Chapter 419: How The Mutants Assimilated The Virus Of Their Homeworld, Turning It Into Their Greatest Power

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"Relax, that disease doesn’t exist anymore. They’ve all been cleansed and ’remade’ by the system as part of the dungeon and everything," Riven explained. "When they were assimilated, that fragment of the lost world was remade too. What the disease gave these people and creatures has become a part of what they are. It’s not something that’s spreading anymore."

"Huh? How does that even work?" Vladimir asked, raising an eyebrow.

He understood the part about the disease being gone. What he didn’t understand was how they could keep everything it had done to them without keeping the disease itself. Looking around wasn’t helping much either. The Mutants were doing things with their own bodies that he would have thought were impossible, and none of them seemed concerned about it.

Riven could see he wasn’t convinced yet. Fair enough, he supposed. Vladimir was the one who would have to live with the arm, so just telling him not to worry wasn’t much of an explanation.

"Well, think of it like an evolutionary heist," Riven said, gesturing toward a chimera-like Mutant who was welding a mechanical plate directly onto its own chitinous forearm, completely unfazed by the sparks.

Vladimir watched the Mutant adjust the plate and go back to welding. It didn’t even stop to check whether they were watching. Apparently, this was normal work for it. He tried to picture an arm like that attached to his own body, but he still had too many questions to know whether that was something he wanted.

"An evolutionary heist?" he repeated. "You’re going to have to explain that one."

"The system kept what they gained and got rid of what was causing the problem," Riven said. "That’s what I mean. They don’t need the disease anymore to stay the way they are."

"Back in their original world, that disease was basically a hyper-aggressive retrovirus. It didn’t just kill people. It rewrote their biology, forcing flesh and metal to fuse at a cellular level. But when the system stepped in and assimilated them, it ran a massive quarantine."

"Quarantine?" Vladimir asked while raising an eyebrow. "How do you even know what the system does?"

"Just a guess based in everything I’ve seen so far. Anyway, it purged the active, infectious part of the virus, the part that spread like a plague, but it didn’t erase what the virus had already built. Instead, that code became permanently locked into their DNA."

Vladimir watched the Mutant worker, his remaining hand unconsciously gripping the spot where his missing arm had been. "Locked into their DNA? Like a permanent scar or something? I don’t get it."

That was something he could understand, at least. An injury could heal and still leave something behind. He looked down at his hand and let go of his shoulder, only then realizing he’d been holding it. The idea of getting an arm was still tempting, but he wanted to understand what Riven was offering before saying yes.

"A scar? It’s not that, technically. It’s more like an organelle," Riven explained, warming up to the topic.

"What? O-Organelle? What’s that?!" Vladimir asked. "You use such weird words... I don’t get half of what you’re talking about most of the time... It feels like you’re doing it on purpose."

He’d barely understood the last explanation, and now there was another word he didn’t know. Riven said these things like they were obvious. Maybe they were to him, but Vladimir had never needed to know what was inside a cell before. He hadn’t even known there was much inside one to talk about.

Having grown up without an education, Vladimir knew very little about how the world worked, especially when it came to the cells that made up living things.

But Riven was patient and loved explaining things to others who were willing to learn. "Organelles are like little internal organs inside a cell. They help it carry out its functions."

"So there are things inside the little things we’re made of?" Vladimir asked.

"Pretty much," Riven said. "You don’t have to remember all their names. I’m just trying to give you an example that makes sense."

Vladimir nodded, though he wasn’t sure the example was making things easier yet. Still, Riven wasn’t laughing at him for asking. That helped. He could admit when he didn’t know something, but it was annoying when an explanation left him with more questions than he’d started with. At least here he could ask them instead of pretending he understood.

"Oh... huh, I had no idea my cells had little organs. That’s weird," Vladimir groaned. "Wait, what does this have to do with anything?"

He glanced back at the worker. They’d gone from replacing his arm to talking about parts of his body he couldn’t even see. There was probably a connection, but Riven hadn’t gotten to it yet.

"I’m getting there," Riven said. "Something that starts out separate can become part of a living thing. That’s the part I want you to think about."

Riven nodded. "Think about how cells work. Billions of years ago, the ancestors of plants were just microscopic blobs floating in the ocean. They couldn’t use sunlight to make their own food. That’s what photosynthesis does."

"???" Vladimir showcased his true incredulous expression when he continued listening to Riven like he didn’t know what he was even speaking about. Everything sounded a little like gibberish, but he was genuinely trying to understand to not feel so humiliated.

"But then one of those cells swallowed a photosynthetic bacterium. Instead of digesting it, the two formed a permanent partnership," Riven continued, looking at Vladimir’s expression. "Over time, that bacterium transferred many of its genes to the host and became the chloroplast. A completely foreign organism became a permanent, vital part of what a plant is."

Vladimir paused, kicking a stray piece of scrap metal out of their path. "What?!" He was completely flabbergasted by the revelation. "S-So bacteria that cause diseases were absorbed? How is that even a thing?"

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