Chapter 27- Out of body experience
Adam’s mind stretched as he was pushed towards the charging pack of shadow wolves. His mind screamed of danger but the wolves all fell limply to the ground the next instant, a wave of silver mana was pushed out of his body alongside himself and continued on to consume the wolves' souls. Adam's mind was a mess and the world around him seemed tense and constrained, with his vision elongated.
He looked behind him to where he sensed the pull and found his soul had been stretched into a thin cord attached to his floating form and back to his body. He had somehow been pushed out of his own body as he floated in front of himself.
The world around him was black and confusing since he could see his soul from two different angles simultaneously. His soul had been partially separated, only connected by a thin silver line, and his mind had trouble trying to process the two separate visions.
He looked at himself while floating a few meters away from his main body and noticed that his core was gone. He floated in the void of darkness for a few moments as he tried to regain control over himself.
He was able to control his projected soul as if he were controlling his soul mana. Being able to float around outside of his body and experiencing what it was like to be sentient soul mana was extremely bizarre. He couldn’t hear or feel anything as if his soul was in an entirely separate dimension.
But he noticed a silver light approaching him in the distance. He was scared that this was the light at the end of the tunnel people would talk about when close to death but then he recognized its owner.
The larger red-cored shadow beast was currently barrelling towards his defenseless body. He tried to return to his body in hopes of being able to reach his mana core before the beast caught him.
When he attempted to return he remembered the thin silver line that tethered him to his body and he pulled at the line in a desperate attempt to return faster.
Before he knew it, he was being sucked back into his body like being pulled forward by a black hole. It was instantaneous as soon as he pulled on the line. His main body was able to watch himself float outside himself when his soul had split, but his real body was completely frozen, his limbs and even his mana were completely inaccessible.
His mind twisted and whirled once more as the piece of his soul he had dislodged returned once more. His minds and visions merged back into a single entity and he immediately regained control over his body. But moving his limbs or standing back up wasn’t his priority. He felt his body fall backward from the jolt and ignored it.
He pulled on his core and pushed out the rest of his soul mana in the general direction of the charging silver flame. The soul mana collided with the pack leader’s and ignited his vision in an explosion of silver. It only lasted a moment before the soul was consumed and the light disappeared.
He lay down on the ground as his mind continued to spin. His brain felt as though it couldn’t remember up from down as the darkness he lay in seemed to somehow spin and stretch.
A heavy pain could be felt behind his eyes as he slowly tried to regain his vision with his greater sight spell. The process took several long seconds as he attempted to send the white mana up to his eyes instead of down to his feet.
“What the hell was that? I’ve never done drugs, but that felt super trippy”
As the spell gave him back his vision, he sat back up and attempted to see his surroundings.
The large black wolf was lying lifelessly on the ground extremely close to him, so he backed up in the middle of getting to his feet. The action almost caused him to fall back on his ass but he stabilized himself at the last moment.
His soul mana was depleted but his standard magic was still at a decent level. He only used the mana sight feature of his great sight spell since forcing his eyes to process more information wasn’t helping his growing headache.
The scene in front of him was one of eerie death as an entire pack of tens of giant black wolves lay dead around him. The large pack that he had purposely avoided by staying away from their nest near the giant crab, this large pack which outnumbered and outmatched him ten to one, all dead by his hand…
He felt a shiver down his spine as he reexamined his power. The old God had told him that the soul affinity was extremely rare, he mentioned something about a million people having it during his life, and who knows how long that guy has lived for.
He had wished for a fire affinity ever since he discovered he could use magic since fire magic was awesome in all fantasy media. But he was instead able to use the exotic silver fire that no one without the affinity could even see. So much for flashy spells.
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But his silver magic now seemed to be much more powerful than he had ever imagined. In hindsight, the fact that some actual god had pulled him into a different realm and told him that he would keep an eye on him did make his soul affinity seem very powerful.
But he hadn’t differentiated between normal magic and the silver kind. He could see his own soul and that of others but so could he see his own mana core and that of others. The uniqueness of his power hadn’t dawned on him since everything magic was already new and mind-boggling for a lost human who had no idea magic was real for his entire life.
But now, standing amongst the dark cave with corpses littering his feet, he finally realized what he was doing this whole time. He had been messing with his soul. Like an actual real nonmythical soul, he had almost subconsciously lumped it in with the rest of his magic as things to look into later.
The memory of him floating outside of his body came to mind as he realized what the soul truly was. It was him, the real him, everything that made Adam Adam.
He wasn’t playing around with some shiny new magical energy, this was his very essence. Without his soul, he couldn’t be who he was. He had messed with his soul believing it was possible to upgrade it like a mana core, but what if he messed up? What if he accidentally changed something he shouldn’t have? Would he change who he was forever? Would he lose all his memories or revert back to the mental age of a child?
All these new uncertainties and fears arose in his mind since the gravity of his power became evident. Souls are an ethereal version of yourself with all your memories and experiences. We misunderstood the purpose of the brain. It was never the thing responsible for our consciousness, at least it wasn’t entirely.
Minds and souls have a complex and intertwined function, they are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other and here he was changing his soul at will, without even thinking about the consequences.
He was lucky that he was able to get back to his body in time. What would have happened if he couldn’t return? Or if he pushed all of his soul out of his body? Would he simply drift about in the void, unable to interact with the real world ever again? Would he die? Or simply exist on forever until the end of time, a ghost cursed to darkness for eternity.
He recalled how he no longer had his magic when floating outside of his body and how powerless he felt. He had gone almost his entire life without these incredible arcane powers but now that he knew what they were, he could never go back.
He took a long minute to think these things over as he tried to reorganize everything he had learned about the new reality he had been tossed into. He realized that his soul mana allowed him to essential reach into his chest and grasp his own beating heart… or soul in this case. Being able to directly modify something that no one should ever be able to access.
Despite how dangerous this all was, he ultimately came to a very different conclusion than one might expect.
“Sure, this might turn me into a mutant freak or a vegetable, but anything meaningful has risks. Magic is dangerous but also the only reason I'm still alive. If I can control my soul like I can control magic… the possibilities are truly endless.”
He still had too little information about the soul and its many uses but a longer life span and better magical capabilities were benefits outlined by a literal God. If his soul could be projected out of his body like he had accidentally done, then could he eventually figure out how to use mana outside of his body?
Hell, if he figured out how to replace other creature's soul's with his own, could he start possessing beasts like a ghost? He knew it was a long shot, but the truth was that magic was insane in what it made possible, like turning into a bloody shadow for one.
That thought returned his attention to the many corpses and their juicy mana cores. Despite the horrifying experience of throwing himself outside of his own body in the middle of a fight for his life… He was actually starting to feel really optimistic about his situation as he got to work extracting and consuming the many cores.
He lost track of time as he devoured the mana of one core after the other. He actually started off with the ants and spiders that had died before since their cores were all grey and of pure mana. Many had lost their cores in the fight but enough remained that it pushed his middle-grade core to its maximum.
He could now notice more red spots than ever at the center of his core and by the time he was absorbing what was left of the larger white ants core, he was pushed over his limit and began to upgrade his core. It pulsated and shifted as the mana compressed and fought itself but he had grown used to the process by now.
It took a dozen minutes longer than his last upgrade but the amount of mana involved had also increased exponentially. By the time his core had resolidified, the red dots in the center of the sphere now seemed to join together and form small glowing red cracks.
The familiar feeling of the white pulses then began as his muscles were refined and strengthened once more.
He didn't even bother checking his status because he knew he had upgraded his core to late stage as the red cracks were foreshadowing his core's upcoming evolution.
An evolution he was hoping would be even closer after he had absorbed all the mana available including the shadow wolve’s. This was actually not an entirely simple process which is why he had left them to last. But first, the large white ant seemed to have a significant reserve of pure mana trapped in a condensed cloud inside various flesh sacks across its back and torso.
Many of them were torn open during the attack but some still remained. Adam wasn't sure how it processed its mana but assumed these sacks were the ants' equivalent of transporting pollen back to its hive. He filed that information away as useful tidbits to look into.
His improved core allowed him to process the mana at a much faster pace but when all the pure mana was absorbed, it was time to move on to the shadow wolves. He had never encountered their weird mana before as it seemed so light and ethereal.
He had seen light affinity mana before and remembered it being dense and refusing to be absorbed without a fight. The shadow magic was similar but in the opposite way. It was a slippery mana that acted like a magnet when attempting to absorb.
If he attempted to push it one way, the magic would go the opposite direction. It wasn't moving in a smooth motion either but rather slipped from side to side. When he tried to push it into his core, it would jump around to the other side of the sphere while never getting close enough to be absorbed.
This black mana didn't fight against him by exploding his core unlike the light magic, but rather by making itself impossible to absorb by any non-show attuned core.
“Well, this is going to be a pain…”