During this period, Yaga Masamichi kept taking Minamoto Soujun out on missions.
He had already reached the Advanced Upper volume of the new standards.
The material now covered the major clans and power blocs in the jujutsu world, their hereditary techniques, key personnel, territorial layouts, and more.
The content was detailed.
There was no way something like this circulated freely. It was already brushing up against the higher-ups' taboos.
Soujun accepted Yaga's support in silence.
The blade-edge along his hand hardened and sharpened. With a true hand-chop he took the head off the curse in front of him, then hacked its body a few more breaths. The curse froze where it stood, and with a light push from Soujun toppled and broke into pieces.
His right arm morphed into a bayonet, shot forward, and skewered every curse along the line ahead. The spike snapped back to normal. Soujun flicked his arm to shake off clots of blood already turning to black mist.
Body morphing was now on track. It was excellent for clearing small fry.
He could also change his appearance into other people or creatures. That was purely auxiliary. The form changed but not the essence, and for him right now it had little value.
He did not need disguises.
Morphing ability depended on physical attributes. The better the physique, the harder and sharper, the more convincing the change.
Soujun seized a curse by both forearms.
Got you.
Four more arms grew beneath his ribs. All six fists clenched and hammered the curse in a storm.
His punches were so fast they left afterimages. The air pressure kicked up dust that rolled down over the curse.
It thrashed and howled as flesh flew. In the end it collapsed into a lump of meat on the ground, the only intact parts the two arms he still held.
Soujun wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.
This was the last and strongest of the nest, and it had given him plenty of trouble to lick.
As he watched it dissipate into black haze, the four extra arms drew back into his body.
Building extra organs and limbs gave him an edge against opponents of the same grade. It was a weapon for strong-on-strong engagements.
What he needed to develop was a way to beat stronger foes with weaker means… No. Everyone else was growing too. If they beat him, they were strong and he was weak.
What Soujun really needed was continuous growth, a path to become the strongest, then stronger than the strongest.
After thinking it through, he arrived at bionics.
Study the structures and operating principles of living things.
Nature is endlessly strange. Humans are the most stable and balanced, but not the strongest.
There were too many potential models.
A fly's compound eyes, a bat's echolocation, a snake's infrared sense, a dog's scenting, an eagle's vision.
What if he integrated every advantage into one body.
Put simply, he would not be a better human. He would become the most perfectly evolved human individual.
—
He earned a fair amount after each mission.
Sorcerers were stealth rich, so long as they did not spend carelessly. There was always enough money.
Provided you do not spend carelessly.
Soujun paid a premium to acquire several hawks.
Eagle Eye Construction Experiment, Phase One, begin.
On his palm he constructed an eye made of nothing but flesh.
Creating extra eyes was no longer difficult. He copied the existing design, tied in blood vessels, connected nerves, then tweaked the structures.
His innate technique made everything simple.
This was the first safety layer. All modifications would occur on this new eye only. Only after a successful build and a trial period with no issues would he touch his actual pair of eyes.
If the eye pair modifications succeeded and passed an even longer trial, he would apply the same changes to the eyes of his soul body. That was the second safety layer.
Finally he would copy several original human eyes and keep them on his person as backups. If anything went wrong, he could restore himself at once. That was the third safety layer.
—
What are the differences between the human eye and the eagle's eye.
Books covered the basics, and research papers filled in the rest.
He bought hawks as reference specimens. There was no need to dissect. With a flow of cursed energy, their internal structures mapped directly into his mind.
The human retina has a fovea. It is the most sensitive region for vision.
Eagles have two. A central fovea and a lateral fovea. Each dominates a different region of the eye. The first creates razor single-eye acuity and detects subtle motion. The second captures more fine detail.
Their foveas also pack far more photoreceptors than ours. Up to one million per square millimeter, versus about one hundred fifty thousand in humans.
Eagles can actively control the muscles that shape the retina and manage the amount of light entering the eye. Even in strong glare, they can still spot prey in the distance.
Eagle eyes also have a remarkable double accommodation. The ciliary muscle changes the shape of the lens and the distance between lens and cornea, while also changing the cornea's curvature. In an instant the eye shifts from far focus to near focus.
—
Once the differences and mechanisms were clear, the roadmap was obvious.
He tried building a second fovea. Success.
He tried positioning it to cooperate with the original fovea. Failure.
Failure.
Failure.
Dozens of failures. Dozens of ruined eyes and rebuilds later, the construct finally produced vision. The field of view differed from before, closer to spherical coverage.
Not enough. He increased the photoreceptor count in the fovea and raised their density. The scene sharpened and became more sensitive, the colors vivid as a sky after rain.
The new visual sense excited him.
He moved on to strengthening the ciliary muscle to control lens and cornea.
By contracting the ciliary muscle he compressed or stretched the lens to change its shape, shortened or lengthened the lens-to-cornea distance, and altered the cornea's curvature.
All of this demanded simultaneous control and fine detail, with precise coordination among tissues. It was extremely hard.
After considerable time, he scraped by with success.
He turned his palm outward and constricted the pupil. Ants on the lawn in the courtyard came into crisp view, every hair clear. Then he dilated the pupil and could also make out the gaps in the far building's exterior wall.
They say an eagle can see up to thirty-six kilometers. This prototype was not there yet. The tissue coordination was still incomplete.
But Phase One was a success.
Next would be structural optimization and micro-adjustments among cells and tissues.
Copying one to one was never the goal. Making one plus one equal two was nothing. He wanted more-than-two outcomes. Ten is more, a hundred is more, ten thousand is more.
After that he would integrate a fly's compound-eye configuration. Even just within eyes there were many axes: acuity, resolution, color discrimination, night vision, underwater sight.
There was much he could integrate.
But he had to stop now.
Dozens of cycles of constructing and dissolving flesh-eyes had stacked the pain too high.
Pain was the sensation he tolerated best. He had felt it since childhood and had grown used to it.
But flesh does not arise from nothing. Where did it come from. It was squeezed out of his own body.
He was much thinner than usual. Cheeks hollowed. Fat massively consumed. Muscles stringy and deflated. Body fat near zero. Skin looked like decayed dry wood.
First principle of flesh alchemy: equivalent exchange.
Cursed energy, flesh, or soul could be the price to forge extra organs or limbs.
But experiments needed to reduce variables. If he built eyes purely from cursed energy, the reference value would be lost. Humans are not like curses whose bodies are made of malice.
His body was flesh and blood.
Soujun hurried to use cursed energy to compensate. His body began to recover slowly.
This round had gotten to his head. On the surface he seemed fine, but he had incurred serious internal depletion. He would need a period of rest to return to full condition.
The outcome, though, was encouraging. Building an eagle eye meant the direction was right. He could go on to build in other creatures' advantages.
Then came the next question. If he could successfully build in other creatures, could he go further and construct a curse, or even construct a sorcerer.
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