Wind came howling in from the far end of the sea.
In the cave in that sheer cliff, Aaron Ball sat cross-legged on a damp stone ledge, his left arm resting across his knees.
His entire arm was a translucent, spectral blue. Beneath the skin were no branching blood vessels, no textures of muscle, only countless fine electromagnetic patterns slowly flowing and flickering, casting alternating light and shadow over the moss on the cave walls.
He had been sitting like this for three days.
The tip of his right index finger remained pressed against his left side-the boundary between flesh and magnetic skeleton, the dividing line between "human" and "monster."
Three days ago, he had thought this was merely a project that required patience.
Three days later, he closed his eyes.
"This simply isn't work a human can accomplish."
His voice was soft, so soft that the howling wind at the cave entrance tore it apart the moment it left his lips.
Three days earlier.
When he first probed inside the skeletal structure of his left side with his electromagnetic perception, he had felt almost at ease.
After all, he was the man who could reconstruct alloys with electromagnetic power. He had suspended ten thousand tonnes of seawater in the sky, condensed a plasma sun ten thousand meters above the ground, annihilated a legendary pirate with a planetary magnetic storm, and briefly merged his consciousness with the magnetic field of the entire planet-at that moment, he had seemed to touch the realm of gods.
A body of flesh and blood-nothing more than arrangements and combinations of carbon-based molecules.
That was what he had thought then.
*I just need to add a little at a time. Guide cellular regeneration layer by layer with a magnetic field, "imprint" the template of my