I Will Teach You How to Hunt Gods

Chapter 720 - 22: Becoming Human (4,000 Words)

While Yun You and Chen Zaikun were fighting outside, giving their all for every second and minute, inside the operating room, Akas felt as if time had slowed to the extreme.

The world-shattering sounds of battle outside were like muffled thunder coming through a heavy water curtain; even wearing specially-made noise-canceling headphones, and despite the rudimentary but effective sonic shielding field, it couldn’t completely isolate the noise.

He could clearly feel each collision, each fight of the Death Gods, causing rust to sprinkle down from the rusty pipes above his head, making the shelves piled with debris lightly shake, and causing the operating table to emit faint groans.

For someone who is both a doctor and a scholar, such disturbances are quite agitating.

But Akas also knew that Yun You was doing his utmost to compress the Destructive Power.

Otherwise, with the full force of these High Tier Death Gods, not to mention a small laboratory, even the entire underground chamber and Nest City No. 4 would be mere building blocks toppling at their touch.

However, as the chief surgeon, the pressure on Akas was indeed immense.

His bloodshot eyes were nearly bulging out of their sockets, glued to the microscope’s eyepiece, with sweat streaming like a creek down his forehead and sideburns, soaking his greasy hair.

Fortunately, his hands were steady enough, his fingertips making micro-adjustments on a self-made control panel bristling with buttons at a speed difficult to discern with the naked eye.

At this moment, under the combined effect of a specially designed energy field and neural inducers, Lamia’s soul, or more strictly speaking, her forcibly modified "consciousness core," was displaying a phenomenon of materialization.

It was no longer a nebulous energy wave nor an imperceptible non-physical substance to the naked eye but had transformed into a semi-transparent form of "clay."

If Chen Zaikun were here at this moment, he would realize that this hunk of clay was precisely the "soul" that Zhu Xing had depicted to him earlier.

Akas’ decades of research had finally touched the root of the human species—the soul.

However, unlike the ordinary souls housed within human bodies that exhibit stable states, Lamia’s soul, or this chunk of clay, was suspended above complex energy nodes and a bionic neural cluster, its state extremely unstable, sometimes collapsing, sometimes expanding, occasionally with twisted chain-like patterns surfacing.

"Hoo..."

Akas took a deep breath, knowing that this surgery had reached its most crucial stage.

The soul-molding phase.

With Doll’s souls having been twisted and reduced, most of their emotional abilities had been forcibly stripped away inadvertently; from the outside, perhaps nothing seemed amiss, but upon careful observation, one would discover that Lamia’s soul was many times smaller than an ordinary person’s and was even fitted with special "emotion suppression circuit" chains.

What Akas needed to do now was use unanchored Soul Energy to fill and shape this missing part of Lamia’s soul.

This operation couldn’t afford the slightest mistake, so Akas was more focused than he had ever been.

He even felt like he wasn’t operating surgical instruments but rather performing a "micro-sculpting" task with a zero margin for error.

"Hold steady... must hold steady..."

He roared silently in his heart, his teeth nearly grinding to bits.

The scalpel composed of high-energy particles cautiously probed into Lamia’s brain, its goal to sever those chains resembling "emotion suppression circuits" coiling around the "clay" core.

"Zizz... zizz..."

The subtle sound of energy annihilation was particularly clear in the silent operating room.

Almost simultaneously, he carefully guided another gentle flow of Soul Energy, like the finest paintbrush, attempting to smooth out the cracks on the clay’s surface that represented trauma, steering it towards a more stable, more "human" form.

"Boom—!"

Suddenly! A terrifying roar far surpassing the previous ones echoed from the outside, followed by violent tremors akin to an earthquake...

The entire operating room felt like it had been struck; the surgical table jerked violently, stacked instruments clattered down, several shadowless lamps went completely dark, the condenser pipe burst with a "pop"... a column of icy water cascaded down, instantly drenching Akas.

"Damn it!"

Akas’ heart skipped a beat, instinctively using a mechanical arm to shield Lamia... the operating room’s environment was already awful, lacking any sterile equipment; now that the water pipe had burst, if even a drop of water laden with bacteria and corrosive liquids fell onto Lamia’s brain, it would be catastrophic.

So even though he got drenched, he couldn’t let Lamia suffer the slightest harm.

However... amidst such disruptions, his operations did inevitably introduce an extremely minor deviation...

In the microscope’s view, the "soul clay" suddenly contracted; near its critical core node, a crack too tiny to be seen with the naked eye but lethal appeared abruptly...

The glow of the entire soul clay dimmed sharply, and its form began to destabilize!

Cold sweat poured out in an instant, a wave of chills enveloped Akas, causing him to feel as if an invisible hand had seized his heart fiercely, nearly stopping it from beating.

Decades of guilt, hope for redemption, his elder brother’s entrustment...

Was it all about to turn into nothing at this moment?

"No!"

An unprecedented ruthlessness erupted from the depths of Akas’ withered body,