As he declared his resolve to survive, Martin’s mind began to stabilise. His mind still hazy, but rapidly clearing up, he tried to understand what had just happened.

He couldn’t tell how much time had passed since it had begun; to him, every moment of it seemed to both pass instantly and stretch into eternity. The fact he’d almost just... vanished sent shivers running through him.

‘That reminds me’

Reminiscing to the exact moment he’d properly been able to think again, Martin realised he’d been slightly shaking the entire time, even before properly realising the experience had been.

That proved he’d somehow become even more in tune with his soul.

More than just it becoming more sensitive to him, and him becoming more sensitive to it, he’d begun to instinctively refer to his soul as himself; to him, it was at the same time an extension of his body, his body itself, and something more, going deeper than his current understanding could comprehend.

‘This is becoming more and more interesting,’ Martin smiled to himself.

Summarising just these facts, it seemed to be that, at the beginning, his mind and soul had still been separate.

The torturous pain of his mind bursting at the seams, which he was too weak to feel at the time, but now made his entire existence tingle just recalling it, suggested his mind had first been a physical construct somewhere in his soul, and his earlier realisation had opened it up and forced the two to become one.

‘I wonder what all that would’ve been like if I still had a body’ Martin wondered. ‘If anything, I’m surprised nothing like this ever happened despite everything I got up to in my last life... although I suppose discovering the existence of souls just happened to never be at the forefront of my mind’

As he half-reminisced, half-joked, Martin finally felt himself start to calm down.

‘I can’t even say I was stupid. Who could’ve guessed just thinking the wrong thing could be a danger to my existence? That aside...’

He finally began to look closer at the changes that occurred within him. To his pleasure, the more he looked, the more he found.

Firstly, something that stood out was that his declaration of his will to survive now seemed to be permanently etched into him. Considering how much he’d feared death, a strong will to live seemed to complement him well.

In fact, the more he’d focus on his desire to survive, the more it seemed to... he wasn’t sure exactly how to describe it, but it was somewhere between ‘grow’ and ‘develop’. ‘Evolve’ seemed almost right, but not perfectly.

Either way, in just the time he’d thought that, it had transformed surprisingly quickly, but nothing even close to the change that had killed him earlier.

‘Interesting. From wanting to live, it’s become wanting to live. It’s not just survival. It feels like the desire to learn; to eat; to drink; to bathe in the morning sun and gaze at the midnight moon; to go through my days, through good and bad, together and alone; everything I can think of is becoming increasingly important to me.’

Martin felt invigorated, his will like a bottomless well with a bucket that was constantly getting bigger.

He suspected the reason for this happening was something along these lines: just as his mind had entirely spilled into his soul, his declaration had acted as an anchor that helped chain the two together in a more fundamental way, and now nurturing this thought seemed to nurture his unified mind and soul.

This brought about the question of what would happen if the declaration had been any different. Obviously, he couldn’t have thought of anything at that moment, but giving how much weaker his ability to think was than it had been before death, the body’s ‘mind’ and the soul’s one seemed to be separate.

If he’d still had his body, how much more could he have been-

‘That’s enough of that’

Martin wasn’t keen on lamenting what could have been, and even less keen to unlink his mind and soul again (if that was even possible), so he quickly left the topic alone.

Deciding focussing on something else was a smart move –he still wasn’t entirely confident the current method in which he was growing wouldn’t lead to his near-death again- Martin began tinkering with what other capabilities he now had.

With only a short moment of testing, he was immediately surprised at how proficient he’d come in controlling his soul; moreso than it becoming more responsive and him feeling it better, he’d also found that actively trying to control it became something that required increasingly less effort with only a little practice.

Within a short time, Martin found he could cause a sensation –which he realised were essentially no more than vibrations of the soul- to only occur locally, or, with a little more effort, in two places at once; to immediately become much stronger or much weaker, with stronger ones starting to make him feel slightly unwell the stronger they were; and with even more effort, to have to completely separate vibrations.

He realised he’d been against that earlier, but in his current state, it was the same as thinking of two things at once. It would explain why he felt like he couldn’t do it whilst his mind was as weak as it had been earlier.

‘Speaking of things I didn’t feel like...’ Martin wondered

He tried to still his thoughts. Not completely, because there was still a slight chance he’d dissipate into nonexistence the moment he stopped thinking, but as much as he thought was reasonable.

‘Would you look at that’

Trying to feel with his entire soul at once, which became much more difficult when something was essentially infinite, Martin found that, even when he was suppressing his emotions to the best of his ability, there were still some vibrations in his soul.

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Of course, he knew he couldn’t entirely suppress emotions from occurring, especially when they were no longer linked to the chemistry of his brain or anything of the sort, and he did recognise small amounts of fear, hope, joy, and more, but there was something more.

His first thought was that all these vibrations were caused by his thoughts themselves; now that his mind an soul were one, it would make sense for every thought to produce a reaction. In a way, thoughts could be described as extremely complex emotions, although that would be a strong oversimplification.

But no, it wasn’t that. Not just. Even when Martin tried to think of the same thing over and over, trying as hard as he could to push everything else out of his mind, the vibrations in his soul seemed ever so slightly different.

At first, he thought it could just be due to slight difference in... did souls have tone? Volume? (He briefly checked, and found there were differences depending on how he thought something.) However, after repeating it over and over, almost as if entering some sort of trance, he managed to rule it out.

The difference was just too big, too random, to say it was something like that.

That meant one of two things. Either there were some inner workings of his soul that he wasn’t aware of -which was almost certainly true regardless, given how he wasn’t particularly an expert in souls before any of this- or...

‘Outside influence’

At the moment, it didn’t look like anything was endangering or controlling him, more like... the equivalent of a breeze of wind, but for souls.

After all, souls had to exist somehow. If they existed, they had to be made of something. And if they were made of something, that thing was very likely to exist outside of souls, too.

Martin wasn’t certain. There was nothing to suggest there wasn’t simply a certain number of souls that have always existed, and are simply recycled upon death, possibly after whatever mind inhabits them eventually acknowledges the soul around it, then inevitably spills into the infinite void without managing a single thought.

But that hadn’t happened for him.

The possibility for something more, something unnecessary for life, put somehow possible nonetheless existed, and he was living evidence of it. Of course, even putting any egotistical thoughts aside, it was true someone like him didn’t come about often, but...

Martin smiled at himself ‘Looks like I’ve been true to my word. I want to live,’ Quickly acknowledging the fact the fundamental link between mind and soul seemed to be evolving in a new direction, and taking the time to check he hadn’t managed to put himself on the verge of death by thinking the wrong thing again, he continued.

‘I’m disregarding anything that would point in a direction that’s inconvenient to me and only looking at what’s most convenient to me. That’s not an attitude I’d normally be proud of, but... who’s going to blame me for having hope?’

Somehow managing to find humour in the fact he seemed to be entirely by himself, stuck inside his own body, only able to look inwards, Martin reminded himself of his need to make progress before the situation began to affect him more than he’d like.

He tried to focus on as much of his soul at once as he could. Even compared to the time he’d done this just short moments ago, he felt like he’d improved significantly. This was due to a mixture of his foundation having some form of breakthrough moments ago and the fact his mind and soul were constantly developing as he used it.

‘I think that’s a great way of putting ‘the more I think, the better I can think’,’ Martin remarked. The more he got used to his current situation, the better his mood seemed to become.

He continued to stretch his focus, covering more and more of his soul at once. The longer this continued, the faster his focus stretched, but he seemed unsatisfied at something.

‘This would be a great way to understand whether the randomness in the vibrations in my soul is something external or internal, but... that would take far too long. Even if I continue to grow at the same rate I currently am, reverse-engineering soul fluctuations to their cause would essentially be creating a new science. I’m not quite up to that, and much less so when I’d be blind to anything myself the entire time until it’s complete’

He really didn’t want to find out whether there was something made to deal with souls that didn’t reincarnate properly, or worse, if there was anything that might use them as a food source.

Nothing was unreasonable when you only just experienced a thought almost killing you.

And so, rather than choosing to cover as much of his soul as possible, Martin tried a different approach. So far, he’d learnt focussing on an emotion would produce a vibration in his soul that was an equivalent to a sensation associated with that emotion.

He’d also found he could reproduce that vibration without having to feel that emotion by focussing directly on the sensation (although as he had that thought, he found there were some minor differences between the results of the two. Still, that didn’t currently matter).

What he hadn’t yet tried was to recreate anything more complex than a sensation. Rather than trying to remember a feeling his body had when something was done to it, he instead focussed on what it felt like for his body to do something.

Since something like ‘moving his arm’ could have strange consequences that he wasn’t ready for, Martin tried something else.

He closed his eyes.

Immediately, he lost sight of his soul. Now, everything around him was pure black. Not that everything wasn’t before, but that at least felt... familiar, especially so when he’d become one with his soul.

Now, everything was cold, empty, and black.

‘I thought this might work, but I didn’t expect it to go exactly to plan like this’

Now that his focus was out of his soul, he tried something else.

Summoning the vestiges of his interoception and proprioception, the senses responsible for feeling the inside of one’s body and the positioning of one’s body respectively, he began a test whose outcome would determine a lot about how easily he could improve his situation.

In fact, what he was doing shouldn’t have been possible. From what he’d experienced so far, only the conscious parts of his mind were present in his soul –for example, he hadn’t breathed, blinked, or digested anything this entire time.

That made sense. However, at some point in his life, Martin had achieved a feat most would’ve deemed impossible, and even if not, unnecessary; he could consciously use his subconscious mind. Anyone could breathe on command, but could everyone tell their heart when to beat? Tell their tongue to stop tasting, tell their lungs to stop exchanging oxygen?

Of course, Martin wasn’t attempting such a thing. Not yet. His test was simple.

Using his interoception and proprioception, he tried to feel not his insides, but his skin.

He immediately became aware of something that had seemingly always been there, but seemed to have constantly eluded him. His soul had an end.

It wasn’t exactly the right way to put it. He could feel the boundary around his soul, but at the same time, he could tell the space contained inside it was infinite. It was something he couldn’t quite understand, but also something he’d have to simply accept; wasting time on trying to explain it wouldn’t do anything for him.

‘Of course it’s a sphere,’ he thought, thinking back to the stereotypical depictions of souls he’d seen sporadically whilst still in his mortal body.

Finding exactly what he’d hoped, Martin tried to ‘open his eyes’. Immediately, perception of his soul returned, but this time, he felt something more. At the edge of his conscience, quite fittingly, lay the edge of his soul.

Considering the two were one and the same, he assumed it wasn’t a coincidence.

The test had gone exactly how he’d wanted. Now, however, he was left with a plethora of possibilities.

While he still couldn’t sense the world outside, he was only getting closer. Constant miniscule sensations –not vibrations, but physical impacts- to the outer layer of his soul spoke of a sea of possibilities outside him.

More importantly than that, he’d found a new method to develop.

‘I wonder what would happen if I tried to breathe?’