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Ch199-Already?

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The bear’s sliced open body looked like someone had prepared it for a roast. It was laying on its back, its internal organs had been carefully removed, the skin had been folded out of the way, and the entire left side had been butchered to reveal the bones.

Sylver was sitting on a small wooden stool and was looking right at the creature. Ria was hovering above it, and apparently, 2 hours was where she drew the limit regarding how long she was willing to watch Sylver sit perfectly motionless, without saying a word.

“I can’t tell what expression you’re making because of the bandages, but you don’t seem angry,” Ria said, as Sylver shifted his weight on his chair and looked up out of habit.

“It’s just… It’s so simple that any idiot with even a cursory understanding of soul magic could have done this. But at the same time, I cannot believe I never thought of this,” Sylver explained, as he gestured with his hand at the splayed open bear corpse.

“What is it?” Ria asked.

“It’s compressed Ki… But the outer shell is made up of mana… There’s no real reason it has to be Ki inside. I never thought there was a way to replicate this kind of wild magic, ghosts and specters can do similar things, but not like this. Normally such a construct would be as brittle as clay, but they figured out a way to use the natural tension of the internal layer to apply extreme pressure onto the outer layer…” Sylver half said half mumbled, as he went back to staring at the corpse.

“Like a Prince Rupert drop?” Ria asked.

Sylver looked away from the corpse and looked up at Ria again.

“I don’t know what that is,” Sylver said.

“It’s when a bead of molten glass is quenched in water. The bead is hard enough that a hammer can’t break it, but if the tail is so much as scratched, the whole thing explodes. The internal tension of the glass inside the bead makes the outer layer extremely hard,” Ria explained.

She spoke with that odd monotone voice she sometimes used when explaining something. As if she was reading the words from a book, but not quite.

“That’s alarmingly close to what has been done here… Except it’s more like a bottle where the outside is rock hard, but if the inside were to be scratched, it would shatter-”

“A Bologna bottle,” Ria interrupted.

“…” Sylver felt a stirring in the area where his gut used to be, but he squashed it down and ignored it.

“It’s a bottle where the outside has been cooled very quickly, but the inside was allowed to cool slowly. It’s hard enough to hammer a nail into a piece of wood but will shatter if you drop a nail inside of it. It’s typically used as a prop in magic tricks,” Ria explained in that same monotone pattern of speech.

Sylver squinted his eyes at the woman but decided against voicing his theory as to where this mysterious mage got the idea for this specific spell.

“Right… Anyway, as I said, if the inside is scratched, the whole thing will shatter. Which would mean your soul will shatter, but… The bear is using such a thin layer of its soul that it’s negligible. Whoever made this is a genius,” Sylver explained, as he stood up from his stool and crouched down near the splayed open corpse.

The slit on Sylver’s palm opened, and a thin dark purple tendril slithered out of it, and slowly disappeared into the bear’s elbow joint. The tendril began to glow a weak golden light, as the bear’s paw began to glow.

Small see-through bubbles appeared on the paw and grew bigger and bigger, and one by one, joined together until they formed one large bubble. Sylver slowly turned his hand, and the large bubble became flat, and after a few more seconds, was wrapped around the bear’s paw as if it was an inflated glove.

Sylver summoned a dagger into his hand and very gently brought the tip towards the inflated glove bubble. He pulled his arm back and stabbed the bubble as hard as he could. The first two attempts made the dagger slip off the bubble, and Sylver pierced the wooden floor beneath it. On his third attempt, the dagger passed through the bubble as if it wasn’t there, and went all the way through the bear’s paw.

The see-through bubble had disappeared, but other than that, nothing happened.

“Now, there should have been an extremely violent explosion… Honestly, I can’t describe just how brilliant this is. If the soul layer was even a millionth of a percent harder, it would have shattered and exploded, if it was softer, it wouldn’t be of any use, but this structure is the perfect balance of hard and flexible. Just perfect,” Sylver said, as the tendril sticking out of his palm began to glow again, and small clear bubbles formed on the bear’s paw.

“I don’t see what’s so amazing about this? You took it down using a handful of explosives,” Ria said, as Sylver shook his head.

“I did, but that’s only because of how much it inflated itself. If it’s smaller, it will be a lot harder. But its defensive properties aren’t the reason I’m interested in it,” Sylver explained, as the bear’s paw lifted itself off the ground, and the bubble formed into a single claw-shaped blade.

Sylver reached into his [Bound Bones] storage and retrieved one of his clones. He floated it near the bubble-covered bear paw, and after some looking around, was handed a brace from one of the shades.

He placed it on the clone’s forearm but didn’t bother tying it down.

“Now imagine this, someone covered from head to toe in very tough armor just teleported over to me, and tried to punch me in the face,” Sylver said, as he lowered the see-through claw down onto the brace, and tapped it several times. “It’s solid, see?” Sylver asked.

“And when you want it to be, it’s not,” Ria guessed.

Sylver smiled at her, as he lifted the bear’s paw and the see-through claw, and brought it down onto the brace-covered forearm. The claw passed through the brace as if it wasn’t there, just as it had done to those trees. Sylver moved the brace away and grinned as he saw that the forearm had been cleaved into two underneath it.

Sylver pulled the hand with the tendril sticking out of it away from the bear’s elbow and reeled it back into his palm. He rubbed it with his thumb to relieve the soreness, as he stood up from his crouch.

“If I wasn’t so happy, I would be pissed off beyond belief that I wasn’t the one who came up with this. I don’t even need to use my soul for this. Although it would need to be something powerful, and I would have to stretch it out first… I’ll use the bear’s for the time being, but we’re hunting that rat and dog thing after we find Edmund,” Sylver said, as he gestured with his hand towards the bear, and the smallest claw tore itself out of its fingertip and floated into Sylver’s hand.

He stared at the claw in his hand for a while, as tiny lines and sigils magically appeared on it, and created small wisps of smoke as Sylver burned the soul-storing framework into it. The claw glowed a bright golden light for a split second before it turned a pale grey color.

Sylver placed the claw into his mouth and swallowed it. It wasn’t a painful experience slicing open the inside of his throat, and moving the claw down into his inner ribcage, but it wasn’t a pleasant one either. Once it was close enough to Sylver’s mana core, he experimentally lifted his left hand.

Small clear bubbles appeared in random spots on his hand, and just as it had for the bear, it eventually merged into one large bubble. Sylver concentrated on the bubble, and very slowly, too slowly, the bubble spread out into the shape of his hand.

***

[Mutating Override (II) Proficiency increased to 59%!]

It took a lot of effort to make the creature’s soul surrender. Not only that, Sylver had realized halfway through that it's soul wasn’t even that good for this. He needed something malleable. Big, but malleable.

But stretching something big would take a lot of time, and Sylver wanted to finish experimenting on this soul before moving on to something he would actually feel bad about losing. Right now his control over it wasn’t perfect, he was slow to move and adjust it, and the fact that he had to use his own mana to fill up the soul bubble made it quite costly to refill if it ever burst.

On the bright side, once it was filled, it required a negligible amount of mana to maintain. It was a bit difficult in terms of mental energy, but it was well worth the effort considering that it could protect him from positive energy, and more importantly, made everyone he fought basically naked.

Now, given how common it was for people to reinforce their bodies with magic, and in this place, Ki, it was unlikely he would be able to tear someone’s soul out of their bodies, but he could at the very least cause some unexpected damage.

Sylver also discovered that he could reinforce his clawed hands using [Deadly Darkness], at least when it came to interacting with solid objects. Sylver looked up at the sky and saw that the suns were at their apex.

“I could probably make a dagger using this,” Sylver said, as Spring and Ria stood up from where they had been playing chess. He wasn’t great at enchanting, but it wouldn't be that hard.

Ria found the chessboard laying around, and made her own pieces by carving some firewood. Ria had 9 wins, 8 loses, and 3 stalemates against Spring. She was about to lose this match but wasn’t willing to admit it.

“A dagger that’s almost invisible and can ignore armor,” Ria clarified, as Sylver nodded at her.

He had to flick his hand a specific way, but he managed to get the bubble to form itself into a half-meter-long spike. Initially, he had been focused on making a proper blade, but a spike was way easier, and despite Sylver’s mastery of all things soul magic related, this was a brand new concept to him, and there were still several kinks to work out.

Right now he was just happy there was a centimeter-thick barrier around his skin, that would render most physical attacks downright useless. Granted, there was a limit to what it would stop, but combined with his bulletproof robe, and [Necrotic Mutilation] armor, the bear soul armor was simply an extra layer of defense, and more importantly, made spells that used positive energy a little less frightening.

He had other plans for this newfound soul-based inflated armor and weapon combo, but he would experiment on it later when he had a chance to see how well it held up in a fight.

Sylver reached out and grabbed Ria, and used [Fog Form] to travel down to the main floor.