Chapter 1425 (Patreon)

The next morning, or whatever I wanted to call the time at which I woke up, I found myself used as a pillow by my older daughter. At some point in the night, or at least while I slept, she had taken Luna’s place and made herself comfortable. Sadly, there was a rather pressing need I had to attend to, urgent enough to make a slow escape from her grip impossible, and I had to be a little forceful. Not enough to hurt her, but by the time I returned from the bathroom, Lia was fully awake. 

“Say, you wouldn’t know what time it is?” I asked, then amended my question. “Incidentally, I have no idea how long I’ve been in my lab, so you would have to be rather thorough.” 

“Well, it’s been five years since the change…” Lia replied, her face and voice perfectly calm and serious, making me gawp at her like a fish out of water. 

“Wha?!” The noise coming out of my mouth wasn’t really a word; it was more an exclamation of disbelief at the sheer absurdity of her statement, but Lia simply stared at me, her expression serene. 

Until she cracked after a few seconds, her lips twitching a little at first before she doubled over in helpless laughter, leaving me scowling as the joke became rather obvious.

“Hahaha,” I said, my voice dry as a desert. “Much funny, so comedic, I can’t keep myself from being amused,” I continued, my voice staying monotone, almost robotic. “Hahaha.” 

“Oh, don’t be like that,” Lia complained, though a trace of guilt tinged her voice. “You know you would make the same joke if the opportunity ever arose.”

“But, to answer your question, it should be late afternoon right now, and you were in your laboratory for a little over three weeks- twenty-five days, to be exact. You have slept for about twenty hours,” she continued, a pout on her face. 

“Thank you.” I nodded, giving her a brief side-hug to make sure she knew I wasn’t really angry about her joke. After all, it would be one I was liable to make myself; I just didn’t enjoy being the butt of it. But that was often the case; being the target of a joke like that was never as funny as playing it. 

“Shit,” I cursed, a sudden realisation hitting me. “I’ve completely forgotten that I wanted to head into the Charland with Gorlock, the Destroyer.” 

For a moment, Lia stared at me, her eyes blank. “Oh, that guy,” she realised after a few seconds. “Yeah, you told me about that, but I forgot, too. It would have been a day or two after you shut yourself in your laboratory, right?” 

“I think so,” I admitted, feeling a little foolish for forgetting the trip. “Well, can’t change that. Guess I’ll have to apologise at some point, and likely head in there without the locals as back-up.” 

“So, you mentioned some experiments yesterday; what did you have in mind?” Lia asked, the change in topic quite welcome. 

“You know I’ve been working on Death and Soul Runes, right?” I asked, trying to remember how much I had told my daughters after those runes literally came to me overnight, likely as a result of a contamination, for lack of a better word, from the dungeon. It was something I had tried to figure out while I sequestered myself in my laboratory, but I had been unsuccessful. There had been some minor changes to my Soul due to the contact, but I had been unable to determine their effects. Hel, I couldn’t even confidently say that the changes were due to that contact. At best, I could correlate the changes to the contact, but correlation didn’t necessitate causation. So it was a deduction, but I believed it was a logical one. 

“You mentioned something, but you never elaborated on what had happened,” Lia replied, her tone making it clear that she wanted an explanation. Curiosity was the one trait all three of us- Lia, Luna and I- shared. We just expressed our curiosity in subtly different ways. At least most of the time. Other times, we expressed it the same way, which is why my tower had laboratories for all three of us, even though Lia, to the best of my knowledge, had never used hers. 

As we ate breakfast, I explained what had happened in the dungeon and my conclusions to Lia, noticing she was a little horrified. Not a terrible surprise, given how vulnerable the Soul was when exposed like that, but I could see that she was also rather impressed. She even offered a possible explanation for why the two skills had been limited to sixty-six. She took my explanation of Soul, Death and Life and concluded that mastery over one required mastery over all three, so the only way to raise the Rune Masteries to one hundred was to have all three. Maybe even raise all three at the same time, but since I could raise Death and Soul Rune Mastery independently of each other, and independently of Life Rune Mastery, that didn’t seem possible. 

“So, now that we’ve gone over the basics, let me explain what I did in my lab, then you can almost certainly guess what experiments I have in mind,” I told Lia, grinning. 

“See, you know that one of the required steps in my plan to bring back my beloved is to temporarily hold her Soul. I don’t like the idea, but I need a way to keep her here after drawing her Soul back from the afterlife, or it will just move on again. And I’m not confident enough to bind the Soul to the Body right away, simply because I don’t know the timing constraints. What if the Soul is brought back too early? What if it is brought back too late and the Body has already created its own Soul, or drawn one in, however that works? Would my beloved’s new Body have to be killed, put into stasis or something like that, so I could work on her Soul?” I shook my head, making it obvious that the numerous issues with this weren’t to my liking. Especially since I could avoid them with my current plan. 

“A few days before I went into seclusion, you suggested something to me, namely that I should try to switch the bodies of some people. Have one person take up residence in the body of another, which sounds like an interesting prank, but there are a few issues with that, as I’ve told you.” Lia nodded at that, likely remembering that conversation vividly. 

“Now, I’ve been thinking,” I told her, smirking. “I know, shocking.” 

“My idea is that I use a Soul Prison to temporarily hold one of the Souls before shifting the other over, as that will give me a lot of practice when it comes to moving Souls around, keeping the mind attached without damaging it and even imbuing a Soul into a body. All things I need to master before resurrecting Sigmir,” I explained, and Lia couldn’t help but mirror my smirk, though hers was a lot more mischievous than mine. 

“Do you think we could make it so the people themselves don’t question why their body is changed?” she asked, making me blink for a moment before shaking my head. 

“It might be possible, but before I would ever try something like that, I’d want to master the basic procedure first. You know, without introducing additional issues and challenges,” I told her, making her pout at my reply. Somehow, this project deeply interested her. 

“Fair,” she admitted after a few moments of pouting and batting her eyes at me pleadingly.

“Say, did Lady Hecate already come up with that portal spell of hers? And, if so, did she teach it to Luna?” I asked, as it was now my turn to change the topic, at least partially. 

“No, we’ve been stuck here,” Lia replied, a slightly accusing look on her face. 

“My bad,” I apologised. “Maybe I should teach you how to use the Anchors, both the version Lady Hecate made and my own, as I don’t put Lady Hecate’s anchors everywhere. This tower, for example, won’t get one of hers; this place will only be for family.”

The noise Lia made in response was rather amusing. She could hide in the shadows, but she hadn't yet learned to step through them. Let alone master it to the level required to travel long distances, like between anchors.

“How would Luna get here if the place is only accessible through the Shadows?” Lia asked, derailing my plans for her training a little. 

“Good question,” I admitted. “Got to think about that; maybe set up an additional anchor in a building outside, beyond the wards? Some place that people could get to, but can’t get past our defences without issues?” I mused, just a little annoyed at that. What good was a fortress impenetrable by virtue of its remote location if you had to build a direct access point so your children could visit?

“Maybe I can come up with a way to shield an anchor, so it only lets those I grant permission use it?” I considered, shaking my head after a moment. 

“Anyway, I’ll have to see what Lady Hecate comes up with before I plan anything regarding the problem.” 

“As for you, would you like to join me in ripping the Souls from a few people and try putting them back? It should be interesting, and knowing you, you're probably bored after being stuck here for a few weeks. We might even invite Luna and make a night of it,” I suggested, getting a very empathetic nod in response. 

“I’ll convince her; I’m sure it’s going to be fun,” Lia exclaimed enthusiastically before running out of the kitchen to find and cajole Luna into joining us. Sometimes, I had to wonder which of my daughters was more mature, because it wasn’t always the older one. Even though there were over ten years of chronological age between them.