Chapter 707: Why Not?

"I’ll use water." Aelthar’s voice echoed.

Grey came back to the same moment again. This time, though, his first thought wasn’t about heat. It was about life.

Aelthar could build a water heart and walk away from controlling it. Grey could reproduce every mechanical function perfectly and still fail recognition.

That difference couldn’t just be skill with the element. Grey had already proven he could force fire to pump his blood without killing him. If that was the case, then there had to be some deeper relationship between an Elemental and the structures it formed.

Grey chose fire for the third time.

Aelthar gave him a faintly contemptuous look, Breejara made another comment about stubborn humans running into the same wall, and the audience reacted exactly as they had in two timelines that now only existed in Grey’s memory.

Oddly enough, the repetition was calming. Everyone else thought he was still on his first attempt, while Grey had already narrowed the problem down twice.

After this, he’d only have one Rebirth left. He couldn’t afford another pointless death.

When the challenge started, Grey destroyed his heart again and immediately formed the cold flame structure he’d learned to sustain on his second attempt.

He didn’t waste any time celebrating once blood started flowing through it. Instead, he turned his attention inward, following the Neural pathways that should have run through the organ he’d just destroyed.

Almost immediately, something strange became obvious. Physically, those pathways were gone. Yet, Grey could still feel exactly where they belonged.

The realization made him forget about Aelthar for several seconds.

His Neural Frame ran through his entire body, threading through flesh, organs, bone and structures so small that Grey would never be able to consciously pick out every single pathway.

If those pathways only existed inside physical tissue, then every serious injury should have shredded pieces of his Neural Frame along with the flesh. Losing an entire organ should have left a permanent blank spot where those connections used to be.

But Grey had been severely injured more than enough times to know that that wasn’t what happened. Instead, Grey’s body always seemed to know where they should be.

Or, more accurately, something deeper than his body knew.

His thoughts jumped straight to Rebirth.

Every time Grey died, his body was rebuilt down to details he had never consciously memorized. Rebirth restored organs, Neural pathways, tiny differences in tissue, and everything else it took to bring back Grey Temolt, not just something that looked like him.

His soul was carrying the blueprint.

Then, another thought followed. Why had Soul Link lowered the cost of his rebirth?

At the time, Grey had happily taken the discount without thinking too hard about how it worked. He’d been glad to spend fewer Cyber Cores and move on. Now that he thought about it, the answer was almost painfully obvious.

Soul Link made the blueprint already within his body clearer.

Grey’s consciousness sank deeper.

The flame heart kept beating under his active control. However, instead of spending his focus on refining its physical function, Grey reached for the connection between his soul and the Neural Frame that should have run through the missing organ.

There was no flesh left to carry those pathways. Even so, Soul Link still held their outline, like an invisible mold waiting for something to fill it.

Grey pushed fire into that outline, and the reaction was immediate. Thin Neural pathways started appearing through the flame without Grey building them by hand.

His eyes went wide. For the first time, the elemental heart contracted without a conscious command.

Grey felt the pulse travel through his body and nearly laughed. That was it.

Well, not all of it. But, it was enough that he finally understood which direction to go.

Prometheus had already shown him something like this.

When Prometheus was reborn and carried Grey along with it, Grey hadn’t come back as a pile of freshly manufactured flesh that needed to be hooked up to his Neural Frame afterward.

His body, his Frame, and the deeper structure tying them together had all come back as a single existence. All of it had been rebuilt according to some truth stored beneath the physical.

So, Soul Link wasn’t just communication between Grey and his Frame. It was the bridge between what he physically was and what his existence understood itself to be.

Grey’s flame heart started sustaining more of itself.

His energy consumption dropped fast as the Neural pathways built through Soul Link took over functions he’d been handling manually. For the first time, the Genesis System’s recognition started climbing, slowly at first, then fast enough that Grey’s grin widened, even with his body still drenched in blood.

Across from him, Aelthar noticed. So did Breejara.

"Interesting," she said, her tone lighter than the tension creeping into her face. "Grey Temolt appears to have discovered something rather unusual, although discovery and victory are unfortunately not the same thing."

She was right. Grey had taken too long, and Aelthar’s water heart was already close to finished.

Grey’s structure kept improving as his mind raced ahead. Even now, he could tell he still wasn’t done.

Soul Link could supply the missing Neural pathways. However, the elemental organ was still fire trying to do the work of flesh, and there was still a subtle divide between the structure Grey had made and the body around it.

His soul knew where a heart belonged. It just hadn’t fully accepted the fire as that heart.

Aelthar’s side flashed gold, and the System announced his victory again.

This time, Grey barely looked at it. He had lost, but that didn’t matter anymore.

Grey stared down at the flame pulsing in his chest as one last connection formed in his mind.

Prometheus hadn’t used Soul Link to tell new flesh how to behave. It had used the deeper truth carried through Soul Link to make that flesh Grey. The little flame God understood the essence of what made Grey, Grey, and then used that to pull him back to the land of the living.

That was a difference. A huge fucking difference.

Grey’s grin widened.

"Finally."

Aelthar looked at him as though that one word confirmed he’d lost his mind.

Breejara was already starting her victory announcement when Grey stopped holding the heart together and let the elemental structure dissolve.

His body immediately started failing around him. This time, though, Grey welcomed the darkness with the calm of someone who had finally found the answer, and only needed one more chance to prove it.

He had exactly one.

...

"I’ll use water."

Grey opened his eyes to Aelthar saying those familiar words for the fourth time.

His final Rebirth was already spent. If he fucked this one up, there was no fifth attempt waiting for him.

Grey smiled anyway. "I’ll use water too."

Aelthar’s gaze sharpened immediately.

Breejara paused for the tiniest fraction of a second before her hosting smile came back. Meanwhile, conversations spread through the audience. An Elemental handing away his own affinity was strange enough. However, a human picking the exact same element right after him, without a moment’s thought, sounded either very brave or very stupid.

"An unexpected twist from Grey Temolt," Breejara said. "The Earthling saying does go pride goeth before the fall."

Grey looked at Aelthar.

"Why not? I’m better than you anyway."

This time, the Fire Elemental’s expression changed more noticeably. A thin line of irritation cut through the confidence he’d carried ever since picking the challenge.