Samsara Paradise: Dream Weaver of Connections.

After Dorothea finished speaking about the origins of the King's Heart, the candle on the table burst open again, and tiny wax shavings splattered onto the tattered map like a frozen tear.

Lin Yi paused for a few seconds, mentally re-analyzing the long passage of information Dorothea had shared.

The four King Hearts were originally one, but after being separated by the Alien King, they were scattered in different places. Tasha had one implanted in her because of the special constitution of the parasitic species, and now this piece is quietly lying in his storage space.

But one detail in Dorothea's description particularly caught his attention: she said that after the King Heart was implanted into the body, it would greatly deplete the potential, and could unleash power far beyond the norm in a short period of time, but it would put a huge burden on the body. Ordinary mutants would not last more than two years before dying from organ failure.

To put it bluntly, this thing is a super amplifier, with an amplification level far exceeding that of conventional enhancement items. It's like a normal person suddenly swallowing a whole bottle of concentrated tonic; if you can't handle the tonic, the result is that you'll die from the tonic.

That's why the alien king came up with the terrible idea of ​​cutting it into four pieces. Each fragment's energy threshold was reduced to a controllable range, and only after implantation could the fragile balance between consumption and endurance be barely maintained.

Lin Yi tapped his fingertips twice on the table, then took out the dark red fragment of the King's Heart.

The moment the Wang Xin fragment appeared on the table, the surrounding candlelight all shifted away from it.

Dorothea recoiled sharply, her gaze fixed on the fragment with a sense of physical repulsion.

The little beetle peeked out from under the chair, then quickly shrank back in, the edge of its helmet hitting the chair leg with a crisp clang.

Karen looked up at the fragment, then looked down again, staring at his wooden feet as if the thing had nothing to do with him.

Lin Yi ignored the reactions of those around him. He held the fragment in his palm and examined it. Under the candlelight, the dark red surface shimmered with a viscous luster similar to that inside lava. Holding it in his hand, he could feel a faint pulsating frequency, completely different from the rhythm of a heartbeat, and closer to some kind of low-frequency vibration.

This thing had no effect on Lin Yi, so Lin Yi directly handed the fragment of the King's Heart to Su Xiao.

For Su Xiao, a great alchemist, the fragments of the King's Heart could definitely be used to create all sorts of amazing things.

The instant Lin Yi handed over the Wang Xin fragment, his senses detected an extremely subtle fluctuation signal. That fluctuation was somewhat similar to the pulsating frequency emitted by the Wang Xin fragment, but not entirely the same. It was as if the same piece of music had been played again in a different key.

The source of the signal was right next to this table. Lin Yi glanced at Dorothea, and in his mind he had already compared the characteristics of the fluctuation with the Heart of King fragment on Tasha's body. The overlap in frequency bands was more than 70%.

This means that Dorothea also possesses a royal heart.

This discovery made Lin Yi mentally raise Dorothea's threat level by two notches.

A person who can carry the fragments of the King's Heart undetected in an environment surrounded by alien species, regardless of how she does it, means that she is definitely not as naive and innocent as she appears on the surface.

Those exaggerated and terrified reactions were either a protective facade she was putting on, or there was a kind of incomprehensible disconnect between the real part of her personality and her hidden abilities.

Dorothea seemed to sense something, and she looked up to meet Lin Yi's gaze.

Those eyes appeared exceptionally clear in the candlelight, so clear that they had an unreal quality, like a bronze mirror that had been repeatedly wiped clean, its surface so smooth that no cracks could be seen. But it was precisely because they were so clean that one wondered if something was hidden beneath them.

Su Xiao straightened up from beside the stone pillar, walked to Dorothea's side, and reached out to pat her on the shoulder.

Dorothea's shoulders tensed slightly under his palm, then quickly relaxed. When she looked up at Su Xiao, she had a perfectly timed expression of confusion on her face, like a cat whose head had been gently stroked by a stranger.

Su Xiao tilted her head slightly and nodded her chin toward the entrance of the passage. The meaning of that gesture was clear: let's talk in private.

Dorothea hesitated for half a second before standing up from her chair. She took off her reindeer bone helmet and tucked it under her arm, then followed Su Xiao through the square scattered with stone carvings and into the entrance of the arched passage.

After the two figures disappeared around the corner, Bubuwang lay down next to the stone pillar where Su Xiao had leaned and yawned, showing no intention of following them. Clearly, Su Xiao had given it instructions to stay here and keep watch.

Lin Yi turned his gaze away from the entrance of the passage and onto Youying.

Shadow remained in the same wary sitting posture, its gaze fixed on Lin Yi from behind the slit in its mask.

When she saw Lin Yi stand up and walk towards her, her center of gravity naturally shifted slightly backward in her seat, and her arms were also slightly outward at an angle. This was a subconscious adjustment made by someone who was in a state of alert for a long time when being approached, ready to spring up and launch an attack or flip backward to dodge at any time.

Lin Yi stopped two steps away from her, not moving any closer. This distance would not trigger the Shadow's alert threshold, but it was enough for the two of them to have a normal, low-volume conversation.

Shadow stared at him for a few seconds. A short, mocking laugh came from behind the mask, followed by her muffled, hoarse voice: "What do you want?"

Her question was extremely direct, leaving no room for politeness or ambiguity, and her tone carried a clear sense of distance.

She hates humans first, then other species; this order itself illustrates the extent of her resentment towards the human population.

Lin Yi did not answer immediately. His gaze traveled down from Youying's mask to the protrusion on Youying's chest.

"Would you like to temporarily return to a normal state?"

Youying paused for a moment, and her gaze behind the slit in her mask momentarily lost focus, as if something had been suddenly activated in her mind and then quickly suppressed.

She paused for two seconds before looking at Lin Yi again, letting out a sneer.

“You humans love to say things like that. Everyone who comes up to me first says they can help me, and then they ask me to do this or that for them. Tell me, what do you want?”

Lin Yi was unaffected by her unyielding attitude: "Nothing special. We're going to deal with the aliens in a few days. You just need to lend a hand."

The shadow stared at him for a while, its gaze behind the slit in the mask shifting from wariness to scrutiny.

She was silent for about five or six seconds, then leaned back in her chair, crossed her legs under the table, and her posture was noticeably more relaxed than before.

"If you can really make me normal again, I'll let you fight, I'll even serve you in bed." She said this casually, but Lin Yi could hear the suppressed emotions beneath her casual tone.

He had seen that habit of using jokes as a shield far too many times. The heavier the promise, the more lightly it should be said, so that even if rejected, it wouldn't hurt.

Seeing that Lin Yi didn't respond to her joke about serving him in bed, Youying changed her sitting posture and steered the conversation back on track.

She lowered her eyes and remained silent for a while, then began to recount her origins in a completely emotionless tone.

She was originally an artist in the Human Alliance. In the era before the alien invasion, her songs and dances filled every row of seats in the largest theaters on the continent.

She remembers the golden-red curtains and velvet chairs, the creaking of the stage floor under her feet as she danced, and the thunderous applause that surged from the audience after the performance, washing over her ankles like a tidal wave.

Then that evening, after her performance, she left through the backstage side door, and an unmarked black carriage stopped at the alley entrance.

She thought it was a car arranged by the theater troupe to pick her up, so she got in. After the car door closed, she was never able to walk out of it on her own.

She was sent to an underground biological laboratory where researchers repeatedly tested fusion schemes of different organisms on various organisms.

She was one of the few individuals in the human sample who had a relatively mild rejection response to foreign tissues, so she was kept for long-term modification.

The entire transformation process lasted nearly two years. Parts of her body were pieced together from human, orc, and alien. Each surgery had to be performed while she was awake, because anesthesia would affect the success rate of tissue fusion.

She remembers the cold operating tables and the blinding operating lights overhead, the dull yet distinct tactile sensation of metal instruments cutting through her skin, and the researchers in white coats surrounding her, recording data while discussing the next stage of the implantation plan in monotone voices.

The three parts of her body maintain a delicate coexistence at the physical level. The conflict between the human part and the beastman part is relatively mild, since the genetic differences between the two are not large enough to produce a rejection reaction.

But the alien part is a completely different story. The alien tissue’s corrosiveness to the host was extremely intense from the very beginning of the implantation. In order to suppress that corrosive force, her body had to mobilize a large amount of resources to maintain balance. The price was that she lost most of the physiological desires that a normal human should have.

Shadow's craving for food had long since vanished. To her, the food on the table was no different from dirt and stones. She could distinguish the tastes, but the signals from her taste buds to her brain no longer evoked any pleasure.

Her need for sleep has also decreased to an almost abnormal level; she only needs two to three hours of sleep every three days to maintain basic physical function.

Her sense of body was so numb that when she touched her own skin, the sensation was no different from touching a piece of cloth.

This is the fundamental reason why she sat in front of a table full of food but had no intention of touching it. Her body could no longer distinguish between hunger and satiety. The most basic pleasure of eating that belongs to normal people had long been cut off from her life by the reconstructive surgery.

Lin Yi listened quietly as she finished speaking. He noticed that Youying's speaking speed remained almost constant throughout her narration, without any noticeable pauses or stumbles when recalling painful parts.

This suggests that she has either overthought those two years of experiences to the point of losing emotional sharpness, or that the content she recounts is already a highly filtered version.

After finishing her story, Youying pulled down the bottom edge of her mask, revealing a section of skin on the lower half of her face that had been worn white and reddish from long-term rubbing against the fabric. Several light-colored scars radiated outwards from the corners of her mouth.

After she finished speaking, she didn't urge Lin Yi to make a statement. Instead, she looked at him with a gaze that was somewhere between expectation and resignation, like someone who had thrown a coin into a wishing well, neither expecting it to come true nor harboring a sense of utter despair.

Lin Yi reached out and grabbed Youying's wrist. She instinctively pulled her head back, but the moment the wave touched her skin, the alien tissue in her body produced an unprecedented reaction.

"The reason why the alien part in your body keeps eroding your other tissues is because its activity setting is always maintained in an aggressive state."

Lin Yi withdrew his hand and explained what he had discovered.

"When the people who created you implanted the foreign tissue into you, they didn't do any suppression treatment, or rather, they deliberately kept the foreign part highly active to test your stress tolerance limit. It's not that complicated to calm it down. You just need to change its activity curve to switch it from an aggressive state to a dormant state. Operationally, it's much simpler than completely removing it."

The shadow's eyes gleamed briefly behind the slit in her mask, but the light only lasted a blink before she suppressed it back into her usual composure.

The dean strolled back from Karen's side at some point. He stood a couple of steps away, rubbing the charcoal dust off his hands. He glanced at Lin Yi, then at Youying, before leaning closer to Lin Yi and saying, "Doctor, are you sure there's nothing wrong? Let me be clear, I've seen at least dozens of modified bodies in all my years, but I've never seen anyone like her who, with her three sources of fusion, can maintain a conscious mind and survive for more than three years."

Lin Yi glanced at the dean: "The kind of people who were corrupted by the bloodline of the ancient god before were really troublesome. Apart from the fact that her problem is a little strange in structure, it is not that difficult to deal with."

After hearing his words, the dean did not ask any further questions. He knew Lin Yi too well. Lin Yi never exaggerated. If he said he could cure it, he really could. If he said it wasn't difficult, it was indeed within his capabilities.

Since Lin Yi had already said so much, the dean stopped worrying about it and turned back to Karen to continue squatting down and trying to extract information about the alien fortress's internal defense system.

Youying sat in the chair watching Lin Yi, her fingers clenching lightly on her knees before relaxing.

"how long it takes?"

“There’s no time today. I need to prepare some things, and you need to have someone clean out a clean room.” Lin Yi glanced at the abandoned buildings on the edge of the square. “You should rest for the night and get your body into a stable state. The smoother the fluctuations of the foreign tissue in your body, the easier it will be to deal with. Your constant state of vigilance will keep the activity of the foreign tissue at its peak, which will actually increase the difficulty of the operation.”

"You just said you could restore me to normal, is that temporary or permanent?"

Lin Yi was sweeping the crumbs on the table into a bag without looking up: "Permanent is possible, but you won't live that long. You only have two months left to live, so it'll probably allow you to temporarily return to human form before you die."

Upon hearing this, Youying's shoulders relaxed slightly. If Lin Yi dared to directly tell her that he would live for several decades, she would feel that Lin Yi was a liar.

Shadow was more willing to believe such words because she knew how bad her body was.

The shadowy figure said nothing more and got up to return to the darkness.

After tidying up the table, Lin Yi leaned against the stone pillar and waited for a while. Then, footsteps came from the arched passage, and Su Xiao and Dorothea walked out of the passage one after the other.

Dorothea clearly heard Lin Yi's words and began tidying up the room. (End of Chapter)