Nick decided to put any further experiments in that particular regard in his long list of thing to do later before moving onto his next and admittedly highly illegal experiment , trying to turn the mundane magical. One of the three pillars of magic was the soul so Nick was curious if it was possible to add magic to a mundane creatures soul and then put the soul back into the creature in order to induce a magic centric mutation in the creature in question. If it worked then it meant that it may even work on muggles!-

He doubted it was enough to genuinely create a wizard from a muggle since they would lack a magical core and circuits but it might be enough to possibly allow that muggles offspring to develop them instead. If it worked out then Nick imagined that it would only take him four or five generations to transform most of the human race into wizards. Just thinking of all the muggle geniuses that could have revolutionized the wizarding world by this point if that had been the case a thousand years back was enough to make Nick shudder.-

The method Nick chose to introduce magic to the soul was a simple one but at the same time dangerous. He summoned a small jar of frost salts from elsewhere in the realm and grabbed a beetle from his dwindling stock as well as a single grain of frost salt. Using his gauntleted hand to extract the soul of the beetle Nick used his opposite hand to carefully drop the frost salt grain into the center of the soul. Immediately the soul started to turn blue and grow in size in his grasp before bursting like an overfilled balloon.-

'The soul showed clear signs of integrations so why did it explode? Was it too weak to handle it perhaps?' He wondered curiously before drawing out the soul of the abomination and repeating the experiment since this time the soul was far stronger than before. Once again the soul immediately started to turn blue after the grain of frost salt was added to it and once again the soul began to swell only this time it stopped at double it's original size and stabilized. Nick frowned however when he noticed that a vast majority of the soul remained white which was the normal color compared to the blue of the magic.-

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He didn't want to risk destroying the soul though and didn't try to add more frost salt to it and instead pushed the soul into the body and waited to see if it would manifest magic. The body came to life after the soul was placed into it but quickly started to shiver and shake as it breathed out cold mist. Soon enough the creature died however and after disecting it he could only declare this experiment a total failure. The soul caused magic to appear in the body alright but the problem was that the cold magic had nowhere to actually go since the body wasn't made for it and so ended up freezing to death from the inside out.-

'While a strong enough soul can indeed gain magical properties the body will end up damaged from the rampant magic it produced inside it.' Nick thought with a sigh and finally called it their for these types of experiments and moved on to adding the souls to his enchanted items which was his original purpose for creating the gauntlet. Doing so caused the souls to be broken down into a sort of pure energy however rather than giving the enchantments living properties.-

The size and quality of the soul also determined how much benefit the enchantment gained from it. using the rings of protection as a base Nick determined that a normal rat soul was worth four beetle souls but less than a goliath beetle soul. This didn't reference the actual species of beetles known as goliath beetles but rather the soul that came about by feeding one beetle soul three others. The final resulting soul was far more powerful than the sum of it's parts and interestingly enough didn't cause almost any changes in the normal beetle body it was in save doubling it in size.-

Nick did the same for rat souls to create a goliath rat soul and found that such a soul was massively more powerful than the sum of it's parts. 'Is it possible that this is what that monster created from the ritual experienced? if so then it explains why it can use magic like it is a limb since it's soul is extremely powerful.' Nick thought with a bit of horror as if it was true the things soul was likely tier five or gods forbid tier six in power.