuming mass from what we’ve gained with Assimilation, it’s more efficient that way. I’ve set up an organ that will automatically Assimilate anything you swallow, so you should still be able to eat just fine. As a bonus, you won’t have to use the bathroom anymore, so that’s nice. As for the reproductive system, I’ve still left it able to…give pleasure, if that was something you ever wanted, but the other functions have been removed for space. I can put them back whenever you would actually like to use them. I also looked into replacing your lungs and gills as well but subsisting on oxygenated blood from Assimilated mass just isn’t feasible. So, I’ve left them in for now, until I can find a better way to get oxygen.

Uh, that’ll be fine. Lilith replied. I think I’d feel weird if I couldn’t breathe or talk or anything.

I’d leave a way for you to talk. Mae said. You wouldn’t need to worry about that, but I understand. I’ll stop looking into that and work on other things. Anyway, that’s it for most of your organs. I’m replacing all the fat on your body now, since with the mass from Assimilation it's pretty much useless. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve increased the size of your bust and bottom slightly, as I could pack in extra matter there without harming how we look. I made sure to prioritize keeping us as similar-looking as possible, if not a little more attractive, simply because it’s been shown that people treat attractive people better than other people.

There was silence for a few minutes as Mae worked, before she finally spoke. Alright, I’m done. You’ll be able to move normally and can feel everything through me, but I’ll also be able to move the body if the need arises. It’s built so that you can shut down my control of the body completely, and in case of a dispute control always goes to you. You shouldn’t need to worry about that, though. I won’t be trying to move the body without your permission anyway. Oh, and I turned pain back on. It would be really bad if you were to get injured and not even realize it because you can’t feel pain.

Anyway, Kali, can we discuss Skill Points a little more? I’ve got a few uses in mind but I want both mistress and me to be fully aware of the situation before we do anything with them.

“Oh, right!” Kali said, sitting up straighter. “So, they’re basically like I explained a while back. You get one for each level of your Racial Classes and can spend them on Skills. So, I was going to have you save them and use them once you establish your own dungeon but what you’ve got in mind will probably pay off quicker, and we’ll be able to earn those points back pretty quickly.”

“So…what do you have in mind?” Lilith asked.

As things are right now, I am technically a parasite. So, I want to spec into the symbiosis line, and we’ve got enough points to get pretty far into that. With what I’m looking at, this will allow me to gain as much experience as you whenever you gain experience and vice versa. It will also add some of my stats to yours, as well as provide a significant boost to your HP and Stamina regeneration. It’ll require 136 points to fully finish the symbiosis line, but I think it’s a worthwhile investment, given the benefits gained from me are much larger than those gained from most parasites, and we’ll be significantly increasing the rate at which we grow our Racial Classes, given we’ll be receiving experience for them twice whenever you get some. Do I have permission to purchase all those Skills?

Lilith didn’t have to think about that one for very long. “Yeah, do it. I was only saving them for Kali anyway, and if she says this is better than there’s no reason not to.”

Excellent. I’ll do that in a moment. But, now that I’ve merged my body with yours, I don’t have any particular need for Classes, as the majority of my stats will come into play as buffs to you, and we’ll share Skills. As such, what would you like me to start working on?

“Uh, I’m not sure yet. Just pick whatever you think is best, alright?”

Understood. Now, I’m going to leave for a moment while I get the spare avatar out of here, and then I’ll be back. Feel free to return to your show, I believe you had almost raised the level of your Skills, right?

“Yeah. Just a bit more and we’ll be done. You can unpause it now, Kali.”

“Gladly!” Kali said, unpausing the TV as the spare avatar left. They watched for a while longer before Mae spoke up.

Why would she run away like that? She asked. That makes absolutely no sense! If she just talked it out, the whole problem would be solved, and they could both move on with their lives.

“Exactly!” Kali said. “We’ve been saying that this entire time! She’s the worst!”

Fighterman481

Alright, back to regularly scheduled author's notes! So, I'm all moved now, everything went off (mostly) without a hitch, and the chapter isn't late, so I'm calling it a win!

As a side note, the story is officially over 100k words! As a mini-celebration, I've made the chapter longer than normal. It's just over 5200 words without 1000 in Skill description like last chapter, so this is most definitely the longest chapter yet. Oh, and I know SH was saying I hit 100k a while ago, but I'm not counting author's notes in my count, just what's in my word document.

So, you'll notice there's very little in the way of system messages in this chapter, despite Mae getting a lot of those. The reason for this is twofold. First, Mae isn't paying attention to any of those. She already knows the gist of what's going on so she deems it pointless to give any more attention than necessary to it. Second, I decided that it would bog down the chapter to an unreasonable extent, and most of the Skills were unimportant anyway, so it's not a big deal. We may see a couple of the important ones in the next Lilith chapter, but not for now.

Speaking of chapter viewpoints, let's talk distribution. I'm considering Mae viewpoint chapters to be the same as Lilith viewpoint chapters for how I'm dividing things up, seeing as how they're working towards the same goal in the same place at the moment, and also because Mae viewpoints aren't going to be particularly common given that she's constantly with Lilith. Our next viewpoint will be Lilith, and then it'll be back to Carmen.

So, this chapter is all working towards something I thought up a long time ago but never really had a way to put into action. IMO, Mae's little parasitism act here is the single biggest power spike Lilith's going to get in this arc, simply because of the possibilities it opens up later down the line. Probably somewhere from 30-40% of her body's been replaced with brain matter, and Mae fully intends to use all that.

Now, would any of the pseudo-brain constructs I describe here work in real life? I honestly have no clue. But, I'm going to let it slide here because magic.

Oh, addendum to how bonuses work. So, I've decided that the sanest way to do bonuses is that there are two 'categories' of bonuses, internal and external. Internal bonuses come from things like Skills, while external bonuses come from things like buffs or debuffs, and internal bonuses are always calculated first. Within a category, bonuses stack additively, so two 50% bonuses would end up with a 100% bonus instead of a 125% bonus. But, the categories themselves stack multiplicatively. So, if you've got a +10 to Defense from internal sources, and someone casts a spell on you that doubles your defense, that +10 is taken into account. This makes it so that spells that 'increase/decrease a stat by x%' or similar work as intended, and also makes it so that you don't get ridiculous bonuses from Skills.

Anyway, I had a bit of a rollercoaster ride when writing this chapter. At first, I was just going to have Mae able to do what she did without an problem, but then I realized that was stupid and there was no way she'd have the capabilities to do something like that. So, I was going to postpone this and have her study a while longer. I then realized that this is likely something Kali dealt with before and she'd have no reason not to share, so I might as well have her help.

Since it's not directly mentioned in the chapter (aside from one throwaway reference towards the beginning), her Racial Classes leveled up a total of 12 times this chapter, and after spending the Skill Points she's sitting pretty at 209.

And I think that's all I had to say. As always, I'll be more than happy to answer questions left in the comments!