I shoved the tent flap aside and the smell nearly made me retch. It smelled like a slaughterhouse left to bake in the twin suns. Copper and shit mixed together in the worst kind of cocktail.
Three bodies filled the small space.
One guy already bought the farm. A middle-aged human slumped against the canvas wall with his head cocked at a geometric angle that guaranteed a severed spinal cord. His dead eyes stared at his boots.
The second guy barely held on. A younger human wheezed through a stomach wound so wide I could practically see what he ate for lunch. He had minutes left rather than hours.
Then I saw the Twi'lek.
She sat propped against a support pole with her arms bound high. Some sick prick severed her left lekku halfway down. The stump looked crudely cauterized but leaked fluid anyway. The other tail hung limp.
Her eyes bothered me the most. They remained wide and blank. I saw that look on the Arachnae feed earlier but reality looked worse than the hologram. She seemed hollow. It looked like someone scooped the person out and left only the shell behind.
My Hyper-Perception swept over her automatically.
Her life signs flickered like a broken lightbulb. Irregular heartbeat skipped every fourth beat while she bled internally in three places.
Fuck. The lekku.
Vasha gave me the biology lesson years ago after I made a dumb joke about the tails being handles. They hold actual neural tissue. Severing one functions like a traumatic brain injury rather than a simple amputation. Swelling and synaptic misfires were likely cooking her gray matter right now.
She was fading fast.
I glanced at the human with the gut wound. He sat closer and offered an easier fix. I owed him nothing. He was another random casualty in a galaxy full of them.
But her situation involved Lyra.
I promised. I remembered pulling Lyra out of that cage days ago while she begged me to find her sister. I gave my word.
I gave my fucking word.
That was a promise.
I wasn't going to pretend this was some noble, selfless choice. It wasn't. I was being biased as hell. The logical move was probably to triage the gut-wound guy first, buy him a few more minutes, then move to her.
But logic didn't account for guilt.
And the guilt of letting Lyra's sister die—assuming this was Herana—felt a hell of a lot heavier than the sympathy I had for a stranger.
"Fuck," I muttered, gritting my teeth. "Fuck fuck fuck."
I moved to the Twi'lek and dropped to my knees beside her.
Arachnae chirped, worried. She'd already sprayed bacta over the worst of the external wounds, but it wasn't enough. Not even close.
I activated my Hyper-Perception, pushing it deeper.
The feedback was immediate and overwhelming.
Microbleeds throughout her torso. Hairline fractures in her ribs. Liver damage. Kidney function at sixty percent. But all of that was secondary.
The lekku was the problem.
The severed neural tissue was trying to heal itself, but the damage was too severe. Axons misfiring. Neurotransmitters flooding into places they shouldn't. The clotting was both saving her life and killing her—sealing off the worst of the bleeding but also cutting off circulation to healthy tissue.
Brain damage.
I could stop bleeding. I could seal wounds. I'd done that before, using the Force to apply pressure at the microscopic level, forcing damaged blood vessels to close.
But this?
A brain?
The human brain was one of the most complex pieces of organic machinery in existence. And Twi'lek neurology was even more complicated because of the lekku integration.
I didn't know how to fix this. I didn't even know where to start.
My mind raced, cycling through every medical procedure I'd ever read about, every Force technique I'd theorized during long meditation sessions.
Nothing. I had nothing.
Except...
No. That was insane. That was—
I looked at her eyes. Still blank. Still staring.
Fuck it. I knew that I shouldn't do this right now. It didn't made sense to do this right in middle of the people who wouldn't hesitate twice in stabbing through my back once they woke up, especially after the carnage that I had done moments ago....but I couldn't just sit here and let her die...Fucking emotions..
I opened the right pouch on my all purpose belt and pulled out the a cylindrical object and pressed the button on top, making it blink rapidly. Atleast evac should be handled, given that Master Ben handles Hett, which of course he would.
I gestured to Arachae to watch my back to which she gave determined nodded before pulling out her stun shot and moving behind my back. Wait, had I added the emotion module in her? How come she is behaving so expressive on that shoddy processor?
Well another black box mystery I guess. I focused back on the lady in my hand.
I'd decided. I'd rather try something than do nothing at all.
I had a theory. More than a theory—a framework I'd been building for months, ever since I started really digging into how the Force worked.
Everything I knew about the Force boiled down to frequency and vibration.
The Force was this metaphysical energy, sure, existing in some higher dimension we couldn't fully perceive. But what made it alive—what made it the Living Force—was the symphony. The vibrations. The oscillations that resonated through every living thing.
We interacted with it the same way. The Living Force inside me, inside everyone, was this grand orchestra. Trillions of tiny sounds converging into one coherent wave.
When you got excited, the symphony spiked into a raging sea. When you gave in to anger, to fear, it twisted into something dark and writhing.
And when you got injured, the symphony broke.
So the question was: if the body affected the waveform of the Living Force, shouldn't the reverse be true?
When a wound healed, the symphony of the cells near the injury returned to their natural state. But what if you forced the symphony to return to that state, regardless of the wound?
What would happen to the injury then?
Each cell had its own unique frequency. Its own waveform. But cells near each other had similar patterns—close enough that you could approximate the waveform of damaged cells based on the healthy ones nearby.
In theory, that meant there was a mathematical relationship. A predictable pattern.
If I could calculate the correct waveform—or even get close—and then broadcast it using the Force itself as the medium...
The Living Force was a giant waveform composed of countless smaller waves. Even if some were malformed, the sheer tide of it would cause those malformations to drift back toward their natural state.
That was healing. That was what the body did naturally, given time.
I was just going to make it faster.
I shifted my Hyper-Perception, changing the viewing layer from material to Force.
The world lost its color. Matter itself faded, becoming translucent, irrelevant.
What remained was an ocean.
Invisible. Intangible. But there. The Cosmic Force in its entirety, rolling and shifting like a vast sea. And within it, points of light—the Living Force burning inside every living thing.
I could feel the disturbance coming from the direction of Obi-Wan and Hett's duel. Waves in the Cosmic Force, rippling outward with every clash of their blades. It was the biggest disruption I'd ever sensed.
For a split second, I worried about the Inquisitors. If they were still on-planet, could they sense this? Would they come running?
My gut said no. I'd spent hours meditating, observing the Cosmic Force, and I couldn't sense Hett's presence even though he was less than thirty meters away. The Inquisitors, if they were still around, probably couldn't either.
Probably.
We'd cross that bridge when we got there. Time was running out.
I focused on the tent. Three sources of light.
One was steady. That was me.
The other two were wavering. Dying embers on the verge of going dark.
I honed in on the nearest one—the Twi'lek—and pushed my awareness deeper.
It was harder than usual. Living beings had an innate resistance, a natural barrier around their Living Force. Not as strong as what a Force-sensitive had, but still there.
I pressed through.
Her Living Force was a mess. Distorted everywhere. Erratic pulses where there should have been steady rhythm. This was the trolley on the verge of being shoved out of the valley entirely.
I ignored the smaller distortions—the broken ribs, the internal bleeding—and moved my awareness to the biggest one.
Her lekku.
The waveform there was shredded. Not just distorted—actively collapsing. Neurons firing randomly, synapses misfiring, the entire structure unraveling in real-time.
This was it.
This was where I'd either save her or kill her trying.
I started calculating.
My brain kicked into overdrive.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Hyper-Perception wasn't just some passive scanning ability. It was a firehose of information blasting directly into my consciousness at every moment. Most people would've gone catatonic within seconds of experiencing what I dealt with on a daily basis.
My brain had adapted. Evolved. Out of necessity, out of survival, out of sheer fucking spite against a universe that thought dumping me into a child's body with a god-tier sensory ability was a reasonable thing to do.
Parallel processing. Multiple threads of thought running simultaneously. It was the only way to function without drowning in data.
And right now, I was pushing it to the absolute limit.
I focused on the cells surrounding the damaged neural tissue in her lekku. The ones that were still intact, still functional. Their waveforms were steady, coherent. I needed to map them. Isolate each one. Find the pattern.
One thread split off to observe a cluster of neurons near the base of the severed lekku.
Another thread tracked a different group, closer to the cauterized stump.
Then another. And another. And another.
Ten threads. Twenty. Fifty.
A hundred threads of consciousness, each one isolating a dozen waveforms, visualizing it in my mind as a three-dimensional construct. Amplitude. Frequency. Phase.
Hundreds of waveforms. Thousands of cells.
The good grace was that only the frequency changed between cells. The amplitude and phase relationships stayed relatively consistent within the same tissue type.
That made it easier. Slightly. If at all.
But as things have been for my fucking life this round, the first problem reared its ugly head.
How the fuck do I measure frequency without a reference point?
Frequency was oscillations per unit of time. But time in the Force layer was fluid. Subjective. There was no clock, no counter, no way to measure anything concrete.
Wait.
My awareness split again.
One thread stayed in the Force layer, continuing to observe and catalog the waveforms. The other dove back into material reality, focusing on a single object.
My datapad.
Every electronic device—even here, in a galaxy far, far away—used the same basic principle for timekeeping as Earth tech. A counter. A simple, relentless ticker that started the moment the computing unit booted up and ran until its last breath.
The only difference was the granularity. How finely it subdivided each second.
This one counted in nanoseconds.
Perfect.
"Oh fuck."
A wave of dizziness crashed over me the moment I tried to maintain both layers at once.
My brain was already operating at the edge of what it could handle, juggling a hundred parallel threads of cellular waveform analysis. Adding the entire material layer on top of that—the textures, the light, the heat, the weight of physical reality—was like trying to drink from a firehose while someone beat you over the head with it.
Information overload. Sensory whiteout.
I teetered on the edge of a full system crash.
Then I clenched down. Hard.
Focus. Fucking FOCUS.
I narrowed the material perception to a razor's edge. Only the datapad. Only the counter display. Nothing else. The rest of reality could fuck right off.
The numbers scrolled past, each nanosecond tick a reference point I could use.
I mapped the first waveform against the counter.
Peak. Trough. Peak. Trough.
Seventeen-point-three-four nanoseconds per cycle.
The second waveform.
Seventeen-point-three-eight nanoseconds.
Close. So close. But identical.
The pattern was emerging.
I grabbed another cell. Seventeen-point-four-two.
Another. Seventeen-point-four-six.
The frequency increased as you moved radially outward from the center of the lekku's neural cluster. A gradient. Predictable. Mathematical. Something I could actually work with.
I started building the equation in my head, plotting points on an imaginary three-dimensional Cartesian graph. Frequency on the Z-axis. Position on X and Y.
The relationship was polynomial? No. Exponential? Closer, but quite.
Logarithmic with a sinusoidal modifier. Had to be.
My brain chewed through the math, running least-squares regression across dozens of data points simultaneously.
Another waveform. Seventeen-point-five-one.
Map it. Plot it. Refine the equation.
Another. Seventeen-point-five-five.
The curve was taking shape in my mind, a beautiful three-dimensional surface that described the healthy neural tissue.
But I was too slow.
Even with my brain running a hundred threads at once, even with Hyper-Perception feeding me data faster than any computer could process, it was enough.
I glanced back at the Twi'lek'.
The light was dimming, pulsing erratically like a dying star on its last legs.
She had minutes. Maybe less.
And I'd only mapped a hundred cells. I needed thousands. Tens of thousands if the damage was as extensive as it looked.
There was no choice left.
I forced my brain cells into resonance.
Force-enhancement. For my mind. The same trick I used for my body, but turned inward, applied to neurons instead of muscles.
The world shifted into slow motion. 0.5x speed, then 0.25x, then slower still. I did know how much slower. The counter ticks stretched out, each nanosecond lasting an eternity.
Time did stop—it never actually stopped—but it slowed. Perception stretched like taffy, each nanosecond on the counter ticking by in luxurious, agonizing detail.
My thoughts accelerated to match. A hundred threads became two hundred. Then five hundred. Then a thousand.
More waveforms. More cells. More data pouring into my brain faster than should've been possible.
Two hundred cells mapped. Five hundred. A thousand.
The influx of information became a roar in my skull, a torrent that felt like it was eating my brain from the inside out.
Something warm and wet trickled from my nose.
Blood or snot? I didn't have the time to check. Didn't have the attention to spare
Another drop fell from my left eye, hot against my cheek.
Ignore it. Keep mapping. Keep plotting.
Two thousand cells. Three thousand.
I mapped another cluster. Thousand cells at once. Their waveforms overlaid in my mind like translucent sheets of music.
Seventeen-point-six-three. Seventeen-point-six-eight. Seventeen-point-seven-one.
The equation refined itself with each iteration. The curve tightened.
Five thousand cells. Six thousand. Then more.
My head felt like someone was trying to crack it open from the inside. The pressure built behind my eyes, a vice grip squeezing tighter with each passing second.
Seven thousand. Eighty.
The patterns screamed at me now. I could see the relationships, the mathematical dance between position and frequency. It was a field. A continuous function describing the entire healthy region, spread out in my mind like a map I could actually read.
Ninety cells.
I cross-referenced the equation against the damaged area. The places where the waveforms were shredded, collapsed, completely wrong.
The delta was massive. Frequencies off by as much as five percent in some areas. That might sound like much, but at the cellular level? At the level of neurons firing and synapses connecting? It was catastrophic.
But the equation had taken shape in my mindscape.
Frequency = 17.2 + 0.015 * r * cos(θ) + 0.008 * r² + ε
Where r was radial distance from the neural cluster's center, θ was angular position, and ε was a small noise term I could fully account for but was probably fine to ignore.
Probably. Good enough for government work. Or in this case, back-alley surgery performed by a teenager who'd learned everything from YouTube and datapads.
Another drop of blood fell from my nose, splattering onto the datapad screen. Dark red against the blue display.
The Twi'lek's Living Force flickered again. Weaker. Closer to going dark.
No time left.
I pulled my awareness back from the material layer, releasing the split perception. The dizziness faded slightly, but the pressure in my skull remained, throbbing in time with my heartbeat. All threads of thought converged back into the Force layer.
I had the equation.
Now I had to actually do it.
I focused on the damaged region. The shredded waveforms. The cells screaming in frequencies that were all wrong.
What I needed was to create perturbations in the Cosmic Force. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Tiny, precise oscillations that would resonate at exactly the right frequencies.
Microscopic control.
Thank fuck I'd specialized in that. It was one of the few things I could actually call myself talented at, to be honest. Making waves with specific frequencies was a level higher than anything I had done before, but I had the confidence to pull it off.
I extended my awareness into the Cosmic Force around the damaged lekku, feeling for the natural currents. Then I began.
The first perturbation was small. A ripple of Living Force that transformed into vibrations in the Cosmic Force itself. I shaped it with intent, forcing it to oscillate at seventeen-point-three-four nanoseconds per cycle.
It was harder than I expected. The ambient waves in the Cosmic Force kept disturbing the specific waves I made. Even the emotional leakage from my own presence fought against my efforts. I tried to rein myself in, something that should've been as easy as flexing a muscle, but due to the sheer abuse my mind was suffering through right now, it felt like climbing a mountain in flip-flops.
I made the signal stronger, overlapped them twice and thrice, and only then did it stop dissipating the moment it emerged. It pulsed outward from my hand, carried by the Cosmic Force, and touched the first damaged cell.
The cell's waveform shuddered.
Good. It was working.
I created another perturbation. Different frequency. Seventeen-point-three-eight. Aimed it at the next cluster.
Then another. And another.
My mind split again, each thread controlling a separate oscillation. Ten perturbations. Twenty.
This shouldn't take much energy, I thought. Small ripples. Gentle nudges.
I was wrong. Very wrong.
The drain was immediate and worse than anything I'd felt before.
My Living Force—the bright light burning in my chest, in my head—began to dim. It was like exhaustion, but different. Worse. It was diffusing. Bleeding out into the Cosmic Force with every pulse I created.
Each perturbation pulled from me. Each oscillation was a piece of myself being poured out, scattered into the vast ocean around me.
Thirty perturbations. Forty.
My head throbbed harder. The vice grip behind my eyes tightened another notch. I could feel my pulse in my temples now, racing too fast.
Fifty perturbations.
The light inside me flickered like a candle in a draft.
I gritted my teeth and kept going. Had to keep going.
Sixty. Seventy.
The world started to fade around the edges. Someone was turning down the brightness dial on reality. The colors were washing out, the sharp lines of the sand and rocks and Twi'lek's body all blurring together into indistinct shapes.
Eighty perturbations.
I could feel my heart hammering against my ribs. Too fast. Way too fast. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely keep my palm steady over the lekku.
Ninety.
The datapad slipped from my other hand, landing in the sand with a muted thud.I didn't pick it up. Couldn't spare the attention.. Every single scrap of focus was going into maintaining these oscillations, keeping them at exactly the right frequencies.
One hundred perturbations.
The fading edges of my vision were spreading inward now. My thoughts were getting sluggish, like wading through thick mud. Each new perturbation took longer to form, required more concentration to maintain.
Come on. A little more. I can do this.
Something warm dripped onto my leg.
I blinked, trying to clear my vision. That made it worse somehow.
Blood.
A lot of blood.
It was streaming from my nose now, running down over my lips, dripping off my chin onto my armor, my legs, the sand. A steady flow that was probably concerning. Definitely concerning. But I could worry about that later.
My left eye felt wet too. Hot and sticky. When I tried to wipe it, my hand came away red.
Crying blood. That was new. That was probably bad.
But then I saw something else through my fading vision.
A faint greenish glow was coming from my palm. A soft, otherworldly light that pulsed in time with the perturbations I was creating.
And the lekku was healing.
Slowly. So painfully slowly. But it was happening. The torn neural tissue was knitting back together. Axons reconnecting. Synapses firing in proper sequence again. The waveforms were straightening out, finding their natural rhythm like a song finally hitting the right notes.
It was working. It was actually fucking working.
I pushed harder, creating more perturbations even as my body screamed at me to stop.
One hundred and ten.
The greenish glow brightened. The healing accelerated. Millimeter by millimeter, the damage was reversing itself.
My vision dimmed further. The world was a narrow tunnel now, everything outside that tunnel gone. Dark. Empty. Like someone had taken a spotlight and aimed it at the lekku, leaving the rest of existence in shadow.
One hundred and twenty.
My chest felt hollow. The light inside me—my Living Force—was barely a flicker anymore. A candle in a hurricane. No, smaller than that. A match in a thunderstorm.
I was running on fumes. Less than fumes. Running on whatever came after fumes.
More. She needs more. A lot fucking more!
Two hundred and thirty.
The world tilted sideways. Or maybe I tilted. Hard to tell. My body felt distant, like it was mine anymore. Like I was operating a puppet from very far away, and the strings were fraying.
My breathing had gotten ragged without me noticing. Each inhale was shallow, each exhale shaky.
Three hundred and ten.
The tunnel of vision narrowed to a pinprick. I could barely see the lekku anymore, barely make out the greenish glow. Everything was going dark, gray at the edges and getting darker.
I bit down on my tongue so hard the copper taste flooded my mouth. Wait, how come it was already coppery? Whatever. The pain was a jolt, sharp and grounding. It bought me a few more seconds of clarity, a few more moments to keep going.
Keep going. She's almost there. Almost stable.
Three hundred and sixty-nine.
My vision was getting darker and darker, like someone was slowly covering my eyes with black cloth, but the lekku looked better. Better. The critical damage was sealed. The waveforms were stable.
Stable enough.
She'd live. Probably. Maybe. Good enough odds for someone who'd been dying two minutes ago.
I could...
The perturbations faltered. One dropped out of existence. Then another. Then three more.
My concentration was slipping through my fingers like sand. The threads of thought were unraveling. The equation was still there, burned into my mind, but I could hold it anymore. Could barely remember what I was doing.
The greenish glow flickered once. Twice.
No. No no no. A little more. Another minute.
The world went sideways all at once.
I didn't feel myself hit the ground. Actually didn't feel anything anymore. My body had stopped sending signals, or my brain had stopped receiving them. One or the other.
Darkness closed in from all sides, swallowing the tunnel, swallowing the last pinprick of light, swallowing everything.
And then there was nothing at all.
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A/N: sorry guys, i fucked up the webnovel scheduler for automatically releasing the chapter. this was supposed to come out yesterday but got delayed to today.
Next chapter gonna be an horror one, try to guess why or how.
Throw in the stones meanwhile. They are a great source of motivation.
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