It was dark wherever I had ended up.
The God-damned hollow Mother phantom drove me into a trap... likely got me stuck in a phylactery of some sort. I sighed inwardly.
My entire Astral Tree felt like had been injected into something, the blue thread acting akin to a hypodermic needle.
At least I no longer felt cold and miserable. Wherever I was, even if Mother had acted by some sinister design, I was certain that I could figure things out, change my path, break away for whatever had been prepared for me by whomever...
Words suddenly flashed in my vision, amidst murky darkness.
Welcome to Novazem, transient soul.
Solve Equation for Full System activation: 67-12-5+5+0x1=
“Um… Fifty five?” I automatically answered the demanding text.
[Sufficient cognition confirmed. Human System Unlocked.]
The Soul-Song declared jovially. Well, at least I'm out of the Astral. That's one problem solved. Wait... human?
"Stats," I mentally ordered.
Re-computing soul stats.
The Soul-Song commented. This didn't bode well.
Name:
_______ Alana Skyisle
Age:
7 days since fertilization
Species & Subtype:
Human blastocyst
Affinity:
Astral Phantom [Various stat bonuses from subsumed soul-shards and affiliated affliction]
Spark of the Morningstar [+ 3 skill channels] [+ Soul-Song skill]
Dryad [+Chrysalis skill]
Level:
2
Experience:
198/450
Health:
2/2
Stamina:
2/2
Mana:
2/2
Mana regen:
2 m/hr
Strength:
0
Agility:
0
Dexterity:
0
Vitality:
0 [+3]
Charisma:
0
Magic:
0 [+3]
Foresight:
15
Intelligence:
0
Wisdom:
0
Soul:
1 [+3] [-1]
Skills:
[Soul-Song LV 0] [ON]
[Raising Spell efficiency by 0.1%]
[Providing detailed Soul-Stats]
[Translating the Soul-Song's Language]
Known Song-Spells:
[Tamus-Anima] [Sectus-Anima] [Conjugo-Anima] [Identify]
[Identify LV 3]
[Chrysalis LV 2] [PAUSED]
[Sectus-Tether LV 3]
Affliction:
[Soul decay: - 1]
I obsessively read the first line again and again, feeling growing confusion and dread.
_______ Alana Skyisle
"Why the hell am I... Fill in the blank, Alana Skyisle all of a sudden?" I grouchily mumbled to myself mentally.
[An unfilled name. An unfilled name is an unwritten path. [+1] in Vitality, [+1] in Magic, [+1] in Soul and [-1] in Soul decay... this means one thing only,] the memory of Kopusha revealed. [This is an unborn child. You have been merged with the soul and body of an unborn child!]
"WHAT?! W-what?! What kind of a monster would do this?!" I mentally yelled into the darkness. There was no answer from either of my two other memories, but I felt my anger boiling to the surface with every second.
This Phylactery was... a human... an unborn, human girl!
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
I pointed [Identify LV 3] at myself, defining what I was mentally. With every passing moment, the branches of my tree were slowly sinking into a human soul of an unborn girl. This would not do.
Something was attempting to fuse me to a human soul. A spell? Some kind of a hexagram?
I shot [Identify LV 3] past myself, defining what else was there.
Binding hexagram.
Here we go.
I used [Tamus-Anima] to still both of our souls before they fused together further and then aimed [Sectus-Tether LV 3] roughly between us. I knew that while the soul was stilled, Sectus could slice it apart like a surgeon's blade.
I released the spell, cutting through both of our souls and the binding hexagram at the same time.
-5 in Soul
In exchange, I received more pain and then blissful nothingness.
----------------------------------------
When I woke up, my entire soul ached. I summoned up my stats.
Name:
_______ Alan Skyisle
Age:
17 days since fertilization
Species & Subtype:
Human blastocyst
Affinity:
Astral Phantom [Various stat bonuses from subsumed soul-shards and affiliated affliction]
Spark of the Morningstar [+ 3 skill channels] [+ Soul-Song skill]
Dryad [+Chrysalis skill]
Level:
2
Experience:
198/450
Health:
2/2
Stamina:
2/2
Mana:
2/2
Mana regen:
2 m/hr
Strength:
0
Agility:
0
Dexterity:
0
Vitality:
0 [+3]
Charisma:
0
Magic:
0 [+3]
Foresight:
15
Intelligence:
0
Wisdom:
0
Soul:
1 [+3] [-5]
Skills:
[Soul-Song LV 0] [ON]
[Raising Spell efficiency by 0.1%]
[Providing detailed Soul-Stats]
[Translating the Soul-Song's Language]
Known Song-Spells:
[Tamus-Anima] [Sectus-Anima] [Conjugo-Anima] [Identify]
[Identify LV 3]
[Chrysalis LV 2] [PAUSED]
[Sectus-Tether LV 3]
Affliction:
[Soul decay: - 1]
Phew. Wait... Alan Skyisle? Did I change my gender by cutting myself off from the poor girl? Did she... survive? I aimed identify into the general direction of where I felt... something.
______ Alana Skyisle LV 2. Human.
Oh thank God!
She's alive. Does this mean that we're... twins now? Guess it does. It seemed that my [Sectus] didn't fully destroy the binding spell, but at the very least I was now bound to a human blastocyst and not another human soul.
I tried to move myself and open my Astral eyes and discovered that I was unable to do so. I was definitely stuck here, attached firmly in place. Oh well.
. . .
So…
I was a human blastocyst that was hopefully inside of a human womb if the System was to be believed. I wouldn't even dare to call myself a full human at this point - I was a bunch of cells that were in the process of dividing. Inexplicably enough, I was able to formulate coherent, complex thoughts which should have been quite impossible for a group of cells that hadn’t even become a foetus yet.
If I recalled correctly, the human blastocyst had a diameter of about 0.1 mm and was composed of approximately 200 cells. There was no rational explanation of how a sphere of 200 cells could contain my intelligence, such a thing was utterly absurd according to everything I knew.
I formulated a hypothesis that perhaps a human soul was a miniature, electromagnetic data construct that was somehow able to store a whole lifetime of information that made me exactly who I was. Was my soul also acting as my processor, allowing me to make coherent thoughts? It was a decent hypothesis if any.
There wasn’t much to do at this point, except to observe the Stats text and to ponder things. This was an acceptable situation for me. Some people might cry and despair if they were to lose their freedom and all of their numerous body functions, but I would be content being just a brain inside of a jar. As long as my mind remained stable, as long as I could formulate complex thoughts, I could find ways of entertaining myself. If the said brain jar had an eye - even better and if it had a robot arm to poke things with, three times so.
Using my imagination alone I could produce an entire universe of theoretical or pure mathematical beauty for endless hours, conceiving what sort of life could form from one chemical or another and how a variety of said imaginary life could interact with one another. If I were ever to grow bored of staring at floating text I could always entertain myself with imaginary abiogenesis.
In my current predicament I didn’t possess eyes, or an appendage or a brain for that matter, yet I somehow observed and understood information presented to me.
Observing the text pleased me even though I currently lacked the necessary dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. How could information be happy? What was simulating happiness in the soul? How did the Soul function? So many questions.
The entire experience of meeting a god that wore the space suit of Yuri Gagarin was very suspect - it wasn’t a thing from any religion that I knew about. Perhaps, the so-called Omniscience was some sort of alien, highly evolved life that had the ability to duplicate or transfer the electromagnetic activity from within the human brain at the moment of death, transposing it to a new host.
Why would it want to do that? What was I to the Omniscience? A soul to be recycled? A mote in the eye of god? An experiment? It had called me one.
Why shove my soul into the soul of another person?
Was this really a womb? It could be a lab for all I knew...
I pushed away this highly concerning hypothesis. I needed to make more observations and not get bogged down by irrational fears.
The primary puzzle was the text floating in front of my eyes that somehow judged my statistics and assigned them numbers. Now that I was no longer freezing to death in the Astral Ocean I could fully contemplate the System itself. The entire horrible experience of local hell was already fading away like a bad dream.
I needed more experience! Yes.
While I was blind and deaf as a Human blastocyst, it was difficult to aim [Identify] at anything of value, so I aimed it at each word, studying the patterns within it.
I considered into which direction I could evolve myself as I slowly gained experience for identifying each word within the Stats chart.
Being stronger in the womb was pointless. Even if I became stronger, there would be no feasible way to measure such. I imagined myself as a tiny embryo that could punch its way out of the womb like a flying bullet.
Ha ha ha, no. I didn't mind being in a womb. If human biology was the same in this world, I would have 8 carefree months to think about things. I didn’t even have to feed myself as a bonus. This was paradise in a way. No responsibilities. No stressful situations. No need to interact with people!
This whole unlocked System biz seemed quite dangerous for an embryo, but then again I was probably a rare case. Or was I? I tried to imagine a world where everyone was reborn remembering their previous life. Grudges would definitely last beyond death in such a world.
“You killed me twenty years ago, prepare to die!”
“Only because you killed me forty two years ago, you miscreant!”
I smiled at my own joke. Not everyone was a shut-in nerd like me. If everyone was trapped in the womb for 8 months they would absolutely go insane from lack of entertainment and human interaction. I would probably only become slightly insane at worst. Slight insanity was acceptable, I assured myself.
I recalled experiments in which Soviet scientists placed people in various sensory deprivation rooms and tanks to record the outcome. When a human mind was disconnected from all of its senses it basically started to generate a variety of audio and visual hallucinations. The worst of these was the sleep deprivation experiment.
I wasn't sure if that one was a made up spooky tale or an actual test in which all participants died. I was told about it during a long train ride on the trans-Siberian Express by a very drunk colleague. It seemed realistic enough - after all, our scientists had conducted many nuclear tests at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeast Kazakhstan with no regard for environmental and public health consequences.
My seemingly saving grace was that I didn’t have a human mind yet to generate nightmarish or psychedelic visions. Also I didn't seem to require sleep as a self-aware soul.
I looked at the rest of my chart. There was one thing that I could truly measure and always wanted to increase - my intelligence.
Why is my intelligence at 0 anyway? Hello? I have a doctorate diploma in biochemistry! Well, I had one. My framed diploma exploded along with the rest of Aralsk-7. Seriously though, I’m a highly experienced Soviet administrator and bioweaponeer. I can do algebra without a calculator! I demand a recount!
No recount followed my demands. Maybe the System sucked at defining me properly?
I attempted to mentally multiply two four digit numbers. It took me about a minute to do, as usual.
Maybe Intelligence didn't mean what I thought it meant.
The definition of Intelligence was another mystery to solve.