After the whole Zacx-the-Formic fiasco, which I had finally found out was the actual Ant-man's name after calming him down, I decided that I needed to understand more profoundly what works and what doesn’t when it came to spirit roots.
It had taken quite a little bit of effort to get rid of Zacx after his “awakening”, as he had become too scared to leave the Smithy because he now feared that the Queens would come for him again, especially the ones from the Conservative Faction.
I thus had been forced to explain to him that the only person who could ward-off the intrusions of the Queens or outright cut-off the connection to the Hives was only himself, and that he needed to take control of his own spirit-roots and learn how to use them properly for that to happen.
I then “prescribed” him a bunch of so-called “meditation exercises” that he needed to practice from now on, which were basically just a bunch of BS self-reinforcement mental platitudes that I could remember from some self-help classes and books that I had read back on Earth. Such words rang quite nicely and seemed to be very helpful if applied to his current predicament, so he had been hanging onto my every utterance with zelous fervor. Only after he had finally left the Smithy while hugging the papers which I had written for him containing the “meditation exercises”, was I finally able to refocus my thoughts.
It had become apparent to me that I needed more practical experience when it came to working on a “living” subject, otherwise the risk of damaging more innocents with my spiritual-fiddling still existed, if I were to encounter and attempt to “awaken” other non-humans in the future.
It had been just plain dumb luck that the Formic-dude had been paralyzed by the Queen's MENTAL assaults instead of actually having any HARDWARE problems, as the issues that could have arisen from his uncontrolled rapid-growth could have gone either way.
I needed to know what generally happened when the spirit-roots themselves got severely damaged or even torn to pieces, and how much of the stem and branches could be recovered or healed even after such a trauma had occurred.
Therefore, I decided to go to the shackled Cultist together with Lingfeng. The dude was still useful as my guinea-pig, and I knew that I could experiment some of my theories on his spirit-roots without feeling too guilty about messing them up. He was amazingly still alive, and I had to give him some bonus points for how much vitality his body had. Was that vitality somehow related to his Blood-Cultist passives? Or had he simply been born with a strong body from the start?
When I arrived at the jail cell, I straight-up told him what I wanted to do to him and the reasons behind my line of thinking, not to mention that it would probably hurt beyond measure. Yet, that did not seem to phase him even a little bit anymore, as he had resigned himself to his fate and had prepared himself mentally to accept his own “execution” at any point in time, in whatever form it came.
Before proceeding though, I had asked Timmy what would happen if I were to wreck the Cultist’s spirit-roots intentionally or even by accident. He told me that the Cultist would simply die and then get sent into the reincarnation cycle as a result, with no actual harm being done to the “base” soul, since it was impossible to harm a REAL “soul” in the first place.
Not even Momma System had that kind of power, as all “souls”, “Player” or otherwise, were information “terminals”(as Timmy liked to call them) of other Greater Beings from the Omniverse that liked to “keep tabs” on this particular Universe and Planet. For the Greater Beings in the Omniverse, any and all experiences could be considered “valuable”, even that of existing as a rock, a bacteria, a tree, an insect, a rat or even a humanoid. Each one of those things had their own struggles and timescales, therefore they possessed certain “values” derived from their “state changes” which appealed to the wide audience which were the Greater Beings from the Omniverse.
Of course, the local spirit-roots that usually grew from the otherworldly soul-terminals could be manipulated, imprisoned, trimmed, altered, connected together or many other things by the Mother System or by some other spirit-manipulator like myself at will, but the original soul-objects that connected this Universe to the Beyond were impossible to “destroy”, and were present in just about anything and everything you could think of. I was actually amazed at how the Mother System was able to keep track of so many “soul-terminals” for every rock, virus, bacteria and other minute thing in the world at the same time with such flawless accuracy.
“Trimming” the spirit-roots at the base, as in getting all of the memories from the previous life removed by force, was something the reincarnation-management part of the Mother System did to every “conscious” entity once they died anyway, so it wasn’t anything strange that the roots got “chopped away” from the soul-baseplate, it was actually the norm.
It took someone with very high levels of cultivation and spirit-root self-awareness to even attempt resisting the “trimming” process of the Mother System, but it was not impossible, as it had occurred successfully a few times in the past, Timmy assured me of the fact.
Of course, “Players” were sometimes also allowed to keep their old memories on purpose, as it had happened to me and apparently to some other people across Pangerra, when our “soul-terminals” had been swapped-over into this Universe and Planet away from our former versions of Earth.
I wondered what the hell did the Mother System do with all of the spirit-roots She kept trimming away from every “soul-terminal” upon their deaths? I could bet my nonexistent hat that She was just hoarding all of those life experiences for Herself, to increase Her own database or cultivation or whatever mojo She functioned with! Cheater! Let everybody else go through all of the pain and suffering of an entire life's existence and then BAM, milk away all of their experiences once they kicked the bucket! Bleh! Damn Mother System! Go into the light my ass!
Anyway, returning my thoughts to the Blood Cultist, I whipped out all of my spiritual “surgery” tools, and then I prepared myself to “operate”.
What I wanted to test out first, was what would happen if I were to “transfer” one of this guy’s already-formed spirit-branches to the end-tip of one of my own wriggling “branch-tentacles” ...ahemm*cough*…I mean, ”spirit-manipulators” (as Carmine has insisted I call them from now on), since I recalled having gained that strange “Bonsai” skill quite early-on in my life after waking up in this world, after I had transplanted my spirit-roots down into my lower dantian.
I had even prepared a few “spirit manipulators” beforehand for exactly this “grafting” purpose, with a widened-head that would allow for the safe-installation of another object upon them.
Looking back at the whole root-transplant procedure that I had performed on myself when I was still freshly-awakened and desperate because of that black control-nail, the action had been indeed quite suicidal, as I had inadvertently placed myself between life-and-death without even knowing it, when I had yanked away my spirit-roots out of my soul-baseplate by mistake.
The aforementioned soul-baseplate which still resided inside of my Crown dantian even nowadays, was an round object that seemed to be inter-connected with all my body’s parts through the complex pathways that made up the Meridian network, and as a consequence, with all of the other similar structures which resembled itself that existed within the Heart dantian and the Lower dantian of the body.
Yet compared to a normal person, which usually had their spirit-roots growing out of their Crown soul-baseplate, mine was empty and barren, as my spirit-roots had been forced to grow out of my Lower dantian soul-baseplate instead, and were using the aforementioned as the “planter” for themselves.
The existence of the three similar soul-baseplates within the body’s dantians was probably the reason why the Daoists thought that a person had “three hun” yang-aligned souls that went to the afterlife, along with the other “seven po” yin-aligned souls, which were probably analogies for the seven Chakra spiritual openings on the Meridian network, and constituted the “corporeal” souls which remained within the body even after death.
Another thing that I had observed while I had forcibly modified my own roots, had been the fact that the “internal-Qi” that escaped and the memories that particular Qi contained always seemed to be in reverse chronological order.
Basically, if left to continuously “bleed out” internal-Qi, the memories lost would start from the most recent ones, then progress further and further back in time the worse the Qi-loss became, until the roots would remain just some Qi-less containers, which would cause them to wither and die.
Therefore, my main goal was to minimize any internal-Qi loss, and also make sure that any lost internal-Qi was “affordable”, as I could allow myself to lose the memories of a few hours ago from the recent past, when nothing lifechanging had occurred, rather than something more profound, like the newfound crafting discoveries about the 3D runes from a few days ago.
Once I was totally ready, I immediately “dived” into the Cultist’s head by forcibly breaking his life-shield once again, and then I grabbed one of his spirit-branches which already had a spell inscribed upon it with my own “spirit-manipulators”, to get it ready for removal. I swiftly prepared my dedicated saw-manipulator to sever it off, but before that, I asked the Cultist to try and recite the spell that was written on the branch over and over again, to check what would happen when the whole “branch” and the memories which were contained within got removed by force while it was still “in use”.
The Cultist then immediately began reciting the Spell, so I also went to work on the branch with my “saw” manipulator, hacking away at its base as swiftly as possible. It immediately came off, and then I simply yanked it out of the Cultist’s Crown chakra with some of my other “spirit-manipulators”, while also trying to suppress the internal-Qi loss that was occurring at both ends.
As I started “stitching up” the bleeding on the Cultist’s side, I also separated one of my own premade spirit-manipulators, one that had been sticking out of my mid-tail section, and I chose it as my “designated target” for the following experiment. Since the rear spirit-manipulators were the least-used and the ones that I could afford to “lose or damage” the most, I then swiftly chopped off the end-tip of the tentacle in one swift motion and made room for the spirit-branch that I had just removed from the Cultist.
Immediately after that, I took the bleeding spirit-branch, and I simply jammed it into the enlarged tip of my own spirit-manipulator, resulting in the temporary unification of both objects and stymying the bleed. Once they got “glued” together, I then immediately began stitchin-up the outer-membranes of the objects onto eachother with surgical precision using White-Qi-threads, causing Timmy to confirm that I had succeeded with my grafting attempt after the job had been over.
Timmy: Congratulations. You have successfully grafted your fist external branch onto your spirit-roots.
Branch rejection chance: 0.2% - Very Good Compatibility due to your Neutral spirit roots.
Time remaining until fully healed: 15 days 4 hours 32 minutes 2 seconds
New branch properties: Blood, 2%.
Spell already inscribed on the branch: [Blood Boil]
Description:
This is a channeled ranged spell. Causes an increased blood-fever in your target, until the blood literally begins to boil inside of them. Causes severe internal damage as a result. Based on the location affected, there is also a chance for a blood-explosion to occur, damaging everybody in the blast radius.
Cost: 100 Blood Qi or 200 White Qi per second of maintained channeled focus.
Currently disabled due to the unfinished nature of the grafting process.
While I had been performing the chopping, the Cultist had kept on mumbling the spell among other screams of pain, even after his spirit-branch had been removed. Well, that was rather strange...how the hell was he doing that? Was this a case of a short-term memory that was stored in the physical brain like a PC’s RAM, versus a more permanent form of memory that was stored within the spirit-roots similar to a PC’s Hard Drive?
I told him to try and actually cast the spell for me instead, but even though he uttered the words, nothing happened. Without the actual spell-circuit that had been inscribed upon his branch, the spell-trigger mnemonics weren’t doing anything.
He even told me that he felt like something was missing when he had tried casting, like the spell wasn’t there anymore, which was quite an accurate description of what was going on. Fortunately, he had also confirmed for me that he could not trigger the spell anymore once it had been attached to myself instead.
It would have been silly if he were to suddenly become successfull at casting the spell from my own spirit-manipulators and by using my own Qi-resources instead of the ones belonging to himself, but that still had been a possibility, one which I had been forced to verify would not occur.
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Fortunately, it was not the case, and the spell did seem to see me as the owner from now on, something that was more in line with my general expectations. On the other hand I had also gained an entirely new, and quite uncomfortable sensation, which came from the fact that I could now “remember” the memories which had been stored within the Cultist's branch like they had been my own.
It was quite confusing and rather disconcerting, because I consciously KNEW that I had never done any of the things which had been performed with that particular spell-branch, which had been mostly cruel and unpleasant, but they all still felt like my own gestures and sins from a subconscious point of view.
Then again, I guess it was to be expected that some sort of a penalty would come with the whole grafting process that meant obtaining somebody else's life experiences and spells, as it was indeed an insanely powerful skill and also probably the ultimate interrogation method, since I could now access the memories inside of the branch like they were my own.
Of course, at this particular point in time I was getting only slight flashes and fragmented visions, but I was certain that once the whole healing process was over, the entirety of all memories contained within the branch would become available for me, so I only had to wait.
With this newfound grafting victory under my belt, I decided to see what would happen if I were to attach more than a single branch that belonged to the Cultist to the tip of one of my own “spiritual manipulators”, therefore I began dragging away two of his already-formed spell-branches, and then I began pulling on them in such a way that would allow me to hack away directly at their base, where they connected to the main root-stem.
*Skreeek*
Hmm...Damn it, why are these things so hard to bend...
*Skproingg*
Ok...maybe if I were to grab them from the other side?
*Skkkkrrrkk*
Ok, this is more problematic than I thought...what if...
*SNAP*
Oh shit!
The moment I heard that horrible cracking noise, I suddenly realised that the entire root-stem had been dislodged from its soul-baseplate and was now hanging up in the air, just like it had happened with my own spirit-roots when I had up-rooted them from my Crown dantian.
The instant that I had dislodged his spirit-roots out of their soul-baseplate, the Cultist had also suddenly stopped screaming, as his eyes had rolled back into his head and he had fainted.
Unfortunately, I now had a bleeding hot potato residing in my spirit manipulators once again, so I had to do something with it. Of course, since we were at the subject of grafting, I did the stupidest thing I could think of, so I chopped off the lower end tip of the Cultist’s spirit-roots where they were at their narrowest, and then I shoved the entire root-stem onto the tip of one of my own “spirit manipulators” which I had also sliced open, just like I had done with the previous branch.
Timmy: WARNING! The action you are about to perform is unsanctioned by the Mother System, and it is also incredibly dangerous! Continue at your own peril! This action will have highly unpredictable results, and may even damage your own mental stability! No, Seriously, this can affect the both of us!
Of course, my poor “spirit-manipulator” that I had picked as the transfer target was now uncomfortably stretched out, and was barely able to fit the circumference of the smallest part belonging to the Cultist's spirit root, so I had been forced to perform a triple-stitching with Qi strings before it finally held securely into place, and even then, barely so.
The whole thing now looked rather ridiculous while being glued to my rear “spirit-manipulator”, as I now seemed to have an entire tree-sapling that was getting dragged behind me while being attached to the tip of one of my “tails”.
It also felt incredibly uncomfortable, as I was now getting assaulted by the flashing memory-pieces that used to belong to the Blood Cultist continuously, and those were horrible to say the least. The guy had not been a nice person while he had been led astray by the Blood Cultists at all, with many innocent victims under his belt. I was now feeling guilty and ashamed for some murders that I had not even committed, but I couldn’t help it since I still had no idea how to filter away those nasty sensations.
Timmy: YOU FUCKING MANIAC!
Timmy: You have successfully grafted an entire root stem onto one of your own “spirit-manipulators”.
Branch rejection chance: 1.25% - Very Good Compatibility due to your Neutral spirit roots.
Time remaining until fully healed: 25 days 7 hours 1 minutes 25 seconds
New stem properties: Wood 40%, Blood 32%, Light-Shadow 26%
Spells already inscribed on the stem:
[Life Drain]
[Essence Conversion: Lifetap]
[Bloodheal]
[Taint Blood]
[Veil of Shadows]
[Alchemical Essence Focus]
Tap here ⊞ to expand the full list.
Timmy: You have earned the following achievements - [Soul Surgeon], [Soul Reaper], [Soul Stealer], [Soul Butcher], [Soul Defiler], [Soul Manipulator], [Soul Grafter], [Soul Experimenter], [Heretic], [Unholy Abomination]
You have been awarded 5 Unassigned Skill Points and 20 Unassigned Attribute Points for your insane feats.
Timmy: WARNING! From now on, you will receive 50% DECREASED reputation gains with any Lawful Good characters or Factions, if they somehow manage to perceive your true statistics and achievements.
Well...that’s quite a nice pile of new stats that I could use. But that Rep penalty though…Auch...I guess I’m not going to get any standard Paladin or Priest to be my friends anytime soon because of that, at least if I want to be sincere with them.
Still, I now had the leftover unresponsive body of the Cultist in front of me, but his vital functions had not totally ceased yet. It’s like he had slipped into a permanent coma that he would never wake up from, so I was intrigued about what I might be able to do with the still-alive but also very dead body.
Just as I was about to start poking at the body, I suddenly witnessed how the three soul-baseplates in the dantians all suddenly vanished in a flash of light, as the Cultist’s soul finally got dragged to the afterlife for “processing”, leaving all of the meridians that used to connect to the soul-baseplates now hanging in the air, as if someone had ripped-off the CPU’s and video cards from a computer, but had left all of the connecting cables to still dangle away inside of the tower-case.
Since I had been cloned as a curious bastard, I just couldn’t let this opportunity pass by, so I immediately stuck the end-tips on some of my “spirit-manipulators” inside of the Cultist’s meridian endings, to see what would happen. I discovered that I could somewhat “manipulate” at will certain pieces of the Cultist’s body if I focused enough, but for now my movements were just some weird spasms, since I had no idea what each meridian performed what job as of yet, but I was quickly getting the hang of it. Lingfeng had also been silently observing from afar, and had been writing down every action that I had made up to this moment, which was overall a very solid scientific approach to such cutting-edge research.
The moment that the Cultist’s soul-baseplates had left his body, his “life-shield” had also started to fade away and his heart had stopped, so I was now able to easily poke at every internal section of his body with my “spirit-manipulators”, including his meridian network. Of course, since I wanted to buy more time for myself to continue experimenting, I followed the meridian path which led to his heart, and then I started sending “shocks” along his meridian network to see if I could get the heart working once more. I also began massaging the heart-muscles with some of my other “spirit-manipulators”, and after figuring out the correct sequence for atrium-ventricle muscle pumping action, I had managed to restart his heart somewhat.
Of course, this was not sufficient for the body to function properly, as I needed a constant supply of oxygen from the lungs to keep the heart in a working condition, so I began to search for the meridian connection to his diaphragm muscles as well, which would keep the lungs refilled with air, if I managed to stimulate the muscle group properly.
It took quite a few attempts to find the right pathway, as I kept hitting other muscle groups which mostly caused the Cultist’s body to jitter chaotically like an electrocuted frog, but in the end I had finally narrowed down the parts which were correct, and I set them into a rhythm.
As soon as the cultist started breathing again and had a beating heart, I immediately saw how the body’s life-shield began re-emerging in a weak state, even though every organ was being “manually” controlled by me. Timmy also started screaming at me again as a result.
Timmy: You have earned the achievement [Hollowmaker]
You have unlocked the hidden skill [Create Hollow].
The skill progress bar has been added to your status screen.
Description:
Instill new life onto a recently-deceased body just like Dr. Frankenstein, creating a soulless puppet that will follow your every command for as long as it remains functional. The puppet can be healed through regular means, and is still considered “alive” by most spell-checks, but it is also considered “soulless” or an Automaton from a mind and soul-check point of view.
You also need to treat it like a living thing, as in feed it and have it perform its other bodily functions like urinating and defecating to have it work properly, but it does not expire like other reanimated creatures after a certain period when the magic runs out.
While this spell is still considered part of the [Necromancy] branch of magic, the spell creates a “fake” life token within the body that keeps it functional from a metabolic point of view, and is not considered as a magical reanimation of a corpse, like in the case of a zombie.
Current “fake life” intelligence level: Similar to that of a Reanimated Skeleton, aka dumb as a brick.
This unit will be able to stand upright and wield weapons on its own, follow behind you, and also perform simple orders like “attack specific target” or “hold position”, but is incapable of any critical thinking.
As your [Create Hollow] skill increases, the default intelligence of the Hollows will also improve.
I instantly cast the spell on the Cultist’s body without hesitation, and I watched in amazement how the Mother System began filling in the spots where the former “soul-baseplates” used to be with three coin-like “fake-life” items that now kept all of the Cultist’s bodily-functions working on their own, and were acting like management-centers for the living-corpse.
Timmy: You have reanimated the Blood Cultist’s body and have transformed him into your Hollow Puppet.
Please assign a new name for the Puppet, or leave it as it is.
Hmm...a new name for the puppet…
I think I’ll just call it Mr. Vacant, since he’s supposed to be Hollow inside anyway.
Timmy: Acknowledged. New designation has been applied.
Mr. Vacant will now respond to your orders from now on if you call him by that specific denomination.
Ok...so now there’s one more problem that needs fixing. Mr. Hollow is currently missing an arm and a leg, so I need to do something about that, if I am to possess a fully-functional disposable minion that can sacrifice himself at my behest. Since Timmy said that regular healing methods work on him, maybe I can feed him a Regeneration pill to regrow his missing arms and legs? It would probably take 3 of those to get him back to a full-body state, but since I have already reduced the Pill cooldown to a day-or-so, I could now have a fully-functional Hollow-slave within a week's time! Haha! Let’s see if this pill can heal him up.
To verify that it worked, I immediately ordered Mr. Vacant to ingest the pill that I had given to him, as he kept staring back at me with his dead-fish eyes and swallowed the item without question. He immediately began to spasm on the floor as his stumps suddenly began to turn black from the Mother System’s tendrils, then regrow slowly. Of course, since he was missing more than 20% of his entire body's mass, the healing process stopped halfway through, and he was now left with a ridiculous-looking mini-arm and mini-leg on his left side, but it was still a decent progress.
The next problem that was in my way now was how the hell would I be able to explain to the villagers that I now owned a controlled Cultist, and that his former self who had done the bad things against the Monks had passed away. I decided to simply ask Carmine to craft a mask for him instead and just bypass the problem, since the fact that he would have two arms and legs after I healed him fully would also remove him from the “suspects” list, as the villagers would still think that the Cultist had missing limbs and was still in prison.
I then left some food and water for the Hollow to feast upon as I ordered him to eat at a specific time during each day, and I also told him to “evacuate his bowels and bladder” when the internal pressure grew too big. Fortunately, that “fake-life” coin that now resided inside his head had come equipped with the basic “how to eat” instructions, so after I verified that the Hollow was now able to feed itself, I left the jail cell together with Lingfeng and then told everybody else in the Mayor’s building to stay away from the Cultist’s prison cell, because some sort of unstable magic was now leaking away from his wounded body and could affect any normal people that came nearby.
>>
"Are you sure that was a smart thing to do?" Lingfeng finally broke the silence as we were heading back to the Smithy. "I have never seen or heard about something like that happening anywhere. I mean, you’ve just “attached” a whole person’s-worth of life experiences onto yourself like it was nothing. That’s just CRAZY! How the hell did you do that anyway? If you took all of the Cultist’s memories away, doesn’t that mean that YOU are the Cultist from now on?"
"Actually, it’s not like that. It’s hard to explain. While those memories do indeed feel like my own, when I “remember” anything concretely it feels like I’m watching myself do something from a third person's point of view while still “feeling” the stuff that happens in the first person...if that makes any sense. The Trina me is watching the Cultist do stupid shit within his memories, but the feelings that Trina gets from those horrible acts are separate from those of the Cultist.
It’s like all of the Cultist’s memories that are currently available within the transplanted roots are stored inside a separate database that I can access freely, but it’s not part of the “essence” which makes up my own true-self.
I’m actually quite used to that uncomfortable sensation, since the Cultist’s “database” is similar to the “implanted” memories that I had been given through the cloning process of the young Lei Lei, the sister of the Hero of the Sun. You could basically say that I’m a 3-in-1 package-deal at this current moment, with probably more to come if I can get my hands on some other people that deserve to have their roots plucked away."
"So you actually WANT to keep on doing that to yourself? You’re going to wind up in the loony bin!"
"Sure, why wouldn’t I? Knowledge is knowledge, Liffy, no matter how fucked up it is! Also, look at all of these shiny new skills and spells that I got for free! Not to mention the Alchemy knowledge! I can only discern small fragments of everything at this moment, but the guy had not told us even a quarter of his real Blood-Alchemy secrets. Yet now, all of the memories are within my grasp. At least, if I manage to survive during the next month’s time, as we still have a pissed-off Ancient Evil beneath us to contend with. For now, all I want is a hot bath, a well-spiced chicken dinner, and a long sleep without someone disturbing me. My spirit-roots are still hurting like hell, so I need some downtime."