Chương 10: Rebirth Is Not Pretty

June saw the scalpel slowly falling onto him. He would never admit it to another person, but he screamed like a little kid. He was nude, and half his body was still in a body bag; it was surprisingly comfortable, but lying there for long would have made a nap go a stage past conventional REM. He kicked and shoved, and eventually he flopped off the table and landed on his back on the cold epoxy floor. The cold assaulted his naked body, and memories of his fight made him shudder.

The last thing he remembered was trying to choke it with one hand; the creature hit his working arm in the joint, and his arm inverted. He ended up ripping its throat out with his mouth after a while of trying to cave its skull in with his own. His body continued to shudder as he curled into a ball; the mortician looked as terrified as she was confused. His body felt like it was churning; a weakness washed over his body; it felt like his body was contracting all at once.

He limply was forced into a fetal position by his panicking muscles; his wounds were closed; his skin was deeply pale, presumably from the blood loss; his fingers were still missing; and it seemed like the examiner didn't get to the part where they would remove the several bone shards from his organs. His body was violently shuddering, cold, hot, burning, sweltering; everything hurt, his skin felt like it was freezing off, but his insides were churning against each other almost as if trying to spark a flame.

Then the vomiting came; he had never had such discomfort, a repugnant and painful vomit. Shards of bone were being expelled from his body, seemingly worming their way out from his organs on their own; his fingers were growing back slowly but painfully fast. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Along with the vomit, a torrent of blood poured from his mouth, liters; he didn't know if he had much to spare, but his body didn't seem to care.

New teeth were sprouting, and deviated growths popped out for a new set, and the process would repeat, drawing more blood and more teeth for every failure to produce perfection. His head started hurting; he fell to the side where his ear was torn from his own bullet. It stopped receiving sound, but June still felt a torrent of chunky liquid pouring from his canal. Thinking became slow, then stopped, then began and resumed.

The pain blipped for a moment before continuing; his thoughts were clearer then than they had ever been, and it made the pain more vivid.

His broken arms were set to resemble their original forms, but his body decided that close enough and perfection couldn't exist in the same vessel, so all his bones in his arms, crushed bones, and shards, even ones that were just fractured, began to tear their way through his arms; the flesh contorted, and the parts deemed insufficient melted off, replaced with a new, pristine olive skin.

His eyes weren't damaged, but regardless, they began to melt and began to form and melt and form and melt until there were perfect pools of gold where irises should have been. His jaw fell off, and that made his face imperfect, so the jaw sprouted back while his face melted off and replaced itself until the torturous force decided it was satisfactory.

His sense of smell was lost; regained with better capability to smell the rot of his liquifying flesh; and lost again, repeating endlessly with each iteration being slightly better at smelling his fate. His hair grew out of his flesh like spines of onyx crystals; they grew and grew, but when they got too long, they fell out. Every second of growth felt like a thousand needles moving in and out of his body to find a comfortable space.

His body was reforming; his spine creaked and crackled as new segments grew out of his back, and his body elongated and melted to fit his taller form better. It was the cost for a foot of height. After a grueling couple minutes, June stood up in a pile of his wasted flesh and bone and looked at the surrounding guards, with a gathering row of onlookers watching his naked, yet perfected, form.

His rebirth was here; his being changed, and everything about him changed, except for the fact that he was terrified and confused. The room was tense, so he tried to alleviate it with a comment.

"Was that normal?" The angel of death had spoken.