Chapter 959

Chapter 959: 959

When the realization fully set in, Tweet’s immediate instinct was terror. A cold knot formed in his chest. The idea of living inside an adaptive, relentless entity that would rewrite living tissue just to crawl back to him made him want to rip the armor off and fling it into the nearest star.

He paused, forcing his racing thoughts to slow down.

He recalled the two mysterious entities who had originally bestowed this gift upon him. They were beings of unimaginable power, fully aware of every intricacy and drive coded into their creation. Yet, they had chosen to hand it to him. In all his interactions with them, they had never struck him as cruel or capricious, they weren’t the type to play sadistic games or make life miserable for lesser beings.

If they trusted him with a tool this dangerous and devoted, perhaps he needed to stop fearing what it was, and start understanding what it meant to wield it.

The two entities reminded him of origin gods, beings who acted on pure, fleeting whims, inadvertently sparking creations of unimaginable scale and consequence.

He thought of Ikenga. A simple, spontaneous action from him had birthed the entire spirit realm within Nana. Yet Ikenga never sought to claim authority or ownership over it, he simply let it exist as an open frontier, a vast expanse accessible to whichever souls were fortunate or destined enough to stumble across its borders. The creators of his armor shared that exact same detached, effortless generosity.

Realizing this, Tweet felt his lingering fear evaporate, replaced by a quiet, profound gratitude.

As for the prospect of fully merging with the armor? That was a path he had never once entertained. It wasn’t out of dread or fear of losing himself to its adaptive nature, but because from the very moment it was placed in his hands, Tweet already knew its true purpose.

His mind flashed back to his past failures, the agonizing setback when he collided with the world’s ruthless immune system. That disastrous encounter had burned a lesson deep into his mind. The second he had received the armor, a brilliant, radical blueprint had clicked into place.

This spark of inspiration had drawn directly from the ancient history of Nana, back when a devastating meteor shower battered the planet’s surface. While those falling stars shattered the landscapes, they simultaneously laid the foundational bedrock for modern civilization.

Yet Tweet’s focus was never on the raw, destructive rock itself, but rather on what rode along inside it, the arrival of Murmur and his many, scattered fragments of consciousness.

Crucially, those fragmented slivers of mind had completely bypassed Nana’s defensive instincts. The world’s immune system never flagged them as a threat. Over time, these lingering fragments even integrated so deeply that they were accepted as native, assimilating seamlessly into the creatures and beings born across the planet.

From this historic anomaly, Tweet deduced a fundamental truth about planetary defense mechanisms, a split, diminished consciousness is simply too faint to trigger a world’s immune response.

To a planet’s living aura, a splintered mind exists in a limited, fleeting state, a transient whisper with a brief expiration date before it naturally dissipates. Even if it attempts assimilation, a complete takeover is never guaranteed. The planetary defense system perceives these tiny conscious fragments as harmless anomalies or passive artifacts, no more threatening than a natural treasure bearing its own faint, sentient residual hum.

The moment he first held the armor, Tweet’s design had taken shape. He initially resolved to seek out knowledge, to master the art of splintering his own soul so he could graft those faint fragments directly into the suit. The plan was to forge a armada of sentient, consciousness-infused relics, seeding them across distant worlds like seeds on the wind. He could only hope those tiny slivers of himself would remain true, braving the unknown without drifting astray to fulfill their intended purpose.

Yet, observing the suit’s wild evolution shattered and rebuilt that initial vision.

Seeing the armor birth its own independent fragments, display an incredible array of adaptive abilities, and manifest a fierce, autonomous will changed everything. It became glaringly obvious that merging with the suit directly would be a waste of its true potential.

Why force a partial soul into a vessel when the vessel possessed a relentless, primal drive of its own?

The suit’s deeply ingrained instinct was to serve him at all costs, a compulsion that drove it to hunt, adapt, assimilate, and cross vast distance just to return to its origin. Rather than trying to tame or overwrite that instinct with a piece of his own mind, Tweet knew he had to weaponize it.

To test his new theory, Tweet commanded the armor to eject another orb. He selected a world far below and cast the glowing fragment down into its atmosphere.

This time, the experiment served a dual purpose. He needed to see how the autonomous fragment would behave when he can’t be located, but more importantly, he used it as an active training ground to master the art of concealing his own life signature.

The task proved agonizingly difficult. Much like a world’s vigilant immune system could instantly lock onto his presence, the split orb’s biological tether naturally sought out its master with terrifying precision. At first, no matter how he tried to stifle his aura, the orb instinctively locked onto his coordinates.

Yet, unlike the overwhelming pressure of a world’s immune system, which always left him helpless, the orb provided a safe, measurable feedback loop. The longer the fragment wandered in confused circles trying to pinpoint him, the clearer it became that his imperceptibility was sharpening.

He refined his technique endlessly, paring down his spiritual footprint until, finally, he achieved a breakthrough: absolute stillness. Tweet dissolved his presence completely, becoming entirely seamless with the ambient surrounding around him.

He held this state of perfect erasure for months. Even with him being on that planet, the frantic orb searched tirelessly, altering flora, lashing out, and exhausting every instinctual trick in its arsenal to locate its anchor. It was utterly blind. The tether found nothing until the day Tweet deliberately dropped his guard and allowed his signature to bloom back into existence.

With his first objective secured, Tweet immediately transitioned to the second, critical phase of his grand design, the pivot upon which his entire plan rested.

The armor once again spat out another glowing orb, but before the fragment could start it’s work, Tweet’s nail lengthed as he pricked his finger and let a single, gleaming drop of his own blood fall directly onto the split fragment.

The reaction from the main suit was instantaneous and fierce. A surge of raw, instinctive rage rippled through the host armor, it reared back, violently lashing out to crush the split fragment into dust. Tweet felt a wave of visceral jealousy washing over him from his gear, the main armor was outraged that a mere throwaway offshoot had received the ultimate prize it so desperately craved for itself. Tweet gently patted the suit, soothing his new biological companion with calm thoughts until its fury receded into a sullen quiet.

Once the suit settled, Tweet cast the blood-infused orb down into the atmosphere of the world below.

This time, however, he didn’t remain in the same planed. He instead veiled his life signature completely and departed the star system, traveling through the dark vacuum until he landed on a silent, desolate world light-years away. Crouched amidst the barren stone and toxic fume of the dead planet, he erased his presence entirely.

He waited, he needed to see what this split fragment now carrying a piece of himself would achieve when left entirely to its own devices without a beacon to guide it back.

Year after silent year drifted past in the barren, airless void of the dead planet. Tweet remained frozen in a state of absolute sensory erasure, curious to see if the blood-infused orb possessed the strength to pierce his newly perfected camouflage.

Then, after nearly a decade of absolute stillness, the silence fractured.

It wasn’t a sudden physical impact or a violent spatial tear, but a faint, persistent rustle of distant voices, a rhythmic, gentle tapping at the outermost fringe of his suppressed consciousness. Intrigued, Tweet slowly unravelled his sensory barrier and reached toward the subtle pressure.

The moment his mind brushed the signal, an overwhelming wave of pure, unadulterated ecstasy surged down the tether. It was a chorus of chaotic, desperate joy that practically screamed, "Found you! Found you! Found you!" resembling a terrified child who had finally stumbled back into the arms of a parent it thought was lost forever.

As the mental link stabilized, Tweet’s mouth slowly hung open in absolute shock at the sheer flood of information pouring into his head.

Through the connection, the orb shared its long, tragic journey. When it first awoke on the surface of the medium-tier world, it had found itself stranded, unable to trace even a whisper of Tweet’s life signature. Driven by its core programming, it immediately began hunting, assimilating, and reshaping the local fauna to widen its search grid yet nothing worked. Tweet was a ghost.