First Intergalactic Emperor: Starting With The Ancient Goddess-Chapter 455: Restoring Face || Return of the Most Handsome Face

The panels slid out from the walls as she keyed a sequence, the clinic reconfiguring itself into something far more serious than a back-alley repair shop. The chair Xavier was sitting on folded backward and sank into the floor, reshaping into a cradle that locked his spine, neck, and skull in place without asking for consent. Thin bands of light traced his body, mapping bone density, nerve clusters, blood flow, and whatever else the system cared about more than comfort.

"Before you panic," she said while pulling a translucent pod down from the ceiling on articulated arms, "this isn’t anesthesia. It’s neural isolation. You won’t feel pain the normal way, but your body will still experience everything."

Xavier exhaled slowly. "That’s reassuring in a very threatening way."

She ignored him and slotted the vial into the pod’s core chamber. The Axiom didn’t pour or drip. It dissolved into the mechanism like it had been waiting for this exact container, spreading through filament channels that glowed faint gold and then faded into something deeper, almost colorless. The pod sealed with a sound that felt final, and the lights in the room dimmed automatically as if the system itself wanted privacy.

The pod lowered until it hovered inches above his face. Dozens of needle-thin injectors unfolded from its underside, not stabbing yet, just aligning, making sure every angle was perfect. Scans flared across the surrounding screens, values scrolling faster now, the surgeon’s eyes moving between them with sharp focus. Heart rate was steady. Neural activity was elevated but stable. Cellular rejection probability recalculated twice, then again.

"You pass out when it starts," she said. "Your brain will decide reality is optional for a bit."

"Hmm," Xavier muttered.

The injectors fired in perfect synchronization. No single stab, no dramatic puncture, just pressure everywhere at once as the Axiom entered his body through microchannels drilled straight into nerve-dense regions around his skull, jawline, and spine. His breath hitched hard, muscles locking for a second, then his eyes rolled back as the isolation field kicked in and his consciousness dropped out cleanly.

The monitors spiked immediately.

Neural load surged past safe human thresholds and kept climbing. The surgeon swore under her breath and adjusted the dampeners, forcing the system to redistribute the Axiom’s flow before it fried his cortex outright. Cellular readings began changing in waves, not random, not chaotic, but structured, like something was running through a checklist written into his DNA.

Then, slowly, it began.

Dead tissue around the exposed cheekbone darkened, then peeled away at a microscopic level as new cells formed underneath, knitting themselves together with unsettling precision. Nerve endings that had been raw and misfiring went quiet, then came back online cleaner than before. Bone fractures softened, reshaped, and fused without leaving seams. Teeth regrew from the root up, enamel forming last, smooth and intact.

The surgeon leaned closer despite herself.

"This is insane," she whispered.

Skin followed, not just closing wounds but correcting alignment, tightening where scar tissue had pulled wrong, restoring symmetry that no normal regeneration would ever bother with. Even the eye socket rebuilt itself, the damaged tissue retracting as a new structure formed around the eyeball, stabilizing it, reconnecting optical nerves that had been half-dead minutes ago.

Scans updated in real time, predictive models failing and rewriting themselves as the Axiom ignored expected limits. Xavier’s vitals dipped, spiked, then settled, as if his body was no longer fighting the process but cooperating with it.

By the time the pod retracted, the chair lifted him back upright, and the isolation field disengaged, his face no longer looked like something that had survived a missile strike. It wasn’t flawless. There were faint signs of trauma if you knew where to look, subtle tension in places that hadn’t fully forgotten what they’d been through, but it was undeniably whole.

The surgeon stared at him for a long moment, arms hanging at her sides.

"...you just burned a miracle," she said quietly. "Well... at least, he looks handsome so it wasn’t a complete waste."

A while later, Xavier woke up, but not with a gasp or some dramatic jolt, but with irritation. The first thing he noticed was that something was wrong with his face.

"—gh... what the fuck," he tried to say, but it came out thick and uneven.

The surgeon was already leaning over him. "Easy. Don’t fight it."

Xavier tried to lick his lips and failed on one side. His breathing hitched when air refused to pass through the right side of his nose. He blinked again and realized one eye was clear while the other felt like it was underwater.

"Something’s wrong," he said, words still slurred. "I can’t move this side. I can’t feel it properly. Vision’s fucked. Breathing too."

She didn’t look alarmed. If anything, she looked bored, like this was the part she’d been waiting for. "Your brain’s catching up," she said, tapping a panel and pulling up live readings. "Axiom rewrote the structure first. Neural pathways come after. Right now your cortex is sorting priorities and saving changes."

"That’s not comforting," Xavier muttered.

"It’s accurate," she shot back. "You’ve got motor lag on the reconstructed side, sensory desync, and partial autonomic delay. All expected. If you felt perfect right now, I’d be worried."

Xavier tried to frown. It only worked halfway. "Feels... broken."

"Feels temporary," she corrected. "Give it minutes for movement, hours for clarity, days for fine control. A week if you’re unlucky. Don’t try to force it. That’s how idiots tear fresh neural links."

He swallowed and then motioned vaguely at his face. "Show me."

She raised an eyebrow. "You sure."

"Yes."

She sighed, tapped the console, and rotated a projection toward him. His face filled the air in front of him, clean and whole in a way he hadn’t seen since before Jupiter. The damage was gone. The bone structure was right. The eye sat where it should. The skin tone matched. But there it was, a faint line near the cheek and jaw, barely visible unless you looked for it, like a seam that hadn’t fully faded yet.

Xavier lifted his hand slightly. "That. Why’s that still there."

She glanced at it and shrugged. "Because the Axiom restores to your last stable biological state, not an imagined ideal. That line is where your body finished rebuilding under stress. It’ll soften. Blend. Your own regeneration will finish what the Axiom started. Days, maybe a week."

He stared at the projection a little longer, then let out a slow breath. "So it’s not permanent."

"No," she said. "And even if it were, it’d still be better than what you walked in with."

Before he could reply, his vision flickered and a translucent notification slid into view.

[A foreign compound detected in the body.]