Well, everything, that’s what could go wrong as he sat there. Absolutely everything. If somehow he ended up the villain, when this was done he had all the passwords and the knowledge that would be needed to turn all his friends as well as the army that surrounded them into nothing but puppets once more.

It was something he’d ruled out as extremely unlikely, earlier, but now that he was about to pull the trigger, it all came flooding back. Logically, he didn’t see how he could be possessed by the spirit of Prince Agardian, but on a visceral level, it was enough to make him stop what he was doing and rethink his priorities.

It’s not about what was likely to happen, he chastised himself. It’s about what might happen.

So, instead of moving straight to his soul transplant, he backed up every log file, all the configurations for his spells, and all of his databases and notes and placed them in Raja’s sleeping mind for safekeeping. It took several minutes, but when that was done, he purged everything that might let a hostile mind do anything harmful to those he cared about, including replacing all of his spells with depowered dummy versions.

Then, when that was done, he gave Emma one more smile, closed his eyes, and tapped into the Phylactery. He didn’t manifest the Prince as he’d done previously to threaten him. There was no point. All he needed were the two files laid out in front of him. On one side, there was the Prince’s soul, which glowed a steady, gentle green as it floated there in a slightly irregular polygon, composed of thousands of tiny sectors like a hard disk, and the other was Benjamin’s.

While the Prince’s looked almost identical to Matt and Raja’s, Benjamin's was only similar. It was mostly intact but ragged around the edges and full of corrupted and damaged sectors. Most of the damage was on the left edge, and the color of the transplanted cells was very slightly different from his own, but those parts still looked a thousand times better than the damaged areas.

I wonder what percentage of the damaged parts are truly irretrievable, Benjamin wondered to himself as he sat there studying the two. One percent? Ten percent? There was no way to know. Any improvement would be welcome, though. Benjamin hated the idea that he was going to force others to summon terrible monsters but that he couldn’t help with that.

He copied the first few sectors from the Prince manually, just to test the waters and look for an adverse reaction. There was none, though. There was only the same sharp pain as before like he was getting a shot or something. It was gone almost as quickly as it was felt and barely qualified as an annoyance. What was more distracting were the glimpses of another life it opened up.

Seeing pieces of Matt’s life on Earth and Raja’s life here had been interesting but ultimately familiar. The visions he got from Prince Agardian’s mind, though, were utterly alien.

What Benjamin saw must have been their capital city on the world island. He was sure of that much. He just wasn’t always exactly sure what it was he was seeing. The architecture was bizarre. At first, he was seeing a castle built amidst the clouds. Only a second and third look revealed that it was actually a series of spires that rose so high that they couldn’t see the ground from their lofty perches.

He occasionally glimpsed the lower areas, and to Benjamin’s early eyes, those cramped buildings looked more like Manhattan than a fantasy world. Each of the buildings weren't large in their own right but shoved together like they were made them seem massive. The only true sense of scale came from the towers the Prince seemed to occupy most of the time.

There was little time to study any of the wider details, let alone the ornate mosaics and other finery that every room the man spent time in seemed to be covered with because that was never the man’s focus. Instead, those exquisite details were only ever the background for the man's lavish lifestyle.

Harems and servants dominated the man’s life. There were moments of brutality, such as once when Prince Agardian summoned a mantis demon to rip a servant who had spilled his tea to pieces, but on the whole, he seemed too enthralled with the pleasures of the flesh to be of much harm to anyone.

The man’s memories were dominated by parties, orgies, and occasionally, more formal occasions where everyone was dressed in suits and gowns that were so overstuffed that there might have been ten miles of lace trim used for just one occasion’s worth of gaudy outfits.

Benjamin paused after a dozen attempts to find a sector in the portion of the soul he’d been sifting through. None of this is what I need, he thought in frustration.

Benjamin spent several minutes clicking around, looking through different parts to try to find something closer to the magical knowledge that he was looking for. He would have settled for anything. School, reading, even glimpses of battle, but for the next few minutes, all he found was more debauchery. This section contained the man’s bizarre demonic lovers, and that one contained his love of narcotics.

It was as wasted a life as Benjamin had ever seen. To say he had gaps in his knowledge of Earth was an understatement, but he doubted there was a single rock star or celebrity that had managed to be nearly as much of a self-absorbed parasite as the Prince. It probably would have taken a whole room full of them to come close.

It turned out that absolute power did corrupt absolutely, Benjamin thought wryly as he took a break.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Still, at least nothing terrible had happened. He’d repaired another tiny fractional percentage of his soul, and he didn’t feel the slightest bit like murdering or enslaving everyone he knew. That had to account for something.

It was a little weird, though. He’d tasted so few of Matt and Raja’s memories that he could only recall that he’d seen them play back before his eyes, but after dozens of moments of Prince Agardian’s life, he had a feeling that he’d almost been to Prahana, and…

That thought gave him pause. Prahana. Had he always known that the capital city was named Prahana? Benjamin very carefully tried to remember his interactions with everyone in the city of Arden. Had they mentioned that in the throne room? Was that something Lady Thraxes had said at one of her parties?

Benjamin was fairly sure she hadn’t and that he’d learned that factoid from the osmosis from his donor memories. That was enough to give him pause, but as he concentrated on that and tried to explore the idea more, he found other words connected to it. The Central Spire, lowtown, the jungle, Godgrave, and the Grand Gate Hall. Not all of these had any particularly strong meanings attached to them, but they were all places he’d never heard of that he somehow knew about now.

Interesting, Benjamin thought to himself. So, bleedover was definitely a thing. There were names, too, but mostly, they were unconnected to faces. Names were reserved for people of importance, though. The servants had none. Those poor black-eyed bastards didn’t merit more than titles decided by their duties.

Still it was a promising development, and Benjamin hoped that maybe some of the system knowledge the man had would bleed over too, so he kept it up. Despite that proof that it was working on some level, it took another half hour before he finally hit pay dirt.

Eventually, after sampling enough areas, Benjamin found that they seemed to be in roughly chronological order, and from there, things became easier. Fortunately, that lined up with Benjamin’s damaged areas pretty well. It wasn’t quite a one-to-one relationship, but the memories of Prince Agardian’s time in the academy were about in the same spot that was now a void where his memories of college had once been except the thin tendrils of coding that permeated that region like strands of a fraying green carpet.

That was when he finally decided to write a script. Instead of doing this manually, one block at a time, he was going to speed things up and try to copy each piece in a more rapid-fire way. Scan the next sector; if good, skip. If bad, attempt to replace, repeat as necessary several times per second in an advancing spiral pattern until manually stopped.

Benjamin gritted his teeth before he pulled the trigger, steeling himself. This feels really fucking stupid, he thought to himself, but that wasn’t actually enough to stop him, and in the end he activated it.

He’d expected the experience to be something like the time he’d wired Raja into a whole city full of sleeping minds to brute force the code that locked away his friend’s voice. Then, they’d been forced to endure the snippets of other people’s lives along with the steady flow of mana and solutions.

This was worse, though. Much worse. Not only did it feel like someone was taking a tattoo gun straight to his brain with the sharp pain of each transfer occurring one after the other. He could grit his head through that, of course. It wasn’t so bad. It was the images and the memories that were being strung together that Benjamin found more than a little bit overwhelming.

As a single moment, the memories of someone else’s soul were like a vivid work of art. They were captivating, but they were too complex to remember more than just the impression after they were gone. Whole conversations might happen, but Benjamin would remember more about the Prince’s sadistic glee than about any particular insult that was launched.

That changed once the moments started to spring, one minute to the next, like a string of pearls. They weren’t always in order, and even when they were, the scene that followed was almost never right after the one that he’d just witnessed a moment ago. It was like someone had taken the pages of a book, thrown them into the air, and then rebounded them into whatever order they happened to land in, but somehow, it started to make a twisted sort of sense. Moment by moment and scene by scene, the whole lurching mess slowly took on a fluidity that Benjamin couldn’t have anticipated.

Like a zoetrope that reached critical speed, he suddenly became enmeshed in the daily grind of someone else's life as they studied at an academy meant for nobility. It was a surreal sequence, but there was just enough familiarity to anchor him, even if they had marble columns instead of drywall and illusionary manifestations instead of whiteboard illustrations to demonstrate certain concepts.

He sat in the Prince’s chair, he listened to the Prince’s lecturers, and he gossiped with the Prince’s friends. No, he did more than that. Benjamin was Prince Agardian. Even though he hated the man, for as long as he let his script needle away against his soul, copying file after file, he was Prince Agardian Serifono Augustasian Rhul, and only a handful of people in the whole of the Rhulvinarian Empire could dare stand against him, let alone oppose him.

Benjamin learned a great deal about the man he murdered in a short time once he made peace with that. He learned that, at least at this point in his life, he rarely cared about much beyond his latest dalliance and the intrigues with his many siblings to one-up each other to gain prestige and embarrass each other in the eyes of their father, the emperor.

More important than any of the minor threads of politics that ran through every occasion and interaction, like the air that the Prince and his hangers-on breathed, Benjamin learned something even more important. He learned why the Summoner Lords seemed to know less than he would have possibly imagined about the systems that made their entire way of life possible: No one taught them anything about the things, and intellectual curiosity for topics that didn’t extend to politics or history was basically nil.

Benjamin was shocked by this, but he supposed he shouldn’t have been. He didn’t remember a lot about Earth, but he did know for a stone-cold certainty that the more complex computers got, the less anyone understood them. Every year, programs got more complicated, laptops got thinner, and phones got more powerful. So why should he expect any less from a magical program?

The closest any of the classes ever got were long seminars on the nature of demons, and the hellish conditions that existed between worlds. That part interested Benjamin a great deal, but he was unable to pay much attention to those infrequent nuggets of real, useful information, because Prince Agardian rarely did. He might attend classes, but they were a social activity, and not a learning one.

So, reluctantly, after dealing with a dizzying amount of days and feeling quite sick of this point of view, Benjamin decided to turn the script off and give himself a break. Well, he tried to, at least, but nothing happened. Instead, the process continued as if he’d done nothing at all.