The grand mage stood on his balcony gazing over the city. Down below the inhabitants went about their lives. Various vehicles of all shapes and sizes flew over the city avenues to destinations unknown. Overhead the shadows of the colossal exploration ships were making their way into orbit, off to supply another planet with colonists and supplies.
"This has been a most fortunate reincarnation," the mage said to himself. He had lost track of how many times he had died and reincarnated into another life. Some mechanism of the universe had conspired to keep him from true oblivion. Live die repeat. The cycle of his existence stretching infinitely backwards and seemingly infinitely forwards in time.
He didn't mind the cycle perse. What he absolutely loathed was a loss of memories that had become a part of the experiennce. A couple of lives back he had ran into a sect of particularly nasty soul mages that had managed to do significant damage to his soul when they used him as a sacrifice. The damage wasn't too noticeable at first. However, with each reincarnation, the cracks got worse. Many times he felt his mind reaching for a memory only to feel its absence. All of the feeling and none of the context. Reaching for a long lost lover only to be wracked by a faceless grief. He remembered being born a peasant on a manaless planet, living a long life (as long as a peasant on a backwards planet without magic could live) but could not remember the face of his wife and children. He remembered being a soldier in an global conflict of unknown belligerents and feeling the loss of comrades he could not remember.
For other lives, he wished he could forget. The exquisite depravities visited upon him being born on the streets of a seedy pleasure city. Being branded a heretic, tortured and burnt alive for teaching magic to commoner children.
As his mind wound back to the present a single thought dominated his mind.
No more. His current projections showed that his soul damage would accelerate, turning him into a jabbering idiot in a few lifetimes. Countless millennia of knowledge and experience wiped out by some death cult lost to time.
At 400 years old, his current reincarnation was well into old age by the society's standards. The world was mostly peaceful with an abundance of mana. Technologically it was his most advanced world, physics and magic wound together to propel the people of this world to hitherto unseen levels of progress. The mage was a master without peer in both. Even with the pain of both forgotten and unforgotten memories, a lot of his knowledge across various lifetimes persisted.
Today he would bring all of it to bear to perform a most dastardly of a ritual.
He left the balcony and walked quickly to his personal elevator, barely looking at the apartment he inhabited. He did not plan on coming back. As the elevator descended towards its destination at blistering speed, he reviewed the ritual parts and components. Everything had to be perfect. It had taken him almost a century of study and travel to acquire both the material and the knowledge required to finish his greatest work
The elevator came to a stop many kilometers underneath the surface, deep within a mana leyline. The doors slid open and the mage made his way to his private laboratory. Opening the thick security door, he stopped to marvel at the massive ritual circle drawn on the specially prepared floor. He wasn't just gawking, however, but making final inspections on various parts of the circle as well as the flow of mana into and around it.
Everything was in order. He sealed the door for the final time. Reaching into his robe, he pulled out a piece of candy. With almost reverence, he unwrapped it and tossed it into his mouth and savored its taste. He then bit into it, crushing it to dust and swallowing. It was time.
The grand mage dropped the robe to the floor and walked into the circle stark naked. He sat at the center of the formation in a lotus position and begun sucking in the ambient mana. At his level, the siphoning was truly powerful. The leyline, however, made it seem like he was barely doing anything.
As he gathered the required mana, he constructed his spell forms. Runes of ridiculous density began to swirl around him, as the ritual circle began to glow. It took almost an hour for the various spell forms to complete. He felt the numerous rune circles orbiting and rotating ethereally in his chest. The ritual was at a critical point. Activating the next step was the point of no return. He would either succeed and ensure that he would get back all the knowledge and memories he had acquired in his endless lives would return, or he would absolutely shred his soul to pieces and finally die a true death.
Stolen novel; please report.
"Fuck it. Success or oblivion. Either way I win"
He activated the next step of the ritual. In that moment, he was no longer the grand mage, for all that existed in that ritual circle was pain. The rune circles collapsed inwards and seared themselves onto his soul. The pain was beyond anything he had ever felt before. Mana surged from the leyline into the circle and finally into him. The mana tore through him greedily consuming everything in its path towards his soul. As his body disintegrated, he felt the ritual circle click into the final sequence. Feeling like a massive vice was crushing his soul, he was anchored in place as all his senses faded. His body had been completely destroyed. His awareness, though now dimming, still persisted. Finally he felt as if his soul was being compressed into an unimaginably small tube before sensation ceased and he knew no more.
---
In the void
The soul gained awareness of itself. It seemingly floated in infinite nothingness. As it became more aware of itself it noticed that it wasn't alone. It floated in a cosmic stream light, composed of other point like souls. There were many different colors and sizes. Some zipped through the river of souls at blazing speeds while others seemed to barely move. All of them however were collectively moving towards a point in the distance. This destination gave the feeling of being infinitely close and infinitely far at the same time, as if the idea of distance was more of a suggestion in this place.
Casting its awareness inwards, the soul was _much_ larger than the other souls. It also noticed a curious thing. A magical formation wrapped around the soul core. As if spurred on by being noticed, it activated. In an instant the soul remembered what he had attempted to do. It was a fiendishly complicated bit of magic. He had been in the river of souls countless times before his soul had been damaged. As such he had theorized that when the damage occurred, he had been leaking memories and experiences into the river. As time and space meant nothing in this place, then theoretically they were still floating around as it were. All he had to do was fish out the missing pieces of his soul, repair the damage, and move on to his next life.
The piece of magic in his soul turned him into a him-flavored magnet. Anything that was tied to him would be attracted to his soul cloud surrounding his core, where the second bit of magic would fuse his soul back together.
As pieces of nebulous soul matter started to accumulate around his soul, he felt the attention of _something_ focus on him. Probably the existence that governed the void. In moment that was both short and uncomfortably long, he felt like he was being judged. The power of that gaze was unfathomable. It was scary but exciting at the same time. As a mage who had chased the apex of life mostly in magic but also other fields in many lifetimes, he couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to wield such power. At the moment though he was on the receiving end and it felt like an ant staring up at a planet that could fall on it at any moment. If souls could sweat he would be drowning in buckets of it. The spell, uncaring of what was happening, completed its work, the cracks in his soul body sealing up for the first time in forever. If not for the judging gaze of the _entity_ he would have zipped around in joy and celebration.
A wave that felt like approval washed over his soul and the feeling of the gaze vanished like it wasnt even there in the first place. Before he could examine the changes to his now unblemished soul, a familiar tug pulled him towards the light.
Instantly he was yanked into another space, and he felt his consiousness fading. When he next would wake up he would be starting another life; the first one in a long time with a perfectly healthy soul. He couldnt wait to see what he could do in this life