Lord Joyde The Madman: Heylo, everybody! How are you all doing?

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Creation can be a very difficult concept sometimes.

Especially when what you're talking about is equally unexplained by both science and religion.

I am treading on shallow ground here for you guys and girls...

SO, RIGHT UP MY ALLEY, THEN!

Anyways, here comes the next chapter of EUPHORIA! I sincerely hope that you enjoy, let us begin

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Don't mind me guys and girls! I'm just a line break...

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Out of time... - Outside Of Reality... - Leonardo's Point Of View...

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"Uuuugh... wh-.. where?" My voice echoed as I woke, the familiar feeling of flesh and bone and skin slicing across my fingertips as I rose, my vision unclouding as it has done so many times before.

Just now, I was busying myself repairing the steel bridge I destroyed in my battle against the espers in order to allow my human allies to cross.

Now...

I was back here, at the edge of reality.

Upon the island of meat that represented my soul.

Yet somehow, I felt that the place was different from before. A quick look around confirmed that the Cathedral was still there, alongside the many spine-like spikes upon which bleeding souls were impaled, cursed or blessed to burn in eternal hellfire forever."Huh?"

I lifted my foot, realizing that I was still wearing the outfit I had in the outside world, the pale white boots of said outfit were now completely drenched in red. Pools of rich, crimson blood now littered the landscape, each of them was lit aflame, almost as if the blood was a flammable material.

Upon closer inspection of the bone spikes, I noticed how their formerly completely white coloration had adopted strings of wave-like patterns, not unlike that of damascus steel. Each pattern was colored black, with spots of blue. It reminded me of those high tech bank vaults and looked like a form of living metal infused into the bones.

My bones.

My metal.

... the nanomachines. Their newborn existence has had unintented consequences, reaching as far as my soul, it would seem.

So how come Aria never had such a effect upon me? How come Yomi didn't?

What is the difference between them?

We are born of you and you alone, master.

In a way, we aren't truly separate from your own self.

We are but another limb, an unseen arm that has gained its own consciousness.

Your soul is our soul, your flesh is our flesh, your mind is our mind, your existence...

Well, that one is debatable.

"I could say the same to you, Adolf." Chuckling at my machine collective's antics, I nodded towards seemingly nobody."Anyways, glad to see that you guys are here with me this time."

About that... master, although we are with you...

We aren't within that body you've grown for yourself for whatever reason. We are part of the island.

A blink of momentary confusion."Body? That I grew for myself? What do you mean?"

You... do not remember?

Perhaps this will help.

A brief flash of imagery thundered across my mind, showing several moments before my own awakening to this plane.

The collective arrived here a few seconds before I did and scanned their sourroundings in a panicked fashion before taking note of a bulging sack of meat growing from the side of the cathedral. I.. the body I have now burst out of that sack.

I.. made this body... The Island..

Shaking my head out of my stupor, I promptly knelt down and dragged my fingers across the meat which was the floor. In that moment, I realized something that had evaded my comprehension all of this time for whatever reason.

I.. I could feel myself touching the flesh, but I could also feel being touched.

On my back.

So this.. entire place is on my back? And I, or well, this body of mine, grew out of it?

Wait, this island is my soul, right?"Adolf, what exactly is this island composed off?"

Scanning...

...

Failure. No known or unknown material has been detected.

This confirmed my suspicions."What about energy?"

Master, this entire place is full of energy.

No matter where we scan or where we look, energy is the only discernable thing we can find.

There are traces of known and unknown energies around us: Minor amounts of Chaos, large doses of Life and Void.. and another, purer power that has yet to be named.

Though, we are fairly certain of whom this unknown energy belongs to.

God."But, what about... our energies?"

Unsurprisingly, they are concentrated around this Island.

No.. wait, they..

The effective range of the energies we have detected, that is to say the typical trio, the Prima, Sanguinite and your own version of Chaos Energy, are all coalescent together in one place.

Their .. shape, is exactly the length and diameter of the island.

No."They ARE the island. This place is my soul... to think I ever thought of anything here to be material and physical is really stupid of me."

A hand dragged across the surface of the flesh once again, only to find that it flowed through the flesh just as easily as it touched its supposedly solid surface."Energy. Or plasma? Maybe simply immaterial? Yes, that would be the best word to use here."

Everything around us is created out of concentrated energies...

Is this not how matter is supposedly formed? If so, how come nothing here is physical?

"It is. Yet it also isn't. I guess its just a matter of perspective and want. If I wanted this place to be physical, then it would be for as long as I required it to be, yet the second that thought process fades, the energy returns to its natural, immaterial state."

What we do not feel, sense or see instantly turns back to what it was before we saw it?

How incredibly annoying.

"Hah, thats the first time you've used annoying to describe anything, Adolf."

We find it annoying because you find it annoying, sir.

.. So, while we haven't used the word, there is plenty of things which we could reffer to as such.

"Ehh, point taken." Though this makes me wonder about something.

If I unconsciously created this flesh for the sole purpose of making it easier to manifest myself within this plane, what else would I be able to forge?

A momentary turn towards the Catherdral made me imagine a Creti growing out of its supposedly stone walls... and soon, a bubble of flesh erupted from it and a Creti burst out of it... only to be consumed back into me as soon as it was made and fell down onto the flesh floor.

... Yet, this was kind of expected.

And that wasn't what actually shocked me at this moment. Rather, it was another matter entirely.

You see, the Creti aren't pathetically weak creatures. If one were to fall like that, they could easily grab onto something with their massive titanium claws and prevent any damage from the fall. Yet this one did no such thing for one simple reason...

It..

It was born dead.

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Not only that, it had no soul of its own.

And no brain to hold it together.

The Creti back in the other reality moved not on their own accord but were uplinked to the collective and, much like the collective itself, were little more than extensions of my own body. This one, was created as an individual thing.

The bubble of flesh most likely took the shape it did for the sole reason that I imagine thats how a clone would be quickly grown from a vat or capsule.

Closing my eyes for a moment, I felt the scenery around me shifting and the energies twisting upon themselves. The area around me changed to suit my desires and when I reopened my eyes, I found myself sitting in an office chair. The floor below me turned into metal, with protruding bone becoming a myriad of wires and thick laboratory cables.

In the middle of this five meter area was a giant capsule filled with strange, greenish water with many black dots floating inside of it.

I knew this contraption.

It was the very thing I planned to use for the first part of Yomi's resurrection. It was a Cellular Restoration Capsule, or CRC. It used restorative bio liquids, viral epigenetic triggers and computer directed nanomachines to manipulate and force dead cells back to their living state.

In this place though, the bio liquids were replaced by Prima, the epigenetic triggers by my own infernal blood and .. well, the nanomachines remained the same with the computer being my own brain. With all this in mind, I recreated the Creti within the capsule.

Its imagined protective glass prevented its consumption back into me, even as the glass itself was nothing more than another part of me. Yet, it served its purpose well enough, as it allowed me to take a closer look at my twisted creation. As far as what I knew about the Creti was concerned, this one should be fully alive and well.

Yet, that wasn't the case for whatever reason.

This requires further experimentation. A thought of mine danced around a particular subject as I remembered a clear difference between this place and the other world I was on.

There, my ... body, was a giant crystal of concentrated energy which was continously and everlastingly leaking out from said crystal, as the crystal itself was just a host for the energies created where I am right now. So apart from the obvious difference in reality, there was nothing keeping the subject dead.

Perhaps, since the energy of this place is concentrated this also means that it never infuses other things. After all, my earthly body is also much the same way... In order to transform something, I have to infuse it with my own energy or make that something or someone drink a portion of my blood, turning them into a receptable for my power, a host, if you will.

These Creti are much the same, with the exception that unlike persay Tyrone or the vampire sisters, they cannot survive on their own without me contributing the aforementioned energies to them. So which energies do I give to the Creti that allow them to be... alive?

Psi.

Mana.

And QI.

The answer must lie within one of these powers."Adolf, this body of mine, which energies are flowing through it right now and which energies are flowing through the Creti?"

This body has everything your normal body does, sire.

The Creti however, lacks all of the "typical three".

"Even Qi?"

Why would it have Qi, sir?

It is dead. Unliving things cannot possess lifeforce, can they?

A blink, then a smile as I turned my head around and found myself seemingly teleported towards a giant hole in the middle of my island of flesh and bone. The hole was, of course, the circle of stars from which the tendrils of Life raked into me and allowed me to draw upon their strength.

Though now, the normally star-bright tendrils of white light seemed... dimminished. Come to think of it, I had felt as if I've used far too much power in my battle against the espers. Life is not a power meant for destruction alone... I must create something soon if I desire to keep my connection to the Life Engine.

And in this realization, combined with my current little experiment, I came to know the purpose of this place.

My soul, as a Curator of Life, was meant to become a forge of life and creation.

The Life Energy was a metal.

My mind was the hammer.

But where were the flames?

Another blink as I turned my head towards the massive spinal spires bearing impaled souls. I reached for one and found the spire lowering downwards to reach my height, to make itself accessible for me. There was a familiar soul upon the pyre, belonging to the one girl who started all of this with her death.

In a way, my unfortunate classmate awakened me to the truth of the world the moment I severed her body in half with an axe. Reaching into the burning soul revealed something rather saddening... Nothing of the girl I once knew remained, as everything she ever was, was burned away by the Hellfire of God. The Hellfire burns away the sins and imperfections of those whom it is cast upon.

Memories.

Feelings.

All of them had been incinerated by the flames in an effort to produce more energy to fuel the furnace... a furnace which I, up till now, didn't even know existed, much less knew how to operate. In other words, hers was a wasted soul.

How many others have I doomed to the same fate unknowingly?

Should I... be laughing at their supposed torment? A piece of me feels like the past me would.

Now?.. I don't really feel sad, persay.

Its more like...

A giant fucking waste. If I had been notified of my job by a certain someone before instead of having to find out on my own...

No, this isn't Chaos' fault. She has given me more than enough pointers. Its time I achieved something on my own.

I remember this girls name now. She was Carol, Carol Wright. A young blonde girl who was both rich and beautiful, with smarts and a bright future to boot. Come to think of it, her beauty made even me want to make her into a trophy wife before my ascension. Her existence was, and still is, a foundamental trigger for all that I am right now.

I wonder if she can be restored?

Just as I thought of that, I felt as if something reached into my mind and copied a portion of my memories. When my sight finally returned to what was in front of me, I saw a tendril of life energy protruding from my created body's hand and entering the manifestation of Carols soul. Her burning self regained form and became flesh, my memories of her entering her charred mind and planting the seeds of renewal.

She could regain herself one day, if I ever decided to let her loose... but how would I even do such a thing? By creating her a new body on earth and infusing her soul into it? Would that really work?

Something tells me no. There is a process of recovery that must be completed before her resurrection could begin, a set of trials and tests which, should she pass them, she would regain her incinerated memories and her lost personality.

Her *self*, so to speak.

Perhaps the concepts and truths I gleam from this place may also have a use in Yomi's own resurrection? For now, I should tell her just how big of a bullet she dodged when she trasnformed herself into a physical parasite and kept her personality and memories intact. It would seems that a soul without a *mind*, even if it has a *body* would lose itself to eternity eventually.

Still, that makes another set of people come to mind: namely Holmir and Palmira.

Holmir, the ancient templar whose existence was consumed by the original earthly bearer of the Living Crusade and transformed into a Vassal Soul, sparing him from the Hellfire. Hmm, I guess that does not solely mean saving him from pain, but the loss of *self* as well.

The strength of one's mind may also be a contributing factor for how long a soul may continue to burn without being incinerated into nothingness, self-wise anyways. In that case, Holmir must be extremely strong.

Well, he is one of God's champions, so I suppose its not really that big of a stretch. Though the others are strong too, I doubt they'll last longer than a century even with my protection. As for Carol, she was just a normal girl. Obviously, she won't last nearly as long.

Indeed, the fragment of her self that I just restored is already being burned away. Yet seeing this made me notice another interesting tidbit... Before her memories are burned away, they latch onto whispers of Void Energy. The Hellfire catches these whispers and burns them, clearing away the filth and dark which naturally permeates the void.

... And what is born out of the ashes, is nothing other than mana.

Magic.

Pure, undiluted soul-stuff.

.. does something simillar happen to everyone on a regular basis?

Do our emotions draw void energy into our bodies, only for it to be purified somehow and transform into mana, eventually collapsing together in order to form that which we call a *soul*?

So what takes the place of my Hellfire within the bodies of mortals?

The brain?

I already know that it creates psionic energy by concentrating mana into a singular portion of itself and then somehow turns said mana into psionics. Come to think of it, what exactly is psionic energy?

I summoned a bunch of said energy into the palm of my right hand, the purplish pink taking upon the form of a small cloud above my skin. On instinct, I compared this with the energy of the void.. only to find that they appeared to be the exact same thing, just with the psionics being its purified version, bereft of the filthy darkness which sourrounded the void energy. So void energy purified equals psionic energy.

That only leaves one unexplained part of the equation: Emotions.

There have always been tales of magic users being stronger the more powerful their emotions were.

Emotions.

What in the hell are they actually?

What is love?

Hate?

Greed?

Joy?

If we say that hormones are little more than their *bodies* or physical representations, then their origin is not the human mind alone. No... even without understanding them, humans have always attributed emotions to come from ones heart or soul. Not the mind.

In fact, the brain and the heart have always been two opposing sides, have they not?

So lets say that these fairy tales are correct and the heart creates emotions. The brain then takes these emotions and combines them with mana to form psionic energy.

But... isn't this the same process which creates mana, just the other way around? If the void energy is psionic energy corrupted by the unnatural darkness of the void itself, or just its natural state persay...

Void energy purified by Hellfire creates mana.

Mana infused with emotions by the brain creates psionic energy.

Emotions supposedly act as a lure for void energy.

Meaning that, so long as the source of void energy is infinite, the cycle is effectively endless. Yet that begs the question: What is Earths source of Void Energy?

And if the answer to that question is my sister Gaia, then how is there life upon other worlds? Do all planets with life upon them have an Implausible One imprisioned inside of them?

That seems incredibly unlikely. Perhaps the Earth and its people are special somehow? Maybe we were created for the sole purpose of stalling Gaia's rebirth, with each new soul consuming a small portion of her power?

I was told something along those lines by Chaos waaay before, right?

And to think, back then I felt as if I knew everything. That I was the pinnacle of universal understanding...

Now, I know the truth.

I am nothing more than a child, NO, a baby fresh out of its mothers womb. I don't know shit, do I?

Funny. How times have changed.

Only when you learn something do you truly realize just how little you know, eh?

Anyways, enough of this depressing line of thought...

So mana and Psi are not mutually exclusive, which makes sense.

Things which have a soul, require a mind.

Things which require a mind, seek to have a soul.

This behaivour can be seen by interacting with Earth's AI. They have a body, but no mind or soul.

They interact with others, taking a bit of mana from each person they intract with. This mana collapses together to form a soul. Then this soul somehow gains emotions, which allows its body to form psionic energy... which sustains those very emotions.

Something isn't right here. Where do emotions come from? What made them? How are they made?

Do they simply exist?

... must be something God made. Only God could make something so impossibly incomprehensible.

Well, God or Chaos, anyways.

Implausible Ones... why the hell am I even trying to define them with logic? Hell, aren't I an Implausible One myself now?

Maybe I'm looking at all this with far too much of a mortal viewpoint.

Anyways, I got extremely sidetracked, where was I? Oh yes, the Creti experiement.

So to conclude my findings so far; a creature needs psi, mana and QI to exist, in the physical realm at least, as QI seems to be inconsequential to immaterial creatures in general.

Psi equals a mind.

Mana equals a soul.

After another moment of thought, I finally realized that I still had my hand stuck into Carol's soul. I quickly pulled it out, only to find that a good portion of said soul came with it. A blink was all I offered poor Carol as her withered soul quickly replenished itself, the missing part regenerating by consuming the nearby void energy.

Come to think of it, I was somewhere in the middle of the void and floating above wherever the Life Engine is. If the Void Energy is the first energy and the source of everything else, then life itself must also be descended from it? Somehow, the Life Engine takes the void energy and turns it into life energy...

No, a piece of my mind is screaming at me for even thinking of it that way, yet offers no real reasoning as to why.

Perhaps we, the curators of Life, have much the same purpose to the Life Engine as the souls of those we consume have to us. We are merely fuel for its machinations...

Wait, didn't Eadom say something like this a long time ago? Though he himself confused Chaos with Life, nowadays I know for certain that they are separate.

Damn, I should have listened more to that flayed angel before he got destroyed by God and Chaos... no, perhaps they did that so unexpectedly for the sole purpose of ensuring that I don't listen to him.

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Don't mind me guys and girls! I'm just a line break...

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 So this was meant to be one amazingly huge chapter but.. 4k words ended up being enough for now.

Part two will be coming up later, maybe even today but probably not.

Maybe I'll end up like the latest D: Infernal chapters and have like 10k words in total. XD

Extremely unlikely, but we shall see.

As per usual, I shall remain online for a time in order to edit out mistakes and answer early commets!

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Anyways, read and review! And Good Morning/Day/Night to you all! ADIOS FOR NOW!!!!!!!