I flicked my fingers and reached into Dusk’s realm, summoning a pen into my hand. A few days before, I’d knocked a pen behind a desk, and I hadn’t put it back because now I remembered knocking it back there, and if I put it away, I’d forget where I’d put it, but now I’d have to try and remember that I’d called it to my hand and put it back away. That was going to be annoying.
I signed the contract and pushed it back over to Orykson.
“Just… don’t do anything weird with my body?” I asked.
“I’ve already told you that I’m not,” Orykson said, giving me something of an annoyed glance. “If nothing else, I should be able to take the rooted channels and break them into drops of resolve. There’s a slimmer chance that I might be able to remove them and integrate them into a war body to bolster its existing body alteration spells. The rest of your body will have variable use, depending on when you die. If you were to become an Arcanist, for example, I suspect that I could extract your eyes and use them in a variety of warding projects.”
I shuddered slightly at the thought of Orykson standing over my corpse with a pair of barbeque tongs and a knife, pulling organs out, then integrating them into some sort of horrifying flesh monstrosity.
“Don’t be a child,” Orykson said. “I’d preserve the eye, of course. I abhor the stench of rotting flesh, and only fools who have no sense of self preservation truly try to create zombies as anything more than a temporary measure. In the cases I must work with organs, it’s best to preserve them.”
“That… doesn’t really make it any less creepy, Orykson,” I said, my stomach rumbling in an unpleasant manner.
“You’ve butchered chickens, pigs, and cows,” he pointed out. “How is this any different?”
“Sapiance,” I said. “Those animals weren’t people. They might not have deserved to die, but they were killed to feed people. I can deal with that.”
Orykson sighed and tucked the papers away.
“Well, you have three months to report to Port Ruby. That’s the base of operations on Crysite,” he informed me. “In the meantime…”
He pressed one finger in between my eyes, and I felt a flicker of knowledge mana pass from his finger and into my brain. It wasn’t all that strong, at least by Orykson’s standards, but it was staggeringly complex, directly integrating into my brain and unweaving slowly.
I was suddenly glad that I had so many sensory spells, because I felt a lot of the spare knowledge energy in my brain rushing into the tangle of spellwork. It almost felt like a sustained core of knowledge integrating into my brain, similarly to how I’d heard of permanent strength enhancement potions operating by forming a self-sustaining energy core within the muscles.
As the knowledge unfolded, it tapped the temporal energy and traced that into my spirit, tying in with Internal Pocketwatch, then did… something. I had excellent mana senses, but the fine details of this would have been hard to follow if it had been happening slowly, let alone moving with the alacrity and precision that this spell was.
My tail stood on end as within less than a second, the effect was obvious. I suddenly knew how much time there was until the hag was strong enough to overwhelm Kene’s soul and consume them, as well as the factors that were currently contributing to it. The entire thing felt like my increased perception of time that I got from the Internal Pocketwatch, with me simply… knowing.
“Adjusting to that will require you to burn knowledge energy, but it should be somewhat adaptable,” Orykson said. “Simple things like advancement pills, natural treasures that just expand mana amount, Dawn burning out the Hag and Dusk absorbing some of its power, or basic spiritual repair and reinforcement spells are all within its parameters. If something major does happen, I’ll have to reset it.”
The spell paused for a moment, letting me adapt to the new sense of time, and then it began unraveling again, connecting to different parts of my brain, flowing into the mental energy half and back again, spinning around in loops within the knowledge portion, and more.
As it worked, I could feel it transforming into a sort of mix between a roadmap and a checklist. It wasn’t as simple as just following one simple set of instructions – there were various permutations, enough to make my head spin, but they all followed the same basic steps, just in various ways.
While there were a dizzying number of permutations, they all followed the same basic set of steps.
First, Kene would need to begin reinforcing their soul in a way that didn’t directly benefit the hag as well. Their grandmother, the witch, had already laid an excellent basic foundation for this, but Orykson still had multiple suggestions to improve it, as well as some notes on which methods might actually be helpful for me as well. This step held hundreds of potential options, more than enough to make me dizzy just thinking about it, since ‘soul reinforcement’ was something that most mages eventually sought out.
Second, the acquisition of a body. There were multiple suggestions here: a tree that could grow into a copy of a person’s body if fed enough mana, blood, phlegm, and bile. A laboratory of spelled clone copies of an arcanist to the south who had never managed to establish the soul link, but still created viable bodies that were preserved. Fueling my own temporal bond until I could die and create a new body for myself, then repairing the damage to the body and using that. There were more besides, too.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Third, we needed to either capture and sacrifice a human soul for the hag to consume and use as a bridge – something that I was loathe to do, and which Orykson thankfully seemed to have only included two perfunctory options for – or create a pseudo-soul, which would stabilize her enough to take over the body without dissipating.
Like Meadow had suggested, this step was absolutely the hardest. Most people who tried to create artificial souls failed spectacularly, and those who didn’t often needed to do horrible things in order to create them. Still, Orykson had a few suggestions of places where we might be able to manage such a feat.
The Soul Laboratory was a transient research center that had been created by a now dead group of false Occultists that had been obsessed with undoing the damage fake ascensions had done to them. Finding it was hard, but not impossible, as it moved across the world in a semi-predictable pattern. The research into souls, ghosts, and shades had gotten quite advanced, and there were signs that false Occultists still sought the laboratory out, continuing its research for a time before inevitably failing.
The Wraithmist Gorge was a unique natural site that seemed to spawn shades and ghosts and wraiths and asomatous and echoes and more, all copied from people who had entered its mists – even if they emerged completely alive. It was possible we might be able to push deep enough to capture an echo of a soul, or at least enough spirits copied from humans to make use of it.
The Seven Fall Lake was somewhere between a research facility and a naturally powerful site. Seven rivers flowed together into natural waterfalls, which poured into a deep lake. At the bottom of the lake was a now-abandoned research facility where the Occultist Corpselight had attempted to stitch souls back into dead bodies, create fake souls that could allow his undead to advance, create fake environments out of the souls of children to produce a soul dragon, and bind souls together to forcibly propel them to new heights. Most of his research facilities had been destroyed, but this one had gone unnoticed due to the waterfall’s interference, and had been – mostly – undisturbed for forty years.
The Sekhem Court was a cabal of powerful vampires who clashed frequently with another power, the Shining Spirits. Most of their magic was relatively normal, if strong, vampiric magic, but they did have one well guarded secret ritual that allowed the person transformed into a vampire to retain all but one of the gates they’d had in life, alongside a portion of their legacy, by creating a new pseudo-soul that contained those things, transforming the person, and then fusing the souls together. Convincing them to ply their magic for me would be hard, but it had a good chance of working.
The Thousand Totem Gorge was a natural rock formation that entrapped the shade, ghost, and sometimes more of anything that died within, transforming it into an effigy that was a part of its gorge walls. The effigies had some semblance of life and will still, and often guarded secrets, power, and knowledge. Overcoming the lingering totems would set the spirits to rest, and leave cores of power from what had fallen, and if we could find an instance of several trapped souls, ghosts, and shades, we may be able to alchemically combine the cores into something usable.
The Deepfall Cemetery was an ancient site in a swamp where people had buried their dead for untold generations. It dropped into the murk at a slow but steady rate, and no one knew how deep it went. Though it was a site of cultural significance, the locals used it to train their own death mages, and had been known to grant outsiders entry on occasion. The truly ancient ghosts might have just the right mix of potent death energy and no memory of sense of self, to be able to act as an artificial soul.
The Shadebinder Sect was a once powerful group that utilized a strange combination of spellbonds, a unique full-gate spell, and other unique shade spells to bind shades into their very shadows, animating them and giving them strange powers. In the modern world, their sect was little but dust, long forgotten by time. Magic had advanced since their era, so their spells, once powerful enough to carve out a considerable slice of territory, now had freely available alternatives in many large libraries. But some of their forgotten treasures, designed to fuse shades together, might have some use.
And if all of those options failed, there was one final option: Sacrificial Peak. One of the tallest mountains in the world, at its very peak was a simple circle of naturally formed magical energy and mana, and its function was actually what the Idyll-Flume’s altars had been modeled off of. If you placed five things within it, they would be consumed by the power, and something else would be produced. Orykson denoted it as the final option, because there was a chance it might simply not give us what we wanted, and activating it left permanent, irreversible soul scars and pain that even Orykson couldn’t undo, as well as taking many years off the user's lifespan, or even destroying many types of immortality.
Still, if we had no other option…
I spent so long digesting all of the information on the third step that it took me a moment to move on to the fourth. After blinking several times and clearing my head with some deep breaths, I moved on.
Fourth, we needed a power that would allow us to sever the bond between Kene and the hag. Though this step was much simpler than the last, there were only two real options, which was a relief.
The Occultist known as Silver Tide had been a remarkable spell designer, and many of his spells were still in use today. Though he’d been killed over a decade ago, and many of his more unethical experiments were destroyed, some remained. In particular, he’d created an amulet that allowed the user to sever a bond – be it a soul bond or a spellbinder bond – in the hopes of killing the Sun and Moon Queens. He’d failed, but there were prototypes of the amulet still out there, clunky and imperfect, but able to function.
Then there was the Unbinding Rock. Not actually a single rock, it was a basalt mesa, that if scaled from the bottom to the top during a complete lunar eclipse while battling against the arcanist level creatures that spawned around the mesa, could provide assorted benefits – strengthening the spirit’s durability, cutting out a spiritual parasite, or helping to repair a damaged mana-garden.
Finally, if we managed all of this, Orykson recommended completing it within the bottom room of the first sepulcher we chose to delve. The natural loosening and flexing of the spirit would allow it to be done without permanently scarring Kene’s spirit, and after extracting her from their soul, the sepulcher should be able to fill the massive hole in thor legacy back up.
I blinked as the information finished settling onto me. It wasn’t just the brief snippets I’d been able to sense – I also had a sense for where each of these things were, or at least how to find them, much like I had a sense for how far Kene was, and even which permutations made up Orykson’s recommended path. In particular, I noted him focus on a few things we could even get a start on while on the Isle of Crysite.
“Let it not be said that I don’t keep my end of a bargain,” Orykson said with a smug sort of satisfaction.
“Definitely not,” I agreed. “And… Thank you.”
“If you want to thank me, survive,” Orykson said. “After all, you need to pay me back.”