Deep underground in Las Noches, within Szayelaporro's laboratory—in the innermost room that even Kōe hadn't managed to find back then—five culture tanks of varying colors were neatly lined up against the wall.
"Subject Number One is exhibiting a rejection response. Please handle it as soon as possible." An emotionless, mechanical voice suddenly rang out as increasingly dense bubbles appeared in the leftmost culture tank.
"Subject Number Two is exhibiting a rejection response. Please handle it as soon as possible."
"Subject Number Three is experiencing rapid deterioration. Please handle it as soon as possible."
"Subject Number Four..."
The short figure standing in front of the console made no movement, acting as if the urgent warning prompts in the room didn't exist at all. Even when an anomaly appeared in the fifth culture tank, he remained completely unresponsive.
"Anomalies detected in the divided soul bodies. Initiating emergency protocols."
Except for the rapidly deteriorating third tank, the hoses at the top of the other four culture tanks suddenly disconnected automatically. Simultaneously, starting from the bottom, the liquid within the tanks rapidly turned pitch black.
Following the disconnected hoses, there was a slightly smaller culture tank in the center of the room. The pale purple nutrient fluid slowly receded, and a pair of golden eyes suddenly lit up.
"Main body awakened. Preparing to open the culture tank..."
Lacking the patience to wait, Szayelaporro directly ripped out the dense cluster of thin tubes connected to his body. With a stretch of his right hand, the culture tank slowly split open from the middle.
From the outside, there wasn't much difference from the last time Kōe had seen him. His body had shrunk another size, but his Arrancarification—or Shinigamification, as Aizen called it—was still maintained at a relatively high level. Of course, there hadn't been any substantial breakthroughs either.
Part of this was due to Kōe deliberately holding back information, but the main reason lay with Szayelaporro himself. Arrancarification only brought a breakthrough in power; it was not a path to perfecting life.
From beginning to end, Szayelaporro had his own stubborn principles. As an alchemist during his human years who pushed his research into human experimentation, Szayelaporro retained parts of his human memories and personality even after dying and turning into a Hollow. Such an existence was an extreme rarity, even in Hueco Mundo.
Extracting gold from base metals—this was supposed to be the initial form and definition of alchemy. Yet, with continuous research, this technology gradually deepened, beginning to touch upon the realm of life.
Perhaps "touch upon" wasn't the most accurate phrase, as this was more of an expansion of the research scope. But in the eyes of some alchemists, all things possessed souls, and metals were no exception. They were a special kind of lifeform, which didn't conflict with alchemy's original definition.
Extracting gold from base metals, and extracting a more beautiful, perfect life from life itself—calculated this way, the former was actually just a very small branch of the latter.
In truth, the term "extraction" wasn't entirely accurate either. Transmutation, equivalent exchange, creation, tracing back to the source—there were many methods in alchemy, and they held certain divergences from one another.
It was just that Szayelaporro had always scoffed at these disputes. They were merely different methods. Beginners cared more about knowing the process of turning stone into gold, but at his level, it was the purity of the gold that warranted deep thought—that is, elevating life to its most perfect standard.
Szayelaporro felt that, by now, no one understood alchemy better than he did. Becoming a Hollow had given him an innate advantage, and possessing eternal life was also one of alchemy's goals. In the eyes of mortals, he was already a perfect god.
But the reality was quite different. If he were already a god now, then the title of "god" was far too cheap. As a Vasto Lorde-class Menos at the very apex of Hueco Mundo, Szayelaporro could realize that he still possessed flaws.
Yet, the elevation of his level hadn't made the path forward any smoother; instead, it became increasingly obstructed. He had to admit that he was now trapped in the dilemma of knowing more, only to realize how ignorant he truly was.
This was perhaps one of the flaws he had recognized in himself. The elevation of his life level hadn't brought about a breakthrough in his cognitive perspective, which fundamentally made him no different from a beast.
Szayelaporro walked up to the console and glanced at the short figure sitting in the chair. Seeing that the other party's eyes had rolled back, clearly having lost consciousness, a flash of purple light erupted from his palm, reducing the figure to fine dust.
His slender fingers tapped rapidly across the console. Charts and dense arrays of data quickly crammed the massive screen full.
His gaze swept rapidly over the experimental reports on the screen. In less than a minute, Szayelaporro reached a conclusion: there was absolutely no difference from the results of the previous experiment, including the exact time the subjects encountered problems.
"Bring five more sets of materials over," Szayelaporro ordered into the microphone, then turned and walked back to the five culture tanks behind him.
He wasn't worried about his orders being ignored. Nowadays, he had as many experimental subjects of this caliber as he wanted. The real problem still lay with him.
*Gabriel's Annunciation*—this was the name Szayelaporro had given his current experiment.
According to legend, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to the human world to find a virgin and inform her that she had found favor with God and would conceive a son. Afterward, the woman was moved by the Holy Spirit and indeed conceived, naming the child Jesus as Gabriel had instructed—the Son of God, Jesus. And the woman was Mary, known to later generations as the Virgin Mary.
This was the story of the Annunciation, and it also encapsulated all of Szayelaporro's ideas: under the premise of retaining everything of the main body, entering a mother's body in the form of a fetus, and absorbing the mother's nutrients to be reborn.
The process of life's birth was inherently mysterious. Interpreting this process of going from nothing to something through alchemy was the process of bestowing a soul. Every living being had experienced it firsthand, yet none could retain the memory—it was a miracle to decipher and replicate it.
In terms of extraction, retaining the entirety of the main body to experience the birth process again could remove the impurities in the soul and reach the essence of life directly. And by other interpretations, life itself possessed various imperfections; absorbing a mother's nutrients was fundamentally a method of continuously gathering fragments of life to perfect oneself.
Just like that Holy Trinity, Szayelaporro firmly believed that through *Gabriel's Annunciation*, everything in the world would hold no secrets from him.
He, too, was a trinity: he was the Father, he was the Son, and he was the Holy Spirit. He prepared the salvation, simultaneously executed the salvation, and finally completed the salvation—only, the target of this salvation was also himself.
A beautiful future lay right before his eyes, but the path ahead was completely mired in mud. Szayelaporro felt he was already firmly stuck in it.
*Gabriel's Annunciation* wasn't a simple parasite, nor was it the crude act of directly stuffing the main body into a mother. To retain the entirety of the main body meant not just the physical body, but also maintaining the unity of the main body's consciousness from beginning to end.
This was the major prerequisite, but just this preparatory work alone left Szayelaporro feeling mentally exhausted. Have you ever seen a parasite larger than its host? It was like an elephant relying on an ant to survive. Such a bizarre image gave him a bit of a headache.
And this was only one of the problems. Large and small issues had never ceased during the experiments, the most direct manifestation being that the experimental data hadn't changed in a very long time.
For someone like Szayelaporro, sometimes stagnating was far more terrifying than encountering setbacks.
"You really left me with quite the difficult problem, Lord Ao."