I spent the next few days looking for some suitable bodies to explore the taint. Touching the ground was very likely to at least kill whatever I was using so I decided to go with that first. Depending on the results, I would take a bird to explore more thoroughly. I marked down the locations of a few suitable nests for that. Sadly, there were no raptors in the forest but I did manage to find a falcon in the ravine about a day’s flight away. It would probably be five days without my [Sgiathan Dorcha] to use that body and reach the taint so I was thinking about using a songbird before that.

For the first body, I was torn between a badger and a hare but decided on the latter. The better hearing would hopefully make it easier to detect danger and it was the faster animal as well.

This time, I did not even need Catori to help with using [Winged Dream]. I managed all on my own to cut its soul from its body without losing control over my main body. I simply held onto the connection without activating [Distant Dreaming] until I found a somewhat safe spot to land in. Then I closed my eyes and dove into the animal.

For all the experience I now had with living in different bodies, the hare was one of the strangest I ever used. One might think the ears were a distraction but they moved mostly instinctively. No, I had much more issues with moving. The body structure of a hare was focused on hopping. I tried to walk at first and managed somewhat decently. It was less awkward than walking in my original body. But when I pushed off to move faster, I face-planted the ground immediately after my first jump. It was painful.

I took a full two days to get used to the hare body before I noticed something negative about my aspect choice. I had given it a lot of perditio to be able to destroy the heart with but a thought. It turned out the vis was not aligned with the body as well as I would have liked. Thus, it was deteriorating. I felt muscles spasm as nerves were damaged and breathing became harder. Eventually, I gave it the final push and left the corpse in the forest for the ground to take. Or the beetles. Whichever got to it first.

At least I now knew I could escape easily. I just needed to make sure it did not happen before I wanted it to. I had some ideas for that. The description of [Winged Dream] read: Pull on the world around you to take out your target and turn their body into something better suited for your use. I could probably find a combination of aspects to make something akin to a switch to release the destructive vis only when I wanted to.

Before that, I took a moment to look at the sapling I had received. Elder Leaf stood there and carefully observed it from a few steps away.

“I’ll say, whatever you did helped”, she said, “But it’s not perfect. I can’t tell what this little one is going to grow up as.”

I tilted my head.

“What do you mean by that?”

“There’s vis stuck to it. Something I haven’t seen in my life. But also others. Hmm… I’d guess it’ll change more if you do more of… that. But I can’t tell if the results will be positive or negative.”

“Okay. That’s at least something. I’m gonna try keeping it for another week or so. Maybe the speed of the change differs the more it was in my storage.”

The Elder nodded.

“I would think so. There’s little to do about it, now. Just tell me if you need help with anything, Hero Fio.”

I thanked her and took off.

The next few days were spent finding unsuspecting non-sapient animals and taking over their bodies. I had experimenting to do! For the first few, I tried mixing some aspects to reduce the effect of the perditio on the body. With everything I had access to. The end result was… not promising. The perditio combined with whatever else I put in when it could. When it could not, it instead split apart the other aspect to combine with something that worked. Like when I used tenebrae and it ripped it apart into lux and more perditio only to further separate lux into aer and ignis as well as recombine into tenebrae. That left the body I was using with some of ignis and perditio alongside vacuos and tenebrae. Needless to say, that was a painful experience. There was no body to hide after the fact.

At some point, I figured out I could push my will onto the aspects as I formed the connection. That way, I was able to somewhat direct them to do something specific. Sadly, I could not turn them off without removing them completely. That meant I was left with perditio needing to destroy something and back to square one. At least I learned something from it.

The next experiment was putting metallum and perditio together. I made the former pursue stability in creating more of itself while making the latter work at separation. That was… partially successful. The metallum was able to hold onto its parts, terra and vitreus, for a bit. But eventually, some of it was taken away from the blob of metallum and was unable to be repaired. This was the best result, yet. I finally had a way to at least slow down the natural deconstruction of too much perditio in one body.

I only realized I was taking the wrong approach when I met with Elder Leaf again. The silverwood sapling looked no different to mundane eyes but my superior senses could see the vis it was emanating. It almost looked like a node but I could clearly see it was still just a living piece of wood.

“It looks… larger”, Elder Leaf said, “Did you give it nutrients?”

“No. There’s nothing there but some of my vis.”

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“Oh. Yeah, that’d do it. Especially if it’s close to your soul.”

“Is it… feeding on me?”

“No. Only on the naturally produced auram in every soul. It’s not enough to grow a silverwood tree on its own but… I might have to rethink that theory.”

“Maybe it’s because of how close it is…”

“You want it to grow, I assume?”

I waved a wing.

“Sort of? I want it to but I’m not trying to make it grow right now. Just have it stay alive for planting in a suitable spot.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s good. A tree growing in your soul could be a big problem. Keep up that connection. There’s a lot you can do with it.”

“Like what?”

“If this tree grows a node, it’ll provide you with more vis. Like your soul but in a different place.”

“… wait. That makes way too much sense. Nodes are connections to souls, right?”

She nodded.

“So there’s the option of connecting a tree to my soul.”

Elder Leaf frowned.

“I don’t know how you could make that work. A soul that’s split like that is… I’d call it damaged. Only someone powerful like the Great Tree could harm someone like that.”

I clicked my tongue.

“Right. I was just thinking… Thank you, anyways. I’ve got stuff to work on.”

I barely heard her, “Farewell, Hero Fio”, as I took off.

The idea of having my will imposed on a body was nothing new. The idea of treating another body as an extension of my own, though? I should have been doing that. My targets of [Winged Dream] were not just disposable scouts. They were mine. Or Catori’s. I could just channel the perditio vis into it. Probably.

A quick test with a bat sleeping in a nearby tree proved that I was wrong. Somewhat. It was not as easy as just pushing the vis from my soul into the body. There was considerable resistance. The inner gate of the body was not developed enough to handle the volume of my Wisdom and vis. I found my soul slipping back into the Empty and when I tried to return, the bat was dead.

I quickly rushed to my main body to check on it and there was no trace left. The flying rodent had disappeared without a trace. Then, a burst of vis shot into my body and cycled through it. I gasped in pain and nearly fell over as the energy wrecked through me. And a few seconds later, it was gone.

I took a moment to catch my bearings before sitting up and shaking the lingering ache out of my feathers. I felt remainders of flux dissipating into the air around me. Looking back, I had most likely dragged the bat’s body into the Empty unintentionally. There, it had dissipated into essence, then vis, before being expelled back into the real world through the closest gap in the fabric of reality: my inner gate. And after that, through my body.

That meant, I had to be much more careful with my experiments. Just as I thought that, Catori connected to my mind.

“What the fuck was that?”, she asked.

“I… messed up a little. No taint, just… something weird happened.”

“Spill!”

After I told her what I thought had happened, she calmed down a bit.

“Okay. That’s… Well, it’s fine. It hurt a shit ton but it was over pretty quickly. Please tell me before you start experimenting again. I’ll help you out.”

“Really?”

“Of course! If I can avoid pain, I’ll do it. And I think we’ll be much more successful if we work together.”

“Thanks. How goes the evolving?”

“The system seems to still consider me ready to evolve. It tried once yesterday but cancelled it again due to a ‘lack of information’. So at least we know we were right.”

“That sounds good. It also seems to be expecting it to happen soon so you won’t have to wait too long.”

“That’s what I was thinking”, Catori sounded very happy, “Anyway, I gotta go. Arctus is pestering me to make my move.”

That confused me. Which she easily noticed, of course.

“We’re playing a board game”, she laughed, “It’s my turn.”

“Oh, that makes sense. Have fun!”

“Thanks!”