Chapter 606: Silver Maw

Grey studied the blueprint for several minutes before his grin slowly widened. Unlike the bulky Mechanical Jaw he had started with, this one was almost elegant, following the natural outline of his jaw in a thin band of silver metal before extending inward along the borders of his teeth, framing his white enamel in narrow metallic ridges that made every tooth look like it had been surrounded by silver canines whenever the mech activated.

More importantly, after looking through the structure and the million-plus Curved Faces that made up the design, Grey could immediately tell that this wasn’t really a jaw anymore, at least not in the normal sense.

—

Name: Silver Maw Recursion Frame

Rarity: Ascended

Class: Dominus

Faces: 1,184,622

Materials:

Recursive Silverbone: 312,000 Faces

Echo Ivory: 224,000 Faces

Loopglass Filament: 198,000 Faces

Neural Amber: 171,000 Faces

Reversal Marrow: 147,000 Faces

Dominion Quicksilver: 132,622 Faces

Abilities:

Recursive Communion

Consumption Loop

—

Grey went through the materials first, matching each one to what he had learned during his studies and slowly piecing together what the creator had intended.

Recursive Silverbone was a memory-bearing alloy that retained repeated signal patterns exceptionally well, while Loopglass Filament could carry the same signal through a pathway over and over without the repetitions interfering with one another.

Neural Amber specialized in translating physical sensations into signals a Neural Frame could actually interpret, and Echo Ivory was unusually sensitive to pressure, energy, and other changes when used around nerve endings, which explained why so much of it was concentrated near the teeth and roots.

Dominion Quicksilver tied everything together by allowing the absurd number of separate Faces to behave more like one continuous structure rather than a million individual pieces.

The only material that made Grey pause was the Reversal Marrow, which wasn’t exactly regenerative despite what the name implied, but instead excelled at preserving a previous structural state and returning damaged material toward that established pattern.

Once Grey understood that, the entire mech started making a lot more sense. The Silver Maw was essentially an external Recursive Neural Frame built around his jaw.

Its main ability, Recursive Communion, activated whenever Grey established a proper bite on something, after which the Silver Maw would begin reading the interaction and looping those signals through itself.

If Grey bit into a mech, he wouldn’t simply learn what materials it contained or how it was supposed to function, he would repeatedly experience the way energy travelled through it, where its stress accumulated, how its individual parts responded to one another, and all the tiny quirks that made that particular mech different from another built using the exact same blueprint.

For someone else, that information might have been useful, but Grey’s comprehension made it disgusting.

Crafting at the higher Classes wasn’t just about knowing where every Curved Face belonged, especially when a single blueprint could contain over a million of them, since tiny deviations in materials and construction could change how the finished product wanted to function.

If Grey could actually feel those differences through a loop rather than spending hours testing for them manually, his ability to understand and modify mechs would jump another level. This would also apply exceptionally well to raw materials as well.

The same principle became even more ridiculous when used against a living target.

As long as Grey maintained a bite, Recursive Communion would draw portions of the target’s Neural signals through the Silver Maw and let him experience those cycles almost as though they belonged to his own Frame, which meant he could feel how their abilities activated rather than only watching the result from the outside.

It wouldn’t give him control of another person’s Neural Frame or instantly hand him all their secrets, but with Grey’s comprehension, even a few properly captured cycles could reveal more than watching someone fight for hours.

Then there was Consumption Loop, which was a much more direct evolution of the Mechanical Jaw’s original abilities. Instead of processing something Grey consumed once before moving on, the Silver Maw could repeatedly cycle useful material, energy, and information through itself until it had extracted almost everything of value that was compatible with Grey or the Mechanical Jaw Spirit.

It still couldn’t create something from nothing, but compared to the efficiency of his old jaw, the difference was almost laughable.

None of that was actually the main reason Grey had chosen this particular blueprint, though.

His attention returned to the Reversal Marrow and the way it interacted with Recursive Communion, and a thought he had formed the moment he saw the blueprint began becoming clearer.

The Silver Maw was designed to observe an external structure, establish a repeating pattern of its signals, and feed that information back through itself until Grey could understand what he was interacting with, but there was no fundamental reason that loop had to remain pointed outward.

What if Grey reversed it?

The Mechanical Jaw Spirit itself couldn’t simply eat something and use that material to heal damage to Grey’s Neural Frame, which had become painfully obvious after the battle with the Goddess.

Neural Frame damage was fundamentally different from normal physical wounds, and even the ridiculous regenerative abilities Grey had access to hadn’t prevented him from spending two weeks unconscious while his Frame repaired itself.

The Silver Maw could potentially give him a way around that limitation without actually possessing a healing ability of its own. If part of Grey’s Neural Frame was damaged, he could consume something carrying the appropriate Neural properties, let the Silver Maw establish a stable Recursive pattern from that material, then use the mech as a proxy between what he had consumed and the damaged portion of his own Frame.

Instead of asking the Mechanical Jaw Spirit to heal something it wasn’t capable of healing, Grey would be giving the damaged Frame a replacement pattern and repeatedly forcing it toward that state.

There was nothing in the blueprint saying that would work, and Grey was almost certain the original creator hadn’t intended for the mech to be used that way. Still, the interaction between Recursive Silverbone, Reversal Marrow, Neural Amber, and the existing abilities gave him enough of a theoretical foundation that he was willing to try, especially when the alternative was accepting that every time he pushed his Neural Frame too far, he might spend another few weeks unconscious.

Grey had no intention of letting that happen again. It was too dangerous.

He pulled the blueprint fully into his Cyber Space and began drawing, taking the original design apart as he went and rebuilding it through his own understanding rather than blindly copying what the tome had given him.

The first attempt reached 91.4% SA-Index before the Loopglass pathways produced interference near the rear molars, while the second and third attempts showed him problems in how the Reversal Marrow interacted with the Dominion Quicksilver whenever the recursive cycle was pushed too quickly.

By the fourth attempt, Grey had already started changing portions of the original design, and the fifth climbed close enough to perfection that he could almost feel where the final flaw was hiding before the system pointed it out.

His sixth attempt flowed much more smoothly, hundreds of thousands of Curved Faces appearing throughout his Cyber Space as Grey fitted every pathway together with the understanding gained from his previous failures, and when the final Face settled into position, the entire blueprint flashed silver.

[SA-Index: 100%]

Grey stared at the notification for a moment, then his grin slowly widened as he rolled his shoulders and began organizing the materials he would need.

Now he could start building.