Chapter 1389 (Patreon)

The deliberate shift of my perspective produced incredibly weird results. For one, it induced a floating sensation, somewhat reminiscent of a headache, only without the pain, making me feel as if my head was about to float away. If I had hands in this state, I might have reached up, just to keep my head attached, despite knowing that my neck should perform that function. Though given that I had no hands, maybe I didn’t have a neck either, so my head might start floating off, or maybe I didn’t have a body to float away from in the first place. For a moment, I even started to wonder if I had a head in the first place, only to quickly push that line of thinking away; nothing good would come of it. 

Well, something good came of it, but not quite in the way I would have imagined. The shift of my attention towards the question of my body caused information to seep into my consciousness, forming into something like an image, but not quite. It was more akin to the information I received when using my Blood Magic, allowing my mind to form a mental image even while my eyes were tightly shut. 

In this case, the image was of my body, but not quite. For one, the image contained more than just the elven body I was accustomed to. In the image, my body had the wings I had been using quite a bit recently, only that they didn’t look like the Ice I had crafted them from; they looked as if they were made of flesh and blood. Also, scales. 

The wings in the image I was now seeing looked quite similar to bat wings, with relatively thin bones providing structure and a thin, almost translucent membrane stretched between them to provide lift. The slightly fleshy, muscled parts were covered in scales, their primary colour shifting from a cold, almost glacial blue to a deeper sky blue, though the colour never warmed. Additionally, the scales were rimming in a dark, almost black purple, but I got the impression it wasn’t quite black, making it feel less like a colour and more like the absorption of light. The thin membrane was even lighter, a pale blue I immediately recognised as my skin colour, though its thinness made it hard to tell. Light simply seemed to pass through. Another difference between these wings and the ones I conjured was that they weren’t attached to my hair; they simply seemed to grow from my shoulders, much like my actual arms. How exactly that worked, or how I would keep my balance with the changed wing geometry, I wasn’t sure, but if I ever got wings like that, I would find out. 

However, the wings weren’t the most important change when comparing the image I was seeing now to the body I was accustomed to. That was reserved for my hair, or rather, for the lack of something within the hair. Normally, my hair was lit up with countless tiny motes of light, adding a certain sparkle to my appearance. That was thanks to the Magical Hair trait I had selected all those years ago, which allowed me to store a significant amount of Astral Power in my hair. That power manifested as tiny motes, each mote giving off a sparkle of light associated with one of my affinities. Since my affinities had expanded a great deal since my days on Mundus, they now had a wide range of colours.

While I usually concealed the appearance of those motes with magic simply because I considered them too conspicuous and recognised the weakness they represented. Anyone with the right background information could readily deduce my elemental affinity from them, to say nothing of the fact that they visibly represented the Magical Hair trait. The trait was powerful, but it was also a double-edged sword, allowing anyone who had my hair to strike at me directly or to severely restrict my powers by simply cutting off my hair. 

Focusing back on the image, I noticed even more differences between the Body I was perceiving and the state my physical body had been in before I started the experiment. Sure, the vast majority of those details were minor; the Body was missing various marks like small scars and the odd scratch, things like that. The biggest difference, aside from the two major ones, was that the Body appeared completely hairless below the head. My body, well, it wasn’t, not without a certain amount of maintenance I habitually skipped.

Finally, I tore my focus away from the image of my Body I was perceiving and forcibly shifted my attention towards my Soul. Accomplishing that took a lot more effort than I would have expected after my attention latched onto my Body as easily as it had, but that might just be because I was used to seeing my body. Sure, I usually used a mirror, but perceiving my Soul was much more troublesome. 

Still, with a bit of mental gymnastics and some of the exercises Lady Hecate had taught me to access the Soul Sight, I managed to shift my attention, only to feel the eyes I didn’t have widen in surprise, almost to the point that they boggled from my non-existent head. 

Where the differences between my physical body and the image of my Body were relatively minor, at least in the grand scheme of things, the image of my Soul was vastly different from what I had expected. Even if I wasn’t sure what I should have expected, I was confident that this wasn’t it. Not in the slightest. A ball of scintillating light, maybe some sort of simple image, sure, but this? No. 

As it turned out, my Soul was a dragon. Or maybe I was a dragon, and my soul simply matched that form? I had no real idea what was going on there, but the image of my Soul I perceived was clearly a dragon, and it didn’t feel like a small one. Sure, it was a little difficult to identify the scales involved, as the only thing I perceived was the dragon within an otherwise empty void, but the image gave me a feeling of grandeur, might and awe. Also, fear, but given that this was supposed to be the most fundamental part of me that existed, feeling afraid would be silly. It was, after all, I who would be afraid of me.

Now, while it was impossible to accurately infer the size of the dragon, I could readily see a number of other characteristics. One was the physiology, which was quite interesting. The dragon’s body was long and sinuous, almost serpentine, though not quite. It had multiple wings, the biggest a massive pair sitting about a fifth of its length behind the head and stretching long enough to reach the tip of its tail if they stretched back. Additionally, there were a few more pairs sprouting from other parts of the long body, though those wings were all comparatively smaller.

In addition to the wings, the dragon also had two pairs of claws, one sitting just below the primary pair of wings, the other roughly halfway down the body. Neither pair was large, nor did they look all that powerful, especially as the arms, or limbs, to which these claws were attached were quite short. It made me think of a T-rex, a massive, dangerous and powerful body, but these arms didn’t seem to fit all that well.

The head, which seemed to be examining me with an intensity matching my own, was relatively narrow, almost reptilian, with a stretched-out snout and a pair of large, jade-green eyes that seemed to glow with an inner light. The eyes, at least, were intimately familiar, as I had seen them in the mirror every day of my life.

The eyes weren’t the only familiar part. When it came to colours, the entire dragon was familiar, though mostly because I had seen similar parts just before. The scales looked nearly identical to those I had seen in my Body image, the same glacial blue-white, the same dark edges. The biggest difference was that the dragon's scales were faintly sparkling with power, reminding me of the sparkle I usually saw in my hair, thanks to the magical hair. A part of me wondered just what that might mean, and how difficult it would be to conceal, before discarding the thought. For now, the question of why the dragon was sparkling wasn’t all that relevant. 

Far more relevant was figuring out just what this meant. The obvious answer was that I had, for some reason, a dragon’s soul, though I had no idea what practical implications or consequences that had. 

Nor did I know whether there was a problem with my Body and Soul being so mismatched; it was something I would have to investigate at some point. However, for now, I simply let my focus fade as exhaustion was already tearing at my mind, pulling me towards the sweet release of unconsciousness.