Desmond entered the Soul Realm and was greeted by the familiar starry expanse. It was getting easier to enter this place, he only had to close his eyes for a few minutes this time.

Desmond quickly stepped off his soul glass but felt that something was different this time. As he looked closer at his soul, the legacy orbs above the glass were no longer giving him the full sensation that he always got from them. Did this mean he could consume another orb?

This was an exciting prospect. Desmond could finally start using the orbs to improve himself. He wanted to quickly find out what had changed in his soul, but that was not what he was here for this time. There would be time enough to experiment with this when Riki wasn’t waiting for him back in the real world.

Desmond scanned his soundings and was swiftly able to find the nearby dark star. Desmond also noticed that here in Gateway City there were many stars that were much closer than when he was out in the Expanse. This fell in line with his hypothesis that all these stars were the souls of other awakened people in the world. Were darks represented here? It was a thought for another time.

“Well, there is no use just standing around,” Desmond said to himself.

He quickly orientated the plane he could walk on and started jogging to the dark star.

As he approached, Desmond could see Riki’s soul glass this time. From a distance, he could tell she had four different soul orbs, with two of them being purple and the other two being gray. She also had a slightly larger transparent white sphere off to the side of the soul orbs that he didn’t recognize.

When Desmond got closer to Riki’s soul he made sure to orientate himself with it like last time, so he was walking around the dark star in an orbit. Her soul still looked the same as last time with gray runes covering its otherwise pitch-black surface.

Desmond quickly moved to stand beside Riki’s soul glass. This is when he noticed that something was terribly wrong. Riki’s soul glass was broken! Not nearly as bad as his had been, but it was still fractured into about a dozen pieces. But what was more concerning was that there was a thick almost web-like black substance between the pieces of her soul glass.

This black substance was giving Desmond a really bad vibe. He almost instinctively knew that it was wrong and foreign to her soul or to any soul for that matter. It felt and looked disgusting, and in the middle of this web was a mass of black material that was beating like a heart. The black web-like substance was laid out between Riki’s soul glass pieces almost like it was trying to keep them apart.

This had to be the reason why Riki wanted his help with her soul. He would lose his shit too if this stuff was inside him. Desmond was tempted to immediately start tearing this stuff off but took a moment to calm himself. This stuff had likely been here for years already, so there was no reason to act rashly and make a mistake.

Desmond took a moment to observe the rest of Riki’s soul. The four soul orbs were hovering over her broken soul glass, which was as expected. But there was also something new in Riki’s soul that he had not seen before. There was a large white semi-transparent orb off to the side of her soul glass that had a large dagger inside it.

Upon closer inspection, Desmond recognized the dagger as the weapon Riki always carried with her, [Blood Letter]. The dagger was a relic item and Desmond always assumed she kept it in some type of shadow storage skill, but it would seem she somehow stored it in her soul.

Relic items were treasures left over from the age of the gods. They were incredibly powerful and were unable to be replicated with modern technology. They were also the only items that had a true name. When someone held the item they would subconsciously become aware of the item’s name and to some degree its abilities. And now, it would also seem they were related to the soul in some way.

Desmond had heard that you needed to bind a relic item in order to use it. Was this thing he was looking at the actual weapon, or was it just a representation of the weapon in her soul? Could he use it here?

For the moment he didn’t need a weapon in this space, but then again he didn’t understand this Soul Realm very well.

For the moment he moved back to the task at hand. He could see nothing else out of the ordinary with Riki’s soul so it was time to start experimenting. Desmond moved to the edge of Riki’s soul glass and tried to lightly peel the black web-like substance off.

The substance was sticky and difficult to grasp. It acted more like a very viscous liquid than a solid as it stuck to his hand. Almost like a thick glue that didn’t solidify. Desmond was going to make no progress trying to remove it like this.

Desmond turned his attention to the sickening heart-like organ in the middle of the web. It was slowly pulsing rhythmically and giving off an aura that made Desmond’s skin crawl. He had to get rid of it!

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When Desmond touched the heart-like organ he found its outsides were made of the same gooey-like substance as the rest of the web. As he probed a little deeper, he could feel a more solid core in the heart.

Suddenly, there was a loud screeching sound which caused Desmond to wince. It was coming from the heart and seemed to be getting louder as time passed.

Maybe some type of defense mechanism? It didn’t really matter in the end as Desmond had made up his mind, he had to destroy it now!

Desmond pulled back both his hands before bringing them forward in a loud powerful clap, crushing the heart between them. With Desmond’s strength, it was more like a splat, as gooey black substance shot out from between his hands all over the place.

The screeching immediately ceased. Then the whole space started to shake. It momentarily reminded Desmond of when Riki had moved the last time he was in her soul, but it didn’t last long. Quickly the Soul Realm stabilized and returned to a calm.

“It would seem Riki felt that,” Desmond said as he looked around her soul space.

That’s when something caught his eye. The white glowing orb was empty! The dagger was no longer there.

“Well, let’s just hope she is using it for, emotional support,” Desmond said with slight concern. He completely trusted Riki but also knew that she could be a vengeful bitch at times.

Desmond turned his attention back to the web-like substance. With the heart destroyed he found the substance had solidified. When he tried to touch it again, he found that it would break apart into fine dust.

This was convenient for him, so Desmond set about cleaning the black web-like substance off Riki’s soul glass.

After around 20 minutes he had removed all the black material and the glass was clean again. Now he just had to put the 12 or so pieces back together. This should be easy as they were still all in the right orientation just slightly separated. This would, however, require him to touch the glass.

Desmond slowly moved the soul glass fragments back together, trying his best not to look at the images that would appear on them every time he touched them. This did make the whole process a lot more work, but Desmond wanted to at least try and respect her privacy.

Even then, he caught a few flashes here or there when he was trying to line the edges up perfectly. Riki seemed to have been through a rough childhood. He caught several images of what seemed like life-or-death training at a young age, but Desmond tried his best not to focus on it.

Then he saw a memory that he shared with Riki. Or really it was a memory from right before he and Riki first met.

Riki and her party of hunters were engaged in an intense melee with a group of blood runner hounds. Usually, they were solitary beasts, but her party was fighting no less them ten of them. It was a brutal scene where both hounds and hunters were torn apart one after the other.

Riki managed to stab a hound in the eye, the second one she had killed in this short memory. But at this time, another hound vaulted over its dead companion before Riki could remove her knife. The hound’s claws tore through her leather armor leaving deep gashes across the top of her chest. Riki staggered back from the attack as one of her fellow hunters stabbed the beast through the head to cover her retreat. Slowly the memory turned red as Riki collapsed onto the ground. Then the memory ended.

Desmond must have gotten there not long after this scene. The Lodge plate could functionally send out a distress call to any nearby hunters. Desmond had gotten one such call and followed it to the site of this attack.

When he arrived the fight was already over. There were only two blood runner hounds left alive, one too injured to move and another in the middle of eating a hunter’s corpse. In their current state, the two hounds posed little threat to Desmond.

After dealing with the hounds, Desmond surveyed the area and was surprised to find two hunters still alive. One had half his guts eaten by a hound and was too far gone to be saved. Desmond had to put this hunter out of his misery. At this point, Desmond had never come across something like the Revival Potion he had gotten from Ben.

The other hunter was Riki. She had deep wounds across the top of her chest and was suffering from severe blood loss. Her right arm was maimed and she had cuts and bruises over most of her body. She was alive but wounded to the point where she would die without healing.

Unfortunately, Desmond was no healer and didn’t even carry any health potions on himself at this time. So he spent the better part of an afternoon stitching up Riki’s chest wounds. Desmond had then gone around and looted the fallen hunters, gathering their health pots together to give to Riki.

For the next two days, Riki was unconscious as she fought for her life while Desmond gave her a potion every 30 minutes or so until he ran out. On the third day, Riki was over the worst of it and started to fade in and out of consciousness. Desmond determined it was now fine to move her. So he carried her back to the Lodge with as much of the loot as he could haul.

Since Riki’s party had won the fight that meant the loot was all hers, but Desmond saw no reason to just leave it there.

Desmond stopped his reminiscing as he slid the last piece of memory glass into place. With that, he had fixed Riki’s soul. Or he had at least done all he could, as this soul stuff was still confusing to him. Desmond looked around the soul once more and was relieved to see that the dagger had returned to the white orb at some point.

“Hopefully, that means I didn’t get stabbed,” Desmond joked to himself.

Riki’s memory glass came together much better than his own, as hers was only broken into about a dozen pieces. This made it an easy puzzle to put back together with no guesswork needed. It made a nice 2 by 2 meter square. A bit smaller than Desmond’s own 3 by 3 meter square. But that was probably because souls are all different?

Her memory glass was also much thicker than Desmond's at around 7cm or so. As Desmond bent down to take a closer look, he could tell that Riki’s memory glass was made up of layers like an onion. The thickest layer was on top at about 3cm, with 4 layers below that each getting incrementally smaller.

Suddenly a cold shiver ran down Desmond's back. This is not what his soul looked like! He had put his soul back together wrong!