Chapter 214 - Mind Your Step (1/2)

It was too damn quiet, but there wasn't anything they could do about it. Making any noise, any form of disturbance would likely ruin the entire mission.

There were too many Watchers lying dormant around the city. It would all be ruined even if a single one of them woke up and stirred up the hive. The Infestation would tear the entire city apart, brick by brick, to find the disturbance...

And they'd probably lose their only guaranteed chance to acquire the sample they needed.

What Reed and Lu'um were seeking was a genetic sample of the Emperor.

Reed already had the necessary materials to bring the dead back to life, even if they were only clones. With his taboo mastery of the flesh and the soul, he had actually cheated Death more thoroughly than even the Ancient Mulians had accomplished.

While the Ancient Mulians had created an impeccable immortal gene to prolong their life indefinitely, once someone died in an irrecoverable way — such as being thoroughly destroyed or atomized — it was impossible even for them to bring a person back from the dead.

Even they had not yet mastered how to precisely control matter-energy relationsh.i.p.s to undo something that had already happened. The only method they had to undo a matter transformation was to reverse the flow of time and prevent the change from happening, but that in and of itself presented its own major headaches, making it an unfeasible alternative...

To be fair, though, Reed had not mastered how to undo matter-energy transformations, either.

What Reed was doing amounted to recreating the deceased individual's body and filling an artificial soul with a copy of their memories. Technically speaking, he wasn't bringing the original person back from the dead, but rather, he was creating a facsimile — a perfect reproduction — of the person that died. Nevertheless, it was a game-changing accomplishment, no matter how you spun it...

When Lu'um heard about Reed's resurrection process, she felt as if her whole world had been rocked to its core. Words could not convey the terror in her heart. Though Reed had jokingly called the process 'playing God,' but she knew better.

That isn't playing God... That is an act of God.

Even if they are copies, they are perfect copies. It contradicts everything we thought about the nature of the soul... And it opens up a can of worms I don't want to think about...

As far as the Ancient Mulians knew, the extra-dimensional anchor known as the soul was a unique construct present in every living thing. There were no two souls that possessed identical features in terms of size, form, or wavelength.

Although an individual's consciousness and memories were products of the mind, the soul seemingly had an unclear role in the processing, recollection, and awareness of memories.

To the best of their knowledge, some Ancient Mulians hypothesized that souls were, in fact, the root of a person's existence.

This was based on the fact that beings who had their souls extracted from their bodies no longer react to any stimuli. Brain death was always the result of soul extraction as if the flesh truly was nothing more than a vessel for the soul...

Others conjectured that souls were a higher dimensional organ and that reality as they perceived it was a lower-dimensional refraction of actual reality. This far-fetched theory was based on the recognition that the Ancient Mulians had indeed discovered that there were higher dimensions than their own.

There were countless theories about the origin, function, and structure of the soul, but the bitter truth was that the Ancient Mulians only possessed a few hard facts on the subject.

And one of the hard-earned facts the Ancient Mulians had worked for asserted that souls were unique entities.

It terrified Lu'um to know that Reed had discovered a method to create artificial souls. The idea that any living being could be brought back as long as one possessed a DNA sample was too great a power for anyone.

If anything, she thought it was a far greater potential threat to the stability of the multiverse than the immortal gene that the Ancient Mulians had created.

The moment this technology left their hands, it'd spell the end of the world. She knew that if her people got their hands on it, they'd utilize it for the sake of fighting the Infestation, but they would eventually abuse it, without a doubt.

An endless army of Ancient Mulians that would never grow old or ill and would never truly die.

A never-ending flood of veteran Ancient Mulian soldiers would engulf every corner of the multiverse. In such a scenario, it was entirely possible that they would be able to drive the Infestation out of the multiverse through sheer numbers alone, but...

No... It'd just be trading one devil for an even fouler monstrosity. Without end, the Empire would become an everlasting tumor that'd plague the multiverse just as bad as Infestation, if not worse.

Once they drove the Infestation out, they'd become an Infestation of their own.

The only reason the Ancient Mulian Empire was as stable as it was during its prime was because every single aspect of the empire was carefully controlled. The laws, the rituals, the number of worlds they were allowed to colonize, even the amount of Ancient Mulians that were allowed to be born every year.

They seemed like a free-spirited race on the surface, but they lived heavily restricted lives in reality.

It was a necessary sacrifice, given how powerful they were. Terraforming worlds, seeding planets with life, forging stars, building interstellar megastructures — a single rogue Ancient Mulian had the potential to cause an unprecedented amount of destruction...

The Mulian Royal Family used culture, laws, and most importantly, their overwhelming military strength as tools to create and enforce peace among their people, not other races. Had they not done so, the Ancient Mulian race would have likely descended into universal, if not a multiversal war against itself.

Ten thousand interstellar Mulian kingdoms vying for supremacy over reality would have torn the multiverse to pieces.