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Chapter 56 : The Ocean of Minds
🕑 Added 2025-08-16 10:21:23 +0000 UTCChapter 56: The Ocean of Minds
The elderly woman's body contorted as she slowly pulled herself upright, her neck twisted at an odd angle and the broken vertebrae crunching as she moved. "You know, for someone who claims to be the perfect evolution… you're remarkably stupid."
Grodd's massive head turned slowly, his grip on Alex's throat loosening slightly as confusion flickered across his face. The voice had been calm—completely in contrast with the carnage surrounding them.
"Who dares—" Grodd began, then stopped.
The businessman's corpse began to convulse, his shattered ribcage grinding against itself as dark blood escaped from his chest wound: "The great Grodd, master of minds, can't even tell when he's being played."
The bus driver's body twitched violently before his completely reversed head began to slowly rotate back, each vertebra popping audibly like breaking twigs. His jaw hung loose and dislocated, swinging to & fro as he gargled through the blood pooling in his throat: "How was it? My performance. Though I have to admit, you really committed to the whole 'superior being' act. Very theatrical."
The young mother lifted her head, cradling her motionless baby as blood trickled from her crushed throat: "It was entertaining,much better than your counterparts in the zoo. I gotta give it to you."
The corpses then began to move.
Not the mechanical movement of mind control or the jerky movement of reanimation—something far stranger.
The bodies were... melting. Dark, viscous liquid poured from the wounds Grodd had inflicted, but instead of blood, it was something else entirely. Something alive.
The biomass flowed across the forest floor like oil, converging on Alex's feet and climbing up his legs. As it did, the corpses revealed what lay beneath—not innocent passengers, but the twisted remains of criminals. A loan shark missing half his face. A drug dealer with prison tattoos covering his arms. A human trafficker whose neck bore multiple scars .
"You see," Alex explained conversationally as the biomass continued to merge with his body, "I knew you would come to me for revenge sometime in the future. I mean I would have to be an idiot to not know you will target innocents when you will find me. So I decided to find you. Your imprint was a lot of help."
The last of the biomass absorbed into his skin, and Alex's form began to shift subtly—his muscles becoming more defined and his posture straightening despite Grodd's grip. "Though I have to say, killing my decoys so brutally was a nice touch. Really sold the whole 'terrified psychologist' angle."
Grodd's grip tightened, claws piercing skin. "Clever tricks, human. But you are still nothing before the might of Grodd. Your mind will break like all the others."
"My mind?" Alex's laugh was genuinely amused. "Oh, please. By all means, take a look."
The psychic assault hit like a sledgehammer.
Grodd drove his consciousness deep into Alex's mind, expecting to find the usual landscape of human thought—memories, fears, dreams, all ripe for manipulation and control. Instead, he found himself standing on the shore of something impossible.
An ocean.
An endless, churning sea of consciousness that stretched beyond the horizon in every direction. And in those dark waters, shapes moved. Thousands upon thousands of minds, each one distinct, each one struggling toward the surface with desperation and hunger.
Let me out.
I repent.
Please, just let me die.
The voices rose from the depths like a chorus of the damned, and Grodd realized with growing terrorr that each one was like a complete person—criminals whose memories Alex had consumed along.
"What..." Grodd whispered, his psychic probe recoiling instinctively. "What are you?"
More shapes rose from the depths. The memories of every criminal Alex had ever absorbed, but changed somehow. Broken.
Make it stop.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please make it stop.
The pain won't end, why won't it end?
I can feel what I did to them, oh God, I can feel it all.
And binding them all together, holding this ocean of consciousness in perfect balance, was something that made Grodd's primitive mind recoil in fear. Not human. Not animal. Something else entirely—a will so vast that it used these thousands of minds like cells in a greater organism.
"You wanted to see my mind," Alex said, his physical voice somehow reaching Grodd from somewhere and everywhere. "This is what I am. Every monster I've consumed becomes part of something greater. And you..."
The ocean began to churn, and Grodd felt something vast moving in its depths.
"You're about to join them."
Grodd tried to withdraw his psychic probe, but it was too late. Tentacles of pure thought wrapped around his consciousness, dragging him down into that ocean. He felt his mind being dissected and his memories being consumed.
"Fascinating," Alex murmured, "Gorilla City. The alien ship. The experimental radiation that gave you your powers—how delightfully crude. Though I suppose when you're working with such primitive base material..."
The memories flowed freely now. Grodd's childhood in Gorilla City, the meteor that had crashed nearby. The radiation that had accelerated his species' evolution, granting him intelligence and telepathic abilities far beyond his primitive kin.
"The irony is beautiful," Alex continued as Grodd's mind was stripped bare. "You gained your powers from an accident, yet you convinced yourself it made you superior. When really, you're just another failed experiment that got lucky."
In the physical world, Alex's free hand had closed around Grodd's wrist. The gorilla's massive arm began to dissolve as biomass consumed it, adding Grodd's genetic template to Alex's ever-growing collection.
"Stop," Grodd gasped, both physically and mentally. "I am Grodd! I am the future of evolution!"
"No," Alex replied calmly as more of the gorilla's form was absorbed. "You're just raw material."
The absorption was complete, but instead of consuming Grodd entirely, Alex began reshaping him. The gorilla's massive form shifted and condensed, his consciousness rewritten and bound to Alex's will. When the process finished, Grodd stood before him—physically unchanged but mentally transformed, his red eyes now holding the same cold feeling as his new master's.
"You understand your purpose now," Alex said, brushing imaginary dust from his clothes as he flexed his fingers experimentally, feeling new neural pathways forming.
The reborn Grodd nodded slowly, his voice carrying none of its former arrogance. "I serve the balance. I am your instrument."
"Good. For now, lie low. Return to Gorilla City and maintain your normal activities. When I need you—and I will need you—you'll know." Alex's smile was cold. "A telepathic powerhouse with your reputation will be... massively helpful for my future plans."
"Interesting," he murmured, accessing the absorbed memories. "Telepathy requires specific brain structures and synapses that human's doesn't naturally support. I'll need to research the gorilla genetic markers, find a way to adapt the physiology without compromising the base human template."
He looked down at where Grodd had stood moments before, then at the genuine corpses of the criminals his biomass clones had been impersonating.
"Thank you for volunteering," he said to the empty air. "Your sacrifice will serve a greater purpose."
The black envelope materialized in his hand—not for any victim this time, but as a reminder to himself. Justice wasn't just about punishment. It was about evolution. About taking the worst humanity had to offer and transforming it into something that could protect the innocent.
As Grodd lumbered back toward the deeper forest, Alex watched with satisfaction. Soon, he would have assets positioned across multiple cities, each one perfectly loyal, each one waiting for their moment to serve the greater design.
Alex turned his attention to the corpses scattered around the clearing. He sent streams of biomass flowing from his body back into the fallen criminals. Their forms shifted and changed—the loan shark becoming the kindly grandmother with her knitting, the drug dealer transforming into the businessman with his newspaper, the trafficker reshaping into the young mother with her baby.
Within moments, the passengers stood exactly as they had when the bus first stopped, their eyes vacant but alert, waiting for direction. The forest showed no signs of the violence that had occurred—no blood, no torn earth, no evidence of Grodd's presence.
As Alex walked back toward the abandoned bus, he could feel the new telepathic abilities settling into his consciousness like a powerful but unfamiliar tool. The gorilla genetics would need research and careful integration with his human form to avoid compatibility issues.
"The scales of justice are broken," Alex said quietly, "I am the balance."
Notes :
1) Finally done with the Arc. Hope you like the ending.
2) Our MC got Grodds powers now. He still have to make it work in his human form & it will take time for him to be proficient. Though some part of this arc were just fillers, I needed my mc to get some sort of mind based powers to combat Martian manhunters detection when he comes back to earth.
3) We start with a brand new villain tomorrow. Please comment if you have any doubts or u find any mistakes.
4) I think i forgot abt the college kid from the fight. I will just delete him from the bus in the previous scene. Too many people feels like a waste.
Comments
Radiant Tiefling
Thank you for the chapter.
