Shattered Sanity

For the next ten days, Riven never woke up once, as the Imperial Anatomist kept him sedated while beginning the first stage of Section Carving.

”When I was young, I made the mistake of not preparing the body well enough for blood refinement.

However, I won’t make the same mistake with this one...

This time, I’ll mold him into the ideal proportions before beginning the true procedure.”

The Imperial Anatomist muttered to himself, reflecting upon the countless failures of his youth, as he understood that before the real procedure could begin, Riven’s body first needed to be transformed into something worthy of carrying such a bloodline.

After all, in his eyes, there was little point in granting a man the foundation of a God if every flaw that nature had carelessly left behind remained untouched within him.

Weak posture, poor flexibility, uneven muscular development, inferior bone density, restricted lung capacity, and imbalanced tendon strength were all imperfections that needed to be corrected before the body could ever approach its ideal form.

The funny thing about those shortcomings was that none of them were determined by bloodline alone, yet every single one imposed unnecessary limitations upon the body throughout its entire life.

Left uncorrected, they would eventually become obstacles that no amount of later carving could completely overcome, and so the Imperial Anatomist resolved to eliminate them now, while Riven’s youthful body still possessed the greatest capacity to heal, adapt, and grow.

”Let’s see what you’ve got...”

The Imperial Anatomist muttered, as standing beside the operating table with a brass caliper in one hand and a leather-bound notebook in the other, he spent hours measuring every major muscle within Riven’s unconscious body, comparing each measurement against the ideal anatomical ratios contained inside a manuscript that he himself had authored after three decades of research.

That manuscript represented the culmination of countless dissections, failed experiments, and observations gathered from exceptional Ascendants belonging to dozens of noble bloodlines.

No ordinary physician would have understood its contents, although to the Imperial Anatomist, it had long since become the blueprint of physical perfection.

Whenever Riven’s body deviated from those ideal proportions, another note quietly found its way onto the page before him.

Some muscles required strengthening, others required lengthening, while several tendons would need to be reconstructed entirely if they were ever to withstand the strain that later stages of Section Carving would inevitably place upon them.

As one after another, the Imperial Anatomist took note of everything that needed to be fixed, before assigning them an order in which they would be fixed, as he made a forty day plan to get rid of all these flaws.

”Just over a month... I can wait that long.

I must not rush this time...”

The Imperial Anatomist muttered to himself, resolving to proceed as slowly as necessary so that Riven could be molded into an ideal frame before the true procedure began.

However, while the old man possessed endless patience for his work, the same could not be said for several assistants, who approached their responsibilities with far less seriousness.

”What are you doing, Karen?” the Imperial Anatomist suddenly barked without looking away from his notes. ”You must knead those muscles harder!”

The startled assistant immediately increased the pressure of her hands, although the old man remained dissatisfied after watching her movements for several seconds.

”No. Put your back behind the massage.”

”He cannot move on his own while those sedatives course through his veins,” the Anatomist continued, finally raising his head to glare at her.

”His muscles rely entirely upon you for stimulation. Massage every major muscle group thoroughly three times each day, otherwise they will begin wasting away long before the reconstruction is complete.”

He admonished her sternly, as Karen immediately adjusted her footing before leaning her body weight into every movement and slowly working through each muscle exactly as instructed.

Only after observing her for several minutes did the Imperial Anatomist return his attention to the operating table and begin preparing for the first surgical correction.

Unlike his shoulders, ribs, and spine, which had already been shattered before he arrived beneath the Anatomist’s care, Riven’s legs remained completely intact.

Their proportions, although considered perfectly healthy by ordinary physicians, still fell noticeably short of the dimensions prescribed within the Anatomist’s carefully calculated anatomical ratios.

And so, without the slightest hesitation, he positioned a hardened steel wedge against the centre of Riven’s left femur before bringing down a polished surgical hammer with calm, practiced precision.

Crack.

A dull fracture echoed throughout the laboratory as the bone split beneath the impact, although Riven’s unconscious body showed no reaction upon the table.

The opposite leg received identical treatment moments later, leaving both femurs fractured with almost perfect symmetry before carefully measured incisions exposed the damaged bones beneath.

Freshly forged expansion frames were then secured around both legs using engraved steel braces, while fine adjustment screws locked the fractured sections firmly into place.

Over the coming weeks, those screws would gradually separate the broken ends by fractions of a millimetre, forcing new bone to grow continuously within the widening gaps.

Throughout the process, Riven’s body was flooded with concentrated mineral infusions, refined beast marrow extracts, and restorative elixirs personally prepared by the Imperial Anatomist.

Each substance had been selected to accelerate bone formation, muscular regeneration, and tissue repair far beyond anything an ordinary child’s body could naturally accomplish.

The old man brewed every medicine himself, refusing to entrust the culmination of thirty-one years of research to the careless hands of an assistant.

He carefully weighed each ingredient upon a precision scale before grinding medicinal herbs, Aether crystals, beast marrow, and dried roots into an impossibly fine powder.

Only after verifying every proportion twice did he transfer the mixture into a glass vessel and heat it above an Aether flame maintained at a perfectly stable temperature.

Failure had followed him throughout the previous thirty-one years, claiming one promising subject after another while exposing weaknesses within each version of his procedure.

This time, however, he refused to allow carelessness to accompany his final attempt, as he double checked everything personally to ensure that this last attempt did not end in another painful failure.