It had been three months since I had departed from Iulius, perhaps halfway until arrival at our destination of Terra.

Most, if they had to guess, would have predicted I had spent that time training. Unfortunately, any genuine testing of my abilities would have shredded our vessel and everyone within it.

Instead, I had been prying into the secrets of the gods.

“Like grandfather, like grandson.” I muttered, levitating a scalpel.

I had emptied a hangar bay in Persias’s flagship, jettisoned its contents into the void of deep space when told there was no room to put them elsewhere. In the place of small fighter starships and minor support shuttles, I had filled the space with laboratory equipment, surgical tables, cloning tanks, and diagnostic instruments.

Mechanical processes flowed all around me, set in motion by my technopathic command and reined in by programmed code, test tubes growing tissue samples and centrifuges separating the components of blood. Blackened cauldrons and a single golden pot containing hissing draughts that bubbled on top of burners. Neural scanners displaying high detail replicated models crowded the room.

And in the center lay a Servus girl who wanted to be anything but what she was.

Livia wanted to be like me. I said I would try my best, but in truth I had no intention of going that far. Even if I was able to replicate what Augustas had made in the ring, the chance that she might somehow awaken some measure of divinity was too much.

We had shared history, held a common wish to be more than what we were born as, and I felt an obligation to her for uprooting her from our home world of Lavinius, but all the same…

I didn’t trust her enough to try and rip out a shred of my own power and implant it in her.

Divinity was a fascinating subject, the first thing I had started to explore when I began my studies into understanding myself and my friends and enemies.

I flexed my fingers, the statue-like flesh cracking to let wisps of flame to leak out into the air. What made a god a god? More and more I was finding that the reality behind it was that the blood of the heavens were living Commands upon the universe, the same as the ones I could speak with a borrowed voice. Within my genetic information were words inscribed in nucleotide code, orders and demands seared into the building blocks of my cells.

A suspicion ran through my mind on why exactly it was that I alone of Augustas’s descendants had summoned forth celestial powers, that if I was being lent Heracles’s voice and if my new DNA was the god’s commands in a different medium, then perhaps those directives were being activated by the Holy Champion’s will.

“Slightly disconcerting,” I said to myself absentmindedly, the machinery humming around me.

What measure of me was earned versus charity of beings beyond my full understanding?

In a way, this project with Livia was a path to understanding why Heracles and Augustas would want to engineer someone like me. What was it like to be a hand stretching down from Heaven to touch a mortal soul? What differentiated a blessing from a curse?

Golden constructs of blazing light shaped into needles and azure psychic scalpels flickered into existence, circling around Livia’s unconscious body.

Awakening into your Path made your physical aspect and soul resist alteration, it was why gene modifications to Imperators were usually done when we were embryos and only a small number of total changes.

There were ways around this, ways to beat and bully nature into artificial states. The Servi rebels in their uprisings as well as Subgovernor Marias Maxion had taken advantage of alchemy to warp themselves into hideous yet stronger combatants. This wasn’t so much mutation of genes as it was a twisting of the body. Unchecked growth, augmentation like that of surgery and anabolic steroids.

Many used technology and cybernetic implants to enhance themselves beyond what previous ages had accomplished, though this was a crude and limited option.

Next, there were changes to the soul, the hardest and most costly. Antonias and I were the best examples I knew of. Our bodies had become far more dangerous than they should have because our souls had been tampered with and the transformations had cascaded throughout every element of us.

I shifted her face slightly.

“I’m sorry, Livia.” I said. “This will be a bit rough for you.”

Everything I did turned to ash, I hoped that she liked the flame’s sweet agony as much as I did.

The blue scalpel projections of light sliced through her skin and then her muscle, telekinesis prying the flesh open further to reveal bone and to confine her blood from spilling out.

With the golden needles, I carved runes of Ancient Thaekyria’s script and letters of the Greek and Latin alphabets, setting down prayers and invocations and commands into her skeletal structure. Robotic arms wielding needles siphoned up prepared elixirs from alchemical cauldrons as I worked.

I waved a hand and they began the injection process, bubbling fluids of sickly yellow and radioactively neon green shooting into her through the needles’ points, stabbing into muscles, veins, and tongue. I reached out and a handheld injector flew to my hand, this one filled with nanomachines which I promptly drove into Livia’s heart.

The engravings on her bones whispered of remembrance and past days, the alchemical potions erased age from her cells, and the nanites reversed her adolescent development slowly. It created a process that needed a catalyst to bring it all together.

My hands cracked into molten fissures once more and I laid them on her naked stomach, the fat evaporating away into noxious fumes.

“Spirit, forget the times you have lived. Flesh, abandon your growth and decay. Be what you were, cast aside Rank and Path.” I said with the Divine Champion’s intense voice, the booming sound shaking the hanger bay.

The combination of command, scripted bindings, alchemy and modern nanotechnology fused into a seething deluge of youth, the years Livia had lived seeping away in seconds, her internal clock dropping back from early adulthood to late teenagerhood and then finally below that of what had been her biological state prior to thirteen.

Before she had Awakened to being a Copper Servus.

Livia’s eyes briefly fluttered open, her eyes lacking Silver and pupilless brown. The enormous pain hit her, her mouth opening to scream.

“Sleep.” I said.

She went silent, her jaw starting to sag and saliva flowing out of the corner of her mouth. I wiped it with a rag.

The reversal of her aging kept going, from twelve years old to ten years old and then to eight and then four years of age. With split off copies of my consciousness, I watched every aspect of the backtracking, ready to halt it.

Right as she shrank to mere clump of cells too tiny for mortal eyes to see, I spoke.

“Stop there.” I cut the rejuvenation off before it could wipe her out of existence.

A vial came flying through the air when I beckoned it, inside the solution floated retroviruses designed to insert DNA into a host’s genome and enzymes crafted to snip out weaknesses and the hallmark traits of a Servus.

“Soul of Livia, allow this combining to happen. Solution, merge with these cells and remake them.” I said.

The viruses spliced their genetic cargo into the embryo and the enzymes cut away at the nuclei’s cores like tiny scissors, my directives helping them along the way. Her spirit rebelled at the changes, but most of them took.

A timer went off and I left Livia’s side to pull the golden pot off its heating pad before the alchemical elixir within dissolved its container and the floor of the hangar bay. It was an aging potion and it had taken a month and a half to brew to completion.

As the colorless contents sloshed around in the shining vessel, the fizzing noise intensified to a harmonized note, the barest hint of voices singing trickling through with every bubble that reached the surface of the potion to break through to the air.

“Here goes nothing.” I muttered.

I carefully poured a dripping stream of the elixir down towards where her microscopic remnants lay, telekinetically slowing the flow as it descended in a melodic stream.

“Reclaim your Rank of Silver and your age but cast aside the Servus’s Path forever.” I commanded the cells.

The alchemical drops smacked into her embryo and Livia’s tissues began to expand again, years piling up onto themselves as flesh stretched and writhed under my watchful eyes.

At around six years of development, I looked to the screens showing the brain scans I had done of her previously, tracing the formation nervously. There was no point in giving her an Imperator’s body if she ended up braindead as a result.

Livia’s eyes opened once to show violet irises and Copper sclera, her tan skin bleaching to marble white and taking on a stony consistency. She had reach thirteen years. Good. Lightning flickered around her when she approached the age she had made Bronze Servus and then once more at the equivalent of when she had taken on Silver into her eyes.

“Excellent.” I said, smiling. This had gone well. Very well, better than I had expected.

She had made the transition of Paths, I could see with my enhanced sense that her brain activity was normal and matched her original scans. This was perfect!

“Almost a little too good to be true.” I said to her. “Eh, Livia?”

She didn’t respond.

“Liv?” I said.

Livia stared at me with Imperator’s eyes, but no words passed her lips, not even a whisper. She twitched once and then fell into a full spasm. Blood poured from her eyes, ears and nose as the girl thrashed.

“Be fortified! Cease the seizure and stabilize! Heal!” I said desperately. “HEAL!”

With one track of duplicated consciousness I tore through her physical vitals with my senses, with another I studied her mind, and with the last I examined her very soul with haste. I couldn’t find the issue at all.

By all accounts, by everything I could pick up from the aspects of her essence, Livia should be perfectly normal. There was no underlying reason for why her body was having seizures nor should she be bleeding. There was no damn rationale for her blood to be pouring out when the blood vessels weren’t even sliced open.

The blood was phasing intangibly through blood vessels and tissues to drain outwards, completely ignoring the fact that Livia shouldn’t be able hemorrhage in the first place. There was nothing for me to cauterize or knit back together or heal because there was no physical damage.

How could I fix wounds that didn’t exist?

“Freeze functions! Stabilize! Stop bleeding, damnit!” I said in horror.

My thoughts spun into overdrive, a Golden Imperator’s processing speed and reaction times revving up to its full potential.

The conflict had to be something spiritual, like how Clodias had a normal brain that should have behaved like any other boy’s but his sapience had been ruined by an affliction of the soul. Augustas’s ring had pulled the transmutation off perfectly for me, but my grandfather was an ancient demigod who had been the master of mankind’s greatest empire for longer than most civilizations lasted. He knew things I couldn’t learn in my eighteen years even if I studied nonstop since birth and had all the resources I could ever want.

Think, Adrias. Think, you daft idiot. Think! I thought to myself.

Livia’s soul was rejecting the new Path I had given her despite my efforts. That meant I needed to manhandle her spirit into obeying before it killed her and she went to the Underworld.

Unfortunately, affecting the soul directly wasn’t exactly my forte or my powerset. If it was, I would have commanded it initially rather than include the other methods to affect the body first and then the soul.

That problem remained. Whatever the way out of this was, I had to start with flesh and blood, atoms and molecules, and use that as leverage to solve this. Somehow, I had to figure it out.

I studied my cracked hands, the golden-white tongues of flame licking out periodically. The pyric energies destroyed weakness. Most of the time, I thought of that as a side effect of a lesser man like trying to copy Heracles, but in other ways it was a main effect itself. Weakness had to be scoured to let the remainder of me use divine strength to the fullest extent.

What if I could send the flames through her, direct it properly, and use it to strike at the blockage within? A Trojan horse. I thought.

Livia’s spasms were growing wilder. I had to act now or accept she would be going to see the Corpsefather.

“Let every part of you that will live as an Imperator be strengthened.” I said. “And let every part that won’t be purged until you can do so.”

I leaned over her, opened her mouth, and pressed mine to hers and breathed searing fire down her throat. It flowed into her lungs and then snaked through Livia’s veins and arteries, filling her like it did me.

For my part, I fought with the blaze like a madman, willing it to chain itself to my purpose and to do no more harm than necessary.

Flow through her body and excise the spiritual injury. I ordered it mentally.

Red lightning screamed around Livia as her soul resisted my heavy hand. With agonizingly slow progress, I felt it shift and the results press into her mind and body. The rush of blood stopped dripping from her face.

Inhaling the flames back out of her, I stepped back from the table.

“Heal the physical damage from Heracles’s flames.” I said. “And you may awaken now.”

The scorched cells repaired themselves, leaving only a young female Imperator lying on a partially melted metal table.

Livia opened her eyes once more and leaned up. She looked confused, staring at her surroundings before covering her chest with her arms when she noticed me.

“Hey, Livia.” I said. “It worked. Let me get you a hospital gown.”

“Who are you? Where am I?” Livia said.

Shit. I thought.

Natural law could be bought, but not cheated evidently. There always was some kind of price.