“Breathe in deep.” 1. 2. 3. 4. “Out.” 1. 2. 3. 4. “There you go. Now, push.”
Dan Heng closes his eyes and pushes with another deep breath, gripping the chair’s arms as the egg slides lower in his womb.
“I can feel it. Push harder.”
Dan Heng opens one eye to look at the scholar in front of him. “This isn’t too strange for you…?”
Anaxa scoffs. “While indeed gruesome, childbirth is a natural process and nothing to be ashamed of. Besides…” There’s that familiar mad glint in his eyes. “Reviving an infertile species’s ability to reproduce? A challenge is a challenge, and I do so love challenges. Why shouldn’t I be here to witness the end result?”
Fair enough. Dan Heng hums thoughtfully and pushes, feeling the egg slide into his birth canal and into Anaxa’s grasp.
With the small egg finally in his palm, Anaxa carefully pulls his hand out, taking the egg out of Dan Heng’s bleeding birth canal.
Dan Heng sighs in relief, watching Anaxa rinse the blood and membranes off the tiny egg at the sink. “And with this,” Anaxa murmurs, “the first stage of this experiment is a success.”
Right. The first part of this project was to see if they could get Dan Heng’s cycle started. They can now move on to the second part…which is…
Dan Heng feels his face and the tips of his ears burning at the idea of the project’s second stage: fertilizing his eggs. He still hasn’t decided who he wants to…involve.
Caelus is busy running around.
Mydei seems like the attentive type, but his position as crown prince would surely draw their hypothetical child into political conflicts.
No one knows who or where Phainon is.
Aglaea is absolutely out of the question. Dan Heng doesn’t trust her one bit. Even if he did, she is far too busy running Okhema and dealing with the Elders’ political schemes. Like with Mydei, their hypothetical child would be caught in politics. (Or worse, murdered by Caenis’s Cleaners.)
Hysilens is also out of the question, much as he admires her. He’s not about to drag her into this while she’s still mourning Cerydra.
Maybe Cipher? She and Dan Heng are practically strangers to each other. But then again, she might be disturbed and very uncomfortable with this, and rightfully so.
He and Caelus are cut off from the Astral Express, so he has no way of reaching Welt, Jing Yuan, or anyone else.
…Then again, this project is meant to be secret, anyway.
Who better than the mad scholar actively participating in it?
Dan Heng swallows and takes a deep breath. “Anaxagoras?”
“About the second part of this project…”
YES YES!! please we need to part 2 anon-