This was odd. Avery had never been a disembodied soul before. It was also the first time she’d randomly had illusory boxes filled with text pop up in front of her face, but that was possible with a simple application of a silent image spell. That was somewhat concerning, as it implied that the gem was trapped in the extremely specific way of someone inserting their soul into it, but even if the thing were to explode or something the spell should just return her to her body. Additionally, the lack of explosion thus far implied none was forthcoming, barring a secondary trigger spell like explosive runes. That particular spell only activated upon someone reading the printed words, at which point they and everyone around them are detonated by the magical writing. It was actually proving slightly difficult to avoid reading that stuff, the writing being in a blue box that floated in the corner of her vision, which put itself front and center in here vision whenever she focused on the concept of it. Being as that she fairly desperately wanted to read it, only countered by the knowledge that this gem exploding would end the experiment, it was in front of her the majority of her time thus far.

No time for… existing around, she had a premise to test. Thanks to the energy imbued to the spell, she could detect any kind of life within a certain radius from the soul container. As of right now, that was the slime. Once located, it was a simple effort of will to overpower the creature’s rudimentary programming, and shunt its ‘consciousness’ to the gem in place of her own soul.

A slime doesn’t have a nervous system. It has a circulatory system of a sort, in that the gel inside of it continues to flow around as it moves, allowing nutrients and materials to reach what the creature has of an integumentary system, but it wouldn’t be anything a human would have a point of reference for in terms of how it would feel. The creature’s most advanced method of identifying the world is its digestive system. Through the taste of the air, it can tell what kind of potentially edible materials are in its general vicinity, and which point it can roll over the object. The selectively permeable membrane takes care of the work from there; an autonomous function that occurs without a need from any actual mental activity from what passes for a slimes brain.

Despite the incredibly different senses, movement capabilities, and built in biological urges, the simplicity of the creature is fortunately simple enough that Avery is able to figure out how to exist in a ball of slime rather quickly. For this test run, she only had two hours. Technically, if she had a body with the ability to see, she could maintain the spell indefinitely by casting it after an hour of moving around and doing things to refresh the two hour duration before the mana drained entirely from the spell, but it would end regardless when she needed to sleep. Plus, there was the fact that it would be using half of her time forever working hard to stay the same. Maybe for some extremely powerful body, like if she had managed to walk into the cave of a sleeping dragon, cast for an hour and somehow manage to luck into overcoming its innate resistance. In that case, she’d be pretty much required to keep casting the spell, lest the dragon regain its body and utterly destroy her.

On the plus side, if she were to take over a highly powerful magical creature, she might be able to suborne their power to boost the duration of the spell. At the level of an adult dragon, the spell would last for a full seven hours, assuming she could figure out how to tap into their more instinctually utilized magical abilities. On the minus side, there was a five percent chance that the initial spell would even reach the creature, and even less chance that it would overcome a dragon’s force of will. In theory, there was a spell a necromancer could cast which renders dragons paralyzed and therefore completely harmless, with a fifty percent base success rate if it manages to get through the innate spell resistance, so two and a half percent success rate, but at the moment it was beyond Avery’s abilities to cast in any reasonable amount of time, and it required the wizard to touch the dragon, without dying first. Slimes were slightly more reasonable.

Thinking more on the subject, scaling up to kobolds might not be the worst idea. Adventuring groups would take on squads of fifteen at a time with no issue, and Avery had heard about a kingdom to the south using groups of convicts to take care of the lizards by the hundreds. Seemed barbaric to her, but for those who had the death penalty anyway, using them as the blade an army forces monsters into was a logical method of utilizing killing experience while keeping the productive and expensive members of society safe behind their shield wall.

After enough time wasted away for Avery to get rolling around at the speed of slow out of her system, she tested out whether moving out of the crystal’s soul retrieval range had any notable effect. With the length of the cave, that required getting through the blanket covering the entrance. If there were any bends or turns in the tunnel, going around even one of them would have broken the line of effect, but since it was perfectly smooth and new she had no such luck and had to hope there were no extremely attentive adventurers in the canyon today.

It was only after she had pushed her way through the blanket and out to the sunlight that she realized she was going to have to figure out how to pull the fabric away from the cave entrance without any hands. As it turned out, there was no feedback of any sort to let her know that the spell wouldn’t safely retrieve her soul if a stray sword happened to find her not selectively permeable enough membrane. That simply meant she, or anyone using this methodology, would have to be careful in arranging their experimental space to account for line of effect in the event of random explosions or rampaging monsters.

While hands, grasping appendages of any sort, or anything at all weren’t exactly in the repertoire of a slime, what they could do was slowly dissolve their way through things. Unfortunately, that took time, and the spells duration was almost over by the time Avery managed to get back into the cave. It was unfortunate that she would have to buy a new blanket, but blankets were cheap compared to incredibly powerful magical artifacts and methods of their use. Once she transferred back to the gem, shunting the slime’s soul back into it’s body, Avery immediately jumped back into her own. With a gasp of air, she sat up straight, and cast a quick light spell on a handprint of the tunnel wall behind her. She sighed in relief, as the slime was still a good twenty meters away from her, and she didn’t have to worry about it jumping her before she got reaccustomed to her own body. For some reason, the area around the crystal looked deeper and larger than when she had cast the spell, but Avery put that down as a trick of the magically created light. She stands up, and gives the slime a solid kick, bursting it.

That had been cutting it fine. According to the textbook, if the spell ended, the souls would no longer be tied to the objects or bodies they had been bound to. While that led to a quick righting of bodies if the caster was near enough to the gem and their original body, if the wizard in question were stuck outside of the cave, blocked by a centimeter of cloth, they would instead be freed of all earthly attachments and get to head of into whatever afterlife awaited them.

Deciding to leave the gem in the cave, Avery picked up the book on botany. Today had been fairly productive so far, considering she’d only done about an hour of actual magic and five minutes of exploring the possibilities of what she had discovered. Her next step was going to have to be finding a better test subject than a slime, but that would have to wait until tomorrow, as she had to get back to -

Avery fell face forward onto the ground, heart stopped.