Red handed over control of the Imperial Cruiser to Buckley by installing the chip to the navigation control system and now had to wait until the pirates arrived to take over. The cruiser had been brought to a stand still. Red took the dagger and cut the Vice Captain's head off.
He had not killed anyone else on the cruiser, but this being was most likely an Ashura spy within the human alliance and Red would not stand ceremony in getting rid of him. He checked the persons of all the fallen soldiers for any possessions but didn't find anything useful. He headed to the Captain's room. There he found an alloy box kept securely.
Red opened the box by pressing the button which suddenly caused the box to expand to the size of almost half the room. Inside the box, red found five data chips and over 50 test tubes containing blue liquid solutions. Picking up the liquid solutions he found them numbered exactly like the numbers during his experiments. He looked over to the last one, it was actually the one he had been given on the day the planet was attacked.
Red had suspected that this solution might have caused changes in his body, because he remembered the extremely adverse reaction he had had when he consumed it and he almost died because of it. He wondered if this had been a factor in the change of his talent. He closed the alloy box and took it with him. He next went to the Vice Captain's room. Given that he was probably an Ashura spy, he might something on him.
Inside the room Red searched hard but couldn't find much, until he mistakenly kicked the bed and found a hidden compartment in it. Inside it was a small box made of a peculiar wood. The wood had blood like veins growing through it and it constantly kept throbbing. Inside he found another couple of data chips as well as an ancient scroll made of red parchment. Red kept this wooden box inside the alloy box and waiting for the pirate mates to arrive.
After a few hours Buckley took over the ship. "Lad, you truly are amazing! I am the first pirate in this quadrant to take over an manned Imperial Cruiser haha!" He boomed. "Your plan almost had me killed Buckley." Red said, but made no mention of the Ashura. He showed the alloy case to Buckley. "This is the research material, I'm taking this as payment. May be I can find out a way to practice martial arts with the help of it." Buckley laughed and nodded. "You are the man of the moment lad, anything you want."
The pirates had to modify the cruiser before it could be added to the pirate fleet. Thus the two ships were taken to a barren planet where they could take their time to modify the imperial cruiser. In the meantime, Red went to his room and locked it.
He slowly perused the data chips in his holographic device. What he found was startling. Dwight Kingdom had been secretively researching methods to raise talent for centuries. They had found many plausible methods from integrating beasts and alien DNA, to genetic modification, material augmentation, however, these were too technologically advanced for the kingdom. Also they boosted the base physique, but didn't augment martial arts talent.
Thirty years ago they discovered a severed arm in the ruin of the Dwight Capital. It is speculated that the ruin was possibly a burial ground for some ancient monarch before the Dwight Kingdom was even established. However, the arm remained without rotting for so long and it had blue blood. However, otherwise it looked like a human arm.
Dwight Kingdom spent 20 years trying to research the blood, but it was limited and when all the blood was collected out, which was about one vial, the arm decayed and disappeared into thin air. Analyzing the chemical composition and replicating it along with using various replicating agents were used to create almost similar samples for injecting into test subjects to test the possible effects.
The different replicates made as well the original remaining vial of blood were inside the alloyed box. When Red read that, his body trembled. An arm with blue blood? It turned out that the experimenters lied about everything about the tests to the test subjects. They had no clue what the blue blood even did and were blindly trying it out on guinea pigs.
He then looked at the processes of the various replicates, particularly the one with which he was tested and then realized that the final process when adding to the blood would actually start replicating more of a particular trace energy within the original blue blood. From Red's own experience, he suspected that the energy was too strong for his body and almost killed him as a result.
He thought about something curious. When he was merging his thought threads to achieve a mental breakthrough, at the last moment a berserk blue energy suddenly acted as the final glue. That blue energy seemed awfully similar to the energy from the blue blood. Perhaps... just perhaps, that metallic liquid which invaded the planet fused with the berserk blue blood's weird energy and augmented his body and his physicality. If so, consuming the blue blood might augment his body and talents, Red speculated.
He decided to take a risk. He had realized that the world is too vast and mysterious and without real power he would just be a puppet who would fall victim to the spurs of the wind. He took the first solution, the solution of the original blue blood. It was remarkably different from the other ones. Unlike the other solutions it was thick and it had a palpable energy that could be felt through it.
Gritting his teeth, Red decided to inject the blue blood into his veins.
As the blue blood slow cycled through his veins, his body started becoming transparent and the blue veins began becoming more and more visible. Like a virulent consciousness, the blue blood began replicating on interacting with Red's own blood and a powerful and chaotic energy suddenly started running rampant across all his blood vessels and capillaries. When the blood entered the organs it went and wrecked havoc there as well. The powerful energy started hemorrhaging his internal organs and the pain became unbearable.
The pain Red felt now was probably even worse than that during the test when he felt like dying. Now he was being torn apart. He felt like he was going to explode, cell by cell. His cells were struggling to contain the pressure and when Red thought he would die, His cells suddenly shrunk and from each cell in his body a silvery liquid metal suddenly came and merged with the blue blood that was replicating everywhere.
Every cell felt like it was pierced and suddenly each cell of his body started to slowly transform. Burning flame suddenly lit up in every cell and the cells became stronger and more sturdy. Their chemical and biological composition had a severe change and the energy diffused into each of these cells fused into a greasy silvery blue liquid that permeated and was swallowed up by his body.
A cocoon of white light suddenly shrouded Red and his body began to transform. It became firmer and stronger and his base physical state improved drastically. When the white light dissipated away, Red stood up and looked at himself in the mirror. All his scars had disappeared, his body had secreted out all kinds of disgusting smelly black oil, clearing out all the impurities inside his body and his eyes changed from brown to blue/silver. Even his hair started showing small streaks of metallic blue, but they were few and far between.
Disgusted with himself being so unclean, he went for a bath. There he closed his eyes in contemplation and suddenly he could feel a whole new world. He could feel the universe's Spirit Energy flow.