Descend- Seeing Stars by Sean Oswald (the ebook reader .TXT) 📕

was the self-refining he had done. Jay had reached a point where he wasn’t able to make any further physical changes. He still felt there was a way to convert his body to running solely on PSI. Maybe he could even make it, so he didn’t have internal organs in the same way he did now. That would definitely limit his vulnerabilities.

      However, he had to be honest with himself. He didn’t yet understand how his body worked, at least not well enough to risk trying to replace his organs. It was that very reason that he wasn’t tampering with his brain, but then again that wasn’t entirely true either.

      He didn’t try to alter how it worked but only enhanced how it worked. Normally, new neural pathways didn’t form past childhood, but he had created some. Jay had previously increased the number of neurons in his brain, so he built upon that. He was able to double, quadruple and then finally reach a point where his brain had more than twenty times as many neurons as before.

      Then he worked to create more efficient pathways. The real issue for him was twofold. First, he absolutely needed to be able to react more quickly. His speed was at a point now where when he ran, he was going over one point six million miles per hour at max speed.That number just sounded ridiculous, and it was, but the more significant number to him was that in a single second he could cross more than four hundred and fifty mile now at top speed.

      While his reactions were increased in part by his skills, there was simply no room for error at speeds like that. He could sheer off an arm, splatter another person, or rupture a hole in their ship if he weren’t exactly precise. That of course required more than just reaction time. It also required that he be able to absorb and process all the information that his various senses brought in.

      He now had Life Sense, Telepathic Sense, PSI Sight, Infravision, and Precognitive abilities all feeding him information. It was vital that he make the most of that information. Further, his Hyper Accuracy skill from Charlotte allowed him to make precise movements and refined the information that his senses brought to him, but it was more than that.

      Sometimes the flow of information into his brain was just overwhelming. Since he had combined all the sensory skills into one and their level had been trained up to over fifty-six hundred, he felt like he was constantly detecting everything around him. He knew the location of every living thing around him at all times and had to throttle that flow of energy so that it didn’t drown him.

      His PSI Sight was rolled into there and was always lit up now too. He could see the energy building, cycling, and pouring out of each of the evolved humans. The fuses were almost too bright to look at if he didn’t shade the sense.

As for himself, he felt waves of unused PSI spread out into the universe from him every second. His reservoir was so large now that he never used it up and the power had to go somewhere. What happened to it out in the universe or what effect it had on other things it encountered he could only wonder at for now.

      The perk he had gotten when he crossed the ninth threshold helped some but the modifications he made with the newly formed neural pathways helped even more. A part of his mind was not partitioned off permanently for processing data from his senses. He needed to work to expand it but wanted to take it slowly. Always a good idea to work slowly when modifying your own brain.

      Eventually, he believed that with enough skill increases and enough processing power his precognitive sense could allow him to see multiple possible timelines around him and weigh the relative probability of various outcomes. He was still not there yet but more fusions were still to come, and they would continue to push him to that point. He just needed time to adjust to the partitioning he had already done.

      Besides tinkering with his brain, he had worked to combine more of his skills. He had rolled Intellect Fortress into his Telepathic Bonding Mastery. Then as he thought about it, he realized that Imposing Will was just another telepathic ability, so why not combine it too. Thus, was born his new skill: Simple Telepathic Mastery.

      He was also able to combine Evolved Kinetic Manipulation and Mass Control into Kinetic Manipulation Mastery. The key there was understanding that in manipulating the way the mass of an object was affected he wasn’t actually adding or subtracting mass, he was increasing or decreasing the way that mass was acted upon by gravity. That was another form of kinetic force as he understood it and so those skills were combined.

He had already combined Infravision from Kayla into his Sensory Precision Mastery. The illusions he got from Martina combined with Veil from Daphne to create Veil of Illusions. Sora’s Flesh Manipulation simply got rolled into Genesis Modification Mastery, and why not. That skill already combined his Body Modification and Huong’s healing. This would just add more versatility to the skill.

The final skill combination wasn’t obvious to him at first, but in long periods of refinement he had excess mental space to work on problems like this so he kept looking for more connections that could be made between skills. Eventually he thought about Psionic Teleportation and Phase Burst.

      As he understood it at first Psionic Teleportation was like willing yourself to stop being in one location and instead be in a different one. It was instantaneous yet, there had to be some means of moving from one location to the other. It just didn’t make sense