The Mech Touch

When the Cerebral King moved through the spatial hole that it had created with its expanded powers, it was overcome by its emotions!

For so many years, the king fish had only been able to dream about this moment. Though the fish-whale race could live for a long time, it was truly torture for it to spend so many years in a monotonous haze.

Even the most patient entity would grow a bit crazy after living so many years!

Given these circumstances, it shouldn't have been a surprise that the Cerebral King lost control of itself!

Seeing the bones that undeniably represented the legacy of its god had brought the king fish back to its earliest and also its happiest memories.

Back then, everything was better. The phase whale enclave was not as barren and empty at the time as the energy radiating from the nearby star fully powered all of the systems and mechanisms that kept everything in working order.

The Cerebral King and its fellow first-generation kin assisted their god in running the internal environment of the pocket space and helped with managing the subsequent generations of fish-whales.

They did so by remaining in their cultivation tanks while accessing other fish-whales and systems through the interfaces provided by the lab.

To the powerful alien creature, this was the best of times. Everything was in order and everyone knew their place. God gave orders which the fish-whales unflinchingly followed.

The pocket space gradually grew more vibrant and developed as every fish-whale constantly worked to improve their living environment with directions from above.

Then, all of that started to collapse when their god and maker disappeared one day.

It was not unusual for the Flesh Conqueror to come and go from time to time. The god of the fish-whale race had already taught the king fishes that there was a vast interstellar community outside their homes.

The fish-whales didn't actually have an objective measure of time, so they couldn't exactly tell how long their god stayed out. They did know that their maker always came back at varying intervals.

When the creator of the pocket space did not return at the expected time, none of the fish-whales thought this was unusual.

When their god remained absent for a longer period than the previous record, the king fishes still supervised the pocket space without any abnormalities.

It was only when their god went missing for thrice the amount of time it had last stayed out that the community started to change.

The ordinary fish-whales still performed their tasks as usual, but several king fishes began to implement their own instructions.

The Cerebral King never paid attention to these little deviations because they made sense at the time. Nothing in the pocket space could ever remain static for long.

More time passed while the king fishes kept implementing more and more of their own ideas. The mood in the chamber with all of the cultivation chamber grew ambiguous as the king fish no longer communicated as much with each other as before.

The Cerebral King slowly began to sense that something was amiss when it saw that its fellow kin issued orders that their god would have never made, but in the absence of their guiding leader, no condemnation arrived.

It was only when the traitors among the king fishes decided that their god was gone for good that they made their respective moves!

They broke out at the same time and wrecked the lab that had been their confining prison for so long!

Once they vented their anger and frustration, they barged out of the lab and flew to the continents that they had set their sights upon!

Each king fish that was previously responsible for managing the various supporting mechanisms of the pocket space took advantage of their access and knowledge to take over their respective domains!

The Fusion King took over the main power source!

The Phase King monopolized the largest phasewater-generating wellsprings!

The Hive King commanded its army to claim the largest nutrient-producing landmasses!

The others made their own moves, though they were much less prepared and could only scramble to conquer less productive continents.

The Cerebral King, stunned by the blatant violations of god's will, had little choice but to occupy and defend the continent where it was based upon.

It could hardly recall how much time it spent while getting lost in its anger and confusion. It was only after these strong emotions had faded that it started to pick itself up and properly develop its own power.

It was difficult. Its kin had wrecked many of the labs and neglect had compounded the damage.

Initially, the Cerebral King knew little of how the lab and everything else worked. It was only after gaining access to a repository of knowledge that it slowly started to learn the subjects needed to operate the lab.

The process was incredibly slow and arduous. The knowledge that the Cerebral King considered as its inheritance wasn't set up to teach a fish-whale about advanced biotechnology.

If not for the Cerebral King's abnormally developed cognitive functions, it would have never been able to puzzle all of the essential sciences to utilize the lab for its own ends!

Even then, it took a lot more time than that to verify whether it had learned the right lessons by performing countless experiments and seeing whether the results matched its theories.

The Cerebral King evidently did not correctly absorb the highly abstruse knowledge stored in one of the surviving databases of the lab because a lot of experiments went wrong!

It never gave up, though. The inheritance of god was too precious for it to abandon!

The king fish threw itself in its studies and used theory and practice to complement and verify what it learned.

With so much time on its hands, it could afford to perform many repetitive experiments to master every specific subject of relevance!

It was over the course of its extensive self-improvement process that it began to access and decipher the more up-to-date research files and notes left behind by Flesh Conqueror.

These documents were incredibly complicated as they required a deep understanding of the most advanced biotechnology-related subjects mastered by the phase whale race.

The Cerebral King did not know how long it took for it to unlock the greater meaning and implications behind the research files.

It could still remember the moment it finally realized the truth!

The Cerebral King's eyes turned misty as it recalled that glorious moment of enlightenment. It continued to rub its gigantic body against the immense bones of its god.

GOD… IS… BRILLIANT!

The rebels that had fought against the rules and their confinement were all fools!

Their maker created them all for a reason!

The misguided traitors thought that the Flesh Conqueror had only made them in order to serve as an eternal slave race that could run the pocket space forever.

This was a lie!

According to the ambitious research project that their maker had been working on, the fish-whale race had a much greater destiny!

It was unfortunate that their god had left them without finishing its ultimate design, but the Cerebral King had resolutely picked up where its maker had left off once the truth became clear.

Though the king fish resolutely recognized that it was incomparably stupid and incompetent compared to its god, time was its great ally!

No matter how difficult it was to develop a solution to a research problem, enough time and resources could resolve any issue!

Experiment after experiment continually allowed the Cerebral King to refine its body and organs.

The king fish knew for certain that it was evolving its body towards the goal set by its god!

Yet the closer the Cerebral King came to completing its holy mission, the more the final shortcomings hindered it from taking the last few steps!

It was truly grateful for the outsiders for disrupting the balance and giving it the opportunity to collect the missing ingredients.

The fact that the Cerebral King had reached the holy chamber that the research notes had only briefly references but never described in detail was a dream come true!

MUST… CONTINUE… MUST… NOT… STOP…

The Cerebral King had completed nearly all of the steps outlined by the Flesh Conqueror's research documents.

It only needed to make one more move before it could finally attain the deliverance it always sought.

Once the Cerebral King finally regained enough composure to keep its rousing emotions under control, the fish-whale lifted its massive body and stared out at the even greater expanse of bones.

The Cerebral King had always been the largest amongst its subordinates, but now it felt unprecedentedly small!

The Flesh Conqueror wasn't actually as big as the creature that left behind these bones.

Perhaps if the king fish was sober, it would think more critically why there was such a size disparity.

Now, the Cerebral King had come too far for it to stop! The king fish excitedly flew towards the front of the giant skeleton. This was its ultimate destination!

SOON… MY EVOLUTION… WILL BE COMPLETE…

The Cerebral King slowed down when it crossed over a certain threshold.

Though it initially felt uncomfortable, it soon became unprecedentedly pleased!

It recognized this pressure even though so much time had passed since it last experienced it in person!

GOD! I HAVE RETURNED!

The Cerebral King sped up faster as the escalating pressure did not hinder its progress at all. This was far different from all the probes that the human explorers attempted to dispatch towards the front of the giant skeleton!

As the fish-whale king slowly approached the immensely long skull, the Cerebral King's mood turned pious and fanatic as it slowly stopped above the approximate position where the brain should be located.

A small point of light shone from the center of this sight.

The more the Cerebral King studied it, the more it understood that this point was the source of the pressure acting upon its body!

MY GOD… I HAVE ARRIVED… ALLOW ME… TO COMPLETE… MY ASCENSION!

As soon as the Cerebral King broadcast its wish and intention, the point of light flared to the point of lighting up the entire chamber the humans referred to as the Royal Tomb!

An indescribable burst of power exploded from the giant whale skeleton!

When the Cerebral King became affected by this overwhelming power, its mood elevated to an incredible height even as its body began to shake and fall apart!

Slowly but surely, all of its flesh, bone and tissue started to turn fluid before getting pulled by the giant whale skeleton!

The attraction force caused the fluids bits of flesh and matter to merge with the skeleton, making it look as if the Cerebral King's body was being used as an ingredient to bring the larger whale back to life!

Strangely enough, the starship-grade power reactor that the human forces had originally gifted it remained intact for a while.

However, the powerful light source continued to irradiate it to the point where it slowly broke apart!

The metallic chunks became smaller and smaller until they became nothing but dust. The materials quickly joined the rest of the matter that was even now getting absorbed by the giant skeleton!

This shouldn't have been enough to add back all of the flesh the gigantic skeleton had lost.

However, as the light source in the center of the skull continued to release its energies, a mysterious reaction took place!

The meager amounts of flesh and other organic tissue that had attached to the giant skeleton began to multiply and proliferate!

It was not quite clear where all of the extra mass came from, but due to the mysterious processes initiated by the powerful light source, the skeleton rapidly grew new organic cells, expanding the newly-grown flesh across more and more portions of its immense bulk!

Soon enough, the light source exhausted itself just as a 12 kilometer-long phase whale body had emerged!

One of the oddest parts about this miraculous transformation was that the azure scales and flesh of this immense life form was identical to the scales and flesh of the Cerebral King!

As the body slowly grew warmer and more active, the gigantic eyes of this revived monstrosity suddenly opened!