The planes slightly warped as my avatar manifested on the imperial palace. I was aware that my presence would make either Princess Salayah or dragonborn Caius come, so whilst I waited for them to make their appearance, I inspected the mana capacitator from the perspective of the spiritual plane.

Instead of a raging storm inside the artifact, I was greeted by a monsoon. Not much of a difference, but a very welcomed change.

The purple hurricanes were substituted by plentiful dark clouds of the same color. A few violet lightning bolts here, some brutal blue wind there, and the ceaseless rain littered the place. An interesting change of scenery from my last visit was that the raindrops were no longer pink.

They had become lavender.

The implications of such change were obvious. But just in case, I analyzed the capacitator.

It was important to make the distinction between a mana battery and a capacitator. Mana batteries stored mana, but mana capacitors could do other things. There were two main types of capacitors: ones that sucked a lot of mana fast and took them a lot of time to lose it, and those who sucked mana slowly but discharged it instantly.

The first type aligns with the concept of a standard battery. The latter though could be used in very dangerous ways. Like, for example, a bomb. This mana capacitator was of the second kind.

So, I was amazed and terrified when I found out that the capacitator hadn’t lost much mana.

It made no sense.

This type of capacitator should have mostly discharged by now, over the days, but it had only lost around five percent of its maximum capacity.

How?

Capacitators either charged slowly or discharged slowly, not both. And this artifact had taken a solid quarter of an hour before it neared its limit.

Was I missing something?

I wasn’t what you would call an expert on mana or magical tinkering, but this seemed impossible. But now that I thought about it… the fact that it absorbed part of my dying soul, overpowering the pull of the afterlife, was also strange.

I left the inner workings of the artifact for now, I wasn’t capacitated to deal with them.

Where even was I?

A pulse of True Recall refreshed my soul.

Right, lavender mana.

What I assumed that was happening with the storm-became-monsoon was that my trapped soul chunk was transforming the pure arcane mana of the leyline into soul mana.

Was that even possible?

The answer was a resolute yes.

Mana in its truest form was of Arcane, any other mana was modified by the body of the conjurer to adapt it to its affinity and natural frequency, that’s what mages liked to call ‘mana regeneration’.

So, by total accident, I made an artificial mana transformer.

One that shifted arcane mana to soul mana without the need for a living body.

I said it before, the implications were significant. But the applications were limitless. I had yet to know the speed of conversion, but this “mana transformer” would end up converting all the accumulated leyline mana into soul mana of my own frequency.

But it seems I have to leave all the theory crafting aside because souls were approaching the floating artifact.

Surprisingly, instead of the albino princess or the dark knight, I was greeted by none other than the emperor himself. He slowly descended the stairway at a glacial pace.

“Did it work?” Straight to business, eh?

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I knew what he meant by that question.

“Yes.” My Astral Self nodded. “It took copious amount of healing and there were some psychological and emotional scars, but yes, it did work.”

“I see.” The old emperor’s voice was dry and coarse, yet it carried a special energy I couldn’t quite identify. “That’s good.” He nodded to himself. “Who would have thought that a ritual to talk with the dead could be used to bring them back.”

“It was you who thought that,” I added.

“That much is true.” He sat on the cold stone ground. “I have wondered if that would work for a very long time.”

I did not comment on the unceremonious position of the emperor. But I won’t deny it was strange to see such a powerful man drop on the ground like that.

“I suppose you have lost a significant one then.” My voice carried a spec of sadness.

“You suppose well.” He briefly opened his eyes, showing a potent crimson, overflowing with life, unlike his body. “But back then I was more incompetent than now. And I doubted it would be possible, to begin with. Can you tell me the details, ellari?”

I nodded in solemn silence.

I used no lies or half-truths; I explained to him in detail what happened on the River of the Damned. It seemed like a piece of information worth sharing. I told him about how I needed to search for a single soul from countless ones, a number far bigger for a mortal mind to comprehend. About how reality seemed to collapse. About how when I found the soul and then had to haggle it with a divine entity.

“A goddess, huh.” The emperor crackled a laugh. “So, gods are real then. I’ve always thought, but there was never a sign of them, only a vague instinct.”

“I’m not so sure if gods are real,” I told him.

“How so?” He tilted his head. “Was this goddess of the dead a hallucination? This rower also seems quite the powerful figure.”

“I described them as divine-like, but not gods.”

“What are you insinuating then?” The life of his crimson eyes intertwined with my faux spiritual ones. “You aren’t insinuating that they are mages that have transcended death, are you?”

“No.” I swayed my head. “But something tells me they aren’t ‘gods’. I can’t put my tongue on the why though.”

“An instinct then.”

“Yes, you could say so.” I gave him a weak smile.

“Entities that guard the afterlife, I would have never thought of it, but then again, never has come back from the dead before.”

“And I’m the only one to remember it,” I added.

He looked at me with disbelief. “Doesn’t your partner know?”

I chuckled. I wouldn’t exactly describe Marissa as my partner. Would I? Hmm.

“She does not. Only smudges of memories of the river remain. I’m inclined to believe that the river slowly drains the memories of the souls. Thankfully, she was only long enough to forget the minutes prior to her death.”

“Interesting…” The emperor caressed his long, wizard-like beard. “You are a veritable source of information, ellari. With you, mysticism will progress unto new heights.”

“I can only hope so.” I approached him. “But please, call me Edrie.”

I had already given princess Salayah my name, so this was only the next logical step.

“Likewise,” With a grunt, he got up from his spot and offered a hand to my avatar. “Amyr.”

I accepted Amyr’s handshake. The Astral Self’s corporeal properties were next to none, but I was able to touch him without problems.

Silence lingered; mana permeated.

“Why have you come here then?” I ask him.

“Shouldn’t I be the one asking that question? This is my home, after all.”

We undid the handshake. “You know what I mean. An emperor would never visit a potential menace alone.”

“Are we alone?” Amyr grinned, his white fangs showing.

“Unless you have found a way to obfuscate the sight of others on the spiritual plane, yes, we are the only ones in the room. There’s not a single soul in a twenty-meter radius.”

“Quite the sophisticated senses.” He told. “But we aren’t truly alone. Caius could appear in a single instant, and I’m pretty difficult to kill.”

“I’m a mystic, I know how sturdy we can be.”

“Indeed.” Amyr nodded. “We could survive mages of a superior star without any problem. Especially if we are versed in animomancy.”

Animomancy?

Amyr’s response confused me. Normally, psychimancy was the go-to field for offense and defense. Animomancy wasn’t really capacitated for anything, it was an interesting specialization that dealt with giving life to the inanimate…

I gave him a stern look.

“Yes, I have inspected that artifact from afar.” The emperor confessed. “The item itself isn’t that interesting, but whatever your soul did to it, now that is noteworthy.”

“Are you implying what I’m thinking you are implying?”

“Very much.” Amyr approached the floating black orb without any hesitation. “It’s very difficult to do magic without spells. Computation is needed to do magic, yet you have created something incredible by mistake. How much mana did it even need to overcome the computation to create it?”

Fuel and computation, the very basics of magic. But mages always tended toward the computation side, even the sorcerers who liked to fixate more on the fuel part. For high-starred spells, the mana of a single mage wouldn’t be enough if they wanted to do magic by fuel alone. It was better to reduce that price with computation.

Sorcerers solved this with muscle memory rather than the raw calculations of the wizards. Yet they computed something with these practiced reflexes.

“Did you try to make it?” Amyr asked as he touched the artifact.

The concentrated arcane lightning hit him, and it scorched and cut parts of his flesh, yet he didn’t seem worried. Mana pulsed; the emperor healed.

“No,” I responded.

“Then something must have done it.” He turned to look at my projection. “Magic needs to be computed, even if it’s as small and meaningless as unstructured magic. Tell me, who has computed this thing into existence?”

Our gazes crossed.

Crimson flowed like blood; lavender flew like mist.

There was a single possible answer.

“My soul.”