The second stage of the bio-transfusion needed the delicate, tiny fraction of an inch-level care of a neurosurgeon running inside a burning fire.
Arthur pulled the empty slurry cartridge from the air-powered gauntlet and slammed a backup metal tube into battery. This cartridge contained four hundred drops of hyper-bitter-salt neural-stabilizing saline, enriched with sub-hair-fraction zinc chelates and sublimed sulfur nanoparticles.
“Titus,” Arthur breathed through the neural bridge. His mind pressed against the huge, roaring ocean of the tortoise’s awakening mind. “Open the ventral spirit veins. Let the zinc anchor your movement nerves.”
Arthur depressed the air-powered trigger.
The clear, golden-yellow stabilizing solution flooded through the hollow tube, following the path of the stone slurry into the deeper spongy-bone canals of Titus’s skeletal core.
Where the dark rock slurry had ignited raw, fiery cellular spreading, the stabilizing solution provided the load-bearing work frames. The chaotic, runaway cell division within Titus’s marrow instantly locked into crystal-clear order. The jagged, red-hot fissures across his shell cooled from molten cherry-red to a deep, iron-hard gunmetal-black, their surfaces hardening into dense, linked six-sided dark rock columns that erupted upward like the dark rock towers of the pre-Cataclysm Giant’s Causeway.
Titus’s physical mass swelled before Arthur’s eyes.
