"Wait, what?" I ask, staring incredulously. "A god?"

"Mana comes from the Mistwatcher," Margarette clarifies. "And only the Mistwatcher. Creating mana isn't possible for mortals like us."

“Superstitious bullshit,” Penelope argues, looking irritated. “It’s true that no one knows any method of creating mana, but that’s because there is almost no research in the subject. No one has tried. Why would anyone want or need to create more mana? We have a limitless supply of it!”

“Penelope, you know that mana creation is theoretically impossible,” Theodora argues. “Mana is consumed during the casting of a spell. You can’t cast a spell that consumes heat or light to create mana, that’s the opposite of what a spell is. You’d need a spell that converts… well, mana into mana, which would be pointless. Creating mana is not possible.”

“Except that it obviously is, because it comes from somewhere,” Penelope snaps. “Even if that somewhere is the Mistwatcher itself, which may I remind you we have no compelling evidence to suggest other than basic proximity, it is created somehow. Therefore, creating it is possible.”

“Sure, by something that defies our physical understanding of the world,” Margarette drawls. “Like, say, a god.”

My tendrils curl and uncurl as I listen to the debate on my apparent divinity. I want to say something, but I have absolutely no idea what. This isn't exactly the sort of conversation I ever expected someone to have about me. A god? I sure don't feel like a god. Pretty much my entire life I've spent getting rolled over, ignored, and abused. What kind of god is that supposed to be?

"I certainly hesitate to call Vita a god," Theodora says, mirroring my thoughts, "but I agree on the other points. We have stepped into the Mistwatcher's domain. We've always toed the line, what with defying death and all. But mana? Mana is the very substance that causes the world to function. Mana is why the islands fly. If Vita is a source of that substance, even a new kind of that substance, that… well, I can't even begin to guess the implications of that."

“Well, here’s my take on the ‘implications,’” Penelope answers derisively. “She’s going to have a bitch of a time using any magic since she has to make all of the mana she’s using. Otherwise, not much else. As exciting and interesting as this is— and don’t get me wrong, from a research perspective, Vita, you are a wet dream— from a practical perspective this seems terrible for her future prospects.”

I frown, nodding a little. I can't use the mana the rest of the world uses. Something about that is extra surreal, even for a tentacle monster masquerading as a girl. It's one thing to not be human, but this is completely different from every other living creature. Penelope was just talking about how mana couldn't run out, but maybe mine can. That would be a huge pain in the ass.

“Hey, we don’t know that yet,” Vitamin insists, valiantly coming to my defense. “Nobody knows how this really works, right? Don’t just assume it’s going to be bad. It sounds super awesome!”

“...Personally,” I say slowly, “I just don’t like all the similarities between me and it that are cropping up.”

“It?” Penelope asks.

"The Mistwatcher," I clarify. "Even if it doesn't produce mana, it's said to. And now I have soul tentacles, a big eyeball core, the ability to consume souls or store them inside me, and now I produce mana. You have to admit, god or not, it's like I'm a baby Mistwatcher or something. I even recently hatched from an egg."

"A baby, hmm?" Penelope says thoughtfully. "Well, as an orphan, it would be rather poetic for you to figure out that one or both of your parents are some kind of divine entity, but I greatly question the practicality of such a birth. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Physically, you are human. Until you start growing tentacles made of flesh, I'll have to stay suspicious about any such relationship."

"Well, it's the Mistwatcher. What if just my soul is whatever the Mistwatcher is? And my body is just… wrong for some reason."

"Look, Vita, as interesting as this line of thought is, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense. There are plenty of other reasons you could have the similarities. Besides, if you are the child of the insanely massive creature below us, why did it try to kill you?"

That gets me thinking, and it gets everyone else staring at me and abject horror.

“The Mistwatcher did what?” Margarette all but shrieks.

“Oh, right. You remember that perception event that happened a few days before we met?” I ask. “Yeah, I caused that just by making eye contact. Bastard attacked me out of nowhere.”

“Though not in any legal or provable manner,” Penelope insists.

“Yeah, yeah,” I wave her off. “But still. This shit is adding up, Penelope."

She scowls at that, but nods slowly.

"I concede that you are more than just some girl with an obscure talent. But you're hardly some sort of nascent goddess. You're just Vita. Nothing more."

"Wow," I say, putting a hand over my heart in mock pain like Lyn does when I call her old. "’Just Vita?’ You sure know how to make a friend feel appreciated."

She jolts with surprise, looking away with a tinge of embarrassment.

"…I didn't say that was a bad thing," she mumbles. "You are one of the few people actually worth the time it takes to have a conversation with. So, I appreciate you."

Aw, that’s sweet. Look at how uncomfortable she is! I wonder if she’s ever said that to anyone before.

“Am I your first friend, Penelope?” I ask, smirking.

She glowers furiously at me.

"…Let's just get back to the research," she grumbles. "You're going to cast that light spell and you're going to cast it as powerfully and as constantly as you can. Theodora, Margarette, you two are going to cycle through mana sight spells and modify as much as you can on the fly to try and get an eye on what she's doing."

"What about me, boss?" Vitamin asks, saluting.

"I do not care," Penelope answers bluntly.

"More hugging it is, then!"

I peel off a shard of myself and smash it, feeding my most adorable daughter some crushed soul dust as a reward for her cuteness. She vibrates a little, giggling as it settles into her being.

"Amassing heretical power is pleasantly tingly!" she says.

"I know, right?" I agree.

"Quit being cute and start casting," Penelope orders.

I roll my eyes, but do as she says. It takes quite a bit of focus to start pulling out the energy again, but soon enough I have a steady stream going into the light spell.

“More,” Penelope says.

Scowling, I focus harder. At least Penelope wasn’t kidding about this sort of thing being instinctive. It really is just like the feeling of gathering power to pull someone’s soul out, I simply move the energy into my hands before sending it through any other bits within me that would shape it. The shaping is manual and not instinctive at all, but the light spell only takes a couple of simple flicks to activate and I can do it over and over without difficulty. The more mana I pour into it, the brighter it glows.

“More,” Penelope demands again.

I glare at her but do my best to comply. It's easier said than done. The more power I try to pull in at once, the harder it is to pull it all. Exhaustion quickly starts to set in, a strange sort of pain and weight plaguing my tentacles rather than my physical body.

"…I see something," Theodora suddenly announces. "It looks like mana, all right. I can't tell where it's coming from, though. It just seems to be appearing inside her."

"I told you!" I grumble. "This is getting really hard, by the way."

"Well, don't blow yourself up," Penelope says. “But if you’re anywhere before that point, push harder.”

I scowl.

“I don’t feel like I’m going to blow myself up,” I say. “I use this magic in the light spell faster than I can pull it out of my soul. It’s just trying to pull it any faster that’s difficult.”

“Hmm… right, that makes sense,” Penelope mutters. “It’s not a problem for the rest of us, but it would be for you. Stop casting, then. Let’s see how much chocolate mana you can hold.”

“Please don’t call it that.”

I do as instructed, however, because as bossy as my friends are they probably know what they're doing. I stop converting mana into light and just let the power build up in my core. More than anything, it just makes me feel bloated. I don't feel under pressure any more than that. It's uncomfortable, but there's no apparent fervor in my mana to violently escape my soul, even as I build the density up further and further. At some point, I simply can’t seem to pull anymore energy out of wherever the fuck I’m pulling it from. I’m just too clogged; the pathway from where I would draw the mana is so stuffed with it that I lack the strength to condense it any further.

“Okay, ugh,” I grunt. “That’s it, that’s all I can hold. I literally can’t pull in anymore.”

"It's not really that much," Theodora comments.

I'm weirdly offended by that.

"Okay, well if it's not going to hurt her, see if you can release a small amount out into the atmosphere," Penelope says. "If you damage yourself, I'll patch you right up."

I nod, and almost gratefully let some of the mana stream out. I wince, expecting it to blast through parts of my body, but that doesn't happen. It just exits, calmly and without fanfare.

"It's getting destroyed," Theodora reports. “So that explains why we don’t see any of this in nature, I suppose.”

Just to see if I can, I let all of the mana out at once. Theodora jumps back a bit, and a terrible screeching sound erupts for a brief moment where I assume my mana and the world’s mana collide and fight each other. The world no doubt wins, and Penelope and I rub our ears to try and massage some of the pain out.

“Well, at least I don't have to worry about blowing myself up," I say.

"I don't even know where to start with this," Penelope says, "but overall, as incredibly interesting as it is, I don't think we really should be focusing on researching this. Vita is strange. Everyone here knew that. But I can show you spells, and you can apparently still use the spells, and that's really what matters. Once we're immortal we’ll have all the time we need to figure out what the fuck is up with her."

I nod. As interested as I am in what this means, I suppose she has a point.

"Well, to that end I think those eggs might be of use. When I was out in the forest, I accidentally broke one of them. Inside was a baby monster, but it didn’t have a soul. Yet it could still move around and stuff like that. Once it started to, the Mistwatcher reached up and gave it a soul, but it was just fine beforehand.”

Penelope’s eyebrows raise.

“So you think things can live before even having a soul in the first place?”

“Yep,” I nod. “It freaked me the fuck out. I think losing your soul kills you because of how the soul attaches to the body, not because they’re essential to life. But I have no idea what a body without a soul would be or how it would work. The whole idea freaks me out. But now I’m thinking: what if I do what the Mistwatcher does and put a soul into a living thing rather than a dead one? What would happen?”

Penelope shrugs, but I know if there’s one thing I can always rely on Penelope for, it is not missing an opportunity for blasphemy.

“Let’s find out,” she says.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Margarette says, holding up her hands. “How can souls not be the most important element of life? The three of us are nothing but souls at this point! Our bodies aren’t doing anything other than keeping us inside and for some reason preventing us from getting grabbed by the Mistwatcher.”

None of us have any idea why the hell the Mistwatcher only grabs souls if they’re not in bodies, but we’ve confirmed that is absolutely what’s happening. When I put a soul into a corpse, it pretty much stays in there for as long as I want. But if I leave a soul lying around or put it in an object like my spear or the beautiful and perfect Rosco, it’s only a matter of time before a tentacle reaches up and eats it. Sometimes the tentacle shows up within a few minutes, and sometimes it takes upwards of several hours. There doesn’t seem to be any particular connection between things that cause it to take longer, it appears to be random. Still, never once has the Mistwatcher grabbed a soul from a body.

At least not with one of its spiritual tendrils. The physical one certainly tried to separate my soul from my body.

“That’s a valid point,” Penelope says. “I think the only way we're going to be able to answer that is if we figure out a method of getting a living being in here without a soul and keeping it that way long enough to research. You said that the Mistwatcher placed a soul in the monster as soon as you broke the egg?”

"Yes, that's right," I confirm. "So let’s beat it to the punch!”

"Well, do it already."

I do exactly that, making a soul shard and walking over to the pile of unhatched eggs. Placing it inside one of them, I feel it take hold into the unborn monster. However, it doesn't at all feel like what happened when the Mistwatcher did the same thing. My shard is doing exactly what it would do to a corpse, an object, or any other inanimate thing I would place it in. It spreads out those net-like veins around the inside of the body, giving it motion where in a corpse there would be none. Of course, this body is alive, so it should be perfectly capable of moving itself without the assistance of my shard.

“Well, I think I've fucked it up somehow," I say. "This doesn't feel right at all. Get out of that egg!"

All of my Revenants flinch at the order, but since none of them are currently inside an egg they quickly realize I'm not talking to them. The baby pentapede, however, recognizes me immediately. Or more accurately, the baby is fully unconscious, but my shard acknowledges me and forces it to move. My soul shard strains inside the tiny monster, causing its legs to jerk out and smash against the inside of the shell. Soon, the beast is free from its prison, but now it is also awake.

It doesn't seem to appreciate having something control its body from the inside.

There is no seamless transition, no unity between soul and flesh. My shard puppets the creature, ignoring its muscles, but the muscles are still fully functional. The baby strains and fights and screams as its first experience in the world is a horrific internal agony, a foreign will trying to wrest control of its body, counter to all of its instincts and desires.

“…Yeah, this is kind of creepy,” Vitamin opines.

“This isn't at all what it looked like when the Mistwatcher put souls in these things," I confirm. "It's neat how it's actually kind of working, though. We gotta wait and see if the Mistwatcher tries to replace the soul even though I kinda fucked it up."

I point at the struggling, terrified baby monster.

"Don't move."

Its muscles struggle to disobey me, but my soul shard locks its joints and keeps it in line. I grin, pleased that such a tiny fraction of myself can dominate a living creature. It is interesting how much the baby is fighting, however. I mean, it literally just hatched. I suppose monsters and many animals start out much more developed than humans do, capable of walking almost as soon as they're born. They must be born with instincts to attempt to walk as well, and to either fear or attack creatures like us. Humans aren't like that, though. I wonder how a baby human would develop with a shard like this inside them. Would they just never know how strange it is? Would they even be able to function without a Mistwatcher soul inside them?

While we wait for a Mistwatcher tendril to possibly pop up, I get to practicing on the other soulless eggs. The next one I do the same thing, just for consistency's sake, and we get the same sort of creature. After that, I try to do what I did in the forest and modify my soul shards to get more of the result I want. I don't feel any guiding instinct, though. It is as if the idea is there, but just out of reach. It’s something I almost understand, something that won't fully enter my mind until I'm up late at night, unable to sleep. It feels like struggling to remember a word and having it just at the tip of my tongue, but it is ultimately forgotten.

After another hour, a Mistwatcher tendril does raise up from the ground, but notably it does not bother either of my sharded monsters. It places a soul inside one of the eggs instead, and departs. I try to examine the Mistwatcher's shard as closely as I can, but it's just too complex, and while I still struggle to decipher it, yet another tendril puts a fresh soul in one of the five remaining eggs.

"It looks like I have a time limit on this," I grumble, "but I just can't seem to figure it out."

“Is the Mistwatcher still not bothering the ones you modified, at least?” Theodora asks.

“No, they’re still untouched,” I confirm.

“Can you remove your current soul shard from one of the monsters without killing it?” Penelope asks.

I raise an eyebrow.

“I think so, actually. It doesn’t damage a corpse when I remove a Revenant soul from it, so…”

Penelope looks at Theodora, her soul suddenly alight with excitement.

“Well then… Hypothetically, would it be possible to move a Revenant soul between living bodies that have no other souls in them?” Penelope presses.

“I don’t see why not,” I say. “I could stick Vitamin in one of the eggs just as easily as I could put her in any other body.”

“Aw, man!” Vitamin complains. “But mom, I just upgraded from rat!”

I ruffle her hair, but not too hard because I don’t want it to fall out.

“It was just an example, honey,” I assure her.

“That’s our in, then!” Penelope says excitedly. “Rather than trying to de-age a body, we could make new bodies, and keep one of Vita’s souls in them so that they don’t gain one of their own. Then, with the right magic, we could simply move older people into the younger bodies! Making the body older is substantially easier than making it younger, so if we just figure out how to clone…”

“…Then you still run into the problem of my Revenants not actually controlling the body’s muscles, but instead just pulling the body around with soul force,” I point out.

“Then figure out how to fix that,” Penelope orders, pointing at me. “It will take us plenty of time to figure out how to make the clones anyway, but I already have a few ideas for artificial wombs, so we should see…”

She starts babbling stuff I don’t understand, but she seems very happy about it so I take that as a good sign. I smile, starting to zone out a little as she prattles on. Penelope is a weird friend. She is a friend though, I think. As snippy and arrogant as she can be, something about the way she gets so animated when talking about her interests has me grinning every time. It’s such a treat to see, with how grumpy she normally is. We’ve been through a lot of ups and downs, but listening to the beautiful and joyful song in her soul right now, it feels very worth it to have met her. I’m glad to have the break. I haven’t had a rest since before Angelien died.

Of course, as soon as I think that, the next thing I know I’m waking up the next day.