If my body is screaming, then it must be conscious. If it is conscious, then who am I? Is it a fragment of my me, or am I a fragment of it?

“What is an individual, anyways?” The ancient said. “If your body had anything to do with it, then every time you transform, the new body would be a different person entirely. If your soul had anything to do with it, then you without a soul wouldn’t be a person at all. And yet, you are.

Best we can tell, an individual is really just a collection of memories; A stream of consciousness. You have your old memories, and therefore, are the same person as before. Now enough philosophy. We have important matters to attend to.”

The ancient altered their spell once more, and the blood that had coalesced into my old body’s eyes condensed into a crystal, dropping out of its eye socket like a bloody diamond teardrop. The ancient caught it out of the air with one hand, and placed the other hand upon me.

The ancient made a grabbing motion, and in an instant ripped out every ounce of mana I had within me. I dropped to the ground with an intense headache and cold feeling that came along with mana-deficiency, but to a greater degree than I had ever felt expending mana normally. It took everything I had not to pass out, and I was left gasping on the ground before the ancient grabbed my shoulder, hauled me back up to my feet, and forced the crystal into my mouth. “Eat,” he said.

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“wha—” I gagged on the crystal, swallowing it as I tried to get out the question in my exhausted state.

“Good. Now, onto the next phase” The ancient said.

“What do I have to do next?” I asked.

“Your body will take over from here. We will handle the rest.”

“Pass out?” I asked, right as the crystal burst within me, churning and dissolving my insides along with itself.

I screamed out in pain as my body began to react with the mana and began to deform. It twisted and bloated, phasing into a mist of mana, then back to flesh, over and over.

The subspace too underwent these changes, the space itself bending and twisting into and through itself as the arrays on the amalagamation’s body somehow were cut off from the flesh and diffused into symbols in the air before fading into the subspace. The amalgamation returned to the center of the box, rapidly rotating as it expanded to twice its previous size.

The subspace blacked out, and so too did I.