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Ch265- In And Out

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Sylver sat with his back to the wall and stroked Mora’s head while Edmund floated in a lazy circle near the ceiling.

“So, she somehow got her hands on Yeva’s prototypes. She then reverse-engineered Yeva’s spell to insert souls into leather. And with Mora’s help, gathered enough souls to “weave” a brand-new soul for her soulless parasite golem friend,” Edmund concluded.

“Yep,” Sylver said.

He’d sent Misha and Masha out of the room, and Edmund had been kind enough to lock himself, Sylver, Ria, and whatever was inside of her, in an inescapable barrier.

Not just to help catch any soul chunks that might remain if Ria failed, but also to prevent whatever she created from escaping and causing havoc, on the odd chance she succeeded.

“You sure you can’t help her out?” Edmund asked.

“If I knew what she was doing, maybe. But if I just shove my hand in blindly, I very much doubt it’d do anyone any good,” Sylver said.

“Why didn’t she wait for you? Or at the very least ask how likely this was to kill her?” Edmund asked.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“Going from what I think she said to Mora, she was afraid I’d tell her that trying to meddle with the souls of others requires using your own soul as a tool and that without proper training it’s basically suicide,” Sylver said.

Edmund quietly floated in a circle for a few minutes.

What Ria was doing was violent.

Like someone was banging two razor-sharp swords against one another.

Chips of metal were sent flying, there were sparks, one sword bent, another snapped, and then the surviving sword’s blade was hit with a hammer. At this proximity, Sylver’s soul flinched with every single screaming in terror monster that Ria calmly ripped into a million pieces and then ground into a fine paste.

She wasn’t merely using soul magic wrong; she was using magic wrong.

Proper magic required a steady hand, a firm grip, you told the mana what to do, not the other way around.

But Ria was… it wasn’t just apathy, Sylver was apathetic to his magic, but even when his spells worked against him, he never hated his tools.

Sylver lifted his head as Chrys appeared out of seemingly nowhere and waited patiently for Edmund to make a hole in his barrier for her to enter.

At first, Chrys didn’t say a word as the barrier closed behind her, she just stared at Ria.

Sylver could almost see her move her concern for Ria off to the side like she was pushing a dish she wasn’t interested in away from her.

“It’s not that Lola doesn’t think it will work, or that I’m incapable of making it work, so much as she’s concerned about the risk versus reward ratio of doing it at the scale and time frame that I proposed,” Chrys said.

She spoke confidently, but inconsistently, as if she was reading her speech off from a piece of paper that kept moving out of her line of sight.

Sylver gestured to her to continue.

“Lola doesn’t want to kill the 2 people who can fix the teleportation network, and she’s content with being “one of” the available teleportation alternatives while the network is being fixed.

“But there is a world of difference between being “one of” the alternatives and being the “only” alternative. Even more so when we stop being an alternative and become the “only” option for anyone trying to move any kind of significant distance,” Chrys explained.

Sylver nodded at her and she continued speaking with a bit more certainty in her voice.

“Our goal is still the same, right? Unassailable, untouchable, unreachable? “Too Big To Fuck With?” Less a person, more an active volcano everyone has no choice but to avoid?” Chrys asked.

“And you think integrating yourself so deeply into the High-King’s empire that you become a vital organ is the best way to become untouchable?” Sylver asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question, even if it might have sounded like one.

Chrys made a face.

“You’re the same as Lola. You’re looking at this from the perspective of someone who sees the whole thing as a convenience. Because it didn’t exist in your time, there was never anything like it. But to these people, this isn’t a mere convenience, it’s the very lifeblood of the High-King’s empire. Getting rid of us wouldn’t be like cutting off a finger, it’d be like trying to cut out a tumour nested deep inside the heart,” Chrys said.

Sylver turned his head towards Ria as he felt… something he couldn’t put into words. But given the circumstances anything short of Ria’s own soul being torn to shreds was positive.

He turned back to face Chrys.

“I like the idea, and the spirit, but I’m not going to twist Lola’s arm,” Sylver said.

Chrys shook her head.

“I never said I want you to twist her arm into doing something she doesn’t want to. But if you, and Edmund, could tell her it’s a good idea in the next 5 hours, that would be-”

Edmund appeared directly in front of Chrys and reduced the size of the spherical barrier until he and Chrys were outside of it, and Sylver and Mora were inside, along with Ria.

Sylver felt something entering the skin of his face and his hands and felt the same thing happening to Mora.

The air developed a very potent metallic scent and taste, and in tandem with Mora, Sylver’s skin began to bubble and melt.

Where there used to be a golden sphere sitting on top of a bucket, there was now a gold bar, alongside which was an identically shaped pitch-black bar.

Although unlike Ria’s golden bar, the black one was emitting a dull blue glow, that made Sylver’s eyeballs dry up the longer he stared at it.

Sylver wiped his mouth because he thought he was drooling, but he instead wiped his lips off his face.

He turned towards a terrified-looking Chrys and a completely unfazed Edmund.

“Major radiation poisoning, we’ll be fine. Chrys, can you get someone to go to the alchemist and bring 2 kilos of purified charcoal dust?” Sylver asked.

“And some dried mint,” Edmund added.

“But make sure the mint leaves are whole,” Sylver added.

There was a slight delay before Chrys mutely turned around and ran away up the stairs.

Sylver’s fingernails fell off one after the other as he approached Ria and the black bar she had created.

He crouched near the black bar, and as he moved his hand toward it, his skin sizzled and seemed to evaporate.

Tiny golden sparks jumped along the metal rods Sylver had embedded into the bones of his hand, and the thread Mora had given him that automatically stitched his wounds closed glowed with a weak yellow light as it worked in tandem with Sylver’s body to disperse the harmful invisible energy.

He pressed two fingers against the black bar as if he was feeling for a pulse.

“Oh wow…” Sylver said to no one in particular as he pushed his soul sense a little deeper.

“All good?” Edmund asked.

“Yeah, Ria she… stretched out the other soul like a balloon and filled it up with monster soul fragments… a living soul would normally be too fragile to create enough pressure to contain the necessary mass for amalgamation to start, but Ria used her own soul for the outer layer…” Sylver explained, or at the very least did his best to explain without using words Edmund wasn’t familiar with.

Or words Sylver wasn’t familiar with, since he was as close to an expert on soul magic as anyone was, and he barely knew anything.

If Ria was a mage in the Ibis, and she had explained what she was going to do before doing it and succeeded, Sylver would have been absolutely fine with naming her the Arch-Soulmancer.

But sadly Ria’s singular success didn’t mean she had mastered something that Sylver had spent multiple lifetimes studying, it just meant she got lucky.

She got lucky that Mora had absorbed enough soul magic knowledge from Sylver that she only brought Ria the monster souls that didn’t feel “prickly,” then Ria got lucky that SAM’s soul was as malleable and as tough as it was, and lastly Ria got lucky that her own soul was steady enough not to mess up whatever collection of barely functional frameworks she had haphazardly cobbled together from Yeva’s discarded enchantments.

Sylver used his melted flesh as nutrients for a dark brown mushroom, that grew into the shape of a rectangular book, with two gold-bar-shaped indents inside of it.

He was very gentle as he first moved Ria into the mushroom box, and then moved SAM, or whatever the new creature’s name was, into the same box.

Sylver was touching both Ria and the black metal thing with his hands as he spoke.

“Ria? SAM? Do something if you can hear me,” Sylver said.

They were both beyond any shadow of a doubt too stunned to respond, but Sylver waited for a response just to be sure. In Ria’s case she was effectively in a coma until her soul cooled down enough for her to be aware of her surroundings.

And the SAM, or whatever, thing wasn’t going to be doing anything until it finished absorbing all the soul fragments inside of it. If it continued at its current pace, it should be done in about a week, possibly 10 days.

He waited about 2 minutes before he closed the brown mushroom lid on the unlabeled book. A small amount of steam came out as the blue light coming out of the SAM bar burned the book’s inside, but the mushroom merely changed colour as it absorbed the invisible energy and went from a dark brown to an unpleasant pale green.

Chrys came back at that moment with a sack of purified charcoal dust over her shoulder, and a metal box of dried mint leaves.

Edmund took both from her and placed the sack and box near the edge of his barrier. He created a second barrier around the barrier Sylver, Mora, Ria, and SAM were inside, and when the outer barrier finished forming, released the inner one.

Sylver made the charcoal and mint float over to him, opened both the sack and the metal box, mixed the two together in the air, and flicked the cloud of green and black up into the ceiling of the barrier.

There was a very quiet popping sound as the powders moved around as if there was an intense wind inside the sealed-off barrier, and bit by bit, glowing white ash fell towards the floor.

***

While Sylver brushed away what little radiation managed to get through Mora’s threads and affected her inner body, Edmund healed his skin back.

Sylver’s workshop was now “contaminated,” but luckily nobody who could die from radiation poisoning lived in his house, so it wasn’t that big of a problem. The mushrooms he had spread out to absorb whatever radioactive fragments were left smelled like burned popcorn, and quite honestly were a bigger deterrent from entering the workshop than the radiation was.

Misha and Masha were both in bodies that could shrug off a beheading, much less a barely lethal amount of radiation poisoning. At worst, they might develop tumours, but for two mages that practised so diligently that even Sylver was impressed, the tumours would be about as dangerous as a paper cut.

Edmund had returned to bed once his barrier was no longer necessary, and Sylver was currently soaking in his bath, while Ria, and newly souled SAM floated nearby in the light green book-shaped mushroom he had placed them in. Nothing was going to happen until they both recovered, but he wanted to keep them close by, just in case.

Sylver had just managed to release the tension in his back when Lola knocked on the wide-open door and entered without waiting for a response. There was enough foam floating on the surface that he didn’t need to worry about flashing her.

“Did she explain to you that we are all collectively going to be broke for the next 5 years? She needs everything we have! Not to mention you can forget I exist if you need my help, since I’m going to have to go from city to city to set up trade routes. And we’re burning through every single favour and relationship I so painstakingly developed just to kickstart the whole thing!” Lola said.

Sylver nodded with each point she made.

“She also mentioned something about a brothel?” Sylver asked calmly.

“Brothels. Plural. We’re going to have to have well over 400 women on retainer to keep the teleporters that are going to be resting in Arda “entertained.” Because apparently, long-range teleportation is a skill that is granted almost exclusively to men!” Lola complained.

“Chrys mentioned that, yeah. Weird how it’s the other way around now. It used to be a stereotype that-”

Lola waved her hand at Sylver as she talked over him.

“Managing whores, I don’t mind, it’s a pretty straightforward process, it’s the lawyers I dread. We’re going to need a literal army of lawmen to figure out who each town is “allowed” to trade with, and a team of historians on top of that, to make sure don’t break a 200-year-old peace treaty that in no uncertain terms doesn’t allow the purchase of foodstuff from cities that are owned by the descendants of a particular long-dead nobleman,” Lola said almost in a single angry breath.

Sylver nodded along.

“Don’t even get me started on how many bookkeepers we’ll have to employ… Everything was just starting to calm down, another couple months and I could have taken a proper vacation... And now I need to sell off everything I built and go kiss some country bumkin’s ass, so he agrees to work for me,” Lola explained.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

Lola waited for him to say something, but he just sat in the bath and enjoyed the feeling of being warm.

“Tell me I don’t have to do this,” Lola said in an uncharacteristically tense voice.

“You don’t have to do this,” Sylver said.

He could hear her open her mouth, and then close it, as she couldn’t break away from her train of thought that was derailed by Sylver saying what she wanted him to say.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Lola quoted.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders again.

“I want you to understand what I’m going to say next, I say with genuine sincerity. After I say it, take a minute to really understand that I’m not being coy, or trying to sway you one way or the other. Are you ready?” Sylver asked.

He had turned around slightly, so he was facing Lola, and so she could meet his eyes.

“Sure,” Lola said.

“If you believe it isn’t worth the risk or have any kind of reservation about following through with Chrys’ plan, I trust your judgement. You have my complete and utter confidence in this matter,” Sylver said without once breaking eye contact.

Lola stared back and moved her jaw side to side as she did as Sylver asked and gave herself a solid minute to take in what he said.

Without so much as a shake of the head to indicate what she had decided on, Lola turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

***

Bravo was wearing so much fur that he looked like a small bear standing on its hind legs.

But almost a comedic level of cold intolerance aside, the man knew what he was doing when it came to space manipulation.

Even without being given any details about the waystone Bravo managed to, not merely hypothesize, but prove that it was going to teleport people into Xander’s Hole the first time it was used and was then going to teleport them back to where they initially used it the second time it was activated.

He even explained why Sylver and Edmund were teleported along with Melo when he accidentally triggered it.

Apparently when the stone was initially used the teleportation wasn’t “complete,” so Sylver and Edmund had both been effectively mid teleportation since the moment they first tried to teleport into Tuli.

Normally an incomplete teleportation would involve shredding and things turning inside out, but since one side of the teleportation was in a location that had a Realm Anchor, it stabilized the whole thing enough that, in Bravo’s words, “it just works.”

Bravo went as far as to explain that if Sylver slightly blocked the waystone when he used it, it would make everyone he was using it on teleport incompletely, so the next time he used it would teleport everyone with him, regardless of where they were.

Of course, that came at the risk of teleporting them underground if he was above them when he activated the waystone, but even with that it was a useful function.

Bravo and Melo rode on Ulvic and one-quarter of a wolf shade Sylver happened to have in his shadow when Melo teleported them to Arda, Edmund floated above them, and Sylver rode Mora, with Ria and her creation were inside the light green mushroom book tucked neatly into a leather satchel inside the back portion of Sylver’s robe.

After Lola had left, Sylver had finished his bath, slept until the first sun rose, said goodbye to Misha and Masha, and planned to have a quick drink with Salgok and Ciege, but sadly the dark elves were a mere hour away from arriving by then.

Now that he could teleport, albeit in a more roundabout way than he was used to, not that he could complain, a drink with Salgok or a conversation with Bruno was a short walk from the outskirts of Arda away.

His plan after he teleported the dark elves and the cultivators, and his rabbits, into Tuli, was to get to Torg so the tiny needle that would probably end his life if someone touched it the wrong way could once again be encased in something unbreakable.

He wasn’t going to bother with 2 layers of ribs again, it became a terrible idea the first time his ribcage was shoved out of his body and left his limbs behind. Sylver was thankfully powerful enough now he had better alternatives.

Once he had the [Rune Of Indestructibility] Edmund was going to make something simple to keep the needle inside, Sylver liked the idea of a sphere with a razor-thin spiral, so if shit went really sideways, he could simply tear the sphere out and have Aleri fly away with it.

He would obviously have spikes or something along those lines so the thing didn’t slip out of him, and then he was going to cover it with enough bone that it would be impossible for someone to poke it out of his body with a sword.

While they travelled towards the dark elves, Sylver decided that since Ria was unlikely to be capable of observing anything for a while, he might as well use this time to settle all of his skill choices.

[Undead Mastery] had the typical increases in strength, dexterity, constitution, decreases in undead raising costs, but out of all of those the effect that stood out the most was the one that allowed the undead to assume the form they had when they were alive.

[Skill: Undead Mastery (VIII) [S]]
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VIII – All undead under your control can take on the appearance they had prior to death. *Mana cost dependent on the quality and level of the undead.

Sylver was starting to have a hard time tracking just how many limbs he possessed, as he felt a brand new one effortlessly spring to life. Just like with everything else the system did, it integrated the new hole for Sylver to insert his mana into so perfectly that if he didn’t know any better, he would have thought it had always been there.

Ulvic and the quarter wolf Bravo and Melo were riding very suddenly lost all traces of their inky blackness, and both wolves now looked as living as the day they died. Mora walked over to them, and as Sylver touched their “fur” he surprised to find that it felt like actual genuine fur.

The snowflakes that landed on their noses and just sat there were a dead giveaway that their bodies weren’t warm, but cold-blooded wolves were a lot easier for people to handle than undead shade wolves.

Spring, Fen, Reg, Dai, and Sho were in a similar boat, they looked like they were alive, but they weren’t blinking, and there was a very noticeable lack of movement in their chest area to indicate breathing.

He had to assume the effect would work on any zombies he raised too; in which case this was just short of a game-changer.

People have a hard time fighting their friends that they’re certain died and were brought back to life as undead, if Sylver could make people think that he was using mind control instead of zombies, it could make his opponents lower their guard enough to win fights that were previously unwinnable.

[Skill: Draining Blight [B] (VII)]
…
VII – Create a liquid rain that will absorb HP, MP, and Stamina from the target creature.

The key word with this one was “liquid.” Where before Sylver could drain things from a distance through a “cloud of smoke,” he could now squeeze rain out of the aforementioned smoke. The rain in turn was so concentrated, and worked so quickly, that the rat Sylver flicked the droplets on died instantly.

He almost couldn’t wait to run into a bandit to see just how much damage a splash of “rain” was going to do.

Plus, with [Greater Undead Channeling] he could quite easily slather each and every one of his undead with the extremely dense “rain,” and even if the shades were popped before they did any damage, anyone in the splash zone would be fucked.

[Black Mass] was a no-brainer, not just because it only had 1 effect to choose from, but because Sylver couldn’t imagine anything better than being able to infuse [Common] souls.

[Skill: Black Mass (V) [D]]
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V – [Common] Souls can be infused.

Unlike the [Black Mass] blobs infused with [Petty] souls, the one Sylver shoved a [Common] soul into wasn’t limited to just 6.6 kilos but could handle at least 30 kilos without any issue.

He didn’t know what the limit was, because he only had 30 with him, but even if the limit was 31 that would still be a lot.

On top of that, to say [Common] shade-infused [Black Mass] swords packed a punch, was a gross understatement. Exactly how much damage it would do against someone wearing enchanted armour, he couldn’t say, but he was certainly going to find out.

And aside from floating fast enough that Sylver was having trouble keeping track of the smaller blades, the physical attribute increases the armour provided was unbelievable.

Sylver wished all the luck in the world to whoever was going to be unfortunate enough to give him an excuse to test things out.

But sadly, no bandits ambushed them, monsters kept their distance, and Sylver and company reached the dark elves without any incident.

Seeing them all armoured up in matching colours, backed up by Faust’s cultivators, and in a tight formation made Sylver’s smile even wider.

The small children peaking out from behind the adults ruined the image of a country conquering army, but regardless of that, Tuli was going to be in good hands.