The deep-mantle incubation of Titus lasted for six hours of underground time, during which the vast volcano bowl arena of Progenitor Vault Two seemed to hold its breath. Beside the huge, resting form of the Earth-Shaker Behemoth, the mud terrapin turned ancient Xuanwu remained motionless as an ancient ice-slow errant.
Arthur Vance sat cross-legged on a smooth outcropping of dense green rock ten paces away. His magnifying glass ran nonstop osteological and body-energy scans on Titus’s transforming back shell. The Pre-Cambrian Mantle Marrow the tortoise had burned up was not merely digesting. It was orchestrating a complete cellular and stone revolution throughout his sixty-five-ton body.
Arthur watched the body-energy readouts with the careful care of a beast-doctor corpse-judge. In the lower slums of Ward 9, when he had first found Titus discarded in a rusty chemical drainage ditch, the little terrapin had weighed less than two hundred grams. His shell had been soft and rubbery from severe body-energy bone disease, his eyes swollen shut with bacterial conjunctivitis. Arthur had spent nights hand-feeding him calcium suspensions with a plastic pipette, carefully splinting his cracked belly shell with dental acrylic and medical tape.
Now, through the lens of his magnifying glass, Arthur watched that same belly shell recrystallize into ultra-dense sheets of perovskite-iron alloy capable of withstanding world-size impacts. The dormant genetic exons of the Primordial Xuanwu—suppressed for millions of years during the cosmic aether drought—were transcribing at a furious rate, rebuilding the tortoise’s skeletal scaffold from the marrow outward.
