The hours passed excruciatingly slow in the dimply lit lab. I barely even paid any attention to Mare’s experiments as dark thoughts continuously plagued my mind. They came and went like ocean waves eroding a wall of sand. I fought back against them, steeling my resolve during the short times I was lucid but all too quickly my will faltered. All my doubts and fears bubbled to the surface, overwhelming my sense of reason and determination.

Luckily, I was not able to act on any of these impulses. Mare kept me locked away as she ran her tests. Several times, I asked, demanded, begged to be let out but Mare knew better than to listen. This usually ended with me cursing Mare until my voice was hoarse.

Dad and Charly came to visit me a few times, but I made them leave each time. I didn’t want them to see me like this.

I had experienced the emotional effects of Demons several times throughout my life. A few times were even worse than this one. It would fade with time. It always did. I simply had to wait it out in a place outside the Demons’ sphere of influence.

The worst part was I could not tell exactly when I had started being influenced. Was it when I decided to use our own men as a decoy or had it started before that?

How many of my choices had been made out of fear or doubt? I couldn’t be sure.

Several days passed like this, my mind filled with the worst images it could conjure. Sometimes I fell into despair or rage but more often than not it faded into a detached melancholy. If this world was doomed to die, why should I try to save it?

With time though, these thoughts became less and less common. Three days after the storm ended. I had settled into a sullen determination. I would not give in to these dark thoughts, no matter what. I was no longer prone to extreme outbursts of emotion and Mare let me out of the glass vat.

She raised her eyebrow skeptically as she spoke. “So, how are you feeling, shorty?”

“In control,” I replied with a terse nod.

“Not that, after listening to you rant for three days, I couldn’t care less if you went on a killing spree and wiped out every man in the army. I want to know how your body is feeling.”

“My body?” I mumbled curiously. I clenched my fist in a test. I felt stronger but it was hard to tell how much stronger. Something about my arm though caught my attention. It seemed strangely… toned?

Curious, I looked in a nearby mirror. A lifetime of being sickly had left my body thin and wispy. The past few months I had constantly worked to remedy that but there was a limit to how much the body could improve in such a limited time. Now, when I saw myself in the mirror, it was almost as if I was looking at a different person. Each muscle was defined and every part of my skin practically seemed to radiate a healthy glow. This was not to say my muscles had bulked up, I was still just as thin and willowy as before. Instead, it was more like the body of a long-distance runner. Even after stripping down, there was not a trace of fat anywhere I could see. It seemed almost as if my lithe frame was now carved from marble.

Mare nodded in approval as she prodded my arm with a finger. “With my changes, you should be able to maintain your Divine Body for at least an hour and with Charly’s help I was also able to isolate and fix the blood disorder you were born with. While it is not really an issue to anyone at our level, it should make regaining your peek power a little easier now.”

I ran my hand down my now visible abs and smiled. “You should market this. You could make a fortune selling it as a fitness alternative.”

Mare blinked a few times in disbelief. “Do you have any idea how much energy went into improving your body in a way that didn’t hurt it long term? I could power a major city for centuries with just a portion of it. Even Division leaders can’t afford that kind of expense for something as silly as a fitness alternative.”

I pursed my lips in thought and found myself wondering just how much energy Mare had hoarded away during all this time. “Is improving my body all you have done? You didn’t add anything weird, right?”

“Well, I wanted to add a little cushioning to the ironing board of ours, but I couldn't figure out how to do it without negatively affecting our future puberty,” Mare replied with a sly grin while making an obscene groping motion in front of her chest.

I crossed my arms uncomfortably and shot Mare my best expression of disgust. “Is that all?”

“What more do you want, shorty? I’m not all-powerful. There is a limit to how much I can change, and you were awake through most of it. Surely you would have noticed if I tried anything suspicious, right?”

“I guess,” I mumbled doubtfully, not entirely trusting Mare’s words. I could not help but notice she had not outright said no but I was not going to push the subject just yet. I could use my domain and internal energy to examine my body first to see what exactly she had done. I was also curious about how much stronger I was now. My body felt like it was overflowing with energy as if I had just drunk several cups of coffee and then injected more caffeine directly into my veins.

After being trapped in a test tube for the past several days, I need to get and do something, anything. So long as I did not come in direct contact with another Demon, I should be ok stepping outside now. I immediately walked to the nearest door with a little bounce in my steps and pushed it

“Wait! Don’t go into that… room,” Mare shouted but it was already too late. I had already opened the door.

Beyond the door lied another room, almost identical to the one I was in now. The only difference was that instead of the glass vats I had been stuck in the past few days, there was a single metal table, and on the table…

It took me several moments to understand what I was seeing. The hundreds of tubes hanging from the ceiling, all pumping multicolored liquids into needles. The number of needles was enough to cause a phobia in even the bravest of men and they were all stabbed into… Donte.

Maybe, the thing on the table kind of looked like Donte. At least, the head did. His body however was another story. It was a misshapen abomination ripped straight from a nightmare. Lumps of muscles the size of watermelons deformed his body at seemingly random intervals. A patchwork of bright red rashes spotted his skin. Even his chest seemed to bulge excessively with each breath he took like he was some sort of blowfish.

“Now, before you say anything, he volunteered for the more extreme option,” Mare said hesitantly as she stepped into the room, “Once the procedure is complete, he will look just like he did before. Well… mostly like he did before. It won’t be anything bad though, I promise.”

My stomach felt sick at the sight in front of me. I was abruptly reminded of a time I did my best to forget. A time when I was nothing more than a number strapped to a very similar table. Mare’s tests on me had never been invasive so they never triggered that trauma but seeing Donte like this brought all those horrible memories flooding back.

Fighting back the welling sense of nausea, I spoke with cold bloodlust that was only slightly amplified by the emotional state I had been stuck in for the past few days. “You have five seconds to explain before I kill you.”

Mare’s body shook slightly as she quickly spoke. “He is undergoing the exact same procedure you just did. His is only a little more intense. I put him to sleep so he won’t feel any pain. When he wakes up all he will know is that he suddenly has the body of Adonis and the raw muscle strength to match even Svend in arm wrestling. This is a good thing, I promise.”

I let out a long breath as I tried to resist the urge to attack Mare.My hand gripped the nearby wall, tightening in fury at the sight in front of me. Suddenly, the edge of the doorframe ripped free as if it were made of wet cardboard. I blinked in surprise at the chunk of metal in my hand. Indents of my fingers cut deep into the material. I could barely understand what I was seeing for a moment. The walls of Dragon’s Nest had always seemed nearly indestructible. Even when exposed to explosions of golden fire it had never given way. Yet, now it crumbled like tinfoil in my hand.

I had not been using either my Divine Body or my Domain! How did the metal buckle so easily?

Mare held her hands out in front of her carefully. “Ok, Wren, I need you to calm down. Your body is far stronger than it was a few days ago. I underplayed it a bit to surprise you, but your Divine Body has leveled up quite a bit during my experimentation for perfection. Even without using it directly, you can still exert a portion of its strength. It’s practically at the level of an innate talent at this point.”

Mare’s words caught my attention, and I immediately took a deep breath. My Divine Body activated. A pattern emerged under my skin. The faint golden sheen practically burned into my eyes as a balked in disbelief.

“I directly skipped silver and reach the golden level of the Divine Body? How is that possible? Even the most skilled Seventh Division members can’t accomplish this without decades of practice.”

Mare's face lit up with a smug grin. “With this strength, you should be able to fight against even one of Envy’s seven Demons without being at a disadvantage. At the very least, they won’t be able to toss you around like a rag doll anymore. Once I am done, Donte will be the same. He is my other half. I am probably going to be stuck with the halfwit for the next several hundred years, so I poured everything into this. I’m using nearly ten times the amount of energy I did on you for his body. It may look bad now, but once I am done, it will be nothing short of a work of art. Please, trust me.”

I clenched my fists as I considered refusing. I was strong enough now that I might really be able to fight against Mare. Even if I was in the bowels of her lair, I could charge out through sheer force. Every fiber of my being wanted nothing more than to pull Donte away from that table and keep him away from Mare forever, but I could not know the side effects if I stopped the procedure halfway. Worst case, his body could be deformed forever. I could not risk that.

Finally, after several seconds of tense silence, I walked up to Mare. Jabbing my finger at her chest, I spoke. “If you are lying, I will hunt you down. Not just this body but every version of you that exists across every realm. I don’t care if it takes me a thousand deaths, I will not stop. Understand?”

Mare nodded nervously, no humorous or sarcastic remark this time. I was serious and she knew it. The ancient Preateritum may not have been able to put an end to the Shadow, but I could, even if it took me ten thousand years.