Hunter of Immortals

Chapter 70: Three Potential Reasons

In the end, the revised price that Kim Hee-cho and Wang Shuai agreed on was 360,000. Of course, this was still lower than the market price for a job of the same level of difficulty.

The problem was that there were no clauses on the contract covering anomaly eradications, so Wang Shuai had agreed to pay an additional fee purely as a gesture of good faith.

Adam was quite pleased with earning 360,000 for the job, and he didn't think too much about it. After returning to the academy, he took Shae back to his dorm room to test out some of his theories.

"Did you really not feel anything when Distortion jumped on you?"

Having had some time to calm down, Shae carefully recalled the event, and she was able to recollect some of the finer details.

"I did feel something. It was like water was flowing into my body, but the feeling was sucked away as soon as it appeared."

"Water flowing into your body..."

Adam repeated with a peculiar expression. This was very surprising for him to hear as he experienced a similar feeling whenever he fused as one with any of his anomalies.

However, this simply shouldn't have been possible. Invocators were able to fuse as one with their invoked entities because those entities were projections of their psyche. Hence, it made perfect sense that his psychic body was able to fuse with his invoked entities.

Despite this, the majority of invocators struggled to accomplish this.

Sadou had once told Adam that fusing with one's invoked entities was the most difficult thing for an invocator, and that it was beyond the reach of the vast majority of invocators. It was just like how it was very difficult for the vast majority of schizophrenics to fuse as one with the psychic bodies that broke off from their main psychic body as a result of their condition. Adam's aptitude in other areas was rather ordinary, but he could be considered to be among the cream of the crop when it came to his aptitude for fusing with his invoked entities.

"It's already supposed to be very difficult to fuse with one's own invoked entities, how is it possible that you can fuse with my invoked entities? How does that work? It doesn't make sense! Let's give it a try."

Adam invaded Shae's psychic world as he spoke, and the two of them arrived at the center of the Layton Academy campus.

There was a fountain here, and water sprayed out of the fountain in strange and unidentifiable shapes.

This time, Adam refrained from invoking the anomaly of fear as it was too difficult to control. Instead, he invoked Mummy.

Go and fuse with her,?Adam instructed in his heart, controlling Mummy through the connection between them.

Mummy made its way over to Shae's side while carrying its giant meat cleaver, then slowly fused into her body.

Despite his speculation, Adam didn't think that they would actually be able to fuse as one, and he was completely rooted to the spot upon seeing this.

It took much longer for Mummy to fuse with Shae than it did with Adam. When fusing with Adam, the process was virtually instantaneous, like the water in a faucet flowing into a swimming pool.

In contrast, there was a sense of obstruction in its fusion with Shae, as if this were a fusion between water and glue. First, a barrier was formed between the two, and only after that did they slowly take on the form of one another.

Even so, it still didn't take long before the fusion between the two was completed.

Following the fusion, Mummy had swelled to three meters in height.

"I feel so powerful! It's like I have boundless power in my body!"

This was the first time that Shae had experienced this type of power, and she was unable to suppress her own excitement. She raised her meat cleaver and lashed out at the stone pier of the fountain, smashing it into pieces with a single blow.

"Holy shit, this is awesome!"

Shae liberated her destructive urges to her heart's content as she spoke, striking at everything around her with her giant blade until everything had been smashed to bits.

Adam did nothing to stop her destructive rampage. He knew that even though Shae hadn't said anything, the events that had recently transpired had left her feeling very depressed.

The death of her bodyguard, the revelation that her "parents" had bought her like some type of tool, the sudden change in Adam's identity from someone that she detested into her biological brother, the turmoil that her family's company was going through, the realization that she had come from a human farm, the prospect of having to compete with a cousin that she had no biological relation to for the right to succession...

Even a single one of these things at a time could be enough to send a person spiraling into an emotional breakdown, and one could only imagine how it must've felt for Shae to have to go through all of these things in such a short time.

"This is awesome!"

After demolishing the entire flowerbed, Shae instinctively plunged her carving knife into the ground, a red halo was instantly released, expanding outward in all directions. The red light swept over Adam, and he was immediately struck by a sense of feebleness and dizziness.

Is this a new ability?

Adam recalled that Mummy possessed two abilities in the past, one of which was Bandage Proliferation, while the other was Hypertoxic Halo, but it appeared that the latter had transformed into Vampiric Halo.

Due to the different anomalic power that it had absorbed during the process of its most recent evolution, not only had its physical form undergone some changes, even its weapon and abilities had mutated.

Its defenses had become more powerful, but at the same time, it had lost its hypertoxic abilities.

"How does it feel to use that ability?"

Shae's voice rang out in response.

"I feel like I'm even more full of energy. If I had any injuries right now, I feel like they would've been almost fully healed instantly. Are you alright? I didn't hurt you, did I?"

"I was caught in the attack, but I'm fine, it only sapped some of my energy," Adam replied, and a thought suddenly occurred to him. "Don't you have a transformation ability as well? Why don't you see if using that ability will enhance this form even further?"

Shae was eager to try anything that would potentially enhance her powers, and the head of an old man immediately sprouted out of her body. With that transformation, Mummy's height was further increased by close to 20 centimeters, taking it to over 310 centimeters in height. Furthermore, it had also become burlier and more imposing.

"Looks like it really did have an effect!" Adam could tell what the outcome was from the change in Mummy's physical appearance. "Let's run some other experiments."

He invoked his other anomalies as he spoke.

After a night of experimentation, Adam was able to determine that the anomaly with the highest degree of compatibility with Shae was Hellhound. Fusing with Hellhound clearly enhanced her powers to the greatest degree out of all of the anomalies. Adam wasn't sure why this was the case, and he could only speculate that it had something to do with the fact that both Shae and Hellhound had two heads.

As for why Shae was able to fuse with his invoked entities, Adam conducted a great deal of research, but was unable to find any answers. In the end, he could only form his own theory, which consisted of three potential reasons.

The first potential reason was that he and Shae were biologically related. Of course, this was the most crude and implausible of the three theories. Throughout history, there hadn't exactly been a huge number of adapters who were biologically related, but there was certainly no lack of them, either, and there had been no examples of any related adapters being able to use one another's powers.

The second potential reason was a bit more plausible, and it was the theory that this had something to do with the special constitution of Shae's psychic body. In the 100 or so years since adapters had come into existence, there had been no official records detailing situations similar to the one that Shae was in. She was an adapter who had had a persona implanted into her mind, but the procedure had failed, and the implanted persona had been embedded into the main persona as a parasite of sorts.

There was a very good chance that Shae was a completely unique case. After all, the concept of persona installation had only emerged roughly 20 years ago, and during those 20 years, only the first five years were ones where people had extremely limited experience in the procedure. After those five years, no one would've been foolish enough to try and implant someone's persona into an infantile adapter through brute force.

In the 15 years leading up to the present since then, this piece of technology had become more and more refined, and everyone came to understand that the persona of the vessel had to be purged first, thereby making them a blank slate. After that, the vessel had to reach adulthood in order to ensure the highest success rate. The maturation of the technology had made it far safer than before, and that had given rise to supply chains such as the human farm.

During those first five years in which brute force installations were made without purging the existing persona, there were very few experimental subjects to begin with, and most of them perished. Even for those rare successful cases, there weren't any records kept of them. Hence, even if Shae's case weren't unique, Adam wouldn't have been able to find any answers anyway.

Due to the fact that a main persona had taken on a secondary persona following a brute force installation, there was a precedent for absorption, thereby allowing Shae to absorb other people's evoked entities, fusing as one with a part of someone else.

The idea seemed ridiculous, but it was one of the potential explanations that Adam had thought of.

After all, seeing as she had already absorbed a part of someone else, it didn't seem that far-fetched that she would be able to repeat the process.

The third possibility was the one that Adam felt to be most plausible, and that was the impact of those mysterious flowerpots. Those flowerpots were able to nurture anomalies, absorb anomalic power, and allow him to make constant, rapid growth. To this day, Adam still had no idea what they were or exactly what they were capable of.