There were many ways to cultivate the soul, but they all involved entering the spirit realm. From there, there were many options; damaging the soul slightly and then letting it recover slightly stronger than before, sort of like how one built muscles in the physical realm, or defeating and consuming spirits… or souls, if one was an evil murderer. Leo didn’t enter with a plan, since one’s options were oftentimes very different depending on the location of one’s soul in the spirit realm.
The spirit realm was strange beyond belief. There was no gravity or ground here, for example, which was why the spirit realm was an enormous universe of fog, spirits, souls and the very rare spiritual construct.
Leo’s five senses were gone. There was no vision, smell, sound, or taste even feeling. What he had instead wasn’t even what he got when he brought his soul into the physical realm- that just let him feeling everything within his soul. This was something else. In an enormous radius around his soul, he could perceive everything. It was akin to feeling, but… not. There were many differences that he couldn’t even begin to describe, and only a couple he could.
For example, Leo could feel the differences between color, or whatever took the place of color in the spiritual realm, in the things around him. He could also just barely feel the omnipresent vapor that extended throughout the spirit realm, but found it nearly impossible to miss his own soul, or the spirits around him.
These ones were tinged green, and were also how Leo could pinpoint another difference between feeling and what everyone called soul sense. Leo got a decent grasp of what the spirits were just by having them within the radius of his soul sense. Using this, Leo knew that these spirits were akin to plants; they were small, weak, and not even sentient, but were alive nonetheless; they were what people called vegetative spirits.
They weren’t an uncommon sight in the spirit realm; in fact, it was filled to the brim with them. Weaker spirits and awakened oftentimes viewed them as an incredible fuel for strengthening the soul. They stopped having any effect after a certain point, but until then, there were so many that many could outright double the strength of their soul in days. The only downside was that they would fight back, but they were so weak that they couldn’t really do anything.
Leo had a lot of them around him, and he knew that they were practically his ticket to doubling his strength. With this many vegetative spirits around, Leo might even be able to use his soul to create things, and thus be able to actually participate in Affinity Testing.
But it felt wrong to kill the spirits for nothing. They were like grass, but he couldn’t feel the existence of grass like he could the vegetative spirits. Leo fell into deep, contemplative thought much easier when he was merely a soul than when he was in his body.
‘My affinity is for creation, so wouldn’t it ruin my soul to consume these spirits?’ Leo wondered at first. A soul’s affinity was a core part of what they were; thus, going against one’s affinity was ruinous. The soul’s actions and morals conflicted, causing intense pain and damage.
But… no, it wasn’t. As a soul, Leo felt like he understood himself better than before, and while he felt instinctive repulsion for certain things, he felt none for consuming the spirits.
‘Because I’m not destroying them, but using them as fuel,’ Leo realized. He felt that instinctive repulsion at the thought of destroying them and not using them for anything, but not for consuming and using them as fuel for himself.
Creation was oftentimes a process that could only be achieved by destroying. Leo would not be able to create a sword without mining the materials necessary- or at least paying someone else to do so. Leo would not be able to use the hides of awakened beasts to create armor, or their soul spheres to create a spiritual weapon. All of these things were creation, but also involved destroying.
Creation was, at its most fundamental level, transmutation; turning one thing into another. By killing the spirits, Leo would turn them into fuel for his growth.
Leo’s human morals rebelled against it, but Leo instinctively felt as though this was one of the purest forms of creation, and his mind didn’t feel particularly strong here. He was still in charge, ultimately, but his emotions and instincts were more powerful and less controlled.
Finally, his instincts won out against his morals, and Leo’s soul began to move through the spirit realm. It did not walk, slither or anything of the sort; it simply moved, towards the nearest vegetative spirit, and engulfed it.
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Leo felt the spirit within his ‘stomach’ suddenly burst outwards with power, struggling with all its might, but the damage it caused to his soul was akin to a paper cut. Leo didn’t know how to attack in this form, but it seemed that his soul was passively breaking the vegetative spirit down now that he had engulfed it.
Its struggle only accelerated its demise, as it weakened itself doing naught. The moment that it ran out of strength, it shattered, and its spirit was quickly turned into some strange hybrid between liquid and gas that spread throughout his entire body. Within seconds, it vanished, and at the end of it, Leo’s soul felt stronger.
Now without hesitation, Leo surged towards the next.
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As Leo absorbed vegetative spirits thousands of miles away, a similar scene occurred in the physical realm, an infeasible vast distance between the awakened beast bearing the visions of a creature once called Cthulu and the human boy sitting cross-legged on his bed.
The nameless beast was surrounded by an uncountable number of small awakened beasts. They were all three to four feet tall, covered in the durable hides of their prey. Awakened species were rare, but this was one of them; each and every one of them were awakened, but species like this always came with strange quirks and weaknesses.
These ones were all, entirely physical, and despite being humanoid tool-users, weren’t all that much smarter than a chimpanzee.
It mattered little, though, because there were a lot of the very physically strong creatures- or, rather, it usually didn’t matter, because it had already killed a few hundred of them and wasn’t even having a hard time.
The nameless beasts’ form was constantly shifting.. It dodged everything coming its way by constantly moving, shifting and creating gaps in its own body wherever attacks were directed. Its natural form was a blob of flesh, but right now, it perpetually looked like a blob of gross, fleshy swiss-cheese.
It was only able to maintain its incredibly exhausting method of combat by constantly consuming the soul spheres and bodies of the awakened creatures, because while it contorted and shifted its body to dodge almost every attack, it also slaughtered its prey through thousands of small, spiked tentacles that extended beneath the ground.
Unfortunately, though, its buffet of free food and power was coming to an end. One the awakened species’ most powerful specimen was coming its way, and it had no chance in a fight against it.
Determined to get as much out of this as possible, it exploded in size and power. The thousands of tentacles rapidly returned to its body, and its main, goopy body split into trillions of tiny, fleshy threads. These threads each all spread out and converged a thousand times per second, and it rapidly disappeared into the tops of the trees. Spikes of bone attached to tentacles created out of millions of threads of flesh shot downwards, reaping the lives of an absurd number of awakened beasts. Upon dying, every single one was absorbed by the great many threads, core, flesh and bone alike.
Its body suddenly being made of thread allowed it to spread throughout the tops of almost the entire forest in seconds, perfectly intertwining with the branches of the trees and effortlessly dodging the spears, arrows and rocks that were lobbed and shot at it.
It ‘only’ managed to kill several thousand more before rapidly decreasing in size, becoming the size of an earthworm in an instant. Its powerful aura was still enough for them all to know exactly where it was, but before they or the ‘alpha’ awakened beast could find it, it burrowed into the ground and seemed to disappear towards the planet’s core.
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Leo’s soul was incapable of consuming even a single more vegetative spirit at the moment, so suffused with power that it was still digesting that it might explode if he did. It took a while for Leo’s mind, which had been temporarily dominated by his own soul, to realize its inaction and return to his body.
When he did, Leo suddenly retched, at first because of the disorientation of suddenly having all five of his senses after a long time in the spirit realm, and then out of disgust for what he had done.
Leo must have killed thousands of vegetative spirits within the spirit realm. None of them were sentient or self-aware, but he had been able to feel their very existences within his ‘stomach’ vividly, and their ruthless destruction was disturbing beyond belief.
‘I understand why Verin called soul existences now…’ Leo thought.
After a few minutes of sobbing, throwing up and another few minutes of changing, cleaning up the mess and calming down, Leo checked his watch.
It was the middle of the day on Friday, which meant that he’d been in there for roughly sixteen or so hours- Leo unfortunately hadn’t been paying very close attention to when he’d entered.
Now that Leo had calmed down a bit more, he also recognized that part of the reason he was so disturbed was also because of how easily his mind had become some voice lurking behind his soul’s will.
Contrary to what many thought, the mind and soul were separate. His mind was intrinsic to the physical realm- it was bound tightly to his brain. When he brought his soul into the physical realm, it dominated the instincts and primal emotions of his soul with ease due to the home ground advantage. On the other hand, when Leo’s mind was transferred into the spirit realm, his soul was the one with the home ground advantage, and it tossed aside conscious thought, the morals he’d been taught and everything else in favor of instinct.
Leo had a question for some of the professors, now: if his soul was so driven by instinct, why was it so dormant when his mind wasn’t within the spirit realm?