“Ben, I don’t know what you’re trying to do but it’s drawing a crowd,” Delair said when she came in that day, having seen a variety of materials moving and reshaping themselves into different items floating the full two kilometers above him and the shop that he could reach, and adding enchantments to them each time something new was made. “Ceselee’s gonna come to complain again.”

“Don’t worry about it, kiddo. I’m not hurting anyone, so it’s not a problem. Hell, even if I drop everything right now, it’ll all just hit the roof first.”

“And then bounce off and hit anyone else who’s staring.”

“Ha, then they better make sure they don’t stare too closely,” he grinned. “Seriously though, it’s nothing to worry about. I’m not going to drop them.”

“Well, alright. Then what am I working on today?”

“Join clone five for some stone working and we might do some alchemy in the afternoon. I’ll be keeping you busy today.”

His student smiled at the promise of work, but while she moved to do that as a part of himself guided her, a larger part of who he was focused on continuing to look at the change in his skill, and just how it might relate to the name itself.

With the first area of his focus going to where felt the most likely, Ben began to experiment with the way he would make souls, retreading previous ground that had failed in the past.

Even before the awakening, Ben was constantly throwing different attempts into the mix, wanting to see what modifications he could make on one while still allowing a soul to be brought into existence and slowly grew his knowledge of how they worked and what was possible, but with more skill and power at his fingertips, what he needed to do then was confirm what was still out of his reach and what had been simply a limit in his ability before, leaving him to begin his materialization and observe the way such a thing would fill the space. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

Originally, the limits of his soul had seemed largely based on his own, and for reasons he still couldn’t judge, that still seemed to be the case. The attributes he could fill them with were still only half of what he himself held, not able to surpass that one barrier yet to create a soul that was even on par with his own, yet the fact that he still couldn’t do anything to surpass whatever was holding him back could only leave him looking at the ones he had made in confusion. It didn’t seem like it should have been such a firm wall that even then he couldn’t overcome it, yet there it was, still blocking his way.

But beyond that, there were other structures in the soul, some he understood and some he didn’t, and he found that he was able to build on them well enough, at least for the most part. There were still limits and there were still mysteries, with some structures seemingly not able to be grown if other parts were and configurations that just didn’t want to work at all, yet through that, there was discovery, some of which was more significant that others.

Affinities and resistances being the main ones. Originally, Ben hadn’t been able to touch them, and a part of him had been assuming that was that. That even though he could materialize them in their initial state, he was missing whatever would have let them grow beyond even the first few points of each, yet to his excitement, it seemed that was no longer so. Materializing souls, he was able to build both of those aspects up more and more, no matter what element they related to, with only a single caveat to them. The higher he wanted to raise any, the more the mana cost of creation was.

Stolen story; please report.

Considering that creating a single soul now cost him an insignificant fraction of a point of mana, so little he wouldn’t have even noticed he’d spent any mana at all, that might not have seemed like much, but at the same time, the cost was steep. If the souls he normally made had values in their affinities of ones across the board, then adding a single attribute increased the mana cost to two, which may not have seemed like much compared to the amount he could now wield, and yet, that number would continue to grow for every attribute or resistance point he would add after, making the idea of some incredible soul with one-hundreds across all affinities entirely unfeasible.

And yet, despite that, Ben still grinned. It wasn’t much, but it was progress, and of the sort that he could potentially use. With affinitied souls, there was the possibility of creating materializers for the affinitied magic materials. While they were still being researched, he couldn’t deny that he enjoyed playing with whatever voidstone and deathstone he could get his hands on, meaning attempting to design new devices to house such souls was now a priority on his to-do list, only being held back by his desire to continue his current line of research.

If he could materialize souls holding an affinity or resistance to any given mana, then what else might have been possible? As sad as it was, that was one of the few domains controlled by one’s soul in that universe, and while in others, souls might have held other functions, it wasn’t as if Ben could import any of them there. What he could do instead, though, was try to look at the sections that made them up.

At once, Ben materialized, not complete souls but instead only their component parts, and for the first time trying such a thing, he felt it work, grasping what he’d made with his own to keep them from fading out of reality as he looked the pieces over.

It was the first time he had done such a thing and the first thing he concerned himself with was how they felt, imprinting it in his mind to increase the efficiency of all future soul creation, but with that done he did what he could next, bringing forth every single individual piece of the most basic soul he was able to make and with a bit of his will, assembled it, creating a greater whole, making his eyes sparkle as he held onto the new simple soul before looking at what that meant next. If he could create the individual pieces, then didn’t that mean he could try assembling them in ways that he couldn’t materialize?

He had to know, and with that curiosity came a whole new realm of arrangements he’d never previously been able to touch on, putting parts in different orders than what one would normally find or even either adding or taking away different parts, all with mixed results.

As with any test when it came to soul arrangements, some wanted to work and some didn’t, but he did get successes he never would have before from simple materialization. Some parts seemed able to be removed and others could be doubled up with no obvious drawback when they weren’t in a living being, but there were failures in it all too.

Most notable was that he couldn’t give a soul the same attribute or resistance twice, even though his own experience implied that there should have been a hypothetical way to make it work. Foast in particular, the world’s third tier shapeshifter, absorbed the souls and therefore the affinities and resistances of the things he killed, with whatever was higher between the original and the new one taking priority for him, but it wasn’t like the old affinities disappeared either. If a fully formed soul could be merged into another, then why not just some of the same fragments?

It was curious, all of it, with every discovery leading to more questions in the end, but none so as much as what he ultimately found taking up the largest portion of his thoughts. As he’d named back in his very first attempt to make one, souls were made of essence, and he now had a far greater control of that than ever before, raising the ultimate question and feeling like he’d struck the heart of soul production. If he now had more power over the creation of essence, what could he perhaps make with it other than souls?