Chapter 158: Soul Configuring A Spirit
Mirela was sleeping on her side with one arm thrown protectively over Anya, her dark tail curled contentedly around her leg.
Anya was tucked neatly against the maid’s chest with her silver hair spilling over the pillows, breathing with soft perfection.
On the other side of the mattress, Tasha was buried deep under a mountain of heavy winter furs with her face completely relaxed as a peaceful expression remained on her features for the first time in a long time.
Klaus looked at them for a long moment, a subtle warmth touching his chest. He loved seeing them sleep...
He quietly closed the iron door, sealing the cabin shut.
"Valeria. Sparky. With me," Klaus whispered softly.
CRACK-ZAP!
A tiny spark of blue electricity and a node of crimson energy flared simultaneously near his neck.
Sparky and Valeria materialized on his shoulders... the chibi Lightning Fairy crossing her tiny arms, while the miniature Crimson Sharpshooter sat quietly with her red eyes locked onto him.
Klaus didn’t stay in the control room. He walked over to the side exit, unlatched the heavy wooden door, and stepped out onto the exterior iron runner, closing it behind him.
The freezing sub-zero wind instantly whipped against his face and long silver hair, but his divinely reconstructed body didn’t even register the chill.
Moving with effortless athletic grace, Klaus climbed up the side of the moving carriage, stepping onto the broad heavy oak roof of the caravan.
He walked to the center of the roof and sat down, crossing his long legs, letting his heavy combat boots dangle slightly over the edge.
The view from top of the moving carriage was breathtaking.
The endless rolling snowpacks of the Winterlands stretched out for miles under the vast, star-filled night sky with the silver moon illuminating the jagged mountain peaks in the far distance.
"What are we doing up here, Boss?" Sparky asked, floating off his shoulder and hovering at eye level, her tiny plasma wings buzzing softly. "It’s freezing, and the wind is annoying."
"Is there a threat approaching, my King?" Valeria added, her ethereal voice echoing in his mind as she hovered near his left ear with her tiny hand resting on the strap of her kimono.
Apparently she was wearing a kimono.
Klaus didn’t answer immediately.
He rested his elbows on his knees, staring down at his broad calloused palms.
The translucent white glow of Soul Mana danced just beneath his skin, pulsing rhythmically with the thudding nuclear reactor of his divine core.
"I’ve been thinking," Klaus started, his deep voice easily cutting through the whistling wind.
He looked up at Sparky’s glowing, tiny form.
"Do you think I can create a Spirit?" Klaus asked plainly. "For example... one like you, Sparky?"
Sparky froze mid-air. Her spiky yellow hair instantly bristled with violent chaotic blue static with her tiny face twisting into a furious offended scowl.
"WHAT?!" Sparky shrieked, her high-pitched voice piercing the quiet night. "Are you out of your mind, meathead?! Are you trying to replace me with a bootleg copy?! I am a high-tier, naturally manifested atmospheric hazard! You can’t just ’make’ a spirit out of thin air! That’s blasphemy against elemental nature!"
"Relax, battery," Valeria chimed in smoothly from his ear, a bratty superior smirk on her face. "The King is simply exploring the parameters of his divine authority. Don’t be so insecure."
"WHO ARE YOU CALLING INSECURE, YOU USELESS GHOST?!" Sparky screamed, turning to fire a tiny static shock at Valeria’s face, which passed harmlessly through her incorporeal form.
Klaus let out a low amused chuckle, raising a hand to interrupt their bickering.
"I’m not trying to replace you, Sparky," Klaus clarified smoothly, his tone completely calm. "And even if I tried, any artificial spirit I built from scratch using raw soul manipulation would be vastly inferior and much weaker than an authentic high-tier elemental like you. You’re one of a kind."
Sparky stopped yelling mid-rant.
She blinked her glowing blue eyes, her tiny cheeks flushing a bright rosy pink as she crossed her arms and let out a loud dramatic huff, trying desperately to hide how thoroughly satisfied she was by the compliment.
"Hmph! Well... obviously!" Sparky muttered, turning her head away with a arrogant sniff. "I am the peak of lightning manifestation! Any fake spirit you build would be nothing more than a pathetic dim lightbulb compared to me! But... why do you want to make one anyway?"
Klaus looked back down at his hands, his silver eyes narrowing thoughtfully.
"Because Tasha needs one," Klaus explained flatly. "She’s a Spirit Mage. Without a contracted spirit to act as a core engine, her Spirit Mana is useless... She won’t survive the Academy Entrance Exams at this level, and she definitely won’t be useful to me later if her magic is leaking everywhere."
He paused with his mind flashing back to his experience inside the Endless Tower not too long ago.
Back when he had harvested Sparky’s soul and reconfigured her from a raw wild elemental into a physical entity, Klaus had mapped out her foundational energetic blueprint.
He clearly remembered the exact composition of her spirit core before he altered it... a concentrated unstable node of pure atmospheric friction, wrapped in a self-sustaining spiritual circuit.
A spirit, at its core, wasn’t fundamentally different from a soul.
It was simply a soul infused entirely with raw elemental mana rather than biological memory.
’If I can turn a human soul into a sniper rifle,’ Klaus deduced coldly in his mind, ’and if I can turn a wolf into an armored bear... can I take a harvested beast soul, strip its biological identity, infuse it with elemental mana, and forcefully rewrite its blueprint into an unformed elemental Spirit core?’
Can the Soul King turn a soul into a spirit?
Klaus’s lips pulled into a dark excited smirk.
"There’s only one way to find out," Klaus murmured.
He turned his head, his piercing silver eyes looking down toward the right side of the moving carriage.
Trailing roughly fifteen yards beside the vehicle, running parallel to the heavy oak wheels, was a lone Frost-Stalker.
The mutated beast had been stalking the carriage for the last twenty minutes, staying just outside the lethally spinning perimeter of the Soul Mana dome, waiting for a chance to strike.
Klaus didn’t draw his sword and he didn’t even stand up.
He simply raised his right hand, pointing two fingers at the running monster.
SHHHHK!
A single razor-sharp spike forged from dense, translucent white Soul Mana violently erupted from the outer shell of the spinning dome.
The spike shot sideways with high velocity, piercing straight through the Frost-Stalker’s armored skull before the beast could even register the threat.
PAH!
The Frost-Stalker’s physical body instantly collapsed into the snowpack, its momentum rolling it into a limp lifeless mass.
Klaus didn’t let the soul fade.
He flexed his fingers, making a pulling motion.
A liquid-glass tendril of pure white Soul Mana shot out from his palm, phasing straight through the dead beast’s chest.
It grabbed the flickering dark-blue spiritual form of the Frost-Stalker’s soul and violently yanked it backward through the freezing air.
The glowing blue soul flew up onto the roof of the carriage, hovering directly between Klaus’s open palms.
It was a raw unshaped sphere of spiritual data, pulsing with the feral instincts of a wild predator.
Sparky and Valeria fell dead silent, floating beside his shoulders, watching in breathless awe as the divine atmosphere around Klaus violently shifted.
Klaus closed his eyes.
He tapped directly into the thudding nuclear furnace of his divine core, flooding his hands with an immense staggering volume of pure white Soul Mana.
The air pressure on top of the moving carriage violently dropped, the freezing wind warping around his body as his absolute authority as the Soul King enveloped the glowing blue sphere.
He laid his spiritual hands directly onto the wolf-beast’s soul, isolating the core, and prepared to strip its biological identity to rewrite it into an elemental spark.
Klaus opened his glowing silver eyes, a dangerous grin spreading across his handsome face.
’It’s time to configure...’
...
The heavy oak wheels of Lord Varhem’s restored carriage churned relentlessly through the deep snowpack, carving dark twin trenches into the vast silver-lit expanse of the Winterlands.
In the wake of the vehicle’s rapid movement, the frozen ground was littered with a trail of silent slaughter.
Dozens of mutated abominations... Frost-Stalkers with shattered ice-armor, dire wolves split from snout to tail, and jagged ice-crawlers reduced to steaming piles of dark green slush lay scattered across the snow.
To any random wanderer stumbling across the scene, the deaths would have seemed entirely incompreable.
There were no arrow shafts sticking from their hides, no burn marks from fire magic, and no footprints of an army.
The answer to the mystery revealed itself thirty yards back.
A lone massive Frost-Stalker, its saber-teeth dripping freezing saliva, was sprinting at full tilt along the flank of the carriage, trying desperately to find a blind spot in the vehicle’s defenses.
Suddenly, from the outer shell of the invisible, rotating dome of Soul Mana surrounding the carriage, a single razor-sharp spike forged from hyper-dense white energy stretched unnaturally far outward.
SHHHHK!
The spike extended twenty feet through the sub-zero air like a living metallic spear, piercing squarely through the Frost-Stalker’s armored skull before the beast could even register the threat.
The monster didn’t even get to whimper as its legs instantly buckled with its heavy body slumping lifelessly into the snowbank.
The white spike contracted instantly, snapping back into the rotating curvature of the dome.
A second later, a glowing translucent white sphere... a raw flickering soul completely invisible to normal human eyes snaked through the air.
It shot over the top of the dome’s spiked perimeter, spiraling upward until it landed directly into the open, waiting palms of a silver-haired man sitting cross-legged on the heavy oak roof of the carriage.
Klaus gritted his teeth with his jaw clenching so hard his back molars creaked.
His glowing silver eyes flared with an intense bloodshot light as he closed his hands around the cold spiritual form.
’Test Subject 46.’
He had been sitting on top of this moving roof in the freezing wind for hours, relentlessly harvesting, stripping, and attempting to rewrite the soul.
It was easier said than done.
When he had first conceived the idea of turning a harvested beast’s soul into an elemental spirit for Tasha, he had foolishly assumed it would be a simple matter of copy-pasting.
He thought he could just scan her foundational architecture, dump the blueprint onto a wolf’s soul, and call it a day.
He had tried that three times.
Subjects 1, 2, and 3 had violently exploded into harmless mists of raw spiritual static the second his divine mana tried to force Sparky’s exact blueprint onto them.
Spirits weren’t just magical constructs, and they certainly weren’t uniform.
According to Sparky’s loud high-pitched rants earlier, every spirit was born from a unique nexus of atmospheric friction, elemental density, and ambient mana.
He couldn’t copy her original self to make this new one.
Sparky was a singular high-tier atmospheric hazard... her blueprint was uniquely hers. Klaus had to forge an entirely new original spirit core from scratch.
"Grrr... ah!" Klaus grunted, a sharp piercing pain shooting through his temples.
Configuring a soul in real-time, while sitting on a moving carriage, while simultaneously maintaining the protective spiked dome around the vehicle and driving the bone-plated mountain bear, was putting a staggering amount of strain on his mind.
His vision went dark around the edges, his divine core thudding behind his ribs as his mental reserves dipped dangerously low.
He felt a wave of severe dizziness threaten to knock him unconscious right off the roof.
Yet, despite the agonizing migraine vibrating behind his eyes, Klaus refused to let go of the soul in his hands.
He forced his silver eyes to stay focused, staring down at the glowing blue sphere.
He had to do this.
A heavy bitter wave of guilt washed over his chest, colder than the sub-zero wind whipping against his long silver hair.
All of this was his fault.
If Taula hadn’t abandoned him back in the beginning... he never would have gone over to Lord Varhem’s forward operating base.
He never would have slaughtered the entire camp in cold blood, he never would have gutted Varhem like a fish, and he never would have stolen this carriage.
If he hadn’t done that, Tasha Morningstar would still have her father.
She would still be a wealthy proud noble daughter sitting in a warm estate in the capital, instead of a bankrupt half-frozen woman sleeping on a floorboard mattress with blood on her clothes.
Klaus tried to rationalize it for a second, but his mind instantly shot the thought down.
He couldn’t blame Taula.
Taula was just a symptom of this cutthroat world. He was the one who had held the blade. He was the one who had killed Varhem.
It was his action, his choice, and his crime.
He was simply the villain of her story.
And right now, sitting in the dark on top of her stolen carriage, sweating blood to forge a spirit that could give her a future, Klaus was paying the price for what he had done.
"Let’s go again..." Klaus growled under his breath.
He closed his eyes, plunging his consciousness deep into the spiritual form of Test Subject 46.