Soul Venerable (Re-written)

 

 

 

Blue light particles which represent lightning elemental particles were continuously accelerated within a contained ring construct. As lightning elemental particles collide with each other, they combine, morphed, mutate, or destroy each other, decreasing the quantity while increasing the overall quality.

In an hour, this process continued, allowing a vast reserve of lightning-path resources to disintegrate into lightning elemental particles.

If other refinement-path masters were to see this, they would be dumbfounded simply because this was very unmagical.

The process of magic possessed high similarity with science, but the systematic education of this world is not that developed. Mages love to conceal their research results, allowing them to reign supreme above others but contribute little to Morgen World’s overall civilization. That being the case, in this world, magic is magic, and science is science.

However, the one who did this is not a mage but a Magus.

Magus are pursuers of truths to the truest senses. Be it technology, psychic, magic, martial, soul, faith… everything was broken down systematically so that they can use their power for their own. There are no limits that they wouldn’t want to cross. Compared to mages, they are far more superior simply because of that mindset.

For example, faith is the domain of the gods. Although all mages are, up to a certain point, could considered as heretics, they still revere divine powers. As long as gods reign supreme in this world, mages wouldn’t want to cross that thin fine line in case of attracting ire of the gods. But for any full-fledged Magus, faith or magic is simply a system of power that has yet to be understood.

In fact, Shion’s former self, Mordred, has categorized divine spells into faith-path for this very reason.

Of course, Shion wasn’t just a ‘full-fledged’ Magus. She was the cream of the crop of Holy Terra, one of the few rank 6 Sovereign in a civilization of Magus. After infiltrating this unfamiliar world, ‘she’ had decoded the system of magic to the highest point in her previous life. One of her accomplishments was becoming the Great Archmage which was capable of using nine elemental methods easily while publicly known as a mere refinement-path expert.

Melting lightning-path resources into lightning elemental particles is actually an advanced refinement-path method, it can only be used by those who understood both refinement-path and lightning-path laws. In other words, one needs to have [Exemplar]-level attainment in both paths. After all, only those who have undergone a Protogenic Ascension and reached rank 4 Paragon are privileged to touch upon ‘Dimensional Laws’.   

The basic building blocks of Morgen World are not atoms, but the nine elemental particles.

Fire would be a pure congregation of fire elemental particles and water would be the physical manifestation of water elemental particles combined into water molecules. This logic extends to anything that exists in Morgen World. Everything can be traced back into the nine elements, even mountains, thunderstorms, the sun, humans or dragons.

For example, a rank 0 metal-path material known as Mortal Iron is the same with the rank 1 metal-path material called Cold Steel. They were both purely composed of metal elemental particles. Yet, they are not an identical object.

It was like hydrogen and oxygen, although they consist of protons and electrons, both have different properties due to various reasons. Although there’s so many scientific errors within that statement, it can at least represent the idea. After all, this is magic, not quantum science.

Compared to Mortal Iron, Cold Steel possessed a higher density of metal elemental particles, and those particles will have slightly different properties like that of Mercury compared to Ferron, or Cobalt to Nickel. And so, Cold Steel has greater durability and other special properties.

That being the case, what Shion and Kasumi tried to do here is similar to cheating. In Holy Terra, there’s a process known as Nuclear Transmutation.

Simply, it was an effort to forcefully alter a chemical composition of a material into another through the use of a particle accelerator. Lead can be transmuted into gold by colliding certain particles to ‘edit’ the amount of electrons or protons within a certain atom.

Of course, more advanced techniques exist after Intelligent Metal, a Sovereign Magus of information-path, rose to power. Refining tungsten superalloy from a star (which consist of mostly hydrogen and other constituents) is not impossible. The real question is whether the resource expenditure to achieve it is efficient or not.

That being said, Shion is currently not strong enough to use Nuclear Transmutation which is considered as a rank 4 refinement-path method in this world. However, there are certain materials which can be used in this fashion: Liquid Lightning Solvent. It is a rank 0 lightning-path material which is the primary material for [Bouncing Lightning], [Piercing Sparks] or many other lightning-path spell catalysts.

It has the form of viscous blue liquid like a deep blue-colored asphalt or a molten sapphire. It isn’t a rare resource, in fact, it was very common. This Liquid Lightning Solvent has been added to various other supporting materials and undergone a process similar to evaporation, it is now in gaseous form.

This gas was extracted little by little and accelerated in a ring-shaped particle accelerator which was Kasumi’s body. “Lightning elemental particle (Lightning-EP) saturation reached… 3999%. Stopping particle acceleration. Experimental Lightning-EP half-life is lower than expected, and must proceed to the next step.” Kasumi reported the progress.

“Good thing we are using rank 0 lightning-path material.” Shion muttered to herself. If higher-ranked materials are used, the elemental undulation would be detected by those rank 1s and 2s professors. “Then, activate the last step.” But, where there are merits, there will be demerits as well. The sheer quantity required to reach this stage is too heavy to be paid by herself.

Thankfully, Sumire is a kind philanthropist.          

“Affirmative.” Kasumi’s small ring-shaped particle accelerator body slowly transformed into a dodecahedron. Within the construct, her slime core is oversaturated with the new type of Lightning-EP. Since it is an experimental material with a short half-life, Kasumi didn’t waste any time. She immediately used the prepared lightning-path method to merge her core with the new material.     

Half an hour later, her slime core expanded twice of the original size. The blue hue also turned darker, evidence of the rich lightning elemental particles content.

“Main soul, the upgrade is successful. Now… I can fulfil the mask of a +4 Soul Armament.”

“Perfect.” Shion sighed in relief. To support Kasumi in upgrading her slime core into a true Lightning Core, she was forced to use her soul arts multiple times. If not for the crystal processor producing copious amounts of telepathic thoughts and her electrochemical reactor for providing the energy, it would’ve been impossible.

At this moment, Shion’s breast opened, revealing two slightly molten eyeball sized cubic fuel cells. She ejected the depleted fuel cells while her back exhaled streams of extremely hot air to cool her reactors down. The reactors were overclocked to provide electric power for the particle accelerator; it was infinitely close to melting point. After a while, she inserted a new set of fuel cells before her chest closed up.

“Main soul, I am now capable of affecting Terrestrial Magnetism.” Kasumi reported as she took Shion’s form to nibble a depleted fuel cell. The depleted fuel cells already formed a small pile, wastes such as those are clues for wisdom-path experts, it's best if she disposes of them permanently. It wouldn’t be a problem for Kasumi to eat them since it’s still considered as lightning-path material.

“This soon?” Shion smiled in surprise. Pre-elementary influence towards terrestrial magnetism for lightning-path cultivators in Morgen World can only be achieved if one is close to reaching rank 1. She must’ve reached 7 transparent stars (late-stage) of rank 0 thanks to the large amount of resources poured towards her recently.

Although cultivating spiritual force nonstop played a role, it’s still an extremely fast rate of cultivation. If not for being Shion’s split soul who had experience in cultivation multiple times, it wouldn’t be possible for Kasumi to reach this stage so quickly.  

Other mages would need to spend at least several months with unlimited cultivation resources to reach the same height, but mages are not about single-minded pursuit of spiritual force but also learning spell models, spell resource refinement, mana pool condensation, path attainment and the understanding of the principle of various magical phenomenon. For combat mages, they will also require to learn how to properly fight with their spells.

After all, having a high cultivation base isn’t automatically translated to high combat ability.

That being said, Shion was also capable of reaching late-stage rank 0 in a short amount of time. Her 4 transparent star soul cultivation base restricts her options by a great deal. She merely needs a large amount of souls, but there’s no rush. What will come will eventually arrive. Haste makes waste, excessive soul harvesting is risky.

“Then, glide-type transformation is now possible.” Shion pondered for a moment, “Let’s change the plan. We’ll use all the resources we have including the leftover lightning-path materials to increase your slime mass. A secondary weapon set is not that important, I’ll think of a way to get Murasaki Ayame’s Omni-Gear as back up.”

“Affirmative.” Kasumi immediately agreed to her Main Soul’s proposal as they continued to refine materials to increase her slime mass.

…

The night before departure, in Murasaki Ayame’s room.

“Sorry for the intrusion.” Shion excused herself as she entered Ayame’s room. She saw Ayame without her blue camo-pattern military outfit, her body was more petite than expected. She looks very fragile, arousing men’s desire to protect or for those who prefer smaller girls, to fuck her.

“Make yourself at home. So what can I help you with, big sis?”

Of course, they are not a real pair of blood related sisters. Thanks to the geographical location of Galatreon bordered with Fuyuhiro permafrost mountain range, the relationship between Galatreon’s Four Clans and Yukikaze clan is actually very good. After Murasaki Ayame joined Twin Helix, they have been spending time together multiple times, allowing them to get closer with each other.

At first, Murasaki Ayame was reluctant to get close to this transfer student because she’s a reserved person. However, as they began sharing lightning-path insights, she found out that although Shion does not cultivate lightning-path, her knowledge regarding it was not shallow at all. Soon, she found out that one of the inheritance Shion inherited contains some level of lightning-path profundity, but unfortunately, she does not cultivate it.

It was such a waste, considering the Great Archmage’s primary elemental path was lightning.

After Ayame expresses her regrets, Shion ‘unrestrictedly’ shared her understanding of lightning-path. There are various gaps in Shion’s knowledge, it was perfectly understandable since the one who cultivated it was her Soul Armament, but her insight allows Ayame to break through various bottlenecks in her own understanding, allowing her comprehension of lightning-path to soar rapidly!

Thus, she immediately got close to Shion, to the point of considering her as an older sister. Ever since, she was invited to her room multiple times, but this was the first time Shion entered her room while she wasn’t wearing her military uniform.

Ayame wore a pink-purple sport bra that highlighted her bust to the fullest while wearing tight leggings. Although she is small and petite, Ayame has great body proportions: healthy pale skin, round and supple buttocks, slim waist, and d-cup breasts. On her midriff, Shion could see electric circuit-like body runes that spread to all corners of her torso and limbs which extended to her neck. The design has a great similarity with Shion’s with the exception of color.

Hers was faintly glowing purple, while Shion’s was dull grey.

To those who knew about body rune design, there’s a common rule that usually fits all body runes: the brighter the glow, the more powerful it is. Although Ayame’s body rune’s glow seems faint, it was very bright compared to other body runes. Meaning, they are supreme-grade body runes, ones that couldn’t be bought with money and connection alone.

Compared to Shion’s dull grey body runes… Well, Shion’s was a fake. Refining a mechanical body in a cave already took a significant amount of resources, how can she use those precious materials for augmentations if the core mechanical organs are still lacking? Thus, her body runes were fakes to give the impression that they are augmenting her stealth-type bloodline power. It made perfect sense because most stealth body runes are focused on concealment, and thus would decrease their presence as much as possible.

Ayame is currently lying flat on her back, watching some sort of computer-generated animation produced by an information-path expert from Galatreon through a holographic screen. Her shoulder-length purple hair is spread, wet. She’s very adorable no matter how many times Shion sees it.    

Shion really wanted to tease her descendant but she mentally shook her head. As the ancestor of Murasaki clan, Shion was aware of the strange preference of her descendants.

Murasaki clan’s combat prowess was higher than Delcroix, Richtofen, or Al-Arsy clan, yet possessed the lowest number of clansmen. This wasn’t because their rate of death while guarding the Extreme South was very high, but simply because… most of Murasaki female clansmen are sexual deviants.

Perhaps they set the bar too high as they use their progenitor, the Great Archmage, as standard, but the result was most of the female clansmen have all sorts of sexual fetishes. Having interest in the same gender is one of the mildest ones as a defense mechanism because they couldn’t find someone that fulfils their abnormal standard.

While it was strange to others why they have incestuous sexual interest for their ancestor, Shion was aware why they were like that.

Demons or other special lifeforms have a method to use their descendant as a backup body or a clone should their true body get destroyed. That being the case, the Great Archmage Mordred also has the same method. He altered the soul of Murasaki Xion, which was his own daughter, as a vessel for his Truesoul.

Since Murasaki Xion was the progenitor of Murasaki Clan, her descendant’s soul was affected. They instinctively desire to get close to Mordred to fulfil an indescribable and insatiable soul hunger.

This unknown soul hunger was caused by a blank space in their truesoul, which was passed down from Mordred’s methods by Xion. Unfortunately, nobody in Galatreon truly understood soul-path, therefore the soul corruption slowly affects their truesouls. The side effect was, as stated before, having an interest in Mordred, their ancestor.

At first, the soul corruption was innocent. It was merely love towards their parents, or the simple desire to have Mordred in their proximity because Mordred’s soul presence was like a drug that completed the blank space in their truesoul. As time progressed, these pure feelings were mixed with biological instinct and need, which was translated to sexual desire.

Xion’s male descendant’s truesouls are capable of resisting this soul corruption as their feelings towards Mordred was that of reverent and respect. However, the female ones are extremely vulnerable towards his charms. After all, it is a biological instinct for females to have interest in a strong male partner, especially in this dog-eat-dog world where strength matters a lot. Being at the top of the world radiates an irresistible charm towards women.

Therefore, the corruption continues until what it is today.

Actually, Mordred was capable of solving the soul corruption during his lifetime. However, the mutation in his descendant’s truesouls also granted Murasaki clan great soul-path and lightning-path talent, thanks to their parents.

Also, Mordred’s research focus at that time was the creation of the Armored Soul Tribe.

Since his descendants can serve as experimental subjects, why would he fix a problem which wasn’t a problem to begin with? That would be beyond retarded. The further decrementing number of Murasaki clansmen are also caused by the immoral experimentation. Thus, every Murasaki clansman has an extremely powerful soul growth rate thanks to the various secret experiments and other factors, but Mordred leaves a backdoor for this so that can use them as he sees fit.

That being the case, Shion is completely aware regarding Ayame’s vulnerability towards her soul presence. She doesn’t want her prized descendant to have thoughts about her own greatn grandfather… yet.

It needs to be said that Mordred, or in this case, Shion, lacked a moral bottom line since that is a detrimental trait as an otherworldly invader. 

Shion has no qualms in venting her desire to Ayame, but she couldn’t and wouldn’t!

At least not yet!

Shion’s physical body lacks various core mechanical organs, getting intimate with others would be giving a large amount of clues to wisdom-path cultivators!

Despite having a mechanical body in the shape of a female humanoid, Shion is essentially still Mordred, a male. It would be impossible for a person of her caliber to discard several lifetimes of habits. Shion still has a certain desire that came from the depth of her soul.

She retracted her gaze which was hooked at her nubile descendant’s attractive body. Murasaki Ayame was extremely close to the appearance of Murasaki Shizuku (Murasaki Xion’s mother and Mordred’s wife) when she was young.

“Can I borrow your sniper-type heavy railgun for a bit?” Shion asked while exerting a bit of her soul presence. It affects Ayame like a wisdom-path method, but Ayame’s defenses against wisdom-path methods didn’t activate against it because it’s actually a soul-path method.

That’s right… All this while, Ayame’s familiarity with Shion was influenced by soul-path methods. Though, it was mostly used to subtly push and lower Ayame’s guard against Shion.

“Sure.” Ayame ‘trusts’ Shion enough to let her try it. In her perspective, since Shion already received the Great Archmage’s inheritance, it wouldn’t matter much if she touched her railgun. As long as her weapon isn’t tinkered with (which is impossible unless Shion is a rank 1), it would be fine.

Ayame closed the animation she’s watching as she navigated the holographic screen. Soon, bright pixels materialize in the shape of a large sniper.

Shion whistled in amazement, “This is the first time I saw the information-path storage method, [Cloud Storage], in person.” She offered a lip service. “It’s very convenient, are all your artifacts stored digitally?”

Ayame smirked. Flattery from someone she respected and liked very much scores a lot of vanity points. “Yes, it’s simpler this way. Big sis, do you want to try an Omni-Gear? I have a spare.” As soon as she finished her words, a flash of pixelated lights materialized a metallic silver wrist watch-like computer.

“Omni-Gear?” Shion raised her eyebrows, feigning ignorance.

“I saw you use the standard tablet given by the academy a lot. It can’t be taken out of the academy grounds since it’s technically the Academy’s property. However, I have a better alternative. This is an Omni-Gear, a standard tool for us Galatreon’s Four Clans…” Ayame slowly explained. “Although it is small, Omni-Gear is a very useful information-path artifact. It can do much more than that tablet…” She added.

Shion took the Omni-Gear and put it on her wrist. The moment she equipped it on her wrist, a feminine mechanical voice spoke, “Activating rank 0 Omni-Gear version 7.4… processing data… Scanning user biometrics… Warning, unrecognizable user… Please remove the Omni-Gear and return it to the nearest Hunter Association office within 3 days… Deadline: 71:59:58…71:59:57…”

Ayame activated her own as a holographic screen appeared in front of her, “Overriding user biometrics. Log in username: Murasaki Ayame, Password: Qn71GoPqzXv*********… Register user biometrics under my secondary account.”

The omni-gear on Shion’s wrist briefly glows in prismatic light, “Secondary account information received. Please input the user's data for hardware sharing…” A holographic screen appeared with a keyboard beneath it. Shion gazed at Ayame inquisitively.

“It’s asking for your personal information like name, age, et cetera. You don’t have to answer fully, but at least give your basic information. This is for identification purposes only; you’ll have an easier time in the future when you order something online.” Ayame helped fill in the blanks.

After all the troublesome procedure was done, she began explaining its uses. “As an information-path artifact, its most useful feature is the ability to connect with the [World Wide Weave]. Since we’re in a Hunter’s Academy, the connection is very strong. The further we travel away from civilization, the less signal there is…”

Ayame began explaining the function of Omni-gear.

As an information-path artifact, its primary use is for exchanging information, which was augmented greatly since it can connect to the global information-path network known as the [World Wide Weave]. Since it’s an all-purpose artifact, it can also fulfil the basic function of offense, defense, investigation, communication, refinement, stealth, storage, enslavement (by controlling certain types of battle puppets) and several others.

However, it was very basic to the point of merely better than nothing. If the user wants to have a better coverage of an aspect, the Omni-gear will have to be specialized, sacrificing one aspect for another.

For example, the Omni-gear can use an information-path magic spell [Hardlight Construct: Dagger], which will refine a dagger of solid light as an offensive method, though it would be very weak. The dagger’s durability will be merely as strong as a dagger made out of mortal iron, but it’s most useful function is it can be melted again into data resources and re-summoned easily as long as it does not suffer a certain degree of damage.

It is the same with the defensive method, it can deploy [Hardlight Construct: Shield], a floating tower shield of physical light that blocks most attacks. Again, the shield is extremely weak, it might be able to defend the user from one or two attacks of a rank 0 martial artist, depending on how many data resources are used. 

Therefore, if Shion wanted to use it as a primary weapon, she would have to sacrifice other aspects to augment it and vice versa.

“Omni-gear can be considered as half lightning-path and half information-path artifact because it uses an obscene amount of electricity to function properly. Thus, it became extremely useful in the hands of lightning-path mages like me. Although this is my spare Omni-gear, it is still one of the newest models with 1 Terabyte memory space…” Ayame continues elaborating the Omni-gear’s metrics such as the RAM, Operating System, et cetera.

Shion mentally smiled as she paid attention to Ayame's effort in showing off the superior technology of Galatreon. 

Showing off the technology to Shion who personally invented them was… a bit cute.