Chapter 299
Blood burbled from her mouth, leaking down the side of her face as a sea of crimson pooled around the wound of her ruined throat. The arterial blood faded away with the memory, leaving only the pale, lifeless expression of a person, small and motionless beneath a wrinkled white blanket that came up to her chest, an oxygen mask over her face.
Beneath it, Jinny's eyes stared straight up, cold and lifeless as the day we'd lost her.
I put a hand on the table for stability, compensating for the sudden weakness in my knees. "This is why you asked for pictures. So... the new ability..."
"We theorized before that, with her body being instanced, there was a good chance we'd need a vessel." Vernon nodded. "That's looking to be true. This is, for all intents and purposes, a functioning body." He pointed to the IV and the heart rate monitor. "Cycling fluids, heart beating on its own. Can't see it, but the neurons are firing." He waved a cautious hand, warding off the obvious question before I could ask it. "The body can't breathe on its own. Brain activity isn't much higher than a person who would be considered clinically dead."
"How did you even pull this off?" It was almost impossible to keep up. I couldn't stop looking at her.
"Simulacrum allows me to create a living form, but it's horrifically unintuitive. The rest was a result of practicing keeping things alive that shouldn't be, not to mention countless hours of bone and flesh sculpting." Vernon hesitated. "Drew from the references I had, tried to stay as faithful as I could, but deviations are inevitable. If it works... she'll probably experience a degree of dysphoria regardless of accuracy—after all, no matter what it looks like, this isn't her body. But she'll be alive."
"If the system doesn't pull a bait and switch and give you something else," I recalled, doing whatever I could to manage expectations.
"Yes." Vernon frowned. "There's also an issue of cost. My recent abilities have been ramping up in requirements, demanding escalating tiers of User cores."
"Anything legendary?" I asked, dreading the answer.