Chapter 123: Anima Depth - Broken Celestial

The host has ceded the front and returned deep into the meld.

[Effective Operating Capacity: 4 → 5]

[Endurance: 39 → 41 → 43]

Elric held it for eleven seconds. I have reviewed the eleven seconds, and by every parameter available to me, the cast he produced should not have been possible at four percent capacity through a body at this stage of reconstruction.

He had surprised me by the method he had used for this spell, and I noted three separate moments in the eleven seconds at which the correct tactical decision was to abort the cast and preserve the body.

He did not abort, and I do not have a parameter for what he did instead. The closest term in my available vocabulary is one I have flagged for review, because it does not belong to the tactical lexicon, and I am not certain how it entered my assessment of the host.

The term is tenacity.

The lightning field was now sustaining itself from the remnants of the old Anima inside the channels, and the Khaaz are dying at the perimeter at a rate of approximately three hundred per minute.

The Anima Depth was becoming deeper, and the grafting of the Celestial Marrow was proceeding in the right manner.

[Effective Operating Capacity: 5 → 7]

[Endurance: 43 → 45]

I returned my full focus to the rebuilding of Elric, and the Hollow Space drew back from the edges, denied the emptiness as the Creation-Anima was holding the line, and the marrow integration crossed seventy percent.

Elric slept in the deep, where the pain was statistics, and he had bought the time I would use to finish making him into the thing the time was for.

[Effective Operating Capacity: 7 → 9]

The transformation rises.

∞

Lightning Dominion’s Field was now partly sustaining itself from the rising capacity of the new depth, and the Khaaz died at the perimeter at four hundred a minute, and I gave them no further thought.

Even without conscious manipulation, I could tell that the arcs of lightning leaving the field were now stronger despite the fact that it was constantly flickering as if it was about to go out.

The unknown equation had worked, and the body needed to be completed for its new combat abilities to be judged, but I could already see the promise of every demon in this world being wiped out.

Dealing with the Khaaz was not the problem. The eleven Khaazim closing from the north were the problem. The current field would slow a Khaazim. It would not stop one.

I had, by my projection, three minutes and forty seconds before the first armoured body crossed the perimeter and reached the curled, half-finished thing in the ash that I was rebuilding.

The rebuild had three minutes and forty seconds, then.

It would take three minutes and twenty, and I returned my full allocation to the work.

∞

The marrow integration crossed from seventy percent toward completion.

At this point, the Celestial Marrow had taken root in the channel-lined cavities of every long bone, and the root-bone I had scraped away was reforming as Celestial substance.

The skeleton would no longer be a frame the body hung on, but an organ in its own right, a thing that would store Anima and conduct it and hold the architecture of everything built above it.

Inside the skeleton were more than 6,000 Channels, but they took a crystalline form that the mages of this world with their young magical civilization could not yet comprehend.

If Cor Telluris was completed and all the channels transformed, the seat of Elric’s power would move from his flesh to his bones.

[Cor Telluris — Marrow Integration: 100%]

[Channels Grown: 127 → 211 / 10,008]

[Endurance: 45 → 49 (Broken-Celestial)]

The Endurance settled. Forty-nine. Half of what the body had carried into the morning, and worth more than three times the count. The number was a mortal measurement when the substance was no longer mortal, and the two would never again agree, and that disagreement was the point.

I turned the last of my attention to the soul.

The new Anima Depth had been rising the whole while, fed by Creation-Anima and pressured by the Hollow Space beneath it, and now it had established enough structure to stabilise. I stopped pushing. I let it find its own level, the way water finds its level when you stop pouring.

[Effective Operating Capacity: 9 → 14 → 23 → 31...]

It rose past the fractions it had been crawling through. It rose past the cracked-reservoir ceiling that had capped this body at a third of itself for fifteen loops. It rose, and it did not stop where the old reservoir would have stopped it, because there was no old reservoir, as it flowed through the channels and bones.

The circuit was not fully perfected, but soon, the entirety of this body would be linked.

Unlike the previous Anima Depth that was shaped roughly like a tube with the seven primary channels emerging from it like roots, this new Anima Depth was spherical with countless tiny bumps on it that would be able to connect with all 10,008 channels.

A massive evolution from the previous Anima Depth.

[Effective Operating Capacity: 31 → 40 → 47]

[Anima Depth: 47 (Broken-Celestial)]

[Note: Standard tier classification no longer applicable. Reservoir-based ceiling removed. Operating capacity at full.]

Forty-seven.

Lower than the fifty-nine the body had carried into the morning, and the seventy-one, the Second Earth Gate had briefly tried to force.

And it was at full capacity, and so for the first time since the cracked reservoir, the channel-shredding deaths, and the long fractional crawl through a third of his own power, Elric would operate at the whole of what he had.

The whole of what he had was now Celestial-grade.

I logged the completion and recalled the cry that had arisen when the new Anima Depth was forming, and this was pertinent now because I could feel that a presence was in the new Anima Depth, perhaps more like a weight.

Creating this new Anima Depth was beyond my knowledge, and I logged it as a unique result of this experiment until I could reconnect with the Stone Oracle and send all my findings over.

I logged it as the second discrepancy. I would watch it.

The rebuild was complete, and the first Khaazim was forty metres out.

I withdrew from the back of the body, released the surgery, and let the meld collapse. I had done what the framework could do. The rest required the one thing I could not supply.

I gave the body back to Elric.