Lu Zhiyu had a redwood tree in his laboratory. He had placed the Tree of Life's soul inside it, and every day he ran all kinds of tests and observations to learn about the properties of souls!
A drop of bright red blood sat in a test tube. Lu Zhiyu had been observing it for a long time. These were Deified Cells he had created from his own body, using the mental power he had gained through meditation over the past few days!
Ever since he had deified his brain and gained a mental space, Lu Zhiyu's meditation had progressed by leaps and bounds. His mental power had fused with his will and personality to become a soul, making its structure far more stable. He could now enter the Zero-Dimension World for long periods without worrying about being assimilated!
It had originally taken more than ten days to gain a single point of mental power. After spending several years at it, Lu Zhiyu had reached a mental power rating of 128. Now, a day of meditation could earn him a point—a tenfold increase over before, a true qualitative change!
Even so, Lu Zhiyu had calculated that deifying every cell in his body would take around 6,400 points of mental power. The number of cells in his brain accounted for only one-fiftieth of the total in his body. At his current pace, it would still take him seventeen years to deify every cell and advance to the next stage.
Lu Zhiyu had already discovered a few properties of Deified Cells. The first was that the cells themselves showed no abnormalities. The change came from their deification: at the cellular level, they had taken on the properties of mental power and the imprint of Lu Zhiyu's will.
The second property was their intense corrosiveness. On contact with any other living creature, they would immediately invade its cells and reshape its life form to match Lu Zhiyu's.
The third was their remarkable plasticity and controllability. He could make any adjustments he wanted to the Deified Cells under his control. In time, Lu Zhiyu would be able to alter his genes at will, strengthen his abilities, and give himself all sorts of powers that seemed to belong to gods and myths!
When he understood these properties of Deified Cells, Lu Zhiyu was overwhelmed with excitement. "With plasticity and controllability this powerful, all I need to do is figure out the Gene Templates of a few powerful creatures, and I'll be able to transform into them. I can remake myself into a shapeshifting Dragon and change my form whenever I want."
Then another thought occurred to him. "No, that's not all. If I can figure out how the laws of nature work—how electricity and fire are produced—and encode those principles into my genes, I can give myself all kinds of supernatural abilities. Not abilities inherited from the body, but true control over lightning and fire, metals, magnetism, gravity, and temperature."
Ordinary cells could never withstand such arbitrary alterations, but Deified Cells were different. Lu Zhiyu could control them down to the finest detail, adjusting, strengthening, and modifying them at will. Their powerful regenerative ability could also withstand those changes.
As long as his mental power was strong enough, Lu Zhiyu could manipulate the laws of the world like a true god, commanding wind, rain, thunder, and lightning, overturning the earth with a wave of his hand, and shattering stars with a single strike.
And once every cell in his body was deified and he had become a deified creature, he would have virtually no fatal weak points. Even if most of his body were destroyed, a few surviving cells, given enough energy, could regenerate him. He would become a truly immortal being straight out of myth, a godlike existence.
That was why Lu Zhiyu was so eager to remake himself completely into a deified creature. Looking at the Deified Cells he had created, he felt as though he had opened a Pandora's box.
The path to transforming himself into a deified creature was still long, and he couldn't reach the goal overnight. But he could start experimenting and gathering information now, preparing for the day he became one.
Lu Zhiyu beckoned to an Ant-Man standing guard by the door. The Ant-Man came over at once. After hesitating for a moment, Lu Zhiyu drew his Deified Cells from the blood with a syringe and injected them into the Ant-Man.
Lu Zhiyu opened the Nutrient Pool built into a nearby freezer and had the Ant-Man lie inside. Then he closed the pool and watched the creature closely.
He immediately saw the Ant-Man's body collapse. Then its entire lean, sinewy frame began to swell. Lu Zhiyu could sense its cells undergoing violent changes.
His Deified Cells began rapidly assimilating the Ant-Man, affecting every cell in its body like radiation. They assimilated its original cells, breaking apart and recombining its genes. A single drop of blood was enough to completely overwhelm the Ant-Man.
Lu Zhiyu could sense his longevity genes and human genes steadily assimilating the Ant-Man, completely reshaping its life form to match his own. Its body began to shrink; muscles grew around its joints, and masses of muscle gradually replaced its original shell, forming skin.
"How incredible! How is this possible? A single drop of blood can do all that? This ability to invade is terrifying!" Lu Zhiyu could imagine that if a true deified creature died and its corpse lay scattered across a desolate continent, countless living beings could grow from it.
The most powerful deified creatures could even influence others at their very core. Just looking at one or approaching it would draw your life form closer to its own, turning you into one of its followers, forever unable to escape its control. What else could you call such a power but divine or demonic?
"Something's wrong!" Lu Zhiyu felt that something had happened.
He watched as the Ant-Man's body suddenly collapsed. Its whole body scattered across the floor, turning into a pool of flesh.
Lu Zhiyu reached out and saw countless cells, invisible to the naked eye, fly out of the Ant-Man's body. They gathered in the air and condensed into a drop of red blood.
Lu Zhiyu sighed. "It failed!"
Just then, Lu Zhiyu had sensed the imprint of his will within the Deified Cells clash with the Ant-Man, its intense corrosiveness provoking a conflict. The fusion had failed, the transformation had gone wrong, and the genes had collapsed in an instant.
Lu Zhiyu put his Deified blood back into the test tube and stoppered it. Then he sat in a chair and thought. "The Ant-Men have little intelligence, but they aren't mindless. Faced with this kind of foreign invasion, their bodies instinctively fight back, which is why a conflict arose with the imprint of my will!"
"So that means if I find someone who won't resist my will at all, I can remake them at their core into a follower who carries my bloodline. Why does that sound so much like a religious fanatic?"
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