“So let me get this straight.” She gave me a dubious look. “A 60 million year old crazy Necron overlord who likes to collect curious things locked you in a time-stasis and ran off with your main body?”
I nodded.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing.” I shrugged.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.” I nodded again. “There is nothing to do, nothing I can do at the moment.”
“Wasn’t your main body important?”
“Not really,” I shrugged. “The only thing that’ll be bothersome to replicate will be the Soulbone skeleton, but that’s just going to need me to sit down and meditate for an afternoon.”
“I see,” she said with a raised eyebrow, obviously not quite believing that I’d let the matter rest just like that and she was right. That tin can would get his due in time, but as of right now, I couldn’t do shit to him.
“SO,” I clapped, turning around as our conversation came to a close. “Oh very good, we have some aspiring test subjects who only have the faintest traces of corruption! Tell me young lady, how long have you been a cultist?”
The skin and bones woman who only wore some rags in the same colour as the cult’s banners stilled as I hopped up to her and pulled her to her feet with a touch of TK. She was unfortunately far too frightened to answer my question, so I just shrugged.
“Alas, it seems I am not to know thine secrets,” I mused, twirling her around in the air and putting her into the middle of the hall. “Ah, I almost forgot! I’m going to need some refreshments before doing this.”
I left the woman hanging as I floated out of the hole. “Can you monitor them so they don’t run off?”
“Sure.” Selene shrugged.
“Thanks!”
I came to float over the opening and started channeling bio-energy through my body. The energy rushed through me, slowly growing faster or slowing down until I reached a steady base in it. Then I gave it a vibration.
The tones I knew were matched easily and the symphony of the crotalids resonated in my body. The crescendo came about in a few seconds and I only had a moment to realize that this might not have been one of my greatest ideas.
A chunk of that condensed biomass sphere I kept orbiting my soul appeared in realspace just as I wanted it to but with my body being the center of what was basically a summoning ritual, it appeared in my body.
I doubled over, my human senses protesting the head-sized object inserting itself between my guts.
“I’m such an idiot.” I wheezed as I pushed my tendrils to absorb the new biomass.
The disturbing feeling abated quickly and with a sigh I sent out my replenished bio-energy to remake my body. In the blink of an eye, my human body morphed into my Psyker Form in all but the skeletal structure which now had a stand in I made by mixing a bit of Tyranid bone structure with the Eldar one.
My mind cleared up and I could feel the change in my emotions. Sympathy and natural human empathy dimmed and gave way for the baseline Eldar emotional spectrum. Some might say that the space elves only felt more but there was a deep-seated sadism built into their very genes.
That could be counterproductive. I purged it and along with that went the sudden urge to make the tests to become far more painful for my subjects than they needed to be. Pragmatism was preferable to unreasonable sadism, though I didn’t think it made me any less of an asshole for what I was about to do to them.
I fell down, TK dampening my velocity and laying me down on the floor gently.
“Alright,” I grinned. “Let’s see! First thing first; I promised some healing to you didn’t I?”
The malnourished little girl gave me a look not unlike what Selene gave me recently, looking at me like I grew another head or something. I threw a glance at Selene, who, contrary to her previous look, appeared relieved.
Hmm, anyway.
“Here ya go.” I poked her in the forehead and my twin energies rushed into her body.
Before topping myself off, this amount of energy could have remade my human body from nothing but right now I barely noticed the loss of it. My internal counter showed a loss of about 0.0001% of my current energy reserves.
The girl shivered and her mother grabbed onto her shoulders, helping her stand upright as I rebuilt her weak body to the best it could have been. She grew twenty centimeters, her bones grew denser and her muscles swelled while fat gathered in all the right places.
Her skin tightened on her newly gained muscle mass and gained a slightly rosy tint even with the more dark colour that was the norm among the wasteland dwellers.
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I looked her up and down. My soul energy settled into her body, reinvigorating organs and reinforcing her flickering vitality. She should be good now. Even if most of the sympathy I felt for her left me by now, a promise was a promise.
“Looks good.” I nodded to myself. “Want to make any changes? Since I am having a great day so far I am willing to give you a little something extra.”
“Change?” The girl said absently, looking down at her new body in bewilderment.
I nodded. “Hair colour, skin colour, do you want eyes that look like liquid gold or do you want pointy ears?”
“I uh,” she looked up at me with uncertainty. “Can you make me strong?”
“Strong is subjective.” I tilted my head. “How strong?”
“I want to protect mommy!”
Her mother pulled her back into a tight hug. Where moments ago the girl barely reached her chest, she now stood at eye level with her mother so the scene looked different.
“You don’t need to.” She whispered to her. “Please don’t change my daughter.”
“Ah well.” I shrugged. “This should help if you don’t want any touch-up.”
Another flick later, she had bio-energy coursing through her body and reinforcing it. She wouldn’t be giving any hard fights to Astartes with that, but it should make dealing with a small time cult effortless.
“Off you go.” I flicked up a portal and waved them in. “Don’t poke at the big men, they bite.”
“Thank you,” the mother bowed before ushering her daughter through the portal which hissed close behind them.
“Why did you do that?” Selene asked, her face betraying nothing about her feelings.
“Helping them?” I asked and received a nod. “Call it a whim, I lost barely anything from it and they kicked my barely existing sympathy into working order for a bit.”
Seeing the slight frown on her face I gave her a look. “There is a difference between feeling sympathy for you and for a regular person Selene. Though I feel this body is not quite the best vessel for sympathy.”
“What’s up with it?” She let her gaze wash over me, lingering in places.
“It’s mostly Eldar.” I twirled around. “Didn’t I say that already? Hmm, I thought I did?”
“Eldar?” She looked up at my face curiously, evaluating. “The face doesn’t really match.”
“I don’t really like the whole androgynous facial structure they have going on.” I shrugged. “Would this help?”
My ears morphed, growing longer and their tips ending in a point. They weren’t as long as regular Eldar ears but they were still twice as long from the ear canal to the tip than they were before. I had to admit that they had a certain fantastical appeal to them. These ears go well with the whole supernatural beauty thing I am going for.
“I think I’ll keep it.” I smiled, ears flopping down a bit as I did. “Oh, they move like that, hmm, nice.”
I wiggled my ears up and down while Selene stared at me going at it.
“The cultists? You wanted to do experiments, right?” She asked with a fake cough, though I noticed her cheeks were slightly flushed.
“Oh, do you want pointy ears too?” I wiggled my eyebrows at her. “I can give you some, I won’t even need to change your genetic template for it much.”
“No!” She gave me a weak glare.
“Your loss.” I shrugged. Then I turned to the cultists and Bob who watched our byplay with varying degrees of astonishment. “Alright ladies and gentlemen, let’s get this thing started!”
“Sorry for leaving you hanging like that.” A flick of my wrist pulled the unfortunate first test subject in front of me, the woman biting off a scream as I dragged her through the air.
The skin on my forehead parted and my vertical third eye brimming with liquid white light opened up, staring down at the woman but seeing something very different from what my regular eyes showed. Though, just to be sure, I channeled some soul energy into my right eye too to get a third perspective on her.
Human souls were weird to me. Especially with the context I had to compare what I was seeing to. There were all the spiritualist mumbo-jumbo back on Earth that I heard of for one and while I never quite embraced those world-views, my mother was a staunch believer in that everyone had a soul and an aura.
I couldn’t help but grimace as I remembered her. We weren’t too close and even if we met; she was more like a bothersome bigger sister that was just around and came for a visit to bother me than an actual parent. Maternal obligations weren’t really her thing.
Still, I had her spiritualist babble still swirling around in my head and as annoying as it was to admit it; it was right on more accounts than it was not. Souls were real here and so were auras, those two things were facts to me by now and auras worked similarly to how I expected them.
Souls were different. I’d have imagined them to be like an overlaid imprint on the body or something like how ghosts were depicted in children’s cartoons but souls were more complicated here, especially human ones.
The only other thing I could compare them to was my soul. It floated about in the Immaterium and a thread connected it to my body.
Humans didn’t have soul threads, and neither did they have their souls entirely in the Immaterium. The human soul was inside their body, at the center of their being and the central foundation for their minds but at the same time it was an imprint left on the Immaterium.
That was the confusing part. Human souls seemed to exist at two places at once, in realspace and in the Warp.
I narrowed my eyes, all three of them boring into the cultist whose soul was already close to being snuffed out, it flickered violently as she stared at me wide eyed and then she went still.
Just when I was about to mark this as the first failure and grab the next subject I stopped. Her soul stabilised and the soul I sensed in her body shimmered out of existence and melded together with the one in the Warp.
Then came the ravenous monsters. Right as the soul flickered into life again in the Warp, a swarm of what I saw as bloodthirsty fishlike beings ripped it apart. Each monster bit at the rapidly dimming soul until there was nothing left.
That was the harsh fate of every single human that lived, to die and be ripped apart by demons. This woman for instance was especially unfortunate. She was a simple human with a weak soul so if no monsters chomped down on her soul for only a few seconds, her soul would have disintegrated into pure Warp energy and she wouldn’t have had to face oblivion in the most agonising way possible.
‘The Emperor protects.’ A dark smirk crossed my lips. There was nothing out there in that dangerous ocean that was willing to protect insignificant little souls like these. The only ones the big golden God-Emperor of Mankind protected were those who were worth the effort to wrestle for them with the demonic quartet.
That wasn’t what interested me though, I knew that any unprotected soul would be ripped apart after death but what I wasn’t sure of was the ‘Why?’. Why were they only vulnerable after the physical body died?
I absorbed the cultist’s corpse without giving it another look, only grimacing inside as my soul energy obliterated the lingering warp-taint. Still feels like someone is vomiting into my whole body.
A flick of my wrist pulled the next unfortunate subject in front of me who screamed silently with his gaze transfixed by my third eye. Oh well, it wasn’t like I liked screamers anywhere outside of the bedroom.
I slowly pushed a glob of soul energy into him and scouted around, finding his soul in short order. Humans were like an onion. The outermost layer was the body, then came the mindscape and at the center of it all was the soul. Of course you couldn’t find the soul if you cut a human in half — I checked — but for anyone with some skill in telepathy, piercing through those layers was doable, if not effortless.
My tiny thread of energy moved with great care, poking around someone’s mindscape and soul carelessly had the unfortunate side effect of either sending them into a seizure, shock or outright making them catatonic if the telepath used their powers more like a drill than a scalpel.
Humans are fragile.
Thankfully, gazing into my third eye didn’t have the textbook reaction on the humans, which was instant raving madness or catatonic shock. He just stared into them like he just laid his eyes on something so beautiful that his mind blanked out and he couldn’t make himself tear his gaze away from it. Works for me.
I poke around his soul, my third eye watching the mirror image of said soul in the Warp like a hawk for any changes. Whatever I did to the soul here, happened to the soul there.
Now, the question was whether that was the same the other way around too. I suspected the answer was no, otherwise the monsters wouldn’t wait for a soul to die. Most of them didn’t exhibit enough forward thinking to just wait around so when the two souls merged they’d get a double-sized meal. They were mindless, ravenous monsters. These humans were far too powerless to attract anything with even a semblance of intelligence.
Then I let a single droplet of soul energy suffuse his (real) soul and all hell broke loose around his immaterial soul.
The monsters came, biting, chewing, nibbling and fighting amongst themselves but despite their best attempts, the human only shivered as if a frigid chill rushed down his spine.
That is one hypothesis proven. Let’s get started on the rest.
A wide grin spread across my face.