An Arcanist's Citadel 11 (Patreon)

An Arcanist’s Citadel

Chapter 11

-VB-

For the next few weeks, nothing of note happened.

The Papacy set up a consulate at the capital city of Elysium, the Citadel Council got more testy with the Systems Alliance for no reason, and Elysium rejected an offer from the Systems Alliance to join them despite not having met all of the requirements. 

Nothing of note, I tell you.

What was more important, though, were my children’s education in both mundane and not-so-mundane matters. 

“When you are working with more than the average human’s worth of spiritual matter,” I began as I brought out exactly what I was referring to: an average soul. “You have to be aware of several things. The first of which is whether the soul is aware or not.”

Then I grabbed the soul in question and played with it. 

Squeezing, stretching, twisting, and all other things that would be painful for a soul. 

Because, yes, even souls had a form they preferred and deviating from that caused them harm. 

But this soul didn’t scream or beg for me to stop. While inducing pain was neither the best nor the most humane method of determining a soul’s sapience/sentience, it was both the simplest and quickest method. It was also not always accurate. Some very weak souls might retain sentience but lack the minimum ego needed to form coherent thoughts and ideas. 

Sora, Sai, Hana, and Amy all stared at the soul as I handed it to Sora first for him to try it out himself. 

My eldest son fumbled a little before he managed to reinforce his hands with enough spiritual presence to give himself an “in” with the spiritual world. He did the same thing I did, but he was far more cautious and weaker than what I did. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to hurt the soul? I’ll ask him later.

When Sai got his hands on the soul, he was a lot more brutal with it than Sora. 

Then he skipped Hana and gave it to Amy first. Amy was a lot like Sai; she went for a full-on double knob-twisting stretch on the egoless soul.

Finally, Hana got her turn. She took the soul, looked it over, and poked it a few times. After poking a few times, she stretched it out a little bit before letting it settle back. 

“Does this soul really not have any, you know, mind?” she asked me. 

“Nope,” I popped that P. “I made sure to scrub it.”

She frowned in disgust. 

She knew exactly what I was talking about. 

“And that’s not a human soul but a batarian soul. There’s a lot of those around recently.”

Her disgust ebbed away just a little. 

“Now, what you do with these depends on what you want to accomplish. I’ve all taught you the basics and intermediate spiritual manipulation,” I said as I pulled out three more such souls. All scrubbed, egoless, and pliable for novice spiritualists(?). I handed one each to my children. “Since you have done this before with your spiritual essence, I now want you to make whatever effect or item you want from the soul I gave you.”

I watched them all put their all into this one simple act. Sai struggled to mold the soul in his hands to what he wanted, and I kind of knew what he was going for. He was a big lover of miniatures. Wood, plastic, or metal, he didn’t care about the material. So he was trying to turn his into a miniature. However, even an egoless soul has memories of what it used to be. Turning it into something else that it wasn’t took effort and precision or a lot of brute force power, neither of which he didn’t have. I was going to let him struggle a bit more before pointing that out. 

My gaze shifted over to Sora. He was having an easier time because all he was doing was … eating the soul, metaphysically speaking. As my eldest, I put a lot of pressure on him early in his life. He got to see a lot of things in my labs that a child didn’t need to see, and that warped his sense of normalcy. Or rather, he lacked it. So when I asked him to do something with the soul, he did something he’s seen me do multiple times: tear a soul apart to fuel myself. And he was doing that now by making the soul burst with too much power, but fumbled the conversion. 

The reason why power was injected into a soul was not that different from how digestion worked. Unlike a biological body’s digestion, a spiritual body’s predatory digestion involves overcoming the ego, memory, and essence of a soul. That’s how Hollows worked. A Hollow needed to do more than just eat a soul; a Hollow needed to beat the soul down and grind it up.Otherwise, when they became a Menos Grande, they would lose their identity to the countless egos still active within their soul.

Injecting power and causing a cascade failure from spiritual dissonance allowed one to mix foreign soul matter with one’s own soul matter, making it easier to “swallow” and integrate. What Sora struggled with was pulling the now not-quite-his-soul-matter-mix back into himself. Unlike Sai who lacked both power and precision, Sora at least had power. In fact, he had as much power as the rest of my children combined, but that was also precisely why he struggled to control that power. 

Then, I glanced at Hana. My eldest daughter was the exact opposite of my eldest son. She lacked power but possessed even more control than I did. Considering that I got my power from bullshit ROB shenanigans, that was saying something. However, because her own soul was so weak and small, she couldn’t even attempt to do what Sora was doing; even a broken, shredded, and scrubbed soul matter would dilute her soul’s identity. Instead, she tore the soul apart to fuel a simple spell: reinforcement. As long as the “fuel” lasted, she would be physically strong, durable, and minutely better defended spiritually from the soul matter serving as an ablative armor of a sort against any spiritual attacks. 

Finally, I looked at the youngest of the four in front of me. Amy was the most violent of my children, but there was a good reason for it. She wasn’t dumb but she hated how complicated the world was. She understood that the world was complicated because there were webs of interests, emotional ties, and financial incentives everywhere. Maybe it was because I spoiled her for a long time, but she saw all of those connections outside of our family as superfluous and unnecessary. 

She had one friend. 

And that friend nearly died under her watch. After that, Amy became violent. Any aggression. Any subtle works. Anything that remotely hinted at hostility was dealt with before she, her friend, and our family got hit first. Out of all of my children, she was the one who most resonated with my own philosophy. She was offensive where I was defensive, but once the fighting started, we both went for the throat. 

So when she got her hands on her own batarian soul, she didn’t even bother to play with it. That soul was, after all, one of the batarians who had come to harm her world, her friend, and her family. 

She made the soul burst and made a curse with it. Then she brought out a bullet and imbued the curse into it. 

Did I mention she was also a gun nut? 

Because she was a “I have a .50 cal sniper rifle” gun nut. 

I focused on the cursed bullet for a second, looking at its surface and the simple spell underneath it. 

Ah, I see. It was a curse of decay. Even if the bullet struck a nonbiological matter, the impact site would have the curse transferred to it, and it would linger and spread outward, causing fragility and decay. Unfortunately, the curse was too simple; it would ignore anything the bullet didn’t shatter or bounce off on impact. If it bounced off the bone, then the bullet would lose the curse and the curse would be on that bone only just as the curse would only target one metal panel if that’s what it stuck to.

I smiled as she looked at her siblings with obvious magical superiority, and that urged the rest of my children to try even harder. After a while, I started to give them pointers and instructions. 

Teaching my kids how to do magic was, in its own way, magical.

I swear if anyone interrupts me in a moment like this, I swear I’m going to murderfuck them, their superior, their subordinates, and their kids.

I waited…

And waited…

“Dad, you’re doing that weird thing again,” Sora sighed. 

I sniffed. “Dad’s being vigilant for inopportune idiots,” I replied with a huff. “... And where’s your soul?”

He looked sheepish.

With a huff, I pulled out another soul and tossed it at him.