The turquoise droplets touched the exposed horn bud. The running room filled with the sharp, clean scent of ozone and crushed ice-slow pine.
For a single heartbeat, the liquid sat upon the jade tissue like morning dew on a stone leaf. Then, with a heard fizz, the potion-made solution vanished. It was drawn down into the porous draconic tissue by powerful tiny blood vessel and osmotic forces. It passed directly into Echo’s brain breath flow.
A blinding flash of cyan light erupted beneath the razor-sharp microscope.
Arthur Vance didn’t pull back. He kept his eyes locked to the oculars, his hands resting steady on the silicone cradle as a deep bio-potion-made chain reaction tore through Echo’s physiology. In his last life as a beast-doctor corpse-judge, he had studied cellular reproduction. But this was not the slow, linear mitosis of mundane biology. It was the explosive, hyper-sped up gene reversion of an ancient divine ancestor.
The hot-water chimney salt—cooled under eight crushing deep-sea pressure of deep-sea pressure—ignited the dormant mitochondria in every cell of Echo’s body. The river-jade silicates provided the raw load-bearing peptides, rushing through the bloodstream to feed the expanding horn matrix. Meanwhile, the leech-bile permeabilizers broke down cellular pushback. It allowed foreign aetheric minerals to integrate seamlessly into living osteoid tissue.
