He extended tendrils of PSI from himself, that he could now see with his PSI sight and began attaching them to her. Before bonding had always been an instinctual thing. It was more a function of desire, wanting to be connected had been enough. As always intention controlled so much of what they were now.
Now though, Jay wanted to be more precise. He wanted to do it with open eyes to gain a greater understanding so to speak. So, he searched for just the right spots in her to attach the tendrils of energy that flowed out of him. In some ways it was like when he would merge channels and resonate energy, but this was more about emotion and thought.
As he progressed, he saw just how to connect tendrils to parts of her brain and how they flowed back to his brain. He was still very leery of making any changes to the brain, so he stopped short of that but still anchored the threads of power between them. The pleasure centers of their brains had a thread connecting them, just as did the cognitive processing sections and on down the line through the different parts of the body.
It wasn’t a fusion, but it was a much more complete connection than the prior bonds and maybe it was a step in the right direction of understanding how the fusion worked. He didn’t stop with the brain either. He forged bonds connecting their PSI channels, their autonomic systems, down to hearts, lungs, nerves, and bones.
When he finally felt like he was done, he mentally pulled back and saw the intricate weave of PSI threads that were connecting them. It was like he only needed to infuse it with an extra burst of power and then it would sink in.
He went over each connection again. He tried to check how the different connections would interact with each other. Then he triple checked everything till he was content that this was just a more detailed version of the bonding without any appreciable risk that he could detect. Once he was sure, Jay flooded it with PSI power and suddenly she screamed.
Trudi’s back arched like she was spasming and she fell backwards. Jay instinctively cushioned her with a PSI construct and sent his senses running into her. Her heart was racing. Her muscles were contracting wildly, almost like they were trying to tear themselves free of her bones.
He flooded her with healing regenerative power using the skill he had obtained from Huong and that eased her pain, but she was still experiencing some type of convulsion. Jay was worried that he had caused permanent damage to her, so he scanned further.
It then dawned upon him what his mistake had been. It was twofold. First, he was so far beyond what he had ever been before. She was also less in the sense that she had no refining and was only 4th threshold. He had never bonded with anyone that was so far removed from what he was.
Then to make matters worse he had of course decided to push the bond to a whole new level. Now her body was trying to adapt to all the input that it was getting from his vastly more powerful and efficient body. It was almost like he had uploaded an incompatible operating system into her body.
With the problem diagnosed, Jay realized that he needed to react quickly to fix it. The first idea that he had was to fuse with her. That might fix her as it would push her body up by a great amount of power. The thing was again though that he had never fused with anyone who had absolutely no refinement. Even the first fusion with Mia was when she had some minimal refining done to her. Also, he had been much less then, so the shock of trying to merge with him had been more about equals.
If he bonded with her, it would be like trying to graft a piece of Superman into a normal human. It would tear her apart. She simply couldn’t make that much of a change. So, if that wouldn’t work, he was left with the simple need to refine her. But he would need to do it more quickly and more thoroughly than he had ever contemplated before.
It wasn’t like this was a new process though. He had done hundreds of refining sessions with the members of Team Jay and even done some minimal refining with Team Miguel. Now he just had to be better. Fortunately, his Body Modification skill was up to one thousand fifty-seven so he expected he would be able to make the changes quickly enough.
He dove in and started changing her body. She quickly passed out from the pain, but he could see her body continue to try to rip itself apart. Jay raced to make the necessary changes. He began with her nerves and tried to soothe them. If he started with hardening the bones the muscles would still take damage as they over contracted. If he started with the muscles, they would have snapped her bones.
Of course working with the nerves was the most complicated but his skill had gone up dramatically, so he made it through her entire nervous system in less than an hour. That still meant that the spasming didn’t entirely stop for that hour and she remained unconscious.
A closer examination showed that there was some swelling inside her skull, but he had to hope that he could heal that quickly enough to stay ahead of it. He began pouring PSI into Evolved Genesis which was his healing skill while at the same time beginning to strengthen her bones.
It was a draining process and he ended up making