74 74. Element

More than four years of bleeding himself half to death for an entire month every two to three months, that was how much blood, time, and energy Liam invested to produce one grain of sand worth of impure but stable Element.

It wasn't hard per se, just extremely grueling even with the fact that the more he drained his blood the faster and in greater quantity his body would produce it, his large daily intake of food and beverage extremely rich in nutrients helping in this.

There was also the fact he kept on growing, he was 2.39 meters (~7ft8) tall and weighed nearly half a ton, his body proposition not having changed at all if slightly bulkier and thinner in certain parts keeping him in the domain of human-looking if carved out of marble.

This size also meant aside from being a great annoyance for clothing and armor and most of everything when with humans led to a greater need for substance but on the other hand, it also meant more blood produced.

He discovered that being in contact with radiation aside from seemingly bettering temporally the functions of his implant by a small amount also led to a minor increase in the amount of this chemical percentage in his blood.

Those two aspects varied by the degree of radiation he was in direct contact with.

So he might have added micrograms to grams of unstable radioactive uranium here and there as some sort of spice and it felt great. He didn't risk contaminating others, his body absorbed it all while his implant used it and the Element Nexus was not made for anybody aside from him in mind.

This might sound dangerous for him but he was aware that the amount of radiation necessary to pose a threat to him was far above this. It would be the one that would lead to his skin blistering and melting on contact, wounds not directly leading to the loss of a limb or most of an organ would heal well and without much of a problem.

A cancer like one for humans worked, was not going to even be able to develop and if for some reason it did, it would be eaten alive by his blood cell. The same was true for cellular degenerescence.

The blood he extracted from his body was in the several tons and the food and beverage behind that added even more mass, and all of it was for one teeny tiny droplet of pure liquid Element.

The chemical he needed for his and everyone else's survival, the win against the RDA and the United Nations of Earth without a difference of technology greater than the one between Na'vi and humans when the latter arrived would be nigh impossible to get without it at least without extremely heavy loss.

It was the equivalent of the Holy Grail for him, one from his body.

If his implant did not cause the flow of impure Element molecules in his blood all would have been lost or at the very least the situation would have been catastrophically bad. Adding to the list of problems the leaders of humanity were not the only possible threat out there in space.

Liam was certain the presence of Element in his bloodstream was a type of malfunction due to the fact he was not connected to the ARK Orbital Network, the Colony Ship, and more where his biometrics would be controlled and regulated. But it was a blessing in disguise.

He doubted nigh-omniscient transhuman beings and their almost godly AI would make such mistakes about a substance that gave the coup de grace to humanity after its largest war. Or it was on purpose, or truly mistakes due to errors that would undoubtedly happen.

But he could also be wrong for all, they were all but hypotheses made on wild guesses and knowledge of the lore that might very well be completely irrelevant in many points here.

Yet doubting everything was pointless, and so he didn't in the end he couldn't do anything about it, and the droplet that just splashed against the uranium-234 before his very eyes was what mattered.

His implant glowed in response to his excitement but it glowed even brighter as cables by his will over the systems connected to the magnetically levitating tesseract holding the uranium and Element started to pump nanoparticles of activated uranium straight in.

The point where the droplet hit turned a purplish blue before vein-like roots of the identical color grew from it and in a matter of seconds they propagated millimeter per millimeter rapidly gaining in celerity as time went on and as uranium was warped into something else.

The multiple scanners fed Liam all the necessary data he would ever need to know in great detail what was happening within the uranium as it was eaten and converted in and out. But one thing stood out to him with how glaringly obvious it was.

"It's growing toward me…?", he mumbled in stupefaction as he moved to the right to make sure he wasn't hallucinating or that it wasn't just a mere coincidence and it proved to be neither of those two as new tendril grew by converting matter toward his new position.

"Fuck it is…", he said moving his left arm up to test and in a few seconds the results of his experiment were immediate, the Element grew up with his movement, and he added with just as much confusion, "It's actually growing toward my implant. How…?"

The direction of the tendrils Element as they grew seemed focused on his implant by means he wasn't aware of, such as how could it so precisely locate him in space or locate him at all.

If Eywa or even a particularly talented and experienced Tsahìk or possibly even a tsakarem or a very gifted individual like Kiri was here then he would have been informed but it wasn't the case so he didn't. He wasn't into subtlety when it came to that domain.

It shouldn't do so by his knowledge but he wasn't omniscient and this was proof of it. And looking at the Element it made him feel a similar bizarre but different feeling when he saw his nearly torn pinky finger after he tamed Aegis.

It was puzzling and opened a literal Pandora's box of questions as to why those two specific things were happening. And the fact he was oddly focused on the substance aside from being a must to have.

There was something between him, his implant, and the Element surely due to it being from his very own blood when it was inert and impure as well produced by him but more time would be needed to unravel what all of it was in its true essence. He mustn't jump to hasty conclusions even less so act rashly on them.

Yet even with this, his gazes remained full of joy and relief never leaving the Element. It didn't only grow in his direction, it was the main point but not the only one, it converted everything close to it all at once in an endless cycle that kept on snowballing bigger and bigger.

Years of work finally beginning to bear fruit led his already present smile to explode in a full-blow toothy grin that would scare more than one, such was its intensity and it was almost too wide. The fact he smirked fairly rarely outside of a certain set of individuals would add only to it.

Most of the uranium was gone in the span of a minute and from what it used to be, now was almost pure Element in solid that grew explosively in the form of multiple twirling roots of dark metallic grey glowing with a soft purplish-blue light, all ending in curved sharp tips akin to twisted javelin.

The light from the ceiling seemed to distort slightly on contact, taking in the hue of the nascent uncorrupted Element Node. A humm could also be heard in rhythm with his heartbeat.

More matter seemed to form as the Element growth and spread was promoted by what Liam had just done seconds ago, it replaced everything with itself and took more space than what was before but it was with both mass and volume. It created more from what it had at disposition.

The cube inside the tesseract housing the whole, not being spared in the least as it began to be converted just as well.

The only known material Liam knew could slow down and not stop an Element conversion by tangible barrier was an alloy of this chemical itself. It was a case of fighting fire with fire.

As the last particle of uranium disappeared the growth suddenly slowed down but it didn't stop, it couldn't be stopped, only slowed down or used as material or separated from other materials to avoid its propagation.

This was why at multiple points in the room he was in was separated from the facility, held away by magnetism, the same was true for the tesseract. It was the best method for this kind of situation, maintain a safe distance and no physical contact.

Flicking his right hand the cables unconnected and a facet outer cube that composed the tesseract snapped open, the facet floating above to be used for what was to come.

Then a mining drill appeared from his inventory in his hand, it was a modified version made specifically for this exceptional task.

A cable popped from the ceiling and he connected it to the back of the customized mining drill, giving it direct access to the power of one of the four nuclear reactors of the facility. It would need this much and it was because this mining drill place for fuel was changed for something else.

And with that in order Liam without a second of hesitation pointed the tip of the drill at the contained Element before pushing the trigger. There was no time to waste, his sheer excitement is also a major factor. Look

In an instant, the disk-shaped barrel tip of the drill flashed brightly before powerful arcs of baleful orange plasma shot out and like a magnet locked and focused onto their target.

Molecule per molecule, atom per atom the tesseract, and everything contained in it began to fade away under the thin plasma beams' collective power. Then what was collected traveled toward a miniature forge using a plasmatron as its source of heat, a plasma forge.

The materials that composed the tesseract were evidently not random, their choice for Liam was based on three factors: how much radiation they can slow down under a certain threshold, their magnetism, and their use for stabilizing Element.

And this is what was happening to the nine kilogram worth of Elements whose unstable ever-expanding state was brought down by localized heat rivaling the lower level of the Sun's photosphere, the visible part of the star.

The heat added to a precise cocktail of atoms and a sudden thermal shock as the new half plasma half liquid mix was propelled in a separated chamber close to the absolute zero caused the Element to shift into perfectly spherical grains of an artic blue in color.

It was Element Dust, an extremely stable form of Element that can easily be refined into others form, and as it entered the subspace that was his inventory Liam's implant glowed brighter than ever, the hologram above gaining in intensely as well.

"This… I predicted something like this might happen but this… It's fucking intense wow.", he said out in shock, his body tensing up and eyes dilating slightly as the entire nine-kilogram of Element Dust was stored in his implant.

He was consuming a minuscule amount of the Dust but it felt like he got invigorated by a very powerful drug which was a bizarre if accurate thought or also if until now he had been dying of both thirst and hunger and was offered a full-on unlimited buffet of the highest quality for him and only him, or his specimen implant more precisely which he was the same.

"It works instantaneously.", he said, taking a deep breath as he took in and out of his inventory the mining drill in rapid succession, something that should take at least a few seconds.

Acclimating himself with an object helped give a type of memory to his implant that facilitated the storage but it never was remotely close to this. There was no latency or wait, the only limit was how fast he could act.

All for but a meager tenth of a gram of Element consumed and he instinctively knew it would last for the week. He was well acquainted with the more technological part of his being.

"Incredible.", was the only words he could say, and it didn't only make the inventory work back at the capacity it should but also the crafting function was back.

Well, not truly it was more akin to him being able to use his implant to transform this Dust into a more condensed form such as Shards or in what could be considered ingot which was what he was going to need. The crafting function for more at this point was not even needed.

This however would make him gain a large amount of time as condensing stable Elements into their less or more dense forms was not a simple or not time-consuming process, to put it mildly. It was like a cheat to have this function back, a cheat he was going to abuse.

That wasn't all too, the link to everyone became clearer. It was felt by all but the most prominently by Eywa.

'I succeeded.', he thought as the innocent curiosity from the All-Mother reached the edge of his then it was waves of relief, she trusted him and was the only one knowing precisely what he was doing and why, she knew of the dangers entailed but it was a must.

And she knew it was to be. She couldn't and wouldn't stop him from becoming what he truly was. He was at the moment still but a child in his infancy fated to grow beyond what he was now but he needed to figure it out himself.

That she was certain he would. She didn't let herself be infatuated and fall to this anomalous being from another universe for no apparent reason.

*

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