Chapter Eighty-six

I wasn’t exactly sure when it was that I had waken up, but my vision returned, and it sure didn’t feel anything like the memories I had of opening my eyes. I had a distinct urge to yawn — probably a leftover feature from my time as a human — but I was unable to do so. Disappointing. On the other hand, I was feeling rather good, refreshed even, all without having the need or the ability to consume coffee, so that was good.

Hm. Sleeping.

Shit! I’d been sleeping.

Hank! Oh no! I had left everyone alone with the idiot-horror. Without being conscious and able to curb his hunger or preventing him from taking over our body. How long had I been out?

I stretched all my tentacles — luckily, I was still in control of them — to have a good look at my surroundings

It was morning, judging by the reddish sunshine the quarterdeck was bathing in. Krissy and Kiwa were sitting on a box under one of the masts — along with Tilry and a dozen rangers — eating something that looked liked porridge and bacon for breakfast. Phew, that was a relief. It was a quiet morning by shipboard standards; the breeze was weak, the sea was calm, the deck was filled with living people as opposed to corpses robbed of their souls, doing their morning routines. The usual cawing of the seagull-like birds was absent, but I didn’t think that had anything to do with Hank. Maybe we were far enough from any landmass for them to give up following the Furious Fist and the other ships.

‘Oh, look who’s awake! Rise and shine, brother!’ Hank greeted me with irritating cheerfulness.

‘What did you do?’ I shot the question at him. He must have been up to no good while I was out.

‘Whatever do you mean, bro?’ he asked, feigning innocence.

I stretched my tentacles out even more, checking the decks below as much as I could, looking for dead sailors or marines. I saw none.

‘Oh ye of little faith! I’m Hank,’ he complained as he observed my effort to incriminate him.

‘Exactly!’

‘Do you really think so little of me?’

‘You’re a Tentacle Horror,’ I growled at him.

‘So are you, for all intents and purposes,’ he retorted.

‘Tilry, is everything okay? Did he do something? Anything?’ I turned to Kiwa’s familiar. Who seemed to be just fine.

‘We’re fine. He’s done nothing. I mean he’s done something, but nothing bad,’ Tilry spoke, her voice a little tired.

‘Alright, listen bro, we have been busy while you were snoring away, so cut us some slack, will you?’ Hank demanded.

I was not snoring. Krissy interjected, as some of our words leaked out from our KHIM node, probably thinking we were talking about her. I demand you all return to talking through the same … what was it? Comm-node? Yes. I demand you all return to the same comm-node you use with me! I don’t like it when my familiars keep secrets.

‘Hey, we are not you’re familiars. I am your familiar. Me and no-one else.’ I protested that statement immediately, using our original comm-node. ‘Hank is …’

‘… is a free spirit. Bound to hosts for lifetimes doesn’t suit me anyway,’ he finished my sentence and not at all the way I had intended to finish it — he left out the part “Hank is an asshole and not suitable to be anyone’s familiar or brother”. Not to mention that as long as we occupied the same spiritual body, he was bound to the same host as I was for as long as I was. Free spirit in one way, not so free in another.

So? What are you two plotting? Krissy asked, chewing on the piece of meat I still believed was bacon, or the closest thing to it I’d seen in this world.

Actually, what are you three plotting? Kiwa butted in to the discussion. Tilry? I heard you talking with the weird ones.

‘The weird ones?’ Hank and I asked at the same time, our tones matching in carrying the same amount of indignation. Unnerving.

‘Twinsies!’ Hank yelled happily, and I groaned in spiritual pain. I should have seen it coming.

‘We have determined my level,’ Tilry stated.

‘Oh yeah? What level are you?’ I asked, suddenly interested.

‘She is Level 4 if we go by the number of times she’d eaten a soul and grown, but around Level 18 if we go by her overall size as well as her Essence and Mana storage capacity. It turns out not all spirits are equal by nature.’

‘Well, I know as much,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he giggled, and I was sure he was grinning mentally. ‘Her Essence Pool can store about 38 EP, her Mana Pool about 25 MP, which is about what we had when we were Level 18. Now, she is your run-of-the-mill familiar spirit, just the way spirits are meant to be. Her body works differently than us evil spirits …’

‘Wild spirits,’ I corrected him. I was still convinced the word “evil” shouldn’t be used that lightly.

‘That’s what I said: wild spirits.’ Hank didn’t miss a beat. ‘When she consumes a soul with the help of some Black Essence, her body uses it differently. Instead of putting it into body-mass, she uses most of it to enlarge her pools, which is fine, but it’s at the expense of Essence collection rates. She has four arms to absorb Essence from the air, and they’ve been roughly the same size since her last two level-ups. We, on the other hand, have ten tentacles, growing steadily, so we have a much larger overall surface area through which we absorb Essence. We collect 15 EP/minute while my dearest Tilry here collects only 3 to 4. We, brother, have the natural advantage in almost everything. At least individually.’

‘What do you mean?’ Tilry inquired.

‘There are a lot less of our kind, the average wild spirit isn’t exactly a team-player, and the gods can rally all their associated familiars to bring them down if need be.’

‘Or gods being gods, they can just smite them out of existence themselves,’ I commented, remembering Wensah’s threats of exactly that.

‘You know what? I don’t think gods are actually that dangerous,’ Hank said with a wondering voice.

Oh, this did not sound good, strong famous last words vibe.

‘What do you mean? Gods are gods. Grand spirits or whatever, right? Isn’t that the very definition of “powerful” and “dangerous”?’ I asked, quite uncomfortable with the topic. Doubting what someone like Wensah could do was sure to be the first step towards tragedy.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

‘I mean, yeah, sure, but only in the Spirit World,’ he explained. ‘Being able to move and act freely over there while the rest of the rubble is unable to do so, does make them dangerous. That, and their ability to produce Black Essence from all the Essence-tax they’re collecting. But unlike over there, I think they’re limited by how much Black Essence and Mana they’re able to dispense through their avatars here in the physical world.’

‘A lot more than we can,’ I offered my assessment of the issue.

‘Yep, a lot more then we can. At least for now,’ Hank said, not in the least bit discouraged. ‘But once their avatar is destroyed or otherwise disabled, I think they wouldn’t be able to do a thing in the particular time and location.’

‘That’s a big but,’ I mused.

‘Otherwise disabled?’ Tilry chimed in with a question of her own.

‘Yeah, I’m one hundred percent sure they maintain their connection to their avatars the same way we do.’

‘The Black Essence portal inside,’ I said, realising what he was getting at.

‘Precisely. You’re not as stupid as you look, brother,’ he said with the kind of sickening affection in his voice you might hear from a disappointed father who knew his son was an utter failure, but still did his best to love him anyway. The fact that I had heard this from Wensah every time she showed up, did not help. ‘If we whack that portal-thing hard enough, the connection will be gone and I think the avatar will just … stop.’ Hank finished presenting his theory.

‘Or maybe even start a miniature Essence-apocalypse and it would break down the avatar completely along with everything and everyone in the vicinity.’ I added.

‘Yeah, that could happen,’ Hank said excitedly, not even the least bit fazed. ‘Or we could even have a drunk god, like it happened to you.’

That wasn’t something I would have liked to see.

Krissy had been listening patiently, mostly focusing on her food, and I doubted she understood half of what had been said. But the words “drunk” and “god” in the same sentence had caught her attention.

Alright, listen you two. She said as she swallowed the last spoonful of her porridge along with the last bite of bacon. I have no idea what you’re talking about, but drunk Kevin was bad enough, and if you’re thinking of getting a god drunk, I swear I will …

‘Oh, don’t you worry about that, we’re not going to go around getting gods drunk.’ Hank tried to calm Krissy in a hurry.

‘Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. Can’t move around without you, remember?’ I added, just to make sure she wouldn’t blow up and give us half an hour’s worth of angry lectures on standards of behaviour. ‘Anyway, this tangent has been long enough, and it has nothing to do with the matter at hand, does it? Soul Sheilds for everyone, remember?’

‘Actually, it does,’ Hank said, and I could just picture him shaking his metaphorical head in pity for the fool who didn’t understand these spiritual matters. Well, tough, not everyone was a born Tentacle Horror, then getting a mental stat-boost thanks to munching on an exceptional soul like mine.

‘It does, huh? In the most roundabout way possible, I assume?’ I asked, making sure to cram as much indignation into my voice as possible.

I could feel Hank’s attention turning to Tilry, wanting to address her instead of me.

‘Allow me to explain my findings, love, and forgive me for using lay terms. I need to make sure my mentally challenged but well-meaning brother is able to grasp it as well.’

It was at this point I felt an almost irresistible urge to unleash my inner Cain on my self-proclaimed brother.

***

Krissy and Kiwa had enough of our bickering-slash-discussing of spiritual matters, and I couldn’t blame them for changing their minds and asking us to go back to using our private KHIM channel. They had their exercise routine for the day — worked out by Kitala Iwani in order to maximise the limited space available — and marines and sailors were enough of a distraction, as some of them would stop and glare at the spiritualists doing spiritualist things on the ship. Our hosts didn’t need our constant and annoying background noise on top of that.

Surprisingly, the rangers on board — not just Toven but others as well — had proved to be good teammates whenever the sailors were giving the girls the stink-eyes. They stood up for them, proclaiming that they were one of them, and had done more for Solace in two weeks than all tarlickers in a year combined. That never eased the tension, but I was glad our hosts had such support.

I was almost sad that we had to leave Solace behind. But I comforted myself with the thought that if we survived whatever Wensah — or Sivera for that matter — had waiting for us on the continent, we might be able to return, and if Krissy so desired, we could not only settle there but be welcome and respected members of elven society.

But that was something to worry about later. Right now, I had to suffer through Hank’s condescension-drenched lecture on spiritual stuff. Fine, I could act like a good little pushover for a little longer.

Unfortunately, almost everything he presented made sense.

So, apparently Tilry’s level and eating habits were connected to our Soul Shield project — in a roundabout way as I had suspected. Hank had looked into how I was able to break a soul down while Tilry wasn’t. It was one of those things our body just did without any conscious control or knowledge on our part, much like how a human heart would beat, or how a stomach would produce digestive acids without the person ever being aware of it.

As it turned out, I had more invisible organs than I knew about. One of those organs was taking a little bit of Essence from my primary pool on the regular, turning it into something that would liquefy a soul, making it ready for consumption. Hank proposed that we learn how to make larger amounts of this spiritual digestive acid, or enzyme, or whatever the word was, and use it to feed and level Tilry. On top of that, he was sure it could make compressed Essence materials more malleable and easier to work with, and as a result I could craft better shields and armour for ourselves and for the souls of our hosts.

I had to admit, it was a good idea, and while I still had to spend time to practice making the new comm-thread, I was rather excited about the new set of experiments before us.

***

It took me a full day filled with intense bouts of concentration to start getting a feel for this so far unknown organ, and for the weird type of substance it produced. It definitely had Essence as its base, but whatever that organ did to it, changed it into something that was more akin to Mana than anything else. But it was lighter or less dense — if those words could even be applied to something immaterial — and it just felt wrong. While Mana was a jack-of-all-trades substance just waiting to be instructed to do something, this enzyme-thing had one thing in mind: to melt anything it touched. Well, anything spiritual, as it had no effect whatsoever on anything physical. And despite all the similarities, it didn’t mix with Mana at all, instead, it would repel it like oil repelled water. Both Hank and I thought there might be some sort of application for this quality as well.

It took us another day and night to study this, until we had a clear picture of how it all worked, and what we could do with it.

The process looked like this: I’d catch a soul, the organ would send out a small amount of the enzyme, it would enter into the captured soul through my tentacles. And it would turn said soul into a mush which I could absorb. Lovely. And how did we study this process without any souls on the ship we could sacrifice on the altar of science? Fishing. How else? We were at sea after all.

I mean, sticking my tentacles through the ship’s hull and into the water, then grabbing the souls of the brave fishes that dared to come close enough to the Furious Fist, probably didn’t qualify as fishing at all. But I was sure people would still do it if they could, even if true fishing enthusiasts would definitely declare the method heretical. But who knew, maybe it would catch on in places like Australia?

The fishes I caught were … less than nutritious, despite some of them being quite big like tuna, providing me an average of 5 to 10 EXP each. While fish-souls weren’t as slippery as I had expected, what surprised me the most was the taste: they tasted like fish. After learning that human souls tasted like toothpaste, elves like honey-cheescake and orks like mushrooms, it was a pleasant surprise. I had always been fond of sushi and sashimi, and fish-souls were quite the similar experience. I needed to find a creature whose soul tasted like soy-sauce, then I could delve more into the culinary side of soul based dining.

Tilry was suitably terrified — watching us build a small storage organ inside our avatar body was probably like watching a horror movie featuring chainsaws and guts flying everywhere. But it was necessary: we couldn’t figure out how to make the Enzyme, so Hank and I decided that tricking the organ into producing it more, then store the surplus in the new storage pool, was the way to go.

Instead of mucking around inside our main body, conducting the construction through the tiny, internal Black Essence portal, we opted to create the new pool inside our avatar here in the material world. It was a small pool anyway, the Enzyme-organ was inside the avatar as well, plus we didn’t want to accidentally dissolve ourselves. It was the sensible thing to do.

The Enzyme Pool was small, made of a similar spiritual composite as Jack’s Room or the Spirit Room, but I coated the inside with Mana to Enzyme-proof it. It wasn’t a lot of work, as I had plenty of experience building pools.

Making an internal pipe from a combination of Essence and Mana was simple enough, and I was ready to funnel all the Enzyme into its new home. And lo and behold, soon the new pool was full.

This was progress. Pretty good progress. And the next step was to get Tilry — who was living proof that spirits had the ability to look like they were about to throw up — to eat some predigested fish so she could grow, and then we could work on the damn Soul-Shields finally.