Chapter 504 Soul Refinement

The framework hovered in the midst of the storm. Neither flesh nor energy, with no weight and no temperature. Inside it the new skeleton hung at its correct intervals, every long bone threaded, the lattice seated in the marrow, ten thousand and eight channels strung and standing under tension with nothing running through them.

Perfect, empty, and temporary. Now it had to be filled.

Blood and marrow cannot be condensed out of intention. I inventoried what lay within reach. Ash, nine feet deep, most of it demon. Fused glass. Thirty Titan cores, Peak Class Five, made from Transcendental flesh, which made them the finest material on this continent and the wrong material entirely.

There were shells meant for consuming Abyssal matter, and Cor Telluris was able to do that, though not as effectively as some specialised shells. There was no doubt that the new shell I had forged could consume part of these materials, but there was no need for that, since I had an excessive amount of Celestial essence to work with.

His previous body had vanished, but the accumulation remained. Adamantium Titan was at the Transcendence threshold, and even now I could feel it reaching for the framework, trying to put Elric’s flesh back the way it had been.

The only problem with this was that the soul of Elric was shattered, and what the Law of Flesh and the Law of Blood would be correcting towards was a specification that was now archaic. I could not raise the new framework into Adamantium Titan, because there was no stable soul to act as a medium.

I took a new path and reached for Mortal Shell. It was at the peak of Arcanist, but it would have to serve as a complete account of what a vessel is.

Between them the two disciplines contained every statement a body requires, and I would only have to rebuild them to fit the current framework. Mortal Shell and Adamantium Titan were the host’s primary defensive abilities. Mortal Shell bound the soul to the flesh. Adamantium Titan made the flesh unbreakable. Together, they made the host nearly impossible to kill.

But they were separate, and there was a chance here for them to be fused.

I took two Unattuned Law Fragments. A fragment is law that has not decided what it is about, useless for almost everything except true creation. Then I took the Law of Flesh and the Law of Blood.

∞

I unspooled Adamantium Titan and fed it into the framework along the line of the bone. Mortal Shell I laid across it at ninety degrees, and the fragments ran through both as thread, and the storm of Celestial essence still turning over the valley came in behind the weave and set in every gap it left.

The Law of Flesh went into the weave itself, dissolved through all of it, so that what came up was tissue rather than an instruction wearing the shape of tissue. The Law of Blood I put into the heart and let it run. With all of this in place, the body filled outward from the spine.

Marrow first, where a vessel and a body are the same, then the vascular tree, carrying blood that came up red for the length of one beat and then turned silver. Then the organs, in the sequence I had chosen, closely followed by the muscle over bone.

All of these changes needed fuel, and the storm around him held more of it than the work could consume.

The framework did not resist being filled. It had been written for this, and as the body rose inside it the instruction thinned, and was gone, which is what a shard is for.

The weave closed last at the scalp, and the hair came through white. I paused, a fragment of a memory sweeping through my consciousness before it was discarded as the odd bleed-through I have had since the merger with Elric’s soul.

I went through my workings ten more times, and it came out perfect, and I pulled up the System for confirmation.

[ Mortal Shell — consumed. ]

[ Adamantium Titan — consumed. ]

[ Law of Flesh — consumed. ]

[ Law of Blood — consumed. ]

[ Celestial Body: 200 (Sovereign) — Mythic — New ]

[ Lock: released. ]

[ Ceiling: unavailable until the Seventh Earth Gate. ]

Celestial Body... this was unexpected. His foundation had produced a Celestial Body before he had crossed the Seventh Earth Gate. That could only mean that the foundation he would build as a Celestial was something that was not in my records.

The Transcendental lock on his flesh no longer existed, and the only thing holding him back was his knowledge of the law and his application of it. Nevertheless, creating such a flesh gave me new opportunities with what I could do with his soul.

∞

The flesh was perfect, denser than adamantium, more responsive than flesh had any right to be, bound to the soul by a Law that had been reforged into something greater than it had been.

But the soul was still shattered, and so I turned my attention deeper.

The soul was in fragments. The Anima Depth was broken into pieces and scattered through the channels. The crystallised core, the product of two crystallisations, was cracked in a hundred places.

Celestial Body was holding it together. The skill was the only reason Elric was still alive and his soul had not fled into death. With Celestial Body the soul could heal, as it was now able to bear the strain of all the Celestial anima from the Earth Gate, but Celestial Body could not be truly completed if the soul it was holding was unequal to it. The mismatch was unsustainable.

I faced a new challenge, as Celestial Body could nurture the soul so well that it was already healing, and in any other case this would be good enough. The standard I had set myself was perfection, and that was what I was going to give him.

I reached into the storm and began to gather Celestial essence into the channels. The soul I channelled alongside the new shell. All of this was to give the soul a new snapshot of the state of the body, so that it would let go of the framework it was still holding.

Doing this proved harder than the method suggested. Elric’s soul was resilient, and that resilience was the obstacle, because a thing that strong does not unconsciously accept a new framework.

That meant I had to break it.

This was easy, the soul could not hold the anima and I applied force, breaking it to pieces and allowing it to flow through the entire body in one cycle.

Checking the System for confirmation, it authenticated that this path was correct.

[ First Refinement: Complete ]

[ Soul State: Crystallising (Second Stage) — 100% → 0% → 15% ]

[ Soul Purity: 70% ]

[ Stability: Temporary ]

The soul screamed. It was not meant to be rebuilt like this. But it held.

I took the Celestial essence and I poured it into the soul. The essence was purer than anything Elric had ever absorbed. The fragments of the soul absorbed the essence and grew stable, and for a moment it was as if the soul was now capable of housing the essence inside itself, but cracks began to develop across it.

It was not good enough... then I broke it again.

I examined each fragment. I found the flaws, the places where the soul had been built too quickly, sticking to its older framework. All of the imperfections that had accumulated over hundreds of loops... And I removed them.

For anyone else, this would irreversibly change who they were, but all of Elric’s memories were buried inside the darkness of the Hollow, and when he returned to his soul his memories would bend to fit its new shape, and nothing would be lost that made him what he was. The only difference would be that his soul was now radically different.

Those flaws I fed to the raging Celestial essence and it burned them to nothing, before I allowed the essence to flow into the soul once more.

[ Second Refinement: Complete ]

[ Soul Purity: 70% → 85% ]

[ Stability: Improved ]

Thirty-one minutes remained on the lid I had put over the Pale Matron, and the work would take longer than that, and I continued anyway.

I looked at it once more... not good enough. I crushed the soul and rebuilt it again.