Travelling north was quite interesting. There was something about the mountains that increased the saturation of Astral Power, making all of us feel more alive but, at the same time, it also seemed to attract stronger monsters. Or maybe the animals naturally grew stronger within the higher saturation of Astral Power and were competing for that natural resource, I wasn’t sure. But it was a fascinating sensation to immerse myself in the flow of the Astral River up here, it was, without a doubt, magical.
A part of me was deeply intrigued by the differences in the Astral River, making me want to stick around an area up here and spend day and night immersed in the flow of it, trying to figure out just where the differences came from and what they might mean. Alas, I also knew that I would likely need months, maybe years, of study to understand more than the basics of this incredibly complex topic, so I focused on another topic I yearned to understand. Namely, the interaction of Soul, Mind and Body.
Part of my studies in that regard was to go over the experiments we had performed recently, both on people and on critters, trying to find patterns in the results but also in the experiments themself. There, the biggest problem was repeatability, there simply was no way to eliminate potential complications stemming from the choice of test subject when it came to the experiment’s outcome, not unless we had a far larger pool of test subjects and conducted the same experiment over and over. Thus, it was incredibly difficult to figure out whether one experiment worked because we were applying the correct stimulus to the right subject or if it worked because the stimulus would generally work.
When I was done going over the completed experiments, I had a long, and fairly dense, list of ideas and observations carved into stone but sadly, there didn’t appear to be a pattern visible. Maybe if we could try the experiments again, a pattern might emerge but as of yet, I couldn’t really predict the outcome of an experiment, at least not outside of fairly crude predictions that were almost as often wrong as they were right. In fact, if we found a magic eight-ball, I wouldn’t be surprised if the predictions from it were just as accurate as my current models, making the whole thing just a little bit incomplete.
But, what I was beginning to see, was just how deeply interconnected the three parts that made up a person were. Before, I had always considered the Soul to be the most important part, the eternal part that turned a lump of flesh into a person but when we started to tug and pull on it, I realised it wasn’t just the Soul that made the Body but the Body, in turn influenced the Soul. Sure, the spark, so to speak, within a Soul might be eternal, or at least it might come from outside the person, but it wasn’t separate from the mortal world around it.
Just the fact that Luna, Lia and I could exert influence over it, all in different ways with different outcomes, showed just how easily the Soul could be altered and, to a lesser degree, twisted, causing all sorts of interesting effects to the body it animated. Hel, I had even managed to alter a part of my Soul by accident on Mundus, when I had used the Eternal Ice below the glacier so I could unleash a massive blast of Ice Magic. Back then, the cold had seeped into my Soul and, looking back, I was fairly certain that the massive migraine and physical discomfort I had suffered once I was out of the capsule had been some sort of backlash.
Following that idea, I sought to delve into the depths of my own Soul, trying to find out if there was any indication of that event if I could find evidence that I had accidentally altered my Soul while my Mind was controlling my Avatar. It was quite interesting to recall the memories of Mundus, there was a stark difference in clarity. When I tried to remember something that happened since the Change, it was simple, the memories were there in incredible clarity and detail but when I tried to remember things from before the change, things got a little cloudy. Sure, I could remember my life, I could remember various events on Mundus, but where the memories after the change were akin to a movie, the memories from before the change were more akin to the summary of a book, with a few direct quotes and pictures thrown in to illustrate.
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Trying to find out more by turning my Mind Magic on myself was equally difficult. To find my own Mind was like trying to look into my own eyes without using a mirror or other reflective surface. I could meditate and find the flow of Astral Power within my body, I could even follow that flow until I found the place where I’d project my Mind Magic from, but trying to project out and find myself was nigh impossible. Or maybe it straight out was impossible and my attempts were doomed to failure from the start, that was equally possible, though if so, it was a little disappointing.
Out of curiosity, I decided to expand my experiments and include my companions as non-invasive test-subjects, mostly to train my perceptive abilities. Just looking at them using my different abilities, trying to see where their individual parts connected to form the people they were. If I didn’t try to alter anything about them, there should be no danger, which is why I was willing to try at all.
What I found was quite interesting. The first thing I noticed was that the differences between Lia and Luna were far, far greater than those between Lia and Alex or Luna and Silva respectively. Part of that was due to the vampiric elements the souls of Lia and Alex had but I was fairly confident that even without those elements, Luna would have more in common with Silva than with them.
Similarly, their bodies were something I didn’t even try to compare. Sure, there were clear similarities between Lia and Alex, thanks to their shared vampiric traits, but beyond that, there was little that the four of them had in common. I had expected they’d all share a commonality in that they were mammals but to my surprise, there was little to no evidence of that in Lia and Alex. They still had their superficial mammalian parts but when I investigated a little deeper and looked beyond that surface, there was little evidence to show that these parts had ever been used for reproduction. Those elements were simply missing, replaced with organs I couldn’t identify, even with my Blood Magic.
The discovery of those definitely non-standard organs made me investigate further and check out their bodies in the greatest detail I could and what I found was quite interesting. Vampires, no matter how much they looked like people on the outside, were anything but. I had no idea when it had happened but internally, Lia had about as much in common with a cactus as she had with Luna and myself. None of her organs looked anything like those in us, at least to my Blood Magic, and again, I couldn’t even begin to explain how they might work or what they did, other than keep her alive, for a given value of the word, and moving.
Now, in hindsight, I regretted that we had left the Vampires we had created near New Dawn behind. These organs looked incredibly interesting and I had a feeling that they were part of what made Vampires as physically formidable as they were but how they did it, I had absolutely no idea, I couldn’t even begin to guess.
If I had a few freshly created Vampires, I might have been able to observe and learn something but sadly, we didn’t have any of those, so I could only put a pin in that project and focus on different things.
Things like our continued path north, always following after the pull of the Nexus, so far away but so tantalising close. There was still some instability within the Astral River, enough to make working across long distances impossible but the Astral was settling down.
A part of me wondered if I was the only one planning to take over that Nexus or if there were others out there, hoping to take control of these natural foci of power so they could make their wishes reality. I wasn’t as arrogant to believe that I was the only one with the desire to change the world, there’d be others. Whether they had the ability or not, I wasn’t sure and, at the end of the day, it didn’t matter whether they could take over the Nexus. It only mattered if they could do so before I could get there and take control.