Chapter 159: Infant Spirit
He didn’t try to force a complex adult elemental blueprint onto the beast.
He learned from his previous forty-five failures. Instead of building a fully matured hazard like Sparky, Klaus used a highly delicate approach.
He pushed a concentrated needle of pure, white Soul Mana into the core of the Frost-Stalker’s soul.
With godlike authority, he shaved away the feral violent memories of the beast... the hunting instincts, the hunger, the memories of blood and flesh until nothing remained but a clean unblemished blank slate of pure spiritual energy.
Next came the elemental infusion...
Klaus tapped into the ambient atmosphere rushing past the moving carriage.
He gathered the static electricity created by the friction of the wind and the snowstorm, weaving it directly into the blank soul slate.
He forced his white Soul Mana to act as a stabilizing loom, threading the raw blue atmospheric lightning into the spiritual matrix, binding the element directly to the soul wall.
VWOOM...
In his palms, the dark-blue beast soul began to violently pulse.
The coarse aura smoothed out, turning into a brilliant, luminescent, crystal-clear orb of pure blue lightning.
Bzzt!
A sharp cheerful spark of high-voltage blue plasma arced between Klaus’s fingers.
Klaus opened his eyes, letting out a long, heavy breath of air that plumed into a thick cloud of white steam.
The process was finally complete.
Klaus opened his palms. Floating three inches above his hands was a tiny, glowing, brilliant blue spirit.
It wasn’t a physical, humanoid chibi like Sparky or Valeria... it was an infant spirit core.
A blinking luminescent sphere of blue lightning, roughly the size of an apple, pulsing with an energetic flickering aura.
It possessed a mind of its own, though it wasn’t complex. It was innocent, instinctual, and purely emotional, behaving almost identically to how Sparky had existed when Klaus had met her.
Despite being an infant, the density of the lightning mana packed inside its core placed its power firmly at Tier 2.
Bzzt! Bzzzt!
The tiny blue spirit fuzzed excitedly in the air. It circled around Klaus’s wrists, nuzzling its warm glowing form against his broad knuckles.
It didn’t possess speech, but through the direct spiritual link established during its creation, a soft innocent impressionable feeling resonated directly into Klaus’s mind.
’...Mother...? ...Creator...?’
Klaus stared at the tiny, flickering ball of blue lightning. A genuine warm smile broke across his exhausted handsome face.
"Yeah," Klaus murmured softly, reaching out his index finger to gently tap the side of the sphere. "Hey there, little guy."
The spirit was surprisingly warm to the touch, like a smooth, heated crystal. It didn’t blast him with aggressive static or throw a high-voltage tantrum like Sparky would have done.
It simply hummed happily against his skin, pulsing with a bright joyful blue light.
CRACK-ZAP!
Sparky hovered over Klaus’s hand, her glowing blue eyes wide as she stared at the newly created spirit core.
She crossed her tiny arms, floating in circles around the blinking sphere, inspecting it with intense critical scrutiny.
"Hmph!" Sparky scoffed, though her tiny plasma wings buzzed with undeniable curiosity. "It’s small! And soft! It doesn’t even know how to compress its plasma properly! It’s completely unrefined!"
Despite her harsh words, Sparky reached out a tiny hand, poking the blue sphere.
The infant spirit blinked happily, buzzing a tiny spark back at her fingers.
Sparky’s face flushed slightly, and she secretly let out a tiny, amused giggle, gently batting the sphere back and forth like a ball with Valeria.
Klaus leaned his head back against the carriage roof, taking a deep restorative breath as his divine core slowly began to replenish his drained mental reserves.
’This is good...’ Klaus thought, watching the tiny spirit play with the two chibis. ’I finally have a spirit to give Tasha.’
With this infant lightning core bonded to her, Tasha’s Spirit Mana would have a proper permanent engine.
Her magic would no longer leak, her physical stats would be amplified, and she would actually have a fighting chance during the Royal Academy Entrance Exams.
However, as Klaus looked down at the playing spirit, his nature reasserted itself.
He couldn’t just walk into the cabin, hand her a god-tier infant spirit on a silver platter, and say ’Here you go, I made this for you.’
First of all, hand-delivering a custom-made spirit would raise a million dangerous questions about his true identity and capabilities.
Second, a spirit bond forged through effortless charity would carry zero weight.
A Spirit Mage needed to earn their bond through struggle, will, and emotional resonance... otherwise, the spirit wouldn’t respect her authority.
Klaus’s silver eyes narrowed as a sudden, brilliant idea flashed through his mind.
"Aha," Klaus smirked, a clever mischievous glint entering his eyes.
He looked over at Sparky, Valeria, and the tiny, buzzing blue spirit.
"Listen up, you three," Klaus said, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper. "I have a plan."
...
Tap! Tap!
A soft rhythmic tapping sound echoed against the side of the wooden cot inside the main cabin.
Tasha’s light blue eyelids fluttered open. Her mind was foggy, heavy with the deep, physical exhaustion of her recent battle.
She groggily sat up on the fur mattress, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.
Standing right beside the cot, looming over her in the dim, amber light of the cabin lantern, was Klaus.
Tasha’s breath caught slightly in her throat as her vision cleared.
Even in the shadowy cramped confines of a carriage cabin, wearing a simple dark shirt with his broad chest slightly exposed, Klaus looked ridiculously handsome.
His long luminescent silver hair fell over his broad shoulders like spun moonlight with his sharp chiseled features radiating an untouchable nobility.
’What kind of royal prince is he...?’ Tasha thought to herself, her cheeks flushing a faint subconscious pink as she stared at his silver hair. ’Even the highest dukes in the capital don’t look like this... I just want to run my fingers through—’
She violently cut the thought off with her face burning hotter as she realized where her tired mind was wandering.
She hurriedly shook her head, sitting up straight.
It was then she noticed the silence.
The heavy, rolling motion of the carriage had completely stopped. On the other side of the large mattress, Mirela and Anya were still fast asleep, breathing softly under their fur blankets.
"Klaus...?" Tasha whispered, her voice still rough from sleep. "Why did we stop?"
"Keep your voice down," Klaus instructed quietly, gesturing with his head toward the door. "Come outside. There’s something you need to see."
Tasha blinked, confused, but she quickly pulled her heavy winter boots back on, wrapped her fur cloak tightly around her shoulders, and followed him out the cabin door onto the exterior runner.
The moment her boots hit the freezing snowpack outside, the biting sub-zero night air completely cleared her remaining drowsiness.
They were parked in an open snowdrift surrounded by distant, pine-covered hills. The sky was clear, the silver moon illuminating the vast landscape.
Klaus stood on the runner, pointing his long arm toward the dark pine forest roughly two hundred yards away.
"Look over there," Klaus murmured.
Tasha turned her light blue eyes toward the forest.
There, floating right near the edge of the dark trees, was a bright, blinking sphere of luminescent blue light.
It was arcing with tiny, high-voltage sparks of blue lightning, drifting slowly deeper into the woods as if wandering aimlessly.
Tasha’s eyes widened to the size of saucers. Her heart violently thudded against her ribs.
"Is that..." Klaus started to ask, putting on a perfect mask of mild curious innocence. "...is that a spirit, like your father—?"
Tasha didn’t even let him finish the sentence.
"YES!" Tasha gasped, her voice cracking with overwhelming ecstatic shock. "YES IT IS!"
She didn’t wait for Klaus to give an order.
She didn’t ask for a weapon either.
Before Klaus could even pull out the training blade he had planned to give her as part of his elaborate trick, Tasha leaped off the iron runner.
SWOOSH!
She hit the deep snowpack at a dead sprint, leaving a massive spray of white powder in her wake as she dashed at full speed toward the dark forest, her light blue hair whipping wildly in the wind.
Klaus stood on the carriage runner, his arm still awkwardly extended in the air where he had been about to hand her a blade.
He stared at the cloud of snow dust she had left behind, his face locked in an expression of total deadpan speechlessness.
"Well..." Klaus muttered, a long weary sigh escaping his lips as he slumped his heavy shoulders back against the carriage railing. "It’s all up to them now."
He was completely exhausted.
The mental strain of creating Test Subject 46 had severely drained his reserves, and his body was screaming for a few hours of quiet rest.
He closed his eyes, leaning his back against the wood, leaving the outcome entirely in the hands of the spirit he had built.
CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!
Tasha’s heavy boots pounded furiously against the frozen permafrost.
Her chest was heaving, cold air burning her lungs, but she didn’t slow down for a single second.
Her light blue eyes were locked entirely onto the drifting sphere of blue lightning ahead.
As she closed the distance, reaching the edge of the dark pine forest, her refined Spirit Affinity began to process the energetic feedback radiating from the glowing orb.
Her steps faltered slightly with a flicker of confusion crossed her face.
’Wait...’ Tasha thought, her brow furrowing. ’This... this isn’t my father’s spirit.’
Her spirit senses were exceptionally sharp.
Her father’s original lightning spirit had been a mature aggressive, dense elemental entity.
The orb drifting in front of her right now didn’t carry that weight. It felt small, fragile, and intensely emotional... it was an infant spirit.
Tasha paused near a massive, snow-covered pine tree, staring at the blinking sphere hovering ten feet away.
What is an infant lightning spirit doing out here in the Winterlands...? she wondered with her mind racing.
Wild spirits were exceptionally rare, and an infant lightning spirit born in a sub-zero ice-dominated region was practically a statistical impossibility.
However, Tasha immediately extinguished the skeptical thought, her eyes welling up with sudden hot tears.
’No... it makes sense,’ Tasha realized, a wave of profound sorrow washing over her heart. ’Spiritual Death...’
In the lore of elemental magic, when a contracted spirit’s host died or when a spirit suffered catastrophic damage, the spirit didn’t always vanish forever.
Sometimes, the core underwent a Spiritual Death... its memories and power were completely wiped clean, and it reformed back into a blank infant state to begin life anew.
Looking at the innocent, blinking blue sphere, Tasha’s hands trembled.
’It really is him...’ she thought, tears spilling down her cold cheeks, freezing into tiny ice beads against her skin. ’Father died... and his spirit reformed as a newborn baby, wandering in the cold searching for home...’
An intense burning rage against the Death Cult flared like a supernova in her chest.
She clenched her fists until her knuckles turned white, silently swearing a blood oath that she would not rest until every single cultist who had taken her father was wiped from the face of the earth.
"Hey..." Tasha called out softly, stepping into the small forest clearing.
The infant blue spirit stopped floating. It turned around in the air, its bright lightning aura flashing erratically, as if it were alarmed by her sudden presence.
Tasha raised both of her open hands in a universal sign of peace, taking a slow, gentle step forward.
"It’s okay... I’m not an enemy. I won’t hurt you..."
Before she could take a second step, a terrifying growl shattered the quiet forest.
GRRRRRR!
From the thick, dark shadows of the pine trees directly behind her, a massive Frost-Stalker erupted.
The saber-toothed beast had been stalking the drifting spirit, and it used the distraction to lunge directly at Tasha’s exposed back with its razor-sharp ice-armored claws aimed straight for her spine.
"Eek!" Tasha gasped.
Her combat instincts, honed by Klaus’s brutal corrections earlier, fired instantly.
She didn’t try to turn around as she violently dropped her center of gravity, ducking downward into the deep snow.
SWISH!
The massive, ice-coated claws missed her head by a fraction of an inch, cutting through the empty air with a sharp whistle.
Tasha rolled across the cold snowpack, scrambling back onto her feet. As she spun around to face the attacker, her eyes caught a detail on the Frost-Stalker’s face.
The left side of the monster’s snout and its left eye were completely, blackly scorched... a fresh smoking burn mark caused by a high-voltage lightning strike.
Tasha looked from the scorched monster to the blinking blue spirit hovering nearby.
’The spirit did that...’ Tasha realized, her heart swelling with emotion. ’This monster was trying to eat the newborn spirit, and the little guy fought back!’
"I won’t let you touch it!" Tasha yelled, her light blue eyes hardening into cold steel.
GRRRRRR!