The dragon's harem - Chapter 1875: Brain Hopper

Chapter 1875: Brain Hopper

Arad had just been on a table with a horrid monster on it, and now he was back only to find Poppy’s lifeless, but still alive body, on it. Disturbed, he looked at the body, then at Doma, who stood at the corner of the room.

“It has no soul, but it’s still breathing.” As he asked, Doma shook her head. “All vitals are normal, I even had Eris fully heal her, restore her magic, and make sure nothing was wrong…” She approached the table and touched the body.

“But there are no traces of a Pricolici, vampiric, or even lycanthropic blood.” She put her hand on the body’s head. “The brain is dead, long gone.”

Merlin, who was going through several notes beside the table finally, moved and spoke. “Most likely, she is swapping bodies by killing and rewriting their brain structure with hers, somehow.”

She lifted her robe to show Arad her torso. “As you know, I’m a high human, and thus was born with an extremely weak and fragile body in exchange for abundant mana and talent. To survive, I had to graft organs to replace my failing ones regularly. The process is complicated, but doable. What I don’t know is if it’s possible to graft a brain.”

Doma added. “The brain is where your consciousness and sense of self are.” She tapped her head, “If this breaks, you’re gone.”

“Isn’t that the soul’s role? You’re the soul, not the vessel that is the body or its organs.” As Arad replied, Merlin had to correct him a bit.

“You’re right, but wrong. The brain is the medium between the soul and body; it is the interrupter and translator between the two. Lose it, and the soul passes away to the afterlife.” She tapped the body on the table on the chest. “Her heart is still beating, but… this body is no longer able to get a signal from a soul, and so… it is dead.”

She looked at Arad, “I’ll cut the head open and see if I can find any traces of grafting. If I don’t find anything, then it means Poppy has another way of changing hosts.”

“How else could she do it then? I’m a Pricolici as well, and I don’t think I can do that. Does it have anything to do with what Amaterasu said? About Poppy possibly having multiple brains?” As he asked, Doma added from the corner of the room.

“Brain Swapping, the act of taking her brain off and shoving it in a new body. Brain Hopping, the act of attuning her soul to a new brain, then linking it with her soul. Rebirth, the act of giving birth to herself, then swapping bodies like what D does. Or it could be something else we’re not aware of.” She lifted one finger.

“I don’t think she is swapping brains, because that would require moving one brain from one body to another, and that doesn’t align with how she escaped from Gamond. It could either be Brain Hopping, Rebirth, or something else.”

The door opened, and D walked inside with Jasmine. Merlin looked at her, and Doma smiled. “Welcome, immortal witch of the dark elves. Would you mind explaining your rebirth to Arad?”

D looked at them with a worried face, and then at the body resting on the table. “With magic, I can get myself pregnant with my own cells, effectively raising a clone of myself. When I give birth, my soul transfers to the newborn body, and my current body dies; that is how I extend my lifespan and get a new one if I was majorly maimed or cursed.”

She pointed at her stomach. “It’s a magic that modifies the body, in my case, turns my reproductive organs into a cloning organ to respawn. The side effect is that I can’t have children, and this is a magic that only women are capable of using.”

Merlin pointed at the body on the table. “Would you mind inspecting her? I want to know if she is using Rebirth to swap bodies.”

“I think that would be impossible since the process takes months.” D inspected the body anyway and concluded that it wasn’t even old enough to bear children, making rebirth literally impossible to use. This narrowed their guess to only two.

“So, it’s either Brain Hopping or a method unknown to us.” Arad sighed, “How does Brain Hopping work?”

“I’ll explain!” The door slowly opened, and Sena walked inside, followed by Selica. “Brain Hopping is a complicated mess.” She approached the body on the table, touched it, and then frowned.

“It is indeed Brain Hopping, but an advanced version that I’ve never seen before. It is even more advanced than what my father used.” She looked at them. “While father used the brains of his dead enemies, this one is using live people as her hosts.”

She went on and explained how the brain acts as a bridge between the soul and body, and how modifying it with magic could allow a soul to partially link with the body. She also went on to explain how the girl’s brain is modified, but not much.

“Poppy probably has multiple hosts that she uses as a computing cluster for her psychic and magical powers. But from what I’m seeing here, even though I guess she has tens or hundreds of modified brains, she only uses one or a few at a time, allowing the rest to live a normal life until she needs them.” She tapped the girl’s head. “This is why this brain is barely modified. She was probably living a normal life until Poppy needed to use her body a few days ago, so she killed and took her place.”

Arad sighed, “Great, so anyone can be Poppy. Do we have a way to tell her hosts apart?”

Sena shook her head. “I can tell them apart, but my method would give them brain damage and might even kill them. So, I can’t start inspecting everyone we come across.”

“A body swapping, mind bending, Pricolici…” Arad rubbed his temples, “She might be an even bigger problem that we anticipated.”

Arad was good at dealing with world-ending threats, but not so much when it came to someone like Poppy. The very nature of her power, or existence, made her hard to track, detect, or counter. If anyone could turn to her in the blink of an eye, then Arad might not have a chance of stopping her if she decided to act.

“Sena, how long do you think it would take her to swap to a new body?” As he asked, he didn’t need to hear Sena’s response as he saw it in her face and heard it in her thoughts.

“Seconds. First, the brain would stop working, her soul would kick the previous soul, and take over. She gains consciousness and then manually transforms the body to her liking with magic if she wants.” Sena shook her head. “From what I’m seeing here, she prefers her little girl body, like this one, as it’s what she was before first becoming a vampire. But… there is nothing preventing her from controlling the body of an old man, a woman, or anyone.”

Arad remained silent for several minutes as he ran everything through his mind, and soon came up with an idea. “Let’s ask Fernanda. This might be a type of eldritch magic.”

Merlin flicked her fingers and summoned a tea set. “Let’s just hope that we don’t need to find and kill all of her innocent hosts to get rid of her.”