He will come,

Shedding mortal flesh and bone.

He will come yet again,

To reclaim his Mortal Throne.

The Prophecy of The Emperor’s Return, Stanza 8

Pain.

That was all he could feel. Every nerve ending in his body fired at once informing him of the drastic changes taking place. Cyn’s legs gave out as the muscles began to fire randomly, making him twitch on the ground. To escape from the agony, he once again invested his consciousness into his soul.

He could sense the growth his soul had experienced since the last time he had inhabited it. Unlike the fuzzy feeling of being shaped like a bird which he had experienced previously, this time he felt like he truly transformed into one, albeit a bit illusory. It was a psychedelic form of existence, as he could see and yet, not see at the same time. It was the same for all five senses. The best way to explain the feeling is that it was like watching an eclipse through dark glasses. Because of the glasses, a lot of details would be filtered out but it allowed one to see what was normally invisible. Like the interior of his body.

Looking at all the complex systems working together synergistically to keep him alive was awe inspiring. But right now, momentous changes were transpiring. All of the nerves in his body were being separated from their connections and coated with a thin layer of energy which he recognized as Aura. Then from the ends of the nerves, thin filaments of Aura branched out and reconnected them with the organs they were previously attached to. Previously, one nerve was connected to one bunch of muscle and any signal would make it contract or relax together, but now, the Aura strands connected the nerve to each fibre of muscle separately, exponentially improving his fine motor control. The Aura also increased the conduction rate of his nerves, vastly improving his reaction time and reflexes.

Using his soul sense, he felt his bodily Aspect expand, doubled and redoubled until he began to feel unbalanced and bloated. It was as if his mind was too slow to cope with the millions of new connections it would have to deal with and therefore was performing worse than before the changes.

As the bodily Aspect finalized, the soul light shone on his brain and an indescribable agony assaulted him. Luckily, he was still in soul form and felt the pain in a detached way. Still, even this filtered sensation was enough to nearly drive him insane. His brain and spinal cord wriggled and pulsed as every neuron in them was pulled apart from each other and coated with Aura. The fluid in his brain and spine drained away as the organs expanded to fit their bony shells, Aura taking its place as the shock absorber.

When the changes finally ceased, his brain was 30% larger and the transmission of nerve impulses was much faster than before. His mental Aspect had greatly increased, eliminating the bloated feeling and leaving a sense of extreme coordination between body and mind. Looking at his Aspect of mind with soul sense, he saw that while it had resembled arcs of electricity racing from one part of the brain to the other before, now the electric arcs spread throughout his body with a higher concentration in the brain and the spine. At the tail end of the spine, protected by the coccyx, he found another bundle of nerves which had formed. From what his soul sense could glean from it, it was like a second brain formed to exclusively deal with the manipulation of Aura.

Realizing how vital it was to his future path, he named it the Core and designated his current realm in the martial path as Core formation. He felt joy at his progress but somehow, that joy seemed oddly muted. Apathy washed over him. Logically analysing his future plans and realizing that it was all geared towards revenge, he suddenly felt that it was all senseless. The dead would not come back with any amount of vengeance, abandoning his path of the avenger was the logical thing to do…

“Live on for all of us and exact vengeance.”

Pure unadulterated rage burnt within him evaporating the apathy and snapping him out of his fugue state. As a vivid human being, his emotional Aspect couldn’t lag behind the others and under the soul light, the glands that produced hormones and the lymphatic system, their carrier, morphed and meshed with the brain and body until the Aspect seemed to be a fuzzy pink mist that suffused his entirety.

His soul form dived into the cloud of wispy energy occupying the front of his brain and reached the Chamber of Memories. Unlike the last time where it had only 8 sides, this time, it had 20. Each played a different memory and his enhanced mind parsed through all of them simultaneously while categorizing important details from them. He could now recall every memory since his birth from both lives and even a few things from when he was still in the womb.

His perfect recall combined with his augmented mind and emotion allowed him to dive into the sea of his memories, relive them and pick out things he had not noticed before. For example, he recalled hearing his mother’s personal maid telling another that the Baroness’ favourite flower was hibiscus as she passed by him while gossiping.

His Aspect of memory merged with his body as it synergized with his muscle memory. This meant that just by practising any martial art once or even by looking at someone perform it, he could become equally proficient at it.

When the four Aspects stabilized and merged, his soul automatically invested into his heart and with a bang, the entirety of his energies coalesced into a midnight blue Aura with multicoloured streaks swirling in it.

Suddenly, his consciousness flew upwards and tumbled out of his body uncontrolled. For what could have been an instant or an eternity, he floated in the void before stopping in a blank room similar to his chamber of memories. As his consciousness took his form and tried to find his way back, a melodious warble emanated from a distant place. Looking up, he saw a gigantic swallow flying towards him at alarming speeds. Knowing it was too late to run, he stood his ground till the swallow stopped before him, its wings flapping gently to keep it afloat. It was huge, the tip of its talons taller than he was. It seemed real and illusory at the same time, and yet, when he looked at its jet-black eyes, he felt inexplicably sad.

He silently reached out and placed a palm against its beak, gently stroking it. The majestic bird crooned at his touch and a few fragmented words and memories flashed past into his mind. Before he could analyse them, the swallow let out a thunderous cry and whipped its wings, creating a gale that blew his consciousness out of the memory space and slammed it into his body.

His eyes snapped open and his newly awakened Aura exploded outwards, shattering the tiles on the floor. Slowly restraining his Aura, he stood, looking at a patch of darkness to his right.

Artemis walked out of the shadow with an extremely curious look on her face. “You awakened? Just like that? Don’t they say that you need an extreme situation for it to happen?”

Picking up his discarded toothbrush from the basin, he grinned suggestively, “Hey, brushing your teeth can be pretty extreme,” he waggled his toothbrush, “want to try?”

Artemis gawked at him for a moment before going into a fit of giggles. Cyn laughed along as the burden of vengeance became a lot lighter with his sudden mutation. The Chief had been a player before his wife had tamed him and the young Pavone had been an amiable man. Since the merge, his personality had been suppressed by the threat of discovery and the monumental difficulty of the task before him. Now, with a body he hesitated to even call human, his chances of avenging his clan increased greatly.

So, he let loose and laughed, the curse light in his soul congealing further into tiny runes that flowed on its surface while the plumes on its two tails grew brighter and more colourful.