Chapter 346. Breakthrough (Patreon)

The scream resounded in the woman’s head, piercing and pained. Ian could almost hear it physically. Nothing was forcing him to listen to the woman’s thoughts, but he wanted to know what his soul manipulation felt like. It would help him understand what parts of it would go unnoticed–and what couldn’t be ignored.

In this case, only fully severing the soul evoked a response.

Ian paused the experiment. His ethereal tendrils swiftly re-established a few connections between the woman’s body and soul. He stopped using his Remorse to read the woman’s thoughts.

With his hands still planted on the woman’s torso, he considered his next steps. Eury, he asked via quantum channel, is there still an end arrow connecting you and the experimental subject?

No. It’s gone.

Ian wasn’t surprised, but he had been hoping that careful and slow un-anchoring of the soul would allow for End bindings to persist when it was fully untethered. Ian wished he could run his experiments in Euryphel’s Regret scenarios, but he required more than a minute to work with. He could call on Eury if he wanted to finesse a certain maneuver, but he wasn’t at that point yet.

It’s a bit ironic, isn’t it? Ian thought, this time to Maria. She wasn’t with him in the experiment room–as far as Ian knew, she was still with Kaiwen. Even though the women had spoken a few times using the transmission artifact, they had a lot to catch up on.

What specifically? she replied.

To win the war against you, I developed a technique to sever End bindings. I used necromancy to effectively kill myself, albeit temporarily.

The memory is vivid in my mind, she said, her thoughts slightly caustic. My son was your first successful experiment, after all.

Well… now I need to find a way to separate the soul without destroying the bindings of fate.

I think there’s a better way to think about this than simply ‘ironic.’ You’re learning more about the limits of necromancy, limits you’d find difficult to plumb while in Eternity. You may be talented at necromancy, Ian–that’s obvious to everyone around you–but you’re still inexperienced, at least when it comes to manipulating embodied souls directly.

An opportunity indeed, he thought, suddenly thinking of the Hall of Ascension. He didn’t personally know of any necromancers among the Hall’s ranks, which was interesting considering that Death was an affinity that could most benefit from descending to conduct ascendant trials.

Eternity had mortals with pliable souls, but they weren’t practitioners. The only way to find mortal practitioners–outside of using artifacts like the one that had turned the black faction against Achemiss–was to descend.

Therefore, while most practitioners could reach the peak of mastery wholly within the confines of Eternity, this wasn’t the case for Death–and Life, based on Ian’s limited understanding of how Life practitioners could influence souls.

This opportunity may never come again, he thought, his fingers cold against the feverish heat of the unnamed experimental subject’s body. Sweat fell down her exposed back in rivulets, tracing the paths of her scars. If I never descend–either by joining the Hall of Ascension or using another return beacon–I’ll never again have the chance to freely manipulate practitioner souls.

The realization was like a cold vise, squeezing guilt into submission. These experiments were meaningful and necessary–not just to deal with Achemiss, but also to further his stalled practice of Death.

He almost recoiled at the thoughts. Really, dangerous human experimentation is necessary to further my practice? Those were the thoughts of someone like Ancient Ash, someone who valued his personal progress over all else. Spending time surrounded by immortal ascendants had clearly impacted his perspective.

What will I be like in a thousand years, I wonder?

Ian wondered if Beginning might be the key to protecting his mind from becoming detached and calloused. Beginning was known for enhancing the mind and allowing it to do intensive calculations and analyses, but Ian knew more was possible at higher levels of affinity. He considered the oldest ascendant that he knew in Eternity, Ascendant Holiday. The man was a bit unhinged, but he wasn’t a cold monster, as far as Ian could tell.

What stood out to him, thinking back, was how he had treated Maria when she was still human. Holiday had known that Maria’s fate was all but hopeless but had still given her well-meaning advice.

Ian didn’t even want to think about how Ash would have treated Maria. Probably with a lot of excitement. He’d have almost certainly experimented on her since she was an incredibly rare mortal practitioner with an unprotected soul.

A more interesting case was Karanos. The man was a genius, his mind powerful enough that he could masquerade as a Beginning practitioner. But that massive intellect hadn’t saved him from becoming callous toward mortals.

Karanos had reneged against a practitioner-elitist regime back on his home world. He was polite to mortals in Eternity. But something was missing. Even after Karanos accepted that Ian and Maria weren’t to blame for Ari’s demise, he had incessantly bullied her.

What had he said? Ian wondered, thinking back. His Beginning affinity pulled up the memories. They had been following Karanos to the edge of Eternity, where they eventually found Floria’s lifeless plane. Karanos had been moving too quickly for Maria to keep up, saying that the fault was with Maria for choosing to accompany them. When Ian confronted him and asked where else Maria would have gone, Karanos’s words had been casually cruel. They rang crisply in Ian’s head.

“The grave? Not my concern. It’s unlikely she’ll survive more than a few days. Why suffer when you can go out peacefully?”

The lack of empathy, Ian thought, is probably a defense mechanism. He could understand it, but didn’t want that for himself. He didn’t want to stop caring.

His eyes fell to the calluses on his experimental subject’s hands. They protected her hands from a rough existence, but something was lost. Ian couldn’t call those fingers beautiful, and he knew they would be less sensitive than less-calloused fingers like his own.

It wasn’t a perfect analogy. There was nothing wrong with calloused hands–Ian didn’t particularly care. It did capture an idea of an innately beautiful mind, one that could empathize and care for others, one full of hopes and dreams… becoming cold and closed-off, protecting itself from the pain that accompanied such vulnerability.

Ian recognized that such mental self-defense was almost necessary for ascendants to remain sane. But what if Beginning could serve as a shield, like a pair of gloves in the hand analogy?

Ian felt his heart racing as the insight crystallized. He breathed deeply in and out. A breakthrough, he thought, his eyes wide. He hadn’t expected his Beginning to noticeably advance anytime soon, but he wasn’t going to complain.

I suppose I still am within the initial five-year period of rapid growth after awakening an affinity, Ian thought wryly.

His Beginning affinity couldn’t have increased by too much, but Ian’s thoughts came slightly smoother and easier. It wasn’t much, but the fact that the change was noticeable at all spoke to at least a two or three percent increase in the affinity.

His eyes locked onto the unnamed woman with renewed intensity.

Eury, can you re-establish fate with the woman? Ian didn’t know the specifics behind doing so, but knew it was possible, especially within Euryphel’s own palace. As a bare minimum, it required intentionality on Euryphel’s part.

Already done, Euryphel replied.

Ian smiled softly. Inhaling deeply, he took his hands from the woman, flexed them, then placed them back on her skin, pressing with his fingertips. Ethereal energy snaked from his digits and into the woman.

He re-initiated mental contact. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t what he found. Silence. She was silent. Petrified, but adamant, unbreaking. She didn’t know what Ian had done to her, and her body instinctively feared the soul-searing agony he’d inflicted, but she refused to so much as mentally whimper.

Ian could appreciate her tenacity. Whatever her past was, it must have been brutal to make her so capable at stomaching torture. As his ethereal tendrils caressed the ethereal suspension cradling the woman’s soul, he teased at the soul itself. When disembodied, souls were like watery orbs stained by ink. Embodied, they transformed, becoming organic and spreading throughout the host like a mix between root and web. Only with the fiery crown from Maria’s regalia did this appearance become apparent. Without it, the soul appeared to Ian’s soul sight as a tightly wound coil.

Sans Maria, Ian didn’t have the ability to visually see the embodied soul, but he didn’t need it. What he cared about was the coiled form of the soul… the essence of the person. As he teased the soul’s outermost coil apart, Ian monitored the woman’s thoughts. She seemed unaware of his intrusion. Good. The soul was still there, after all. It’s not like he’d cut part of it off.

Ian let his instincts guide him as he teased the soul apart. Suddenly, he was assaulted by a foreign memory, entering his mind as fragmented sensation and emotion. He wasn’t in her soul, where the memories would spill forth like a flood around a jungle of metaphorical constructions. From handling her soul, he was just dealing with a single memory.

As a novice necromancer, he’d struggled to comprehend anything. After training with Soolemar, he’d become skilled at understanding the crux of another soul’s memory, though he never understood all the details. Now he processed the unnamed woman’s memory with greater ease than he ever expected, his Beginning affinity facilitating its ingestion and his training with Remorse helping him to process it.

There was fire, everywhere. Blistering and horrible, toxic fumes filling the air. Ian saw the world from a full-face mask, one rugged enough to withstand the flames but whose intention was to provide fresh oxygen and filter out the fumes.

Ian didn’t know where this was, but the crumbling infrastructure of the building revealed a smoke-filled sky and a neighborhood that looked like it had been hit by a natural disaster.

In the memory, Ian strode forward with hurried purpose. He blasted various pieces of furniture with flame and collapsed them with thick, flame-proof boots. He growled and ascended to the second floor, boosting his steps with more flame. He burst down the door with an arm jab and continued to a twin bed. Beginning allowed Ian to take in details that had possibly been lost on the unnamed woman as she experienced the memories firsthand. The room was filled with posters of children’s cartoons, the ceiling covered in a galaxy of glowing stars. Not even powered by an array–they were made of some pale, naturally fluorescing material. They glowed gently since the room wasn’t yet on fire and the room was dark, the lacy pink curtains drawn.

Ian blasted the bed with flames, but this time he was met with more than just the screaming of the cheap furniture breaking. He rushed forward and kicked the bed aside, revealing two things. The first was a black safe, rugged and locked by a simple-looking circle. Ian knew that beneath the surface was likely a complex array.

Next to the safe was a burning girl, curled up on herself. The flames of a fairly strong fire elementalist weren’t just normal fire. They licked around the girl, hungry and unceasing.

Ian felt sick, a sense of dizzy dissociation coming over him. And then he stepped forward and blasted the girl’s head with fire, scorching her skin and boiling her brain in equal measure. He then sat down and fiddled with the safe. He sat on the girl’s body, using it as a cushion, uncaring of the fire that still charred her corpse.

Seconds later, he tsked and grabbed the safe, hoisting it awkwardly. He walked to the window and smashed the glass with a well-placed kick, then burnt the wall around it to widen the exit. He stepped onto the roof and looked behind. The girl’s boiled eyeballs stared back.

He shuddered.

The memory ended.