Chapter 418: An Unbreakable Soul

Stay with me here... I’m not crazy; I just think this is one of the most genuine ideas I’ve had about how I want to build my fighting style.

For one, Sovereign Caldus had said that it was impossible for a mage to hold a Law and think at the same time... but you see, I kind of do that, even without a Grimoire.

In my last loop, I was attacked by a Sovereign from above, and I had to defend myself against their attack. One of the reasons I was able to respond to the spell was my Law, which had allowed me to anticipate and create a shield almost instantaneously.

I had felt no strain when I did this at that time, and over time, every time I touched the completed Law inside my soul, there was no strain. So, if I look at it from this point, I do not need a Grimoire to aid me in wielding Laws, but something else.

But nearly every skill and spell that I own, I bought by dying. I have thrown myself at a problem until it killed me, come back knowing one more piece of it, and thrown myself at it again. Hundreds of times. That is my method, and it has worked so well for me... and it is also the reason my foundations are shallow.

Inside a Grimoire, thought takes no time.

So: how many attempts can I make in a place where death costs nothing, before I have to spend a real one?

I had died so many times by now that I was beginning to acknowledge that my soul was strange. When the scars in my soul began to fade, I believed it was the result of my soul going through another round of crystallization, but I may just be wrong.

From the beginning, I had abused my soul beyond limits, even when I was an Acolyte, and the state of my soul always returned to baseline, as if no matter what I did, or how I broke myself, my soul would always find a way to repair itself.

At the beginning, I thought it was the loop, but I had just seen Eldritch abominations in the void, granted knowledge that I should not have, my soul had been shredded to pieces, and I took only one meal from a magical deer to heal me halfway, though Dorrik had believed that I needed at least six of those to bring me back from the brink of death.

Even now, I could feel my soul healing, and it would not be long before the injuries were all gone.

The only reason the loop was effective for someone like me was that no matter what I suffered, my soul was always able to heal itself, and it had done this so many times that I no longer considered this to be abnormal.

If I were a regular mage, then I would have gone mad many loops ago, and the first demon that tore my soul apart with his corruption would have ended my journey, and I would have been cursed to relive the same day over and over again, until the engine inside my soul responsible for bringing me back faded away to nothing.

What if I was able to use this trait of my soul that granted me this unreasonable soul recovery to my advantage and do something with my Grimoire different from every other mage?

Caldus made an army in his; then I would make a slaughterhouse... a room where I can run the fight before I have it, and lose it, and lose it again, and keep the lesson.

Instead of dying to a loop a thousand times, I would die a thousand times to my opponent inside my Grimoire, and learn from them inside that place. The loop was everything that I knew, so there was no reason to throw away my greatest weapon; I just had to weaponize it.

My Grimoire would be a furnace with a door, and I would burn myself until I was able to bathe in the flames of the sun.

And I am aware of what that says about me, and I am not going to defend myself. If my soul will always come back, then I should tie my power system around something that no one else seems to have.

∞

Which brings me to one of the bedrock principles that laid the foundation for this crazy thought in my head.

During the battle with the Sovereign, the Pale Matron said many things from too many mouths, and with my perfect memory, I did not forget a single thing she said, and I always returned to a particular set of words.

Your kind always did love the pretty little boxes you keep your smallness in. You take the Firmament and shrink it into a box.

In that entire battle, even when the Sovereign was fighting against a cathedral of meat, nothing seemed to be fazing him, but these words had drawn something out of him, and he had flinched before he answered with anger.

I had never had the chance to ask him why these particular words had disturbed him so much.

And there is the engine inside my soul that brings me back from death. The Soul Flayer had called it a Pivot of the Firmament, something that no soul should contain, not even a Maker’s, and he said the Makers created existence; even the fact that I could house nine law shards in my soul seemed so terrifying to him.

So, if I am right, and this is a crazy if... a Grimoire is a Firmament, and after so long, I understood that a Firmament could be seen as Laws. We take a part of the heavens and the earth and place them under our control.

Sovereign Caldus had taken a Law of Flame and bound it in his Grimoire, the same way that Seed had taken a Law of Darkness and made his own Grimoire... I don’t know what laws the Sovereign of the Stars had bound in his Grimoire, but I had no doubt that one day I was going to discover them.

Now, a demon had told me that I had a Pivot of the Firmament inside me, and I know that it was this pivot that enabled me to leap across time with my soul, and if that is true, then I am not building a Grimoire like a normal Sovereign; I am building two, since I already carried a Firmament inside my soul.

It was in this moment that another even crazier thought occurred to me: why settle for one Grimoire? I have nine Law Shards, and the engine of the loop inside me.

Could I build one super Grimoire, or something even crazier?!

Still, all my speculations depended on how much I could translate what I wanted to Dorrik. He might be the most powerful Forgemaster I would ever come across, but if I cannot tell him what I need, then he would have no way to make it.

I do not know if he has a word for spell, and he does not have any channels. I had watched him work as he created the blade, and there was nothing moving in him that my senses could find.

He had never used Anima; there was no such thing as a resonance, no tier, no skill, no status screen, since he was not part of the System, and I had no frame of reference to connect with him.

I could not tell him a Grimoire was a Mental Space, because he did not divide the mind from the world in the first place; he seemed to be a part of it, and I thought gods wielded Laws, while mages enforced them.

Sovereign Caldus told the world a rule, and the world agreed; Dorrik came to an arrangement with stone, and the stone acted, and I am not certain those are the same act described twice or two different acts entirely. It was all but decided that I would need to go back to the future to acquire a Grimoire as reference.

I sighed and rubbed my face, as the answer was simple: if I stopped thinking about it too hard, I just had to tell him what a Grimoire was for.

"The weapon I want is something that can take the Laws of this world and bend them to my will."