Andrew sat with his legs crossed.
Readjusting his glasses, he listened to the other person as they talked.
“–Fifteen. There were fifteen of them! I would’ve died if it weren’t for my soul lock!” Joshtin whispered across the table, completely ignoring the food and wine. Joshtin had rich brown that was delicately groomed in a side part.
Andrew replied with a jesting smile, “And that is why I learned how to teleport. If I had been in your position, I could’ve teleported out before the cave even collapsed in the first place.”
Joshtin rolled his eyes.
“It took you 11 years to learn how to teleport. I don’t have that sort of dedication or time when I’m trying to decode the necromancy of the ancients. Maybe when I turn old and senile and I want to brag to all my friends, I might learn how to,” Joshtin teased.
“Is that so?” Andrew nodded.
“Indeed,” Joshtin replied.
“Making one’s accomplishments look effortless can be difficult when other people know that you spent 11 years learning how to teleport. I trust that your mouth isn’t so loud as to spout such a secret to my friends and colleagues. It really affects the power dynamics in conversations,” Andrew smiled.
“Of course! I would never,” Joshtin laughed, smacking the table as he did.
Andrew, feeling his vocal cords were blocked, cleared them with a cough and sensed that it was finally the right time to address the topic of today’s meeting.
“Joshtin, how long have you been practising necromancy?” Andrew asked.
“Ever since I was 8 years old and first entered under Rossworth’s tutelage. So, about 22 years of intense study on a daily basis,” Joshtin said proudly.
Andrew gave a brief pause before continuing, “Impressive. If you don’t mind me asking, how familiar are you with—specifically—the soul.”
Joshtin replied, “Very, very familiar. I could draw up a model of my soul on this very tissue”.
He tapped on the tissue beside his plate to emphasise his point.
“I have examined over one-thousand souls in the course of my studies and counting. Though there are hundreds of old fogies and other recluses who are more experienced than me, I am quite sure that I will surpass them one day. Why do you ask; Andrew?” Joshtin raised the question out of curiosity, wondering where this was all going.
Andrew smiled, “Allow me to ask one more question. What do you think of chimera souls?”
Joshtin raised an eyebrow and answered, “Well, chimera souls are, firstly, very rare. I have only come across 4 of them. All of them were completely unfunctional and lifeless. The bottom of the soul is usually over-enlarged, their meridians are all over the place, you can’t charge them, and they’ll kill anyone that it possesses. They are great to educate juniors about certain things, but unless someone wants to somehow summon an army of dragons and conquer the entire world, they are useless.”
Joshtin frowned as he added, “Please don’t tell me you want to me make some kind of freak abomination for you. It’s not going to work.”
“No,” Andrew shook his head.
“I will tell you why I have come to talk to you after we finish this meal. I’m very hungry after all,” Andrew grinned.
“Really?” Joshtin grimaced.
Andrew proceeded to ignore him as he cut into a steak.
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Joshtin sighed. There was no use arguing against someone who could snap their fingers and will him out of existence.
Thus, after eating their meals and giving their wines a first taste, Andrew was the first one to break the silence.
Not with his voice though, but with the clasp of a suitcase opening.
Inside was a large stack of crisp yellow paper. Detailed on the top page was the detailed diagram of a blue, confusing blob that was made up of countless dots and lines. It mirrored the anatomy of a human brain, yet not quite so.
“Look at this,” Andrew handed him the stack of paper.
Joshtin thanked him and briefly examined the first page before flipping over to the next with a flick of his thumb. Upon seeing the next page, he squinted his eyes. He spent less time on this page than the last and as he flipped to the next, he saw an emerging pattern.
He rapidly flipped through the rest of the pages and once he was done, he immediately asked, “What did you do?’
Joshtin’s face was grave.
Andrew replied with a blank face, “I didn’t do anything.”
Joshtin gave him a doubtful look.
He caught himself and calmed down. Fortunately, Andrew didn’t take offence to his abrupt reaction.
He reminded himself to tread the rest of this conversation carefully. Andrew had a notorious reputation that he didn’t want to underestimate.
“Excuse my reaction from before, but what exactly are these images of?”
Joshtin knew exactly what they were; images of some type of soul. But this wasn’t any normal soul.
Andrew said, “What if I told you that there are nine-hundred other pages that go with that?”
Joshtin briefly paused. His heart skipped a beat.
“What do you mean?” Joshtin asked with an agape jaw.
Andrew was silent for a few moments, allowing Joshtin to subconsciously put part the majority of the puzzle.
Andrew then revealed, “Those are the sketches of the soul of but an ordinary 16-year-old girl.”
Joshtin almost spat out the wine that he had been drinking for comfort.
He gulped the wine down and yelled, “What!”
The entire restaurant looked over.
Joshtin ignored their stares and continued to stare at Andrew. However, Andrew, finding that the situation had grown out of his control, stood out of his chair and called for a waiter.
Seeing that there was no nearby waiter and the closest was on the other side of the restaurant, he didn’t bother waiting. He teleported right in front of them in a blink of blue light.
“What’s the bill?” Andrew asked at a rushed pace.
“Woah!” The waiter stumbled over himself and almost ran into Andrew.
Andrew’s face remained straight.
Everyone in the restaurant was shocked.
After finding his balance and evaluating the mysterious person before him, the waiter mustered the greatest, most brightest smile he could.
“The bill? Give me just a moment, Lord Shiva.”
----------------------------------------
“How is this possible?” Joshtin was speechless as he examined the remaining sketches.
Andrew smoked on a pipe and noted, “Apparently it is.”
The fireplace crackled, eating the generous amount of wood that Andrew had donated to it.
Every so often he would stoke the fire with a twirl of his finger, levitating a metal bar to manage the fire.
Late into the night, as lighting thundered in the distance and rain slid against the glass windows, Andrew asked, “Joshtin, how is it over at the university? I haven’t been to that place in…twenty years.”
Joshtin took a break from his intense study and leaned back. He stretched his arms upwards and yawned, “It’s…liveable.”
Joshtin frowned as he thought about it.
He continued, “The elders are corrupt as ever, no one wants to share their knowledge, the university itself hasn’t gone under active maintenance in over forty years, and recently, there are rumours that acolytes of Zoltar are amongst the staff faculty and even the students themselves. I could go on and on. It’s not good, just know that.”
Andrew did not react.
He gave another puff of his pipe and replied, “I’m not surprised. You would have to kill almost everyone important to make changes. That place used to be different.”
Joshtin looked over with a stunned expression when he mentioned killing several dozen people.
He got back to work after that.
An hour later, Joshtin finished reading through all nine hundred-plus pages.
“To be honest, I have no idea what this thing is,” Joshtin scratched his head, wracking his mind for answers.
Andrew was disappointed when he heard this.
He blinked slowly as he said, “You don’t?”
Joshtin sighed, “Yeah.”
There was silence for many several moments as both sat in deep contemplation.
Joshtin continued to think and focus.
And then he found something.
“Wait!!” Joshtin stood up from his seat and sifted through the many piles of paper.
He found the piece of paper he was looking for and planted his index finger at the centre of it.
“Andrew, come look at this,” Joshtin said.
Andrew stood up from his chair and walked over, leaned over the desk and looked at the piece of paper that Joshtin had placed in the middle of the desk.
At the centre of the soul’s sketch was a neat, perfectly sloped circle. It was the size of a person’s thumb and within the circle was a coiling, snail-like pattern. The line wrapped around the outer perimeter of the circle before slowly, yet gradually vanishing into the circle’s centre point.
“I think I know where this is from. I’ve seen it before,” Joshtin had what it exactly was on the tip of his tongue.
Andrew smiled. He waited in patience for the young man to find his thoughts.
A few moments later, he jolted in excitement.
“I know now! It’s a crafted soul,” Joshtin exclaimed.
Hearing this, Andrew gave a small “oh” of realisation.
Joshtin then cringed as he explained further, “To put it simply, a crafted soul is a soul that has been manually tinkered with or engineered in a specific way. In contrast, a chimera soul is merely put together as one would do with a puzzle.”
“How did you recognise that it was a crafted soul?” Andrew asked with his hands held behind his back.
Joshtin answered, “I remember seeing this specific design in a book. It only took me so long to recognise it because I think I read it over ten years ago.”
Andrew grew excited but didn’t show it.
He continued in a calm, soothing voice, “Could you perhaps locate this book?”
“Yeah, I could. The only problem is that the book is somewhere deep in the university’s library,” Joshtin said.
“To go there and back will take me 5 days. Are you sure you want to wait that long?” Joshtin asked, concerned.
To gain favour with Andrew, Joshtin didn’t care about how long it would take. He could practice his magic along the way too, so it wouldn’t be that much of a waste of time.
Andrew replied, “How about…no.”
Joshtin was taken aback. Why wouldn’t he—
Suddenly, Andrew took a hold of his waist and said with a devious smile, “Hold on tight, pretty lady.”
“Wait, don’t—”
They disappeared from the mansion in a blink of blue light.