After yet another session of testing the prisoners, I had to let out a soft sigh. This wasn’t working as well as I had hoped it would. Sure, I was steadily getting better at reading the prisoners’ minds but I was still far from getting to a point where I could scan their minds at will. At the moment, the best I could do was try to prod them into recalling a memory and essentially watch the memory as they recalled it, though there were a lot of limitations to the trick. The biggest was that memories weren’t fixed, at least not at the levels of Intelligence these people were operating at, thus, the memories could easily be distorted, either by the one doing the remembering or by the observer.

To make matters worse, if the memory was distorted by the observer, it could lead to a permanent corruption of said memory, essentially modifying what the person remembered. There were limitations to that thanks to a certain amount of self-correcting within the human mind, but that worked only to a point. Once enough of the subject’s memories were altered, especially if it happened with a purpose, to provide a new, coherent picture within that subject’s mind, then what used to be a self-correcting mechanism would likely turn into the opposite, completing the subject’s memory distortion to the point that they wouldn’t be able to tell that their mind had been messed with.

It was, in many ways, a horrible ability to have. Killing somebody was simple enough, with or without magic, but what Mind Magic allowed me to do was so much more. With enough time and effort, I could rewrite the Mind of a person to the point that they weren’t who they started out as, turning them into an entirely new being. In a way, it was even more intrusive and altering than what I had accomplished with Lia, the creation of a wholly new being, only with Mind Magic and the skills I was currently developing, it would be an entirely new being shaped by my mind.

Well, it would be a new being to a point. As of yet, I could only influence the Mind in this way, I could distort memories and might be able to make up new ones from whole cloth but the interpretation of those memories, the lens through which the person having them would view them, was an entirely different thing. To distort that lens, I would need Soul Magic, for that was what the lens actually was, the Soul. The Mind held a record of who the person was, it held information and nothing more. The Soul, on the other hand, interpreted that information and turned it from something that could also be written down in a book into something more. Or rather, it turned that information into a person.

At least that was my current interpretation of the available data. There might, and likely was, even more to the Mind, Body, Soul complex than I currently understood but the only way to learn just what that ‘more’ was to continue investigating. Eventually, I’d hopefully be able to understand it all but that day was fairly far in the future.

For now, I was comfortable with the fact that my understanding of Mind Magic and its application on sapient minds was rapidly increasing, hopefully to the point where I’d be able to implant Sigmir’s memories into her body if I got my hands on them.

Which might just be the most difficult thing to do. Sure, I had my own memories of her but those were obviously from my perspective and limited in scope. Her personality had been shaped over the years of her childhood and while I was confident that my presence had influenced her character, that influence was limited. I certainly had been influenced by her and continued to be.

There were two possibilities I currently knew about and considered worth exploring. The first was in regards to a question I had never quite thought about before. The system was using ExP or Experience Points to track our progress, as many video-games had in the past. But Mundus and the system weren’t like that, so was there a link between our experiences and the experience points? Did the system maybe track our experiences in life and reward points for them? It was incredibly far-fetched, going by a single word and its connotations but it might be worth looking into. Because if there was a link, then Sigmir’s experiences on Mundus and her experience points might be within my grasp, as her sacrifice had added her ExP to my own, right before she died. Thus, they had later become part of the Legacy I had accepted right after the change and thus of me. Maybe, hopefully, I could somehow find them within the legacy and extract them. It would require a fairly substantial sacrifice of EXP on my part but that was a price I was willing to pay.

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The other possibility was a lot more straightforward but a lot harder to reach. The Mind, and thus memories, were an emergent property of the brain, a structure within the body. If I could lay claim to Sigmir’s body, I might be able to somehow decode the connections and lingering patterns within her brain to extract her memories that way. There were fewer philosophical questions involved and I didn’t have to worry about dealing with the system and its inherent obscurity but I would have to solve some fairly serious problems, ranging from the question of how to retrieve a body I had buried a world away to learning how to extract memories from a half-decomposed brain, because by now, about a year and a half would have passed on Mundus. Even with the coffin of Ice I had made for Sigmir and the magic layered on top of the already cold environment, I doubted that much of her brain would still be intact. Still, I refused to give up and continued with my training and testing.

Sadly, I knew I was on a fairly strict timer with my test subjects. Given that I wasn’t about to waste a full portion of food on these guys, their rations were fairly limited, one might even say non-existent. They got as much water as they wanted, it was easy enough to conjure fresh water after all but their food came from Luna’s experimentation with rapidly growing plants. As it turned out, those plants had some of the necessary nutrients, though there was something vital missing, leaving these guys to slowly starve.

One of them, after realising that he wouldn’t get out of the cell he was in alive, tried to attack me in an attempt to escape. He was put down easily, Mind Magic had a lot of wonderfully non-lethal but supremely painful options for that, but it only delayed the problem. After his next attempt and an increasingly painful punishment, he resorted to killing himself, costing me a test subject and forcing me to dispose of the body

Doing so was an interesting experiment in and of itself. I had been wondering about a few effects, mainly in regards to the dead and Death Magic, so I took the dead body out in a magical bag and placed it in a small, somewhat isolated cave before partially sealing the cave. That way, the body wouldn’t be disposed of by wild animals, especially with a few subtle but deadly magical formations I placed around it, trying to keep bugs and such from it. It wasn’t a perfect solution but it would have to do.

The thing I was curious about was whether the body would rise by itself if left alone, as the countless bodies rotting in the streets had after the Change. I vaguely remembered that there was a need to bury bodies on consecrated ground on Mundus, the reason being that the bodies might start walking around again if that didn’t happen. There had been a video about a cleric or something renewing the consecration and having to fight numerous undead to do so.

Thus, the question I wanted to have answered was whether that would happen here, too, and if it did, I wanted to know if there was a way to take advantage of it. Energy, mystical or otherwise, always came from somewhere. Granted, I had no idea where the actual Astral River, the local source of the mystical energy I used, took its energy from but it came from somewhere. Elsewhere, or something along those lines, some place upstream in the great universal something, likely a place beyond Mundus on some grand cosmic map. Though how that beyond worked was another question, there were undoubtedly dimensions involved I had no idea of.

Not that it truly mattered, I didn’t want to find the ultimate source, I only wanted to understand more about the local sources. Thus, leaving an unburied dead out to rise, like some strange science experiment involving yeast.