{Chapter: 119: Hart Under Dex?}
Dex tilted his head slightly and rested his chin on a clawed hand, lazily observing the trembling boy below.
He had spent the last 25 years living as a so-called "garbage man" of the Silent Heart Academy, a title both mockingly ironic and frighteningly accurate. It was true he hadn't broken through to a higher class of wizardry in all that time—but that didn't mean he was stagnant.
The System he possessed had quietly strengthened him in other ways.
With each passing year, the constant devouring of stray monster souls—discarded remnants of magical creatures slain in the academy's underground arenas—had slowly and silently changed him. Twice now, his bloodline had evolved without him even trying, and he had grown… different.
His body, his magic, his presence—it all became something more refined, more alien.
And with those changes came passive abilities, strange mutations of the soul. One of them had proven particularly troublesome.
If someone weaker than a certain threshold met his eyes directly, their soul would experience something akin to rejection—an allergic reaction, if he had to describe it simply.
He had dubbed this ability "[Weak Ones, Yeet]."
It was a joke, really. But it fit.
The effect was automatic. Completely passive. There was no mana cost to it, no incantation, no effort. It was simply there, a barrier of natural superiority. Those who were too weak would find their minds overwhelmed just from his gaze.
And this boy—Hart—was reacting exactly as expected.
'Still hasn't even opened his damn mouth properly,' Dex thought.
With a weary sigh, Dex finally decided to make a small concession. This weakling was, after all, the first to come to him in over a month. More importantly, he was the first viable candidate for something Dex had been preparing.
"I suppose even trash can be recycled…"
With a mental nudge, Dex suppressed the ability. Shutting it off wasn't easy. It required an active force of will and mana to restrain something that had become a natural part of his being. But he did it anyway.
Hart collapsed to his knees, gasping for air. The pressure that had been squeezing his chest vanished. His vision cleared. It was like he had been drowning and someone had finally allowed him to surface.
Above him, Dex's expression remained disinterested.
"Rubbish," Dex said flatly, "lift your head, look me in the eyes, and tell me what your wish is."
The insult stung like a whip. Hart instinctively flinched at the word. He had spent his whole life trying to escape that very label.
Rubbish. Trash. Filler.
He clenched his fists, nails digging into his palms. He wanted to protest. He wanted to scream, "I'm not worthless!" But looking at the golden eyes above him, at the overwhelming power and indifference of this strange being, he knew it would mean nothing.
So he swallowed his pride, because pride meant nothing in front of power.
He raised his head slowly. The dizziness was still there, but no longer crippling. Meeting Dex's gaze was like standing in front of a fire—dangerous, but possible.
After a long, shuddering breath, Hart spoke:
"I… I want to become a powerful wizard. I don't want to be stuck with fifth-level qualifications. I… I want more. I want to be more."
His voice trembled, but the desperation behind it was real.
Dex's expression didn't change. But his eyes—those gleaming eyes—narrowed slightly.
"Oh?" he murmured. "Now we're getting somewhere."
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, studying Hart like a merchant inspecting a curious item in the market.
Hart voice trembled like a leaf caught in the wind, uncertain and fractured. Every syllable Hart spoke seemed to carry the weight of doubt, stitched together by desperation. It wasn't just his tone that betrayed his fear—his body language echoed it too. Shoulders hunched. Hands clenched into clammy fists. Knees trembling just enough to be noticed.
He didn't know whether the towering figure before him had the power to change fate—his fate. He didn't even know if someone like him, someone so average he barely even registered on the arcane spectrum, was worthy of such intervention. His question had been more of a prayer than a request, and even as he spoke it aloud, a voice in his mind screamed for him to take it back.
Was he even worth the trouble?
In most circumstances, modifying someone's innate magical aptitude—especially someone with no detectable affinity—would have been impossible. Organ replacement to improve magical conductivity? Integration of arcanized tissue to enhance energy flow? Sure, it sounded like fantasy. But it wasn't, although not very difficult or impossible, it was definitely not easy either. At least, ordinary wizards can never do it.
If such things were truly achievable by normal, the world wouldn't be drowning in the mundane. The ranks of wizards wouldn't be so thin, the gates to true arcane power not so fiercely guarded.
And yet, the figure before him—Dex—was not most wizards.
He was something else entirely.
Dex stood tall, the golden slits in his eyes narrowing as he evaluated the trembling figure before him. His posture was regal, but not arrogant. His presence was heavy, but not overbearing. It was like standing before a storm contained in human form—something vast and ancient just barely restrained.
For Dex, transformation of the flesh was no longer a pursuit—it was a craft. It was a language he had long since mastered, a melody he could play with his eyes closed.
In a forgotten world, in a forgotten age, he had risen as the lord of plagues, commanding not only disease but the building blocks of life itself. He had forged armies from cadavers, made titans from ash and bone. Zombies? Abominations? Chimera beasts stitched from the corpses of ancient and titanic beasts? Those were child's play to him now.
Reshaping the body—upgrading it—was like fixing a toy clock in his eyes.
He could refine skin that rivaled mythril. Bones that were stronger than dwarven-forged adamantite. Muscles that flexed with enough force to crack boulders and yet remained pliable like serpent steel. Lungs that extracted every bit of mana from the air, converting it into a raw, usable flow of energy, more efficient than any machine. Hearts that beat in harmony with the ley lines of the world. Blood that coursed with more raw vitality than a dragon's breath.
He could build gods out of mortals.
In his hands, even disease became art. Sickness wasn't to be feared. It was a process, a reshaping force of nature. Where others saw pestilence, Dex saw possibility.
"A virus does not ask for permission—it rewrites the rules."
He had said those words once, on the edge of a battlefield littered with the dying. That memory clung to him even now.
To Dex, the body was not a singular entity—it was a nation. Trillions of cells. Microbes, bacteria, fungi, all living in cooperation. And if nature could do so much with chaos, imagine what he could do with order as being of chaos with soul of order.
He could design bacteria that increased endurance, allowing someone to run for hours without fatigue. Or fungi that accelerated healing, rebuilding flesh almost instantly. Or microscopic parasites that linked directly to neural pathways, enhancing reflexes, heightening perception, even improving magical processing speed.
With his mastery, he could make skin as hard as steel, bones as tough as titanium, and muscles as flexible yet unyielding as reinforced fiber composites. He could refine lungs capable of processing air with the efficiency of high-performance turbines, hearts beating with the force of hydraulic pumps, and blood so rich in raw energy that it mirrored the potency of hyper-compressed Radium Cells or stabilized Mana-Crystal Serum—less volatile than Plutonium but still powerful enough to supercharge the human body without spontaneous combustion. At his best, he could create warriors built for war, living weapons engineered to outlast and outperform anything nature had ever designed—he could create The 'Space Marines' and Thunder Warriors.
In his view, not all illnesses were a curse—some could be gifts in disguise. Disease was merely nature's way of rewriting the rules, and if harnessed correctly, it could elevate rather than destroy.
'A virus is neither good nor evil—it simply exists. But in the right hands, even a plague can become a blessing.'
A body reshaped by carefully crafted afflictions would no longer be just human—it would be something more, something beyond natural evolution's slow crawl. To him, sickness was simply another tool, another force to wield in the endless pursuit of power.
The human body was not sacred—it was unfinished. A canvas. A prototype. And he was the artist who dared to improve upon it.
Was Dex a monster? Certainly.
But was he evil?
Only by human standards.
He cured diseases, albeit by infecting others with his own. He recycled corpses, reanimated trash, repurposed the forgotten. He didn't kill because he hated—he killed because creation needed space. He wasn't the kind of demon who took pleasure in pain. Maybe he did.
But is he the kind of demon who does good things and helps others?
Of course!
He is good at learning, honest and trustworthy, he is willing to convert the masses, he is helpful, he is a medical genius, he recycles garbage, so Dex deserves his reputation for nothing!
"I am helpful," Dex had once declared, handing a weeping mother a small vial that cured her child's incurable ailment… while turning his eyes permanently blue.
"I am a medical genius."
"I am honest."
"I am fair… in my own way."
And now, standing under the vast red sky of the flower realm, bathed in the fragrance of massive swaying petals, Dex looked down at the trembling Hart and answered with unshakable calm:
"I can fulfill your wish," he said, folding his arms behind his back like a teacher about to deliver a lesson. "So let's talk about the charges."
Those words struck Hart like a hammer.
His throat tightened, his heart dropped, and cold sweat rolled down his back. The tone was casual, but he felt like he'd just stepped into the jaws of a predator that was being polite only out of amusement.
He gulped.
Something about that smile—gentle, patient, yet utterly soulless—made his instincts scream. This wasn't kindness. It was… opportunity.
Hart glanced back toward the red sea of flowers, as if wondering whether he could still run. Would the field let him leave? Would Dex?
'I feel like leaving now…' he thought with a pitiful whimper inside. His feet refused to move.
*****
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