I clicked my tongue as I absently absorbed the 14th failed test subject as I watched its soul disintegrate into warp-energy.

There was much I’d learned already, but I still didn’t feel all too close to a solution.

The most important thing I’d learned was that the second soul for humans which was in the Warp wasn’t real, it was just an imprint. If the real soul inside their mortal bodies was the moon, then the imprint in the Warp was it reflecting off on a still lake. The water might get muddled if you poked at the moon’s reflection but that wouldn’t do anything to the moon itself.

The second thing I’d learned was even if the human was just a regular old human with zero psychic powers, the imprint in the Warp and their souls were connected. That connection was faint and nothing could be transmitted through it but it was enough for Warp-based beings to sense them through it.

This connection was also what guided the real soul after its mortal vessel was gone. When the body died, the imprint basically summoned the soul to itself.

I stared down at the soul in my psychic grasp. It was tugging against me, wanting to go towards the imprint in the Warp but I was holding onto it firmly. This little soul was in much the same situation as that Eldar stuck in the Spirit Stone even if the soul in my grasp needed me to keep holding onto it to remain in realspace.

It wasn’t disintegrating at least, so that was something.

The idiotic urge to just see what happens if I just dragged it through my soul thread and into my Soul Puddle was edging me on but I knew that even in the best circumstance, that’d just create a connection between where the imprint was and my soul puddle.

Which is why I called that urge idiotic but I was getting rather irritated with how little I accomplished. I learned some interesting stuff and came up with a list of ideas to try but my current test subjects weren’t fit to test them.

I needed Psykers.

No. What if pulling the soul into my puddle drags the imprint along with it? But what would that help me, If I did that to Selene she wouldn’t be able to control an Avatar like I do.

What I needed was for just the Imprint to move into my Puddle. For a Psyker, that would by reasonable logic, change where they drew their powers from, from the Warp to my Puddle.

I stared down at the Eldar Spirit Stone.

There was no way I could reach through the flimsy connection a human soul had with its imprint and move the imprint about but if the connection was strong enough to maintain a permanent tunnel between the two that could change.

I threw the soul away, letting it be pulled to the imprint as I walked over to Selene. There were still 6 perfectly alive cultists so losing a single soul would not hurt, especially now that I knew there wasn’t much else to be gained from studying them.

Selene sat not too far away from where I was experimenting, she had her legs crossed and her eyes only now popped open from meditation as I walked up to her.

“Yes?” She asked.

“It’s nothing really,” I hummed. “I just want to take a look at how different your soul is from theirs, nothing intrusive just yet though. I just want to look, alright?”

“You want to read my mind?” She asked with a raised eyebrow, more curious than outraged.

“No,” I said. “I am curious about that tunnel that connects you to the Warp.”

“Okay,” she shrugged. “Do I need to do anything?”

“I uhm, not sure,” I poked my cheek in thought, my head tilting to the side. “You might feel my aura brush against your mind. If you don’t lash out or anything like that out of reflex, then it should be fine?”

“Should be?”

“It will be fine!” I nodded, though I might have felt more convinced than I sounded. “So can I?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. She closed her eyes again, and I saw her body relax along with her mind.

I pushed only my awareness into her mindscape through my aura and took a glimpse into that tunnel. That was enough for me to zero in on her soul Imprint in the warp with my third eye, not that I couldn’t have done that before, but right now I had the full picture.

Her body, her mind, her soul, the connection and the imprint.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Selene’s soul dwarfed the flickering candle lights of the cultists but it still paled compared to a Librarian for example. The connection was stable too, yet somewhat flexible.

The Warp and Realspace were two faces of the same coin but they weren’t perfectly aligned and fitting for each other so the bridge connecting the two had to have a sort of elasticity to it.

Which means it shouldn’t break if I move it.

I pulled back out.

“You’re done?” Selene blinked up at me, seeming a bit out of it but she recovered in a few seconds.

“Yes,” I said. “For now, I am. I’m going to see whether what I have in mind works on this one.”

“If it does?”

“Then I can do it to you too.” I gave her a smile. “If this works, you could draw from the same pool of energy I do.”

“That,” she said, “would be great.”

There was relief in her voice. I didn’t know how straining it could be to have voices speaking to you, trying to taint and corrupt you every time while the source of your power was more addictive than the worst drugs humans ever cooked up.

I gave her shoulder a firm squeeze, which earned me a genuine smile.

The Spirit Stone floated up from my hands as I stepped back into the center of the room and I noticed Bob stiffening up in the corner but for now he just watched on.

First, I pulled another cultist up to me though and even before they could scream or curse me, a single telepathic spike to their mind blasted apart their psyche. As I said before, I didn’t like it when they screamed and making them vegetables was the easiest solution to that problem.

I reached deeply into the ruins of his mind and pulled the soul at the center of it out and into my grasp, then I absorbed the body. A quick analysis later, I recreated it and shoved the soul back into the body just as it was before.

Of course that wasn’t enough to put the cultist back onto the list of the living and I grabbed his naughty soul before it could slip into the Warp. It needed to be fixed to the body.

How?

I pulled another cultist towards me and with a single thought; I obliterated this one’s mind too, though I didn’t even leave ruins of it this time. The soul stayed inside the body; it felt less entrenched in it but it stayed, nonetheless.

What else fixes the soul to the body? What was different with the body I re-made?

My vision stared down at the two bodies, one capable of holding onto a soul and while the other was not. Is it just impossible? No. Drukhari could do it and I know the old Aeldari before Slaanesh could also do it. What am I not seeing?

[~~ding!~~Recommendation: Try using bio-energy (vitality) as the adhesive.]

Oh. Oooooooh.

That was right, wasn’t it? Humans and anything that was alive had vitality, some life force in them and with me being as efficient — read: stingy — with my bio-energy, the body I recreated only had just enough energy to build itself one, no leftovers.

I stared at the comatose but very alive cultist, my eyes making out every little vein and pulse of vitality in his body, noting everything and sending it all to my mind cores for analysis.

The response came in less than a second, a comprehensive information package of how vitality most likely functioned to stick body and soul together.

I replicated that and shoved the soul back into the still body.

It stuck.

I grinned. It worked.

Then I constructed a rudimentary mind around the soul. If the vitality was the adhesive that held the two together, the mind was more like structural support to keep a stronger wind from tearing the two parts apart.

Doing this was possible only because the soul acted sort of like a black box for the individual, containing everything important about them. I couldn’t quite remake the body just from the soul, but remaking a simple mind that resembled the original required me only letting energy flow into the soul and it did that by itself. The mind sprouted from the soul like a sapling would from a seed.

The reborn cultist groaned, his body trembling once before his eyes snapped open. He jumped to his feet, eyes wide and bloodshot as he glanced around. Then he laid his eyes on me.

I gave him a friendly smile.

He had a heart attack.

Shame.

I reabsorbed him. Still, a success is a success.

Then, finally, I decided to get on with it and attempt giving this Eldar a new body.

I reached into the glimmering gem and pulled out the soul inside. Why it hadn’t dissipated or had been pulled into the Warp became apparent when the damned gem was pulling the soul back much stronger than any soul I ever felt tried to pull towards the Warp.

The Spirit Stone simply had a stronger attracting force than the soul could escape by itself. Not that I didn’t overpower it when I pushed just a touch more will into the action.

The soul came free and the spirit stone clattered to the ground, its light dimming immediately but the fascinating soul captivated me. The Eldar soul was so very different from the human ones in ways that I couldn’t put into words.

It was also rather powerful, about on par with the strongest Librarians I felt aside from Mephiston of course. It also had an intact mind structure around it. A mind structure which I saw ever so slowly fading.

A quick rush of soul energy reinvigorated it and regrew the missing parts. Now to give it a body.

“How did your girlfriend look?” I asked Bob without looking at him.

“Eh,” he made a dumb sound. “She-, she had golden blonde hair and sapphire blue eyes and stood a head taller than me.”

“Anything else?” I asked. This idiot isn’t good at descriptions.

“She had a … angular face?”

“Every Eldar has an angular face.” I remarked.

“I had a picture,” he gulped. “But the cultists took it from me, it should be somewhere here if you just give me a few minutes-”

“Don’t bother.” My aura spread out, soul energy spilling into every nook and cranny of the cultist hideout until I found a single little picture depicting a twenty something Bob along with an Eldar with roughly the same descriptions as he gave me.

She was smiling, and somehow that looked odd on an Eldar but it seemed genuine. So fucking weird.

My mind cores spat out a reworked Eldar template which should cause a body perfectly resembling the woman, at least as much as I could make it with as little information as I had of her. Maybe she had a mole on her back.

Whatever.

A small tendril loaded with twice the bio-energy needed jumped out of my held-out palm and landed on the ground, from there it started building. Bones, muscles, organs, nervous system whatever else before lastly covering the body with skin and finishing it with growing out the hair and nails.

“Does it match?” I asked but Bob just stood there with tears streaming down his face, he gave me a slow, shaky nod.

I covered the body with the same clothing I had on for decency’s sake, if I was her, I wouldn’t want to be reborn bare as a newborn after being a dead soul shoved into a gem for a century or more.

The lingering bio-energy moved in the body, the patterns were different and it took a moment for me to remake them based on the Eldar body but I had something that should work a moment later.

I shoved in the soul, secured the vitality pathways into it and reinforced the mind with a surge of soul energy.

Not a moment later the Eldar was on her feet, a dozen meters away from where she laid a moment ago and looked around warily until her gaze landed on the by now ugly bawling Bob.

“Rob?” She asked, voice sounding as annoyingly androgynous as all Eldars did but her aura radiated something I never thought I’d see an Eldar feel for a human.

Love.