Frei looked again at the staggering number of souls he possessed and could not believe that with one move, he had solved what could have taken months of arduous farming.

"Dividing enemies is really efficient." He thought, still, the situation had been too dangerous for his taste. One sound from the toilet door, one look of Allancard behind him and he had been dead for good. Now there were two big choices in front of him. The more important one was probably the first one.

Should he stay under the Divine Universe, or desert to the Arcane Universe?

  Given the city he was in, both universes seemed to be rather similar. There were probably no resurrections in the Arcane Universe, but that was irrelevant for Frei as he was stuck in the [Adventurers' Guild], receiving missions where resurrections were often no help. It was the greatest source of his urge to change colors. Simply put, the hell had an [Adventurers' Guild] and it sucked! Everything seemed to be digitalized, automatized, quick, optimized. . .fuck that! It was for machines to be the most efficient, he wanted at least a bit of humanity, to actually walk into the damned guild, not to connect to some boring on-line database.

  One of the reasons he wanted to turn coat was also that the Broad Shoulders were probably [Mage]s and based on their behaviour they had quite a freedom. In hell . . he had not even been in hell yet! The only freedom he had was during the missions and he knew for a fact that multiple people kept monitoring them, they had even changed his objective with that angel at that time.

"Fuck them, the Divine Universe are fascists, with all their surveillance and sterility, the Arcane Universe seems more organic." He said and searched for his evolution options, completely missing the curious look of his still waiting companion.

Freedom was expensive, but he would pay to have it every time.

[Warlock]

[Golem]

[Ethereal]

[Demonic Earth Mage]

[Demonic Life Mage]

[SoulStone Mage]

  He did not think that the demon had lied to him, so he ignored the first three. With his limited information, he decided to ditch the demonic influence completely, because by using demonic evolution there might be a way for his old masters to get to him.

"Right, let's do this!" Frei Galgani selected [SoulStone Mage] and watched as his skin turned slightly blue and . .

"Oh My . . . "

"You! You are! N-No way!" Nitarja was pointing at him with her shaking finger.

His shoulders grew to be a bit more broad! He was one of them now!

Frei could not stop laughing.

  The laugh that lessened a bit, when he verified that whatever the AI angel he had met in the white room had thrown at him did not work anymore. He was not surprised, but the local power structure had surely some guide of their own anyway.

"Come Nitarja, the official version is that you are my slave now." He began walking slowly in the direction of an exit.

"What have you done? Have you evolved into them?!" She kept bombarding him with questions.

"Ja. I have evolved into them. Collect the money on the dead, we will sorely need it." Frei walked forward, enjoying his new physique. Turning around felt like steering a ship.

"Done that already." Nitarja smirked. "You can use that guy's uniform, it is in a good state given that he had been killed through an eye."

  He had forgotten that Nitarja was not a lost princess or a woman in a distress, she had probably more experience as a thief than he would ever have and her following actions only cemented what he thought.

"You do not look like an experienced spawn, oh sorry, [Mage]. It will be better if I'll be your guide, I have lived some time with them and we can pretend that I belong to you." She continued.

"You hope that I will get you back through the portal, huh?" Frei tried to guess Nitarja's intentions.

"Not at all." She snorted. "It is only a matter of time before that place becomes a war zone."

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"Wait, you mean that I am basically stuck with you now?" His eyebrows rose.

"No, it is the other way around." She sighed and he felt like he should slap her.

"Let's move." Frei had enough of useless bickering and started walking out of the school. Of course only after he dressed into the dead man's attire that was luckily without any visible blood stains.

"We should go out of the city, less and weaker people means less trouble." Nitarja said and Frei could only nod.

  They walked out of the building and turned in the direction out of the city. Frei noticed that people here were not curious at all, trying to avoid trouble. He recalled how Nitarja called him a mage and wondered how much she really knew.

"How do you know they are called mages?" Frei asked with suspicion in his voice.

"You happen to overhear a thing or two when you are a slave. Do not hope for any extensive knowledge, all I can tell you are a few tips."

"Overhear a thing or two . . .have you overheard some discussions about magic?" Frei was interested, but her answer was not what he had imagined.

"If you consider hearing, I am the greatest mage of our clan, while being fucked so hard that your tits nearly fly off a discussion, then yes, I have had some discussions about magic." She responded.

"Uh, Sorry." Frei felt embarrassed for a second.

"Don't be, I did that one voluntarily, because he seemed like a better master, but in the end, he was just an idiot." Nitarja sighed while twirling her white ear with her finger.

"Ah, got it." Well, they had clearly not imported her for being ordinary, she had probably some peculiar history behind her.

  While chatting, Frei found out about the basic power structure of the planet and the Arcane Universe as a whole. Apparently, the time of states as major powers in the Arcane Universe was over. There were many puppet states without taste, smell and an identity of their own, the true movers and shakers of the universe were interplanetary organizations, one could call them corporations, brands or even secret societies in some cases, their key feature was that their influence reached beyond a few planets. Knowing who was a member of one and who was not became inclusive knowledge for all who wanted to play with politics or big money, as they often hid behind state as their front. The situation could be described as a state being the puppet executor of power, but the strings to this puppet were not in the hands of a single organization.

Nitarja shared with him her limited knowledge of some of the big players.

  Galacron was a corporation centered about magical technology, it was also the one responsible for the technology used to infiltrate other universes and Frei wanted to avoid them, as it seemed too reminiscent of hell's Adventurers' Guild.

  The Sigil of Meridor was a cult with its name derived from a famous Mage Meridor Haal Rattberg, who tried to turn his body into a spell formation. Despite dying, his dedication to research of magic inspired a cult centered about magic research that was not shy of any extremes to achieve results.

  The Church of Thurm had risen in popularity among poor people, it was adept at helping poor people in dire situations and had even more expertise in bragging about it afterwards, attracting new sheep into its fold.

  There had been merges in the past, but it had been shown that big monopolies with no unifying vision tended to lose focus and become toothless, especially given the nature of the power that the Arcane Universe possessed. The Divine Universe had a unified vision of power, but in the Arcane Universe there was no such thing. Mages with unique approaches developed unique powers with specific strengths and weaknesses. The greatest weakness of the Arcane Universe was that it had no brutal, serialized kind of power the Divine Universe had, but it possessed the right poison for every enemy.

" If we want to prevent being caught in a crossfire, we should join one of the three later." She concluded her rant about the Arcane Universe, looking at him with curiosity.

"Hard choice, but there is no reason to leave it for later. What is the main source of income of the organizations again?" Frei asked, as he guessed a new member would be someone making significant profit for the organization to prove their worth.

"Galacron extracts resources from other universes or locally. The Church of Thurm's main source of income is slave trade or cheap manual labour. The Sigil of Meridor is into patents, cloning, mutant soldiers and politics."

"Ah, they have even their own army." Frei pointed out and Nitarja looked at him like he had the intelligence of a rabbit.

"They all have private forces."

Frei though about it for a second, but there was not much to choose from. It felt like choosing between drowning or being shot.

"The Sigil of Meridor sounds the least nauseating." Frei said and Nitarja stopped walking forward for a moment, as if she had remembered something unpleasant.

"If you think so . . in that case, we do not need to walk that far away. There is someone in the slums we can meet with."

  They walked through the narrow, messy corners of the slums, the dusty streets mostly empty. They stopped in front of a large building with only a few windows, its door made of metal that had been corroded in many places.

"Do not forget your part of a story. Mages are similar to nobles, but there is not enough wealth for all of them to live in luxury. many of them embarking on a road of a knight, fighting under other people while trying to accumulate enough wealth to uplift their status and become land owners." She gave him a stern look, like saying not to blow his cover straight off the bat.

"Yeah, yeah, you are one serious foxgirl. Do not worry, I am not a complete idiot." Frei said and knocked on the door. Nitarja looked at him a little bit longer and then simply opened the door and walked in.

"Of course, the entrance is at the yard." They walked through the dilapidated part of the building and reached the yard shortly, where another version of the door stood, but now clean and spotless. Frei knocked again and a man in rugged clothes opened, not dissimilar to those they had seen wandering around the slums.

"What do you want?" He asked, but then answered himself immediately, when he saw Frei.

"Ugh, not again." The man closed the door and soon a shout could be heard from the inside. "Grob, we have another one."

  After a minute, a different person opened the door, his outfit of much higher quality. He eyed them both and threw them a small bundle of something that reminded Frei of a tightly winded wire, but out of a material reminding him of plastics.

"Mana conducting thread, the supplier is experiencing repeated issues causing unacceptable delays. Go to Howling Street and solve the issues before we even begin our talks. You have three days." The man closed the door again, not even bothering to introduce himself.

"Well, that went quick." Frei said dryly and turned around, walking away with the small tube that had the mana conducting thread on its surface. He cast a questioning look at Nitarja, but she only shrugged her shoulders.

"Damn, and I hoped to find out more about my new powers." He mumbled.

  They spent half an hour to get to the Howling Street where there was a large factory building, it did not look like they were producing high quality components in there. The Sigil had probably chosen them based on their price more than anything else.

Suddenly, Nitarja outpaced him, whispering a few words in his ear when she went past him.

"Follow me, do not look back." Not knowing what was going on, Frei listened to her and kept walking behind her, his eyes following her white tail that kept swinging left and right.