Chapter 609: Who Cares About Copyright?

Grey stared down at the pinky ring for a long while before the idea in his head finally stopped feeling like a joke and started feeling like a blueprint. It would be five rings, one for every finger, each connected by a separate chain that ran back toward the wrist and linked into a central structure, though the exact shape of that central structure could come later.

He snorted as he imagined how familiar the whole thing might look once he was done. "If the Genesis Games don’t care about copyright, neither do I."

The joke disappeared almost as quickly as it came, mostly since Grey understood this would be the most complicated mech he had ever tried to make.

Four of the rings would correspond to his four Neural Frame Types, one each for Linear, Resonant, Recursive, and Branching, while the fifth would belong to Prometheus itself.

His status screen already left room for separate mechs tied to each Frame, so rather than forcing Prometheus into one narrow role it had never been designed for, Grey could use that structure to give it access to everything.

That was the problem he had been running into from the start. Prometheus did too many things, and every time Grey tried deciding whether its Vessel should be armor, a weapon, support equipment, or something else, he was trying to define something with no real definition in the first place.

Prometheus was the only one of the Gods with all four Neural Frames for a reason. If he tried to pigeon hole it too much, he would just end up handicapping himiself.

In that case, if Grey couldn’t narrow Prometheus down to one purpose, then the obvious answer was to stop trying and build flexibility into the Vessel itself.

The five rings were actually the easy part. The chains were where things became stupid.

Grey wasn’t choosing chains just to match Prometheus’ whole stealing-and-binding theme, especially when he had never personally used whatever Divine Theft would become at Phase IV.

He needed an external structure that could still communicate with his Neural Frame almost as intimately as a Prosthetic Mech, and since he wasn’t interested in cutting off healthy limbs and turning himself into some fucking clanker, the connection had to come from somewhere else.

Each individual link would mimic a node of his Neural Frame. Every circuit etched through that link would correspond to the pathways, signal patterns, and secondary structures associated with that node, while the next link would represent the next stage branching away from it.

If Grey could map his own Frame accurately enough, each chain would become a one-to-one external representation of one portion of himself, effectively creating four artificial Neural Frames hanging outside his body.

A chain was the perfect vessel for something like that, because each link could both be individual and part of a larger whole at the same time, making it perfect for his purposes.

That alone would have been worth doing, but there was more.

The fifth chain would tie all four together. Prometheus would sit at the center of that network.

Grey’s breathing slowed as the scale of the idea became clearer, since if he actually pulled this off, he wouldn’t just be making a Vessel. He would be constructing an external nervous system capable of mirroring his own Neural Frame, communicating with every portion independently while still allowing Prometheus to sit above the entire structure and direct how those parts interacted.

Then there was the most obvious elephant in the room, the thing Prometheus could actually do right now and the ability Grey relied on it the most for...

Time loops.

Grey had already planned to abuse the Silver Maw by reversing its Recursive Communion and using an external pattern to help reforge damaged portions of his Neural Frame.

The problem had been finding materials or living Frames close enough to whatever section Grey damaged, especially when his own Neural Frame was so strange that finding a true match might be impossible.

The chains could solve that.

If each one was constantly mimicking Grey’s healthy Frame, then the replacement pattern would already exist.

The Silver Maw could read the appropriate chain, establish the cycle it needed, then feed that pattern back into Grey whenever part of his natural Frame was damaged.

He wouldn’t need to hunt down some ridiculous treasure every time he injured himself, he could simply use the artificial version of his own Frame as the template for rebuilding the real one.

Grey’s grin widened as another implication followed.

Neural Frame Abilities normally ran into a soft limit at around six, mostly since cramming too many independent structures into the same Frame eventually created conflicts and instability. A

n external network changed that equation, especially if Prometheus could shift Abilities between the natural Frame and the chains whenever they were needed.

Theoretically, Grey might be able to keep adding Abilities without ever truly reaching that cap.

That still wasn’t the best part, though. Not even close.

Grey’s attention moved toward the fifth chain.

Prometheus had an ability everyone casually called time reversal, but Grey had seen enough of it firsthand to know that description wasn’t completely accurate. His body didn’t literally rewind after death, and the universe didn’t reverse itself around him, his soul seemed to be pulled from a future where he had already died and returned to an earlier point with the memories of what had happened.

It was almost more like absurdly aggressive precognition.

Grey experienced the future, died in it, then received all of that information early enough to avoid making the same mistakes.

There was one strange exception: his Abilities came back with him.

That detail had bothered Grey before, but now it seemed like the perfect target for exploitation. If Prometheus could preserve something gained in a future timeline and carry it backward alongside Grey’s soul, then there was at least some mechanism capable of storing changes outside normal cause and effect.

What happened if Grey built the fifth chain around that?

He couldn’t simply make a mech rewind time every time it broke, that would be far beyond anything he understood, but maybe it didn’t need to. If the Prometheus chain continuously preserved a record of the other four chains’ states, then damage might be treated similarly to the memories Grey carried backward after death, allowing Prometheus to restore the structure toward a previously recorded condition.

Self-repair through stolen time.

Maybe...

Grey was still several mountains of bullshit away from proving any of this, but the possibility alone was enough to make his fingers twitch.

And if he succeeded, the Sync Rate might become obscene.

His best compatibility with Prometheus had only ever reached 0.81%, yet even that tiny fraction had carried him through situations that should have killed him several times over.

A Vessel literally modeled after all four of Grey’s Neural Frames, built around Prometheus’ unique abilities and connected to the same ring that had bound them together from the start, should blow that number apart even if it came nowhere close to the Silver Maw’s perfect 100%.

The trouble was that there were about a thousand ways this could go wrong.

Grey would need to map all four Neural Frames closely enough to reproduce them, meaning the materials alone might consume the wealth of entire nations once he accounted for how absurd his Frame had become.

He would need five separate blueprints just to make each chain function properly, then somehow create a sixth layer that allowed all five to behave like one mech without turning the resulting signals into complete nonsense.

After that, he still had to physically build the damned thing. Then program it. Then survive fusion.

Grey leaned over the worktable, staring at nothing while his mind continued assembling pieces faster than he could consciously sort through them. Every sensible part of him knew he should scale the idea down, build something easier, satisfy the quest requirement, and return to this once he had more time and higher-Class resources.

Unfortunately, the idea had already lodged itself too deeply.

Grey smiled.

There was no looking away now.