Chapter 211: It’s totally legally binding (Patreon)

Once he calmed down, Calvin reneged on the whole ‘eating him alive’ plan and simply killed Carem, cutting off his head, removing his heart and lobotomizing him before putting his body on ice.

The reasoning was such: It takes at least a month to eat a human body the old fashioned way. That was an extra month he wouldn’t have his wife back, and during that time, Kala would be sitting around in the Black Room, going crazy from isolation.

That was also an extra month Carem could use to devise some kind of escape.

It would take a revenge-blinded idiot to not see the problems inherent, and Calvin was able to get his rationality back after only the second finger.

So he killed Carem and iced the body to use with Consume once he got a real body back. His Gift of Tongues mutation worked, but Calvin didn’t want to use Consume on Carem only to discover that a Chained Spirit couldn’t get another one.

Once that was taken care of, Calvin had his legion of Nadias ‘sniff out’ Carem moles across the continent, identifying anyone whose mind was a copy of the body hopping menace.

There were more of them than Calvin had thought, but he never killed them before they revealed themselves somehow, given his natural suspicion of Nadia’s honesty.

“There’s one,” Nadia said, pointing out a little old lady selling fried sliver on the side of the street, and Calvin marked her for further investigation.

Now that she had her Bent back, Nadia was tremendously dangerous, especially in multiples, since that allowed her to combine her mental Guar-power, linking her minds together in a way that seemed to be either unique to her as a Chained Spirit, or an Ilethan royal scion. 

She wasn’t spilling the beans.

Stringing her multiple minds together had made her strong enough to treat someone with more than a hundred Mind like a child. Quantity over quality, at this point.

Death by packing peanuts.

After the initial purge, Calvin summoned her sparingly and tried to keep her total number to three or below. His mental defenses were much, much stronger than when he’d first met her, but he doubted he could resist more than a handful of Nadias at a time.

If she wanted to put a Leash on you, it would have been when there were thousands of her.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Nadia was hard to figure out. Had she simply decided she liked him enough not to stab him in the back, or was she playing the long con? If she was playing the long con, what opportunity could she be waiting for that was better than when she was spread all across the world in staggering numbers, practically unchecked?

She could have had hundreds of them taking advantage to the situation and Calvin wouldn’t have had any idea what she was up to. It was a drop in the bucket.

And yet…nothing.

Here he was, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m probably doing more damage to myself just by worrying about it.

He’d deal with it, if and when it came.

Or, you know, suffer eternally as a crazy witch’s plaything. However it goes.

I feel sorry for anyone who thinks they can toy with me.

I guess you’ve got the track record to back that one up.

The work on the reviving machine went by fast. It was, after all, based on something he’d already made, and the only tricky part was making sure it was capable of using Calvin’s Blade Body mutation – he had a barrel of the stuff – to copy a Chained spirit’s physical blueprint perfectly.

It couldn’t break people down in a fraction of a second, it had to be much faster than that. Near instantaneous. Faster than the System could react and dissolve the Chained Spirit due to lethal damage.

When it was complete, the machine took up a huge portion of the third floor, a massive steel cylinder with a vault-like door that closed and locked behind the subject, so that the entire interior was a perfectly uniform series of emitters.

Calvin had raised the size, accuracy, and durability of his original designs, in order to be absolutely sure nothing went wrong. The amount of Nem was staggering, but he could afford it, and the price of every other material was completely offset by undifferentiated matter reserves the Knick knacks piped in as they essentially printed the thing.

Scarier when you’re doing it to yourself, isn’t it? Elliot goaded him.

Bah, Calvin scoffed, taking off his clothes and stepping into the chamber, standing on the little circle in the center. Ella locked the door behind him.

“Alright, go for it!” Calvin shouted.

Hey, are you sure this is gonna be-

***The Black Room***

The Black Room shuddered.

“What was that?” Elliot demanded, glancing around.

“From the chained spirit reviving machine?” Calvin asked. Need a better name for it.

“But movement in here means – oh, crap! –“

The Black room bucked underneath them, violently.

“Whoah, what the Abyss?” Nadia asked, sitting up, blinking groggily. Her next question was lost in the chaos as the black rooms began to toss up and down, side to side, like a toddler shaking a box with ants in it.

Calvin watched Nadia’s room peel away from theirs in the confusion, the invisible division between them returning to black walls.

“What’s going on!?” Calvin asked over the din, holding onto the table secured to the floor in a desperate attempt to keep his balance.

“Well, the good news is, I think our souls are getting shuffled around thanks to your machine, which means there’s a chance this could work! The bad news is, Idunno what’s gonna happen next!” Elliot shouted.

“I’ll take it,” Calvin said, giving Elliot a thumbs up. Then the floor jumped up and the table smacked him in the chin an instant before the entire room flipped long-ways, and Calvin found himself clinging to the table for dear life as empty beer bottles and a ‘toaster’ swooped down from Elliot’s kitchen, nearly nailing him in the head.

“I would’ve cleaned up!” Elliot shouted apologetically, clinging to the bottom of his ‘computer’, his legs dangling in the air.

The Black Room then started shaking even more violently, like someone trying to dislodge something.

Me, perhaps? Taking a chance, Calvin let go of the table and hurtled down toward the back of the room, arms flailing as he tumbled toward the rear wall of the room. He tucked in his arms and legs and braces for impact, and….nothing.

Calvin opened his eyes to find himself flung out into the void. The only evidence he was spinning violently was the toaster that seemed to orbit him, drawn along in his flight out of the Black Room. There was no motion sickness, or disturbance in his inner ear.

He felt nothing.

There was a massive plane of steel above him, descending from above. It was angled with a razor sharp chisel edge, and it was coming down toward his head.

“Ack!” Calvin grabbed the toaster and threw it backward, towards the direction he felt like he’d come from, trying to use it to give himself just a little extra momentum in this world of emptiness.

The world-severing blade came down, inches away from his tucked in arms , the pressure of its passing sending him tumbling into the void.

Then…he hit something.

***Calvin***

Calvin’s eye’s flew open. He was staring at a series of metallic bumps arranged around him in a circle. He was standing in the center of some kind of bumpy metal cylinder, with blue glass laid into the floor beneath him, along with pinhole openings below him.

How did I get here? The last thing I remember is... What is the last thing I remember?

>>>Error<<<

Illegal soul call error, duplication forbidden. 

Correcting. Isolating soul and assigning to most suitable vessel.

Soul Isolated. 

Soul damaged, fragmented User consciousness. Damage tagged: ‘Doug’s Isekai Hero Summoning: Adaptive Problem Solving AI ™ Subroutine. ’  Begin repair from backup. 

Searching for Backup…>>Error, File not Found<<

Soul  I.D. Missing. Reading Soul Data.

Comparing to Database….No match found.

Comparing to Hard-Coded Entries…

File found.

Assigning I.D….Done

Welcome back, User 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-1. 

Do you wish to revert to the Hard-coded backup? You will lose 13,682 Kulestha Standard years of memory.

Y/N?

Do I want to lose my memories for the last thirteen thousand years and become someone else who’s apparently been hard coded into the System? Ummm….No.

Confirmed, Owner will continue to believe himself a pathetic homo sapiens with garbled memories and a split personality. I can’t say I approve of this choice.

Repair failure, reverting to most recent functional state.

Writing Soul Memories.

…What the hell was that abou-

In the middle of his thought, like day and night, Calvin suddenly understood where he was and what he was doing.

“Holy Guar shit, it worked!”

“I have conquered Death! Master Wizard!” Calvin shouted at the top of his lungs before moon-walking around the edge of the chamber.

That’s like, the starting line for all the best Master Wizards. Elliot said, I mean, I did it nearly a thousand years before you did. He sounded a little miffed.

Yeah, but I did it at nineteen. Oh yeah, is everyone here in one piece? Sound off!

I remain yours to command, Ravager. Kurawe said.

I felt like I was gonna puke. Let’s not do that again. Nadia’s voice echoed in his mind.

Calvin fist-pumped as the vault door of the chamber swung open.

Behind the door, Ella, Baroke and Goob watched in amazement as Calvin danced past them, grabbing new clothes and slipping them on.

“Did it work?” Baroke asked with a frown.

“The System told me my Chained Spirit had been removed because of an illegal soul call error?” Ella said. She held out her hand for a moment before shrugging and putting it back down.

“Nothing. I can’t summon him anymore.”

“You…brought yourself back to life?” Baroke asked. “How the Abyss do you get so lucky? I’ll bet my left nut against your entire kingdom there’s some kind of horrifying catch.”

“Nah,” Calvin said, ejecting one of his knives with Blade body and using it to cut his palm. “Totally alive again.” He held it out for Baroke to see.

Baroke broke into a giggling fit.

Calvin scowled and peered at the blood on his palm. A rich, velvety royal purple substance was trickling down his palm, sending icy panic down Calvin’s spine. 

“C’mon Goob, I’ve got some good ideas for things that could use some improvement around here.” Baroke said with a chuckle as he turned away. “Now that I own this place and all.”

“That bet isn’t legally binding!!” Calvin shouted after him, staunching the flow of…whatever…out of his hand. Baroke just waved as he left, his booming laughter echoing through Calvin’s tower.

“Here,” Ella said, handing Calvin a clean rag. “I’ve never even heard of a Chained Spirit becoming alive again. There’s never been anything like it.”

Calvin took the rag and wound it around his palm, grumbling as he glared after Baroke.

“Yeah, well, it’s not a perfect death cure. Only works on Bent contructs, and it can’t create duplicate souls.”

Calvin shielded his mind from Nadia. Although it could be used as a safety net.

“Wow, you smell really good,” Ella said, leaning in close and sniffing him.

“Um…” Calvin refocused his attention on the oversized Genosian woman. She was leaning in, her body tilted toward him, breath playing against his ears.

“Yeah, you smell different than before.” She said, giving him a few more experimental sniffs before grabbing his wounded hand and sniffing it.

“Wow.” She let his hand go and grinned at him. “Yep, that was it. You’re stuffed with sexy-smelling purple juice. I’m tempted to call this a benefit.”

“Gods,” Calvin said, holding his fingers to his neck. “I don’t even have a heartbeat.”

Calvin spotted Ella glancing at a bit of purple on her thumb.

“Don’t do it,” Calvin warned.

“Do what?” Ella asked, bringing her hand up to her mouth and licking the blood off with her inhumanly long tongue.

There was an immediate reaction.

“Ew,” Ella said, scrunching up her face. “It’s so bitter. Why would blood be bitter?” She immediately began trying to scrape it off of her tongue with her fingernails before finally grabbing a dirty rag rack from his workshop and dragging it across her tastebuds.

Alkaloids, probably?

“And that’s what you get for ingesting weird substances with unknown effects.”

Ella shook her head and shuddered, her face still scrunched up in displeasure.

“But it’s yours,” She said as if that explained everything. “I thought it would be fine.”

“That reasoning doesn’t hold up at all. Come on, we’ve gotta go bring Kala back to life, then we can stop Baroke from running this place into the ground.”

Ella nodded, following behind him as he made for the freezer.

When he got to the elevator, it gave a ding and opened up, revealing a young messanger of Gadveran descent. He was wearing the royal livery of Gadvera.

“Oh, there you are, I guess I’ll just do this here.” He put his foot in the door of the elevator and opened up the scroll on his hip.

“ Prince-consort, Marquis Calvin Gadsint, Your presence has been requested at a summit of nations concerning the recent destruction of Uleis by powers most foul, as well as to discuss the sexual assault of thousands of citizens of every nation by the omnipresent demon succubus. Steps must be taken to secure our borders against the demonic threat.”

“…I have it on good authority that most of them liked it.” Calvin said.

“The message has been delivered,” The messenger said with an expressionless face, handing Calvin the scroll, bowing, then taking his foot out of the elevator door, allowing it to close again.

Ding! 

“Well, now that’s on the agenda,” Calvin said with a sigh, pocketing the scroll. “At least I wasn’t still naked.”

“My ton is num” Ella said.

      Calvin Gadsint    

Body: 35   

Strength: 24   

Kinesthetics: 25   

Endurance: 24   

Mind: 45   

Intuition: 31  

 Stability: 42   

Will: 41      

 Bent: 47/42+5   Warp:  0/35               

Skills:    Stealth 10   Playboy 14   Old Salt 15   Sense-Grafting 20   Dupdomancy 20   Meditation 25   Chained Spirit 31   Calvinian Summoning 34   Your Princess is in Another   Castle 19   Beli Ma 25   Genosian Language 13   Shifting 16   Abyssal Alchemy 14   Drafting 19   Bent Manipulation 12   Trait Doctoring 20    

Race Change: Human -> Maculat Mulieres (Undead)

Things known about Maculat Mulieres: (Calvin’s Journal)

Blood is a rich, pleasing purple color, very bitter, with a strong numbing sensation. Smell is reported as being pleasant.  May possibly cause compulsive behavior.