Monsters Die When Killed

Chapter 370: Chapter 63: Bipolar Brain

For most living beings in this world, the brain—or the central nervous system, or ganglia... it has many names. Whatever you call it, it’s the organ that controls the body, gives it commands, and makes you feel ’I can totally do that!’ whenever you see something, only to have every part of your body retort, ’No, you can’t!’ For anyone, it is an incredibly obvious and exceptionally fatal weak point.

It’s not just that getting it destroyed is bad. Most of the time, just a small jolt, a bit of electromagnetic interference, or even a slight increase in temperature will cause it to immediately crash and stop working. This thing is truly delicate, and even for Transcendents, it’s a major liability.

But despite all these disadvantages, the brain is still extremely important to most life forms. At least for Cultivators at the Extraordinary Tier, their second cognitive organ, the Soul, is still far from being able to completely replace the brain.

Unless they are Ghost Immortals or Cultivators of the Immortal Spirit Path. From the very start of their Cultivation, they begin honing and strengthening their Souls, abandoning most normal human senses to reduce their data processing load. Otherwise, the brain is absolutely the most important tool for any Transcendent to process all kinds of complex information.

So, can a Transcendent who focuses on the physical body abandon their brain, like a Cultivator who focuses on the Soul?

This was the question now on Su Zhou’s mind.

"It’s not impossible," Yara said. It didn’t mind answering Su Zhou’s obviously over-curious questions in the slightest; its only fear was that Su Zhou would have no curiosity at all, like a block of wood. Curled up in Su Zhou’s ear, it chuckled softly. "You could decentralize your brain and spread it throughout your entire body. In that case, your body itself becomes your cognitive organ. As long as your body exists, so does your brain."

"Then what’s the catch?" Su Zhou was very interested in this, as he quite enjoyed hearing these interesting tidbits about Cultivation. His abundant curiosity was one of the very reasons he had been able to cultivate with such enthusiasm to this day.

"The catch is that the more of your body you lose, the more of your brain you lose. In other words, the more seriously you’re injured, the slower your thought process becomes. Basically, you can forget about any kind of clutch comeback. Once you’re at a disadvantage, there’s pretty much no turning the tables."

Yara’s tone was casual. "Unless you can remain undefeated from start to finish—but who can claim to be invincible? Who dares to speak of being undefeated?"

Indeed. Yara had a point. Even someone as confident as Su Zhou didn’t think he could avoid being at a disadvantage forever, or that he could just mow down his enemies from start to finish. Thus, he nodded decisively and gave up on this path without hesitation. "Are there any other methods?"

"Of course. An external brain. You remotely control your body through various connections. The Witch Demon types use this often."

Yara nodded gravely in agreement. "In that case, as long as the Life Box is intact, the Witch Demon cannot die. But the drawbacks are also quite obvious. Any moderately High Tier Transcendent can seize upon that faint, unseen connection during a fight and cross space to destroy the Life Box itself. And ultimately, it’s remote control. For battles where basic exchanges happen in milliseconds and everything hangs by a thread, this method will have latency."

"Latency, you say? Then I’ll have to say, ’I refuse!’"

Su Zhou couldn’t help but shake his head seriously. As an avid player of MOBA and action games, he knew all too well how terrifying latency could be in a fight, so this method was also a no-go.

After thinking it over again, he asked tentatively, "Well then, Yara A Dream, do you have any other gadgets for me?"

Yara A Dream tsked. "There’s also the simplest, most complete method, which is what most Flesh System Cultivators do: directly cultivate the brain to become Vajra Unbreakable, too. It’d be like a supercomputer forged from Orichalcos that even an ordinary Forbidden Spell couldn’t scratch."

"As for drawbacks? Of course there are none. It’s just that by the time you could cultivate your brain into Orichalcos, an enemy of the same tier could probably tear apart Divine Gold with their bare hands. With a single punch, they could annihilate the Great Dao and wear down the fabric of spacetime. At that point, who’d even care about some Orichalcos?"

So, the Cultivation of the brain was a rather unsolvable problem. Fortunately, it wasn’t as if Su Zhou absolutely had to be invincible or block punches with his head. He just needed his brain to not be as fragile as a normal person’s.

Sacred Geometry: Pentagram was Su Zhou’s fundamental Cultivation Method for Fire Spiritual Power. It also included a method for cultivating the brain. And just as Yara had said, at the Extraordinary Tier, it could make the brain as hard as crystal and as resilient as a vine. If nothing else, an incident like when Su Zhou gave the National Preceptor a concussion with a single punch would not happen to Su Zhou himself.

In the Celestial Pool Dragon King’s Mingxun Dragon Transformation Technique, however, the corresponding Cultivation Method was the other extreme. It directly cultivated the brain into a cohesive, non-dispersing mass of liquid that wouldn’t be damaged by any vibrations or physical attacks. Basically, it could be seen as cultivating the brain into an enhanced version of a Slime, though it was more susceptible to damage from high temperatures and lightning attacks.

It seemed every Cultivator would rack their brains to protect their cognitive organs, devising countermeasures and developing different methods based on their past experiences.

And Su Zhou was an adult, after all. His choice, of course, was to have them all.

’Hm, humans have left and right brain hemispheres. I’ll cultivate one half to be hard as steel, and the other to be fluid. I can also modify my brain’s structure to be like a dolphin’s... The Celestial Pool Dragon King’s legacy actually has information on this too. It seems that while the Mingxun Dragon Transformation Technique can’t transform literally everything, it has no problem with most marine creatures.’