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Chapter 90: Thump
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His mind, usually a riot of chaos, grew quiet. Still. A profound, endless stillness, like the bottom of a deep, dark ocean.
Thump...
Then, nothing.
No heartbeat. No breath. No sound.
Adam Cypher lay perfectly still on the table, his skin pale as wax, his body a vacant shell.
Death was not an event. It was an atmosphere. A profound, soundless, lightless ocean in which Adam Cypher hung suspended, his consciousness a single, dim ember adrift in the void.
The operation had been a study in agonizing slowness, a meticulous ballet of exsanguination and transfusion conducted by his own mechanical arms under Technopathic control.
Then, when his mind plunged into darkness. When Technopathy was no longer an option, the prewritten script took effect, and the mechanical arms followed it religiously.
He had known, from every piece of data and lore he could scavenge, that vampiric transformation was not instantaneous.
It could take hours, days, or even a week of torpor as the body died and was reborn in a new, cursed image.
His method; a violent, alchemical cocktail of mixed chaos; was an abomination against both nature and the supernatural, a shortcut forged without caring much for the science of it all.
He had moved with excruciating care, timing the blood exchange so the final transfusion would coincide with the jet's descent into New York airspace.
If he became a monster, he wanted to be near the one person who could, theoretically, reverse it.
But now, the math had stopped. The careful timing was irrelevant.
His heart had ceased. The soft, reassuring lub-dub that had been the metronome of his existence for twenty-two years fell silent.
One minute passed. The silence in the sealed compartment was absolute, broken only by the faint, distant hum of the jet's engines.
Two minutes. His body lay pale and utterly still on the medical table, a waxen sculpture.
The mechanical arms had retracted, their work done, hanging lifelessly like the legs of a dead spider.
Medically, biologically, Adam Cypher was dead.
His brain activity, a constant storm of information and thoughts, collapsed.
The blazing bonfire of his mind guttered down to a single, faint pilot light of awareness, floating in the dark.
No thoughts. No senses. Only a formless is-ness.
His human metabolism; the cellular machinery that turned food into energy, that repaired tissues, that fought entropy; shut down.
Systems went offline in a cascading failure. Without a beating heart, his blood, a thick, dark slurry of his own poisoned remnants and the incoming vampiric cocktail, lay stagnant in his veins.
It pooled, beginning the slow, inevitable process of coagulation.
For a true, undead vampire, this wouldn't be a problem. Their circulation was a matter of mystical animation, not biology.
Their hearts were silent tombs. But Adam hadn't aimed for that. He'd studied the exceptions.
Dracula himself, in his might, possessed a slow, sluggish heartbeat, a symbol of his lingering, corrupted vitality.
Morbius and Blade, products of science and hybrid biology, had fully functional, beating hearts.
Adam's cocktail was a deliberate fusion of all three: the ancient curse, the scientific aberration, the dhampir's anamoulous existence.
He had wanted the power without the complete severance from life. He wanted to cheat death, not just become its agent.
But in the silent darkness, it seemed he had failed. The chaotic formulae, the blood, the calculated risks; they had simply killed him.
Three minutes. The silence deepened. The pale, still form on the table was a monument to hubris.
Inside the jet's systems, Alice maintained her silent vigil. Her protocols were clear. Biomarker deviation.
Cardiac arrest exceeding five minutes would trigger irreversible brain damage, even by undead standards.
The failsafe would engage. A priority signal would be sent to the encrypted channel reserved for Jean Grey. Coordinates.
The message would naturally be to bring Joshua. He will know what to do to save him.
Tick Tock, Tick Tock. The time is ticking by...
Four minutes approached. The emergency protocols hovered at the threshold of initiation. Only a minute away.
Then, an anomaly.
In the absolute stillness of Adam's vasculature, a single, thick droplet of the transformed black blood in his carotid artery twitched.
It wasn't pushed by a beating heart. It moved against gravity, sliding an inch up the vessel wall as if pulled by a silent magnet.
Another droplet joined it. Then another.
Throughout his body, the congealing, stagnant blood began to stir. It was not a flow, but a slow, purposeful, peristaltic undulation, moving through veins and arteries without the engine of a heart to drive it. It was magic asserting itself over matter. The vampiric essence, woven from Dracula's ancient curse and Morbius's biological template, was knitting itself into the fabric of his corpse, creating its own circulation.
Alice registered it. A microscopic shift in internal pressure was something it couldn't detect.
Detecting the movement of a single droplet is a pipe dream. The scanner of one of the mechanical arms isn't that insane.
But the scanner could detect the motion of the ocean, the movement of his blood, and the subsequent effects.
A breach of physics. That is what it was.
The black blood completed a full, silent circuit of his body. From toes to brain and back again, propelled by what can only be assumed to be magic or some supernatural mechanism.
Only then, as if satisfied the new system could sustain itself, did the central pump reactivate.
…Thump.
A single, deep, cavernous beat echoed in the hollow of his chest. It was not the rapid flutter of a living heart, but the slow, solemn toll of a great bell in an abandoned cathedral.
The sound was so profound it seemed to vibrate the table.
A minute of utter silence passed.
…Thump.
Another beat. Slower than the first.
.........Thump.
The intervals were stretching. His heart was not restarting; for something else stole its previous job, his blood was flowing, thus his heart must've been repurposed.
It was becoming a regulator, not a driver, beating only to churn the thick, dark blood and prevent it from settling into permanent sludge.
The real circulation was now the silent, magical current thrumming just beneath his skin.
The transformation, held in stasis by clinical death, now erupted with violent purpose.
Alice's scanners, linked to microscopic sensors within the compartment, painted a picture of breathtaking, horrific change.
Adam's cellular metabolism, once offline, rebooted into something entirely alien.
His body temperature, which had plummeted, stabilized at a cool 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Extreme cellular regeneration ignited. It was not the warm, life-affirming healing of a mutant like Wolverine.
This was a cold, voracious reclamation. The cracked ribs, visible on the scanner as jagged white lines, smoothed over and fused in minutes.
The internal bruising, the micro-tears in his muscles from the battles, vanished as if they had never been.
The burns and lacerations on his skin closed without a trace, leaving behind flesh that was unnaturally smooth and pale, like polished marble.
Even the horrific, cauterized stump of his left shoulder underwent a change.
The blackened, ruined flesh was sloughed off by aggressive new cell growth.
Beneath it, the wound sealed perfectly, leaving a smooth, scarless cap over the severed joint.
There was no bud of regrowth, no hint of a new limb. The regeneration was restorative, not restorative. It made him perfectly, flawlessly whole in his new, amputated state.
His body reshaped itself. Atrophy from blood loss reversed. His muscles, defined before, now gained a sleeker, denser architecture, each fiber optimized for silent, volatile force.
His frame seemed to subtly lengthen, his posture straightening even in unconsciousness into something effortlessly regal.
The process took less than thirty minutes. When it was done, Adam Cypher's body was a masterpiece of undead biology.
Every wound from the battle with Dracula was gone. He was pristine yet again.
And his heart beat not more than once every four minutes. A slow, deep, dormant rhythm.
.........Thump.
The camera from the audience's point of view drifted through the sterile air of the compartment.
It moved over the dormant mechanical arms, across the medical equipment now speckled with dried blood, and finally settled on the form on the table.
It focused on his face.
His features were the same, yet profoundly altered. The handsomeness was still there, but it was sharper, colder, pared of any softness.
His skin was pale as moonlight, flawless. His hair seemed darker. And then, his eyes snapped open.
Both were open, but they were no longer a pair.
The left, his cybernetic eye, brightened, its lens focusing with a faint blue-grey glow.
The right, his natural eye, was no longer its warm hazel.
It burned with a bright, unwavering crimson.
The color of hellfire. The color of Dracula's gaze. The color of fresh, arterial blood under a black light.
[We're So Back!!]
[We're So Barack!!]
[Tf? So he just mixed together a cocktail of bullshit, and it worked?]
[He regenerated EVERYTHING but the arm. Can vampires not regenerate limbs?]
[Don't think so. I mean, if he still has the arm, maybe, but It was eaten. RIP.]
[Dude, the makeup people did a wonderful job. He looks beautiful, so much more handsome than before.]
[It happens to me as well. I get so immersed that I forget this isn't a normal show.]
[Wait... Right, does the show even have makeup people? Does it even have a crew?]
[ Obviously not. There are already several million+ bounties for Adam's information, aka, they're looking for the actor or any information about him, to no avail.]
[...]
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