Zane made it halfway through thoroughly ramping up his future body before encountering an error.

[Warning: Enhancement stability threshold reached. Further expansion will destabilize integrity. Force continue?]

Having already once experienced the rectification for low integration, Zane had no wish to undergo that again. But if there were a chance to make his new self even better… it was worth a little soul-clawing agony, right?

Still, he couldn’t quite bring himself to push the button. The memory was too raw, too recent, and everything in him flinched away from intentionally pushing the boundaries and risking that again.

“Hey, can you tell me a bit more about this quest so I know how I should build my char—ah, my new body?” But when he turned back to the mer council who’d summoned him, he found the whole scene frozen. He took a step to the edge of the air bubble, but could not pass beyond it. Unlike before, when touching it resulted in him becoming wet, now it felt like a smooth glass surface he could not breach.

Apparently this whole re-creation process was taking place in paused time. Zane huffed. Positively, it meant he could probably relax a little about the time limit. Negatively, it meant he’d get no more information until after he finished choosing his new form.

What had the kid said? ‘A life of hardship and violence, betrayal and sure defeat?’ Sounded like a combat-heavy situation for sure.

Zane dialed back the enhancements and tried balancing them out among everything. He could increase everything to about 70% before receiving the error again. So everything by 70, or half the things by 100. This implied an incremental cost increase at higher power.

For a new life in a magical mer-person society ... he'd need to change his assumptions of what mattered.

First, legs. Swimming was clearly an absolute kestone ability, so he ramped up anything related to his legs to +100%, even if that meant he'd have less to spend elsewhere. The mention of betrayal made him bump vision and hearing; if there was going to be intrigue going on he needed to be able to overhear and keep a keen lookout.

That left him with around 52% in most other categories, and 100% in upper and lower leg, thigh, knee, and ankle strength, vision and hearing. He dialed down taste at first, then considered the underwater nature of their environment and dialed down smell instead. Touch he left at 50%. He didn't want to skimp on something that could be important for fighting, but it wasn't the highest priority.

“Oh, right, almost forgot.” He pushed lung strength up again.

[Warning: Enhancement stability threshold reached. Further expansion will destabilize integrity. Force continue?]

Each time it appeared, the temptation to dismiss it and push himself past the boundaries grew stronger. Why satisfy himself with what was given, when he had the option to reach further still?

“Just a little…” he promised himself. His breath quickened in instinctive reflex as he considered actually taking this step. He braced himself. “It’ll be worth it.”

Zane toggled the verification to yes, force continue, and the warning disappeared.

Hesitantly, gingerly, he continued sliding up lung strength. Nothing happened even when it reached 100%. He pushed up another, tension humming through his body, but once again nothing happened.

The feeling of dread began to recede as he continued down the list without incident. At first he’d intended to only increase a few… but once the limitation was out of the way, why stop at anything short of perfection?

He went back through, pushing everything up to max. Then he reached the bottom. The ‘confirm selection’ button stared into his soul. He reached for it but his hand froze midway, all the hesitance of moments before returning.

Did he really want to risk breaking himself this early into his chance at a new life? Maybe he should back off a little and move things back within safe parameters?

His face formed a determined scowl and his hand fisted at his side. He’d spent too long living securely, avoiding risk and playing by the rules. Where had that gotten him? To a place where when he fell into an entirely different world, he literally couldn’t think of a single compelling reason to return to Earth. He’d become an empty mockery of himself. Following the pattern laid out by others: work hard, move up the ladder, earn more, but ultimately for what? An unhappy life in a bigger apartment than the year before? An occasional trip to somewhere worth seeing, just long enough to let him pretend it was worth the year of tedium?

No more.

He pressed the button.

His existence broke apart a second time.

[Warning: Enhancement integrity compromised. Stability below minimum threshold.]

He’d managed to forget just how intensely, all-consumingly wrong this felt. Quite aside from the pain, which remained excruciating, there was an increasing sense of dissonance. As though he’d split his inner self in two and set them at war with each other, tearing him apart in the process. His physical body was glowing, split along the mesh-lines that had been integrated earlier, hovering in ten thousand disconnected pieces that all screamed at him to stop.

[Rectifying . . .]

For an eternal agonizing moment he simply existed. Stunned into inaction. Unlike before, this process didn’t appear to be moving toward resolution, just hovering suspended. If he could have screamed he would have been, but he was once again hovering as though observing from outside even as he continued to feel the searing strain as internal forces both tore apart and shoved together every fragment of his being.

Had he pushed too far? Was he going to simply cease to exist the moment the power of whatever held time suspended ran out?

For a fleeting moment he thought that might be a preferable outcome to continuing to live through this uncontainable agony. But his recently-awakened adventurous spirit quickly leaped out and squashed down the renegade thought before it could gain ground. He had not come all this way to give up at the first step.

[Failure. Rectifying . . .]

As the process continued to stretch out without progressing, he mentally reached through the static of his splintered existence, trying with all his will to bring the disconnected pieces back into alignment. If the balance of integrity wasn’t going to correct on its own, he’d have to correct it himself.

He had no rational idea of what he was doing, simply pulling things together in a way that felt less wrong. Dragging together pieces that resisted his mental pull, like magnets polarized against each other.

He was too far into the process to stop now. He had to find a way to force it to completion, or he’d die or go mad.

Fighting against the pain with a primal desperation he'd never before experienced, he focused all of his attention on putting himself back together.

[Failure. Rectifying . . .]

Each fragment resisted at first but felt right when they finally snapped into place. It was a slow process, piecing together a mental jigsaw puzzle that was his body and soul, and the moment his attention lapsed the pieces would spring apart again and resume their internal war.

But the more pieces he brought together the less they drifted away, and once he got past the halfway point it was as though the polarization had finally flipped back to align. He hardly needed to coax the pieces any more as they coalesced back into a humanoid form and the glowing lines of light receded.

[Success. Species information updated. Conversion: 250%.]

For a moment Zane hovered still outside himself, able to admire the lean, strong, perfectly-formed body he'd created for himself. Teal scales covered him from foot to neck, though his face retained its human coloration. It hadn't been a conscious choice, but he was happy with it. His face was more defined, and there was a reckless gleam about the eyes and reflected in his smile. Purple sharp-edged fins trailed from his arms and down his spine, and tucked tight against his legs.

He wouldn't have recognized this new version of himself in a mirror, but he did recognize it in his soul. It was all the buried pieces of who he wanted to be, transformed and made tangible. Someone who would do the things that others only dreamed of. Go places no one else would.

Perhaps even become the hero these strangers needed him to be?

Then he was no longer an observer, snapping back into his body as the moment of frozen time ended.

[Enhancement complete. Level 0 parameters set. Welcome, Zane Cerulin, to Arisme 4.]

He fell from where he'd been hovering, but this time his knees only bent a tiny amount, absorbing the impact flawlessly. He stood still for a moment, breathing and living free of the absurd pain of tearing himself apart twice over.

He marveled at how easily he breathed, then grinned and stuck his face into the water outside his protective bubble of air. Cautiously, he sucked in a little water through his nose. Instead of filling his lungs he reflexively diverted it to flow through a different channel. It felt strange but completely natural at the same time.

The elder merman relaxed, and the bubble of air popped. Water flooded back in, but this time he didn't feel any pressure. Zane tentatively pushed himself up into the water.

He twisted from side to side, testing the strength of his arms and drag of their fins as he swam around the room in a circle.

Two quick kicks of his feet propelled him up to the ceiling. Then he dove back down, flexing and relaxing the frill along his back to see how it adjusted his course.

It would take getting used to but he already loved it. The sense of complete freedom of movement was liberating in a way he hadn’t felt since he was a child running through a park feeling like he could fly.

Now, he was flying.

He flared the fins on his arms, giving a powerful flap, rocketing himself from one side of the room to the other, and a joyful laugh bubbled out of him.

Any second thoughts he may have had over a hasty decision made without thinking it through vanished. He couldn't imagine trading this away for another day, week, month, year of the same dull routine day after day after day.

So what if this world was dangerous? He'd take danger any day over what he'd left behind.

He'd already experienced more ridiculous levels of pain in the past hour than in his entire life up to this point. It could only get better from here.

Zipping from archway to archway with his fins flowing around him, skewed angles and missed targets and all, he had never in his life felt so free.