I paid, obviously. I wasn’t about to abandon my plan just because the absorption was expensive.

Unfortunately, that was only the start of my suffering.

This time, when I put myself at the tender mercies of the station, the pain was leagues beyond my first experience. My soul was figuratively and literally overwhelmed. The mage’s memories surged in like a tide, drowning me under its sheer weight.

I was a child, cowering before a stern-looking woman. She called herself my mother, but she never acted like one. I was barely old enough to form coherent sentences. My young mind reeled as the woman loomed over me, forcing me to learn how to move my mana.

When I failed, she forced her own mana into my flesh to expedite the process. It was pure agony. I was left on the floor for hours afterward, none of the servants even willing to touch me lest they risk their mistress’s displeasure.

I was a teenager, desperately pushing my mana to cycle so I could follow the path prescribed by my technique. Despair weighed me down like iron chains. No matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I could never accumulate mana as quickly as my siblings could.

There was something defective about me, my mother said. She hired healers to examine me. They agreed.

My core was damaged. Cracked at some point in my childhood. No matter how much mana I pushed into it, the majority would always evaporate rapidly. My progress rate was crippled. I would never be able to meet the expectations placed on the scion of a duke’s house.

I was a young adult. Mana now cycled automatically into my body, but it wasn’t enough. I stared numbly at the servants as they piled my belongings into a carriage which would take me as far away as my mother could manage. A posting in a minor town, where I could be forgotten.

I got to keep my grimoire and some of my more valuable items. But I would have no more boosters, no more reagents, and no more magical aids. They’d be wasted on a girl who barely managed to attain the lowly status of ‘mage apprentice.’

My mother didn’t come to see me off. She hadn’t looked me in the eye ever since the healers gave their prognosis. My brothers didn’t care. Only my sister stood at my side, sobbing as she clung to me.

She would never be able to see me again.

I was in a city under siege. Alarms suddenly rang out, meaning a section of the wall was breached. The old caretaker I had been assigned came to fetch me. He was ranting about demons and getting to safety.

I knew about demons, of course. The invaders, the greatest threat to our world. But we had fortress cities and magical barriers to keep the threat at bay. The demons were supposed to be handled.

Except they weren’t. The demon shooting flames at our guards made that abundantly clear.

There was a surge of mana behind me. I whirled around, spinning up my technique to prepare for a spell. A wild-looking man was rushing towards me. I needed to respond, but my shaking hands refused to cooperate. This wasn’t a demon. It was a human.

I fell to my knees, clinging to my mana accumulation technique for comfort, and then —

I gasped awake, just in time to see the many tools of the station pull away from me. My head was ringing something fierce as fits of memories still struggled to push their way to the front of my mind.

I groaned and shifted my shoulders, relieved to note that my back wasn’t aching as much as it usually did. Seriously, what was the point of having breasts? The stupid things were only good for ruining my spine. My hands moved automatically to readjust the neckline of the one good dress I still owned and wore everywhere.

I froze.

I didn’t wear dresses.

And I definitely didn’t have breasts to worry about.

These were facts, no matter how much my jumbled brain insisted otherwise.

I put my elbows on my knees, buried my face in my hands, and just focused on breathing. I tried to push away every thought other than how my body felt. The movement of my muscles. The sensation of my clothes against my skin. The pounding of my heartbeat.

Gradually, I settled back into my own mind. Flashes of being the female mage still cropped up every so often, but I felt mostly anchored in reality again.

“I need to find a way to deal with this,” I said out loud. “Why didn’t I ask Bronwynn for advice on how to deal with this? I’m a bloody idiot. Who asks about why demons don’t commit rape instead of useful information?!”

I let the rage take me. It was a far easier thing to deal with than my fracturing identity.

Frankly, I didn’t know how many more absorptions I could handle before they did irreparable damage to my head. More importantly, if absorbing a greater soul messed me up this much, what would happen if I ever managed to get my hands on a superior one? Would I lose all sense of my identity and just become the person I had taken the soul from?

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I didn’t like the idea, especially since it bore a scary resemblance to what had happened with me and Hayden. In fact, what guarantee did I have that I wasn’t actually Hayden, just mind shattered and altered by the process of induction into the legion?

I knew nothing about that induction process. Did it involve souls? Was ‘I’ a soul used during Hayden’s induction? Had my memories been shoved into a sixteen-year-old, and then subsequently consumed him? What did that mean for my soul? Whose soul was even having these thoughts?

Who was I?

I felt like I was going to puke. Unknowingly, I had bent over so far that my head was nearly between my knees.

I tried to focus on breathing again. Just a deep breath in, then a deep breath out. A calming cycle that would help me maintain a grip and not break down into teeny tiny little freak-out pieces.

It didn’t work as well as I might have hoped, but it did help me push away all my doubts. I put them in a drawer deep inside my mind, stuffing them back in each time they tried to tumble out.

There wasn’t time for breakdowns. I was only halfway through my task. Now that I’d claimed my kill and paid my dues, I needed to learn how to use the technique I’d absorbed.

Getting started was challenging, but only because I kept having to stop and disentangle Clarinette’s sense of self from my own. Once I managed that, at least most of the way, sinking into the oddly meditative mindset was easy.

In a way, the technique was similar to what I was doing already. I was used to drawing on the mana in my environment and channeling it through my bloodstream with the Body Strengthening technique. Once gathered in my heart, mana would spin for a few cycles, becoming somehow more ‘mine.’ Then I could direct it to the right destination for my current needs.

The accumulation technique I absorbed from Clarinette was based on this foundation, with one key difference. I still drew in the mana and sent it through my blood to form a spinning cyclone in my heart. But once the mana was there, I needed to keep it trapped instead of spreading it to my muscles. To do this, I had to purify the mana and then change its ‘state.’

For a beginner, this would be hellishly difficult. The user had to learn not only how to manipulate mana, but also how to exert enough will to alter it.

The first step was what Clarinette had struggled with at the onset, until her impatient mother lost it and forced the whole process for her. That force had given Clarinette a mana core that barely felt like hers, and which was cracked to boot. Thankfully, the absorption of all these experiences meant I would never need to fear such difficulties.

The station’s space was ridiculously thick with mana. Gathering heaps of it into my chest took trivial effort. The spiral fought to spread and escape the confines of my heart, but I kept it contained with contemptuous ease. All thanks to my training. Clarinette’s training.

Soon, the spin of the mystical force shifted. In the center of the spiral, motes began to change from something like water or vapor to a solid. Bit by bit, those solid specks stuck together, growing larger until a polished marble of mana sat within my heart.

Well, ‘within’ was a bit of a misnomer. Mana wasn’t a physical force. It flowed all throughout the earth, permeating every element and substance. Even the prevalent method of using one’s own bloodstream to channel it was technically superfluous. It was simply what came naturally to most mortal species.

Linguistic issues aside, I now had a pearl of mana that overlapped with the same physical space as my heart. The pearl was rather small, barely the size of a marble, but it was there.

Better still, Clarinette’s memories had allowed me to form that pearl out of incredibly pure mana, something that a beginner would find extremely challenging. So instead of having to purify my core further, all I had to focus on was growing it and adding more layers to it.

‘Purity’ of mana was a funny topic though. Other than elementalists who were focusing on a particular element, most mages just collected all mana in the environment around them. This left it ‘tinged’ by the elements floating around, so the mages had to purify the mana further by painting it in their own ‘hue.’

Not only was my mana pearl fairly pure already, but the station’s mana came pre-painted with the red tinge of the Abyss’s influence. Apparently, this was exactly the hue my internal mana wanted to be.

The implications of this would have worried me if I wasn’t already set on becoming a demon.

Just in case, and with rising hope, I peeked at my ascension progress. To my great disappointment, it hadn’t even budged from one percent. There went my dream of progression through ascension without paying souls.

Still, the accumulation technique wasn’t pointless. I could already feel the benefits. Mana was now always streaming passively into my body, without me having to do a thing. None of it streamed into my core, but it did slowly ‘fill up’ my system, seeping into my muscles, bones, and even skin. This constant presence of mana would nourish my body and, presumably, my soul.

Of course, the amount of mana circulating through my system could only ever be equal to the density of my mana core. In a few days, this process would hit a hard limit, and I would need to significantly increase my mana core density to kickstart it again.

For lower ranked mages, the benefits of this effort honestly weren’t all that big.

My freshly created core meant I could now count myself an ‘apprentice’ mage. I could hope to see marginal improvements to my endurance, and that was about it.

When an apprentice progressed to the official ‘mage’ rank, their body grew slightly tougher, and their soul was ‘enriched.’ This trend continued until a mage hit five layers and graduated to ‘Grand Mage’. Only then would they see true improvements in the condition of their body and attain a lengthened lifespan.

This was all mostly irrelevant to me. It was a small relief to know that I could theoretically extend my lifespan with mana and buy myself more time to ascend, but I didn’t think I would live all that long if I withdrew my focus from acquiring souls. Besides, once I was a demon, I’d be effectively immortal anyway.

For regular humans though? Definitely the biggest appeal of any mana practitioner path.

What I didn’t understand was why strong mana practitioners turned into stronger demons. Was it just the density of their mana? Was it their ‘greater’ souls? If the latter, would a non-mana-practicing mortal born with a powerful soul turn into a stronger demon than an average mana practitioner?

It was a fascinating train of thought. But if I didn’t have time for breakdowns, I definitely didn’t have time for deep inner philosophical debates. My survival was on a deadline. So, after limbering up a little from my long sojourn in the torture chair, I left the station and headed out into the city.

I had only two days to prepare before my masters pushed me deeper into the kingdom.