Chapter 338: Chapter 338: An Honest Spider, Grafting Complete [bonus]
Baruk lay at the door, eight legs splayed, his head flat against the ground, both primary eyes locked on the light bleeding through from inside. Unblinking.
When Regulus stepped out, a foreleg twitched. His body rose slightly, chelicerae clicking once, all eight eyes swiveling upward.
He’d been lying here for a good while. No fuss, no scratching at the door. Waiting... Convinced he’d been exceptionally well-behaved.
Regulus surveyed the area.
Windy outdoors, temperature dropping. Workable, technically, but what he was about to do to Baruk qualified as surgery. Performing surgery in an open breeze felt wrong.
He turned back, drew his wand, and tapped the doorframe.
Transfiguration.
The stone began to flow. Both sides pushed outward, the lintel climbed, and the opening stretched from four feet to nearly twelve, wide enough for Baruk to pass through whole.
Then he aimed his wand at the cottage interior. Undetectable extension charm.
The outer walls didn’t budge. From outside, the cottage looked the same. But the space within was pulling apart.
The fireplace slid back seven or eight meters. All four walls retreated simultaneously, and the ceiling vaulted upward.
A few seconds, and the room had expanded several times over.
What had barely held a bed and a desk now had the interior volume of a classroom.
The flagstone grain in front of the fireplace had stretched thin. The furniture hadn’t moved, but open space yawned around it.
Regulus patted Baruk’s broad head. "Come in."
Baruk stood, all eight eyes on the widened frame.
One cautious step forward. A foreleg on the threshold, testing. No risk of wedging his head against the top anymore.
Another step. Half his body inside, four legs still out.
He paused, scanning the room.
Same fireplace. Same desk. Same bed. Even his spot by the pillow was still there.
Everything familiar. The space around it had changed.
He pulled the rest of himself through and stood in the center of the room, head swiveling, eight eyes cataloguing every corner.
A glance back at the doorframe. A glance at Regulus. Chelicerae opening and closing, soft.
Then he started wandering. Over to the fireplace. Past the desk. Head tipped back to study the ceiling. Head down again, drifting, pausing, drifting.
At the desk he leaned over to peer at the Salamanders in the stone box, then shot a look at Regulus.
Regulus sat by the fireplace, not watching.
Baruk hiked his abdomen, aimed his spinnerets at a ceiling beam, and fired a thick rope of silk. In moments he’d woven a small hanging web up there.
Then he wiggled his rear end, strolled back to Regulus with studied nonchalance, and settled down, all eight legs tucked neatly beneath him, the picture of innocence.
The corner of Regulus’s mouth twitched. He ignored the little performance. "Hold still."
Baruk had been lying there contentedly. At those two words, he turned his head, gave Regulus a single look, then turned back and went perfectly flat. Even his eyes stopped roving.
Regulus placed his palm on Baruk’s dorsal shell and pushed his magical perception inward.
He’d done this many times, starting from their first meeting in the Forbidden Forest, but never this precisely.
Baruk knew this magic well. Not a flicker of resistance. He lay open to inspection.
An honest spider.
His magical structure was far more complex than a Salamander’s.
The venom gland system ran its own magical branch. The silk glands had another. The eight-eye visual array operated as eight parallel lines.
Every system ran stable and independent, branches that didn’t interfere with one another, each doing its own work.
Between the branches, structural gaps. Those gaps were the grafting sites.
The task was straightforward in concept: grow a new branch in one of those gaps, a branch that would carry the Salamander’s fire affinity.
But a technical problem came first.
Salamanders were reptilian. Their magic traveled along the spine and subcutaneous blood vessels.
Baruk was arthropod. His magic ran along the interior surfaces of the exoskeleton and through the gaps between limb joints.
Two entirely different operating systems. The Salamander’s magic seed couldn’t be plugged into Baruk’s body as-is.
Incompatible. It needed rewriting.
The internal pathways of the magic seed had to be converted from spinal routing to exoskeletal routing, from subcutaneous vasculature to joint-gap transmission.
[Beyond Form] didn’t cover this step. That book addressed a wizard modifying themselves, a process with no real technique involved since the incantation handled the conversion automatically.
But transplanting one animal’s ability into a different animal, bridging the gap between two fundamentally different operating architectures, that had no precedent. It would come down to his understanding of magical circuitry and his ability to adjust on the fly.
Regulus picked up the Magic Seed and rolled it between two fingers.
Pea-sized. The internal structure was legible, a single line running end to end with one tendency.
He ran his magical perception across every node, then rearranged them in his mind.
The straight-line structure became a mesh, adapted to an arthropod’s body plan, spreading along the inner walls of the exoskeleton.
Relay points at every joint, allowing magic to travel from one leg’s exoskeleton to the next, until coverage reached the entire body.
He compressed the rewritten structure back into the Magic Seed.
No visible change. Still orange-red, still pea-sized. But the pathways inside were new.
Salamander magic, Acromantula-compatible edition.
Next, the incantation.
Beyond Form provided the root structure. Facultas, ability. Mutare, change. Corpus, body. The specific combination depended on the target species and the desired ability.
He assembled the components based on Acromantula taxonomy and fire-attribute properties.
Facultas Ignis Mutare Aranea Corpus.
Fire ability, change, arachnid body.
He sounded out the syllables once. The wand tip responded, magic gathering along a specific vector under the incantation’s guidance. The direction was correct.
He placed the Magic Seed on the middle section of Baruk’s dorsal shell, near the magical core but not directly over it.
The venom and silk gland branches extended from the core along both flanks. A small gap sat just below center, enough room for a pea-sized seed.
The larger gaps he left alone. Occamy spatial scaling, Demiguise invisibility and precognition, those were far more complex than Fire Affinity and would need more grafting space.
Regulus raised his wand, aimed at the seed on Baruk’s shell, and spoke the incantation.
"Facultas Ignis Mutare Aranea Corpus."
A reverse wrist turn, wand tip pressing down. Magic poured in.
The incantation opened a gateway.
On Baruk’s shell, the spot beneath the seed began to glow, a ring of warm light spreading outward like heated iron slowly showing its color.
The Magic Seed sank from the surface, passing through the hard chitin layer, descending into the magical channels below.
The instant it touched Baruk’s native magic, rejection hit.
Baruk’s body spasmed. All eight legs kicked against the flagstones at once, scraping white streaks across the stone.
Bristles shot upright. A reptilian sheen rippled across the shell’s surface, scale-like patterns radiating outward from the graft site, flaring bright at the joints before fading.
Dark red blotches spread from the abdomen, flickering along the seams of the carapace, bouncing back and forth like something trapped inside searching for an exit.
The Salamander’s magic was under siege from Baruk’s own.
His chelicerae fell open, fangs bared. Eight eyes slid toward Regulus, pupils trembling, the pale light in them shaking without rest.
But he held.
One kick of the legs, then nothing. The spasming stopped. Bristles settled, slowly.
His head didn’t turn back. Of the eight eyes, the two closest to Regulus shifted toward him.
No sound. No clicking of chelicerae. He watched Regulus with his eyes and nothing else.
Cross-Species Switches produced bilateral rejection.
Foreign magic fought to take root. Native magic fought to expel it. Two forces colliding around the graft site.
If the subject were a wizard, they could actively suppress their own magic, buying the foreign element time to acclimate. That was the third step described in Beyond Form.
Wizards could manage it because they controlled their magic consciously. Clear awareness, precise regulation.
Baruk could not.
He was a magical creature. His magic ran on instinct. He could use it, but he couldn’t modulate it.
He didn’t know what suppression meant. He only knew something had entered his body, and his magic had charged in to fight.
Asking him to suppress his own magic was like asking a cat to lower its heart rate on command. Impossible.
This was the greatest risk of applying the book’s method to animals. Without the caster helping to suppress, the subject weathered it alone. If the body couldn’t endure, it died.
The French witch had modified herself. She’d been able to suppress her own magic, but Dragon-scale magic proved too violent. Her suppression held seven days before it collapsed.
An animal couldn’t even attempt suppression. It had nothing but raw endurance.
But Regulus had another option. Verdant Magic.
He pressed his left hand against Baruk’s shell and released it, natural magic flowing from his palm into the spider’s body.
Verdant Magic was neutral and natural magic. It carried no attribute, no allegiance to either side.
It flowed through Baruk, wrapped around the graft site, and formed a buffer, settling between the Acromantula’s magic and the Salamander’s.
Both of you. Stop fighting. Adapt first.
This was the edge he had over the book.
Beyond Form never mentioned Verdant Magic. Likely because wizards who commanded both Cross-Species Switches and Verdant Magic could be counted on one hand throughout all of history.
The two disciplines occupied different worlds. One lived in the Restricted Section at Hogwarts. The other in the Black family’s ancestral legacy. The overlap between them was essentially zero.
But for Regulus, in this moment, they joined as if they’d always belonged together.
Verdant Magic in place of suppression.
He didn’t need to force Baruk’s magic down. He only needed to maintain the buffer. Baruk’s own magic would gradually accept the new branch on its own.
A long time passed. The rejection weakened by degrees.
Baruk’s bristles began dropping from the roots, the rigid spines softening one by one.
The scale-patterned sheen across the carapace smoothed away. The dark red blotches faded. The last traces lingered at the joints for a moment, then sank into the exoskeleton and went quiet.
The fire affinity module had taken root in Baruk’s magical circuitry. His magic was still a spider’s magic, but now it carried a new branch.
Regulus checked. The magic flowing through that branch bore the Salamander’s fire affinity, and it had become Baruk’s own.
Grafting complete.
