At the edge of Crimson Hell, scorching winds howled up from the depths of the abyss, sweeping up the sharp leaves of the Sword Trees. They spun and danced through the air before slowly drifting down.
The leaves fell to the ground and pierced the soft earth of flesh and blood, covering the entire Needle Grass Wilderness like countless miniature daggers.
Boer floated three meters above the ground.
His body had fully transformed into magnetic skeleton mode. An eerie blue glow shone from within him, illuminating a radius of more than ten meters. At the edges of that light, the air ionized with faint crackles.
Eerie blue energy tentacles kept extending from his back, each as supple as a monster's tentacle, yet as tough as steel.
They wound through the air and plunged precisely into the bodies of the dozen or so pirates below. They pierced without drawing blood; they penetrated without killing.
They were only taking imprints.
The tips of the tentacles probed every cell in the pirates' bodies, reading life's most primitive blueprint-the helical structure of DNA, the arrangement of organelles, the folded shapes of proteins. The information flowed back along the tentacles into Boer's body, becoming material for his own reconstruction.
The Superconducting Ring in his chest swelled with golden light.
That light blazed like a miniature sun, illuminating Boer's entire chest until it was translucent.
Electrical energy was constantly extracted, converted, and reassembled according to the life blueprints he had just read, forming the smallest units of flesh and blood-cell membranes, nuclei, mitochondria, each precise down to the atomic level.
Boer closed his eyes.
From the moment he had reassembled in the East Blue from his higher-dimensional state, he had essentially become an entirely new electromagnetic life-form. The parts that had once belonged to a "human"