The only good thing I could say was that my soul was finally, fully me. All the rough patches, all the obviously tacked-on bits, all the scarring where one soul transitioned into another, were gone.
Left behind was a figure that looked fully like Hayden, with eyes that betrayed the illusion of youthfulness. These eyes were past ‘weary’ or ‘morose’ or other such superficial emotions. They looked like the eyes of the dead and damned, so thoroughly bereft of light and joy that a shudder passed through me.
I grappled with that for several long moments, trying to reassure myself that I could feel more than agony and anguish. I was happy to see everyone had made it out of that chaotic battle, right? I enjoyed spending time with Mia, Glaustro, and Bronwynn, didn’t I?
Some positive emotions stirred weakly inside my chest, but no sooner had they begun to surface than they were dragged back down into the tar of my hopelessness and hatred, all aimed squarely at myself.
Then Glaustro’s words flashed through my mind. The desire not to fail him was enough to push me onwards.
Closing my metaphysical eyes, I took a few moments to focus on the feeling of my soul breathing mana in and out. It was odd. I had never felt the process so keenly before. My place within the tapestry of mana was laid bare, stripped of all the falsehoods and assumptions my mortal mind had conjured up. At the end of the day, I was nothing more than a bundle of the primordial substance. One bound and swaddled in flesh and blood, sure, but just part of the whole nonetheless.
My instincts, my soul, hated that.
They wanted individuality. They urged me to cut myself off, rejecting the universe’s demands that I grow, then wither, then dissolve back into it. The Abyss agreed, muttering in my ears that I belonged to it, that my soul would be caught and preserved, if only I would let myself slip into it fully. The cord connecting my soul to the plane around me pulsed. It lulled me deeper into meditation, but also closer to that tar pit of emotion I had barely climbed out of.
I wrenched myself away and forced my ‘sight’ back on, taking in my soul anew.
It really was a mess.
With no one to keep them in check, the emerald flames had seen fit to spread further. A whole patch of my chest was a thickened jungle of green fire, much harder to see through than the rest of my soul. Thankfully, the flames had not yet spread to my core, though a few licks of the scarring had gotten perilously close.
That wasn’t the worst of the damage, though.
That dubious honor belonged to the deep, scarlet scars that ran all the way from my left hand to my right hip, where the jinn’s soul had torn its way through me. While the emerald flames seemed to purify whatever they touched, the crimson scars were jagged and angry, reflecting the defiance of the jinn soul whose death throes had created them.
But their scarlet color wasn’t the mark of the jinn. Instinctively, I knew the Abyss had generously offered up its own energy to bring me back to health. Those crimson scars were filled to the brim with the purest energy the Abyss could offer. All I had to do was tug on the well of power hidden in them, and my ascension would kick off then and there.
As if the emerald flames and crimson scars weren’t enough, my soul bore the mark of one other ‘intruder.’ A patch of darkness had sent tendrils throughout my body, dimming the basic red of the Abyss.
Perhaps ‘intruder’ was a bit of a misnomer. The darkness did pulse with the same energy as the rest of the Abyssal plane. But whereas the red color represented the Abyss’s purest lifeblood, the darkness reeked of despair, self-hatred, and a thousand other types of misery. A part of me, the part that was closest in nature to the Abyss, easily recognized the darkness for what it was.
Emotions. Or, more precisely, the primary emotion that had latched on to me.
I knew every demon had an emotion that defined them, that drove them, that reflected some fundamental part of who they were. It wasn’t like the demons bothered to hide that, though few were willing to admit which emotion was theirs.
Well, I was on the verge of finding mine before I even ascended. I must have pushed much further than I thought with my soul offerings. And I hated it, because the emotion showed me exactly who and what I was.
I was also not ready to handle this particular aspect of demonhood. After all, my first encounter with Abyssal emotions had left me a mindless doll drowning in my own mind. Now, even the relatively small patch of grasping darkness that stained my soul was enough to make my breathing pick up. The longer I looked, the closer I got to a full-blown hyperventilating panic attack.
Tearing my focus away was a struggle, but I managed it in favor of finally taking in my mana core. Surprisingly, the situation there was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.
Someway, somehow, the area around my core was untouched by the devastation that pockmarked my soul. Even the soul matter there was still a healthy, softly glowing red, see-through and delicate like it always had been.
Better still, my mana was straining against the final layer that lay between me and turning into an Archmage. Honestly, that came as a bit of a shock. I knew I had stepped into the final layer some time ago, but considering what little focus I had given to my mana accumulation recently, I genuinely thought I would have fallen short.
I had a feeling I could thank what happened just before my breakdown for the power boost. When I killed that jinn, my sword had done more than just claim the soul. I had felt some of the jinn’s power get ripped away and shoved into me, and I could only be thankful that the process hadn’t done more damage to my own soul.
It remained to be seen what it had done to my core, however.
Gingerly, I approached the mystical organ with my consciousness, then dove in for a closer look. To my relief, I saw that the passageways and loops of mana I had forged were still in place, and more solid than ever. The growth in my mana capacity had only reinforced my core.
“Are you ready?”
A voice broke through my meditation, managing to reach me even as I drifted in the deepest depths of my being. Recognizing Glaustro as the speaker, I managed to nod my head without losing focus.
“Good. I want you to relax. Mia can help you get started, but only if you let her. This wasn’t a risk when you were out of it, but if you try to resist now, things will go badly. We are about to begin.”
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His warning delivered, Glaustro fell silent.
I felt the shift immediately.
Even before, the concentration of mana within the matrix set up for my Archmage advancement was considerable. Glaustro must have activated it well and properly now, though, because that concentration shot up, faster and faster with no sign of slowing down.
My soul was no longer gently communing with the mana in my surroundings. It was desperately gulping the mystical substance down as it pushed in around me, trying to force its way in. I didn’t think you could outright drown in mana, but as the concentration of it continued to climb, I felt my lungs struggling to draw and expel air that was many times heavier and thicker than it ought to be.
A flutter of my eyes briefly exposed me to the outside world, and I saw a thick mist of mana obscuring everything. It swirled around me, slowly condensing into droplets in midair before falling down to pass through my clothing and stick to my skin, worming its way inside.
I tried to maintain my calm, to somehow offset the influx of mana, but no matter what I tried, I failed. Keeping the mana out of my body was a futile endeavor, as its sheer volume and weight crushed my defenses. Trying to shunt it into my core simply strained the organ, threatening to crack it. Even channeling it through my body and outside again failed, because I couldn’t control the volume of mana entering me.
Then I became aware of a back pressing against mine, and a string of mana slipped into me alongside the untamed vortex of power.
I almost reflexively squashed it. Letting someone slip their mana into your body was a surefire way to place yourself at their mercy. A single application of power at the right spot, and there would be nothing I could do to save myself from the death that would shortly follow.
I remembered Glaustro’s warning, though. This wasn’t just some random attack while I was trying to meditate inside a mana storm. This was Mia’s mana, and she wasn’t there to hurt me.
Even if it went against just about every instinct I had, I forced myself to open the door to Mia’s mana.
The cat girl expertly allowed the wild mana of the Abyss to whisk hers along. The stream led her directly to my core, where the untamed mana slammed into my own and bounced off to wreak havoc inside my body.
Unlike that stream of devastation, however, Mia moved her mana purposefully. She attached her mana lightly to the surface of my core, captured a wisp of my mana, and then began to twist it into shapes that soon started to look familiar.
She must have been able to examine my core in great detail when I was little more than a mindless husk, because as I watched, the cat girl tried to imitate the internal structure of my core and impose it on its surroundings. But she wasn’t just going against the wild mana. Instead, she treated it as part of the process, shifting parts of its streams in ways that strengthened the mana structure she was helping me build.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to catch on, but when I finally did, I knew exactly what I needed to do next.
I didn’t pause to confirm with her. Instead, I strengthened my grasp on my mana, then started guiding it along to copy her work. From the beginning, I was able to move with far more speed and ease than she could handle. She was doing her best, of course, but nudging someone else’s mana along would never be as simple as working with your own.
For several more minutes, I suffered and worked while Mia’s presence hovered around, overseeing my efforts. When she was sure I had it, she retreated, withdrawing her mana and consciousness from my body.
I missed her immediately.
There was something reassuring about having her there. She was like my very own safety blanket, protecting me from the darkness and whatever other monsters lurked inside my soul, waiting for me to peek my toes over the edge of the bed.
I didn’t let myself spiral again, though. Instead, I focused on replicating my core’s internal structure throughout my body, using my mana to shape the tunnels and paths that the world’s mana, drawn in by the matrix, relentlessly surged through.
I was, quite literally, turning my whole body into a mana core. My own mana was the framework, and the mana supplied by the matrix became the streams of power that shuddered through the passages.
To put it lightly, this was a struggle.
The mana really didn’t like being corralled. It didn’t like the constant looping I forced it into, which condensed it and tamed it until it was thicker than molasses and moved somewhat according to my desires. Several times, the press of power cracked or shattered pieces of my framework, but I kept patching them up.
I reveled in the sight of the thickening mana as it pressed down on my own. The pressure strengthened the structure I was building, condensing it until it was strong and stable enough to support my ongoing metamorphosis.
Soon, I was on the verge of completing one giant, blown-out core ‘layer’ that encompassed the entirety of my physical form. When the final few parts fell into place, I formed a massive core membrane to seal everything off, superimposing it onto my skin.
There was a moment of perfect stillness, and then the flow of mana intensified several times over.
A truly colossal amount of mana crashed through me, but this time, it struggled to fill up the new layer. The newly built mana structure in my body devoured it all, strengthening exponentially. It took several minutes for a trickle of mana to finally make it past the outermost reaches of my body and begin to fill the channel I had built, streaming towards my core.
The entire manner in which my body drew and channeled mana had been altered significantly, yet the process felt easier and more natural than ever, For a moment, I just enjoyed it, relishing the smooth flow of mana.
Things weren’t quite done yet, though.
All of the mana crushed into the innermost part of my core, the nucleus I had based my expansion on, and strengthened it. I thought things would end there, when my original core was too full to accept any more mana or strengthening, yet the core continued to suck down the mystical substance like there was no tomorrow.
A wave of soothing coolness swept through me, and my attention switched from my core to my soul.
Immediately, I knew where all the mana was going.
Waves of the world’s mana washed into my soul, nourishing it and altering it in a fundamental way different from anything I had experienced before. My soul lost its see-through, flimsy nature, and I watched with bated breath as a crystalline glow spread out from within my innermost being, painting my soul in its luster. A qualitative change swept through me. I could literally feel the core of my soul toughen, grow, and become something far more enduring.
In that moment, I understood why there was such a big divide between Archmage and all the levels leading up to it. Before Archmage, any strengthening a mage’s soul underwent was simply a side effect. Now, however? Now, I was using mana to nourish my soul directly, uplifting my very existence itself.
Of course, things rarely went so well for me.
Even as I watched my soul’s texture change to something like crystal, the spread of the advancement finally encountered my scarring. The pain was as immediate as it was debilitating. It felt like a piece of my soul cracked, was ground to powder, and then reformed, again and again and again.
I could barely spare enough attention to see the crystalline transformation slowly encroach onto the scarred, opaque segments of my soul. The scars put up a fight. They refused to take on the same fluid appearance as the rest of my uplifted soul.
Still, the advancement was relentless. The scarred area stayed opaque, but ever so slowly, it became crystalline, too.
I wish I could say I passed out and woke up when it was all over, refreshed and in control. Unfortunately, there was something about the pain that kept me both perfectly conscious and keenly aware of the passage of time.
All told, it took about four hours for the change to slowly sweep through my soul, and most of that time was wasted on the scarred segments. By contrast, the advancement swept through the undamaged parts of me in minutes, with only a soothing coolness to herald the change.
When all was said and done, I opened my eyes with a whimper, feeling both dazed and more awake than I was in… well, ever.
Every single thought passed through my mind at lighting speed. My senses picked out the slightest variables in my surroundings. My roiling emotions also seemed easier to bear. The darkness in my chest stirred, promising sweet oblivion, but I didn’t feel as tempted to plunge right into it.
Even better, when I opened my eyes and found myself gazing up at three worried faces, there was nothing to smother the flash of happy affection that shot through me, or the brief surge of embarrassment and… something else I experienced when I realized my head was in Mia’s lap.
The darkness rose up again and tried to grasp for my heart. I squished it back down instantly.
And when Glaustro grinned at me, I grinned right back.
“Welcome back, Hayden,” he said.
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