A Jaded Life

Chapter 1362

After a few more frustrating attempts to learn more about the Revenant, I temporarily gave up. Almost every attempt so far had resulted in self-destructive retaliation, and by now, the thing was about ready to give up the ghost. Any further experiments on the main body would see me deprived of this fascinating creature, and I was far from ready to give up.

However, instead of simply giving up and sealing the creature deep in the earth for some time, I decided to try a few other things.

The first idea on my list was to see what the creature's severed limbs and torso were doing. When I had first checked them, they had simply been lying there, slowly disintegrating in a way that mirrored the Revenant’s regeneration. That strongly implied a lingering connection, something I might be able to exploit, even if I had a feeling that the severed limbs would reject my magic just as vigorously as the main body did.

Still, unless I tested it, I would never know for certain.

Which was why my first stop to find more answers was at another cell, in which a severed arm was slowly turning to dust. The hand and forearm were already gone, somehow transferred over to the Revenant, but the rest was still here, until it ended in the gruesome wound I had created when cutting the thing off the monster.

A quick glance through the grate in the cell above showed me little I hadn’t been able to see through my scrying constructs. However, I could see some faint lines of power within the arm, almost certainly a mirror of the strands of power that outlined the Revenant’s regenerating body. Somehow, I had a feeling that poking them magically would have similar results to those on the original.

Keeping my earlier resolution to use proper safety precautions when experimenting, something I really should have learned in the past, given how often one of my experiments had exploded or reanimated in an attempt to murder me, I used another conjured construct to poke the arm with a stick.

Here, the results were quite curious, if a little underwhelming. Namely, poking the arm and shoving it around did nothing, well, nothing beyond what one would expect when poking a severed arm, disintegrating or not. Some of the dried blood was dislodged, leaving an ugly stain on the ground, but that was about it; the arm was just pushed around, with no reaction to the poking stick. It was quite boring, but I had a feeling that introducing my magic to the mix would produce more interesting results.

But before I tried that, I had my construct scoop up some of the grey dust the disintegrated parts of the arm had turned into, curious if those had some interesting properties. After all, if the Revenant kept regenerating, I could keep chopping off parts and get more and more of this dust; if it was magically significant, I wanted to know. It wasn’t every day that you came across an infinite supply of reagents from a monster above level one hundred.

Sadly, when I got the grey dust into my hands, I couldn’t find anything special about it. There was no lingering magic; it was just a fine, somewhat chalky grey powder. It might have some alchemical use, but if it did, I had no idea what it might be. To me, it was no better than some ash picked up after a fire, just without the trace amounts of lingering Fire Astral Power infused into them during the burning. So, no real use there, though I would ask Lia about potential alchemical uses for the stuff.

Just to confirm my earlier suspicions, I gently poked the arm with my magic, but it didn’t achieve anything, until my pokes struck one of the strands of power the arm was infused by, causing a minor flare-up as my poking magic and some of the arm were eliminated in a flash of eldritch fire. A quick check through the construct I had left behind in the Revenant’s cell showed me that the arm’s regeneration hadn’t sped up due to the elimination of flesh here, so even destroying the Revenant’s lost limbs wouldn’t do anything, at least nothing I could see at first glance.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

So far, it didn’t look like I would learn anything interesting from the arm, but maybe one of my daughters would come up with a way to extract information from the stubborn and spiteful creature. It certainly was worth having them try. From a distance and with care, just in case they managed to blow something up.

A quick jaunt through the shadows carried me over to the Nexus Tower, where I tried, and failed, to pry Luna off her rabbits. By now, she had managed to grow another pair of them and was continuously working to increase the growth rate of the rabbits in her tanks, as she wasn’t willing to experiment on humans just yet. I suggested that she might want to try with monkeys, but she argued she’d need the base material for that. It made me wonder whether I should spread my wings and explore further south, using the shadows to travel back and forth at will, but I decided against it. Instead, I suggested that she might want to use human material but stop the growth before the embryos became too alive, though I wasn’t sure what the moral criterion for that was.

After all, when did a viable foetus become a viable human, especially if there was no actual birth involved, merely the decanting from what amounted to a very fancy, enchanted fishtank? Maybe I should set myself up in front of the tank for that experiment and observe the would-be human’s soul. That way, I might learn something about the soul, or I might see the soul come from that external realm where souls resided before their incarnation, depending on how exactly that worked.

After all, if each person got a new soul, reincarnation, something that I knew happened, wouldn’t really work. Which, in turn, made me wonder if there was some maxim allocation of souls, as that would have all sorts of very strange effects as populations grew. What if a population managed to grow large enough, maybe by spreading to the stars, that there weren’t enough souls to go around? Would people be born soulless, or would a soul be reincarnated moments after their previous body died?

Neither option really made sense. I knew that Adra on Mundus had been a reincarnated soul, or so the Grandmother had claimed, and the reincarnation cycle had been a few hundred years, not even a complete lifetime for her species. On the other hand, if I looked at Terra’s population number and growth before the Change and assumed similar trends for Mundus, it would almost imply that the number of dryad-souls was small enough to facilitate a very fast reincarnation. Or it might be a complete coincidence, giving credence to the whole ‘star-crossed lovers’ idea, which was quite romantic but also rather annoying. If it were all up to fate or chance, trying to predict anything about reincarnation would be pointless.

Before I left the Nexus Tower, I did take a close look at the rabbits Luna had grown in her tanks, trying to see if something interesting was going on with their souls, but without a normal baby rabbit to compare them to, I wasn’t able to tell anything. Maybe their souls were a little pale, or less luminescent than the souls of other beasts I had seen in the past, but whether that was due to their tank-grown birth or because they were infants, I had no idea.

Or it might be a product of their domestic state, something to keep people from raising animals for meat and harvesting EXP from them, though I didn’t think that was the case. EXP didn’t come from killing; it was created due to experiences and struggle. I doubted anyone who raised cattle or rabbits for meat had to struggle when butchering them, unless emotional struggle counted. As far as I could tell, the system was rather inconsistent in that regard, or maybe I simply didn’t understand the principles involved; that was possible, too.

Luckily, I didn’t have to really worry about that, not for Sigmir’s revival. After all, I had no interest in getting a random soul into a body, or a new soul. I only wanted to get Sigmir’s soul back and put it into a body, which was an entirely different issue.

Though I might have to make sure I could prevent or control the incarnation of a new soul, as I had no idea what might happen if a body already had a soul when I put another in.

Somehow, I had a feeling that the whole ‘Dominion over Souls’ part of the challenges Lady Hecate had explained to me would be the hardest.