Chương 218: 206. One tough choice after another

"You want me to do what?" Peter asked, clearly taken aback.

"Drown," I repeated.

"Only technically. You wouldn't actually die."

"That's reassuring." Peter chuckled.

"The real trick of the procedure is to turn you into, well… a ghost."

"Sounds spooky," Peter replied with a light chuckle. The attempt at humor was clearly meant to hide his nervousness, which was evident in every other inch of his body at that moment. I could see his hands shaking slightly, matched by the tense muscles in his jaw visible through the skin.

"You're afraid."

"Of course I am. I don't want to drown."

"I get that. But as I said, you wouldn't actually die. You'd just… transform."

"Just like that?"

"The ritual is extremely risky, and I'm not sure about side effects," I answered honestly.

"So why do it? I'm fine. You said I should be able to lengthen my time outside my own body. Manage the pain that way."

"And are you fine with it? Just managing it? Living from one moment of relief to another?" Peter stayed silent, his mouth opening and closing as he struggled with the answer. I decided to push him once more.

"You'd gain the ability to use magic as well." That got a reaction.

"You said that I regained some of the abilities from the souls that grafted themselves onto me. So why do I need to drown all of a sudden?" he asked, a note of anger peeking through.

"Did you lie to me back then?"

"I didn't lie. It's just that the way they used magic and the way you can use it are different. Unlike ghosts we can't just hold the mana inside our bodies or souls as is. We reattune it and change its properties, storing it around our spark, allowing us to command it like an extension of ourselves. You seem to have some talent for ghost magic, yes, but that doesn't mean you have that talent for the way we humans control it.

You should be able to draw on those ghostly abilities once you have mana, but getting it around your spark and controlling it is on you."

"So why can't I just do that?" Peter asked.

"You don't have the talent for it," I answered firmly.

"At least not to the same extent as you have a talent for more ghost-like abilities. The fact that there wasn't an awakening now after all that pain and extremes you went through means you likely don't have the knack for human magic, even if your soul became strangely flexible."

"But I can do it without talent. Hard work and—""No," I cut in.

"One in a thousand has the ability to command magic in a basic form, and a further one in a thousand can call themselves talented. You can try and learn, but the simple truth is that you won't be able to match someone to whom mana simply listens. However, when you first pushed your spirit out of the flesh, the magic trickled into your soul on its own. So after using other tomes to piece together the knowledge present in the books the hive recommended, I believe you would be considered a…"

I paused, searching for the proper words.

"Great ghost."

"Don't I actually have to die to be a ghost?"

"You do. But you don't have to stay dead," I corrected my explanation.

"Won't my body mutate? You said that's why I can't have a shell of mana for my soul. That's why I have to come back to my body." I exhaled slowly. I could understand why someone didn't want to drown, sure. But I needed him to understand what I was proposing.

"Look. I'm not asking you to do this only to satisfy my own curiosity. What I'm proposing to you is a permanent solution. The thing I said about your body mutating is only if your body were alive. What I want to do is kill it. Once that happens, your soul would try to leave this plane with your spark. But since you already retained some ghost-like abilities, if we can slow that process and inject as much mana already attuned to you as we can, your soul should create a shell. Effectively, you would ghostify."

I paused, letting him process the information. Peter sat, his gaze jumping around the storage room, never staying on anything as his mind churned with the information.

"What's the point of drowning, then? Can't you give me poison to kill me in my sleep?" I shook my head.

"Well, that's the real trick. Ghosts need an anchor, something that keeps them in the real world. Your soul should create a shell of its own. We just need to keep your spark here long enough for it to be encased once again. The problem is with the anchor. Normally, it's created by strong emotions. Mana answers them and binds the soul to the object of those emotions. But in your case, well, you can't suddenly gain an obsession, technically. Not the kind without side effects, let's put it like that."

I saw his brows rise.

"The point is that creating this anchor will be tricky. Extremely. The only good news is we have the perfect candidate for it."

"Please don't tell me it's something like my father's Bible. I don't want to spend the rest of my life bound to an object of anger." Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"No." I shook my head and then pointed at the middle of his chest.

"It's your body."

"My body?"

"Oh yes. You are quite attached already, wouldn't you say?" I said, chuckling at my own joke.

"But yes. Once your body dies and the alchemical liquids do their work, you should be able to be re-bound to it, effectively turning it into an object of your haunting. We then stop the rot and degeneration, and voilà. You're good as new." Peter didn't buy my "voilà" off the bat as he looked at me with clear skepticism.

"Wait. But my soul. It's mutated, right? If I create this shell, won't I just go back to my initial appearance?"

"At first. But ghosts can shapeshift much more easily than humans. Turning you back to normal should be a matter of your control."

"And my body? Won't it mutate when I possess it?"

"Not sure, honestly. Certainly not as fast as if it were living, but if any mutations happen… well, reshaping dead flesh is much easier than living," I said. At that, his hand subconsciously went to his left arm, where thin scars were still visible, the outcome of a rather complicated fleshcrafting procedure. Much of his current self was simply sculpted from his own excess flesh.

"How is your body?" I asked.

"It's fine. My left hand lacks some coordination."

"That would become a non-issue. Flight, magic, and more would become possible. And…" I took a deep breath.

"You would stop aging." Peter flinched lightly, but it did not have the effect on him that I saw in other people at the mention of prolonging life. He wouldn't be immortal. No being with a spark was. But he would live for a long time.

"You want me to risk death and possibly horrible aftereffects for power and prolonged life." He smiled lightly.

"You sound like a devil."

"The devils in stories didn't offer what I offer you, not even close. And not at such a cheap price."

"But why offer it at all? I…" He took in a deep breath before slowly exhaling.

"I don't know what to do. You offer me solutions I don't truly understand and expect me to say 'yes' or 'no,' as if 'no' were even an option."

"You can say no. It's not like I'd kidnap and drown you in the night."

"And do what then? You said it yourself, living from one moment without pain to another isn't really living, right? Will there be another solution?"

"Possibly. Or possibly not." He smiled.

"You see. It's not really a choice, is it? I don't know if there's another option someone else might propose to me. I don't know whether you're just bullshitting me to run a fun ritual." I smiled.

"You want me to swear in the name of my clan?" I asked. He let silence hang for a few seconds before slowly shaking his head.

"No. You don't have to. I don't want to be ungrateful. I really am thankful for what you did for me, but… My life right now is… bearable. And it hasn't been that way in a long time. I don't want to lose it. But I would also like more. I just… don't know. And I would like to know why you are even offering something like that. Why bother with a ritual that complicated?"

"Don't you believe I can be selfless?"

"Don't take it the wrong way, but your apprentice described you as a 'natural disaster.' I don't think those help save people's lives for fun. You don't care about my family, you don't care if I kill people, and you would kill me if I asked you to. So why?" I looked around the storage room, my gaze sweeping over the collection of tomes and artifacts, old chests, and alchemical ingredients.

"For this," I said, nodding toward the shelves behind him.

"Books?" he asked skeptically.

"Books, artifacts, everything. Knowledge. The reason I'm eager for the ritual is twofold. I could use a living ghost, and I'm curious about what you will become. That's it."

"You're curious?"

"Yes. I'd risk a lot, including my soul, for that curiosity. So do you want to live free of pain, to wield magic? Then the question—" I began, but he cut me off.

"The question is how far I'm willing to go," he whispered, nodding to himself.

"Yes." Peter smiled ever so lightly at those words.

"Ophelia told me something similar."

"She had a very good teacher," I said.

"You don't have to decide right this second. Sleep on it, think it over. But I might need the decision sooner rather than later. Deal?" I asked.

"Deal." He nodded before getting up, his eyes vacant as thoughts stormed through his mind. Sadly, Peter didn't have much time to think, because the time to make his decision came two days after our talk, when I received an urgent call from the FBI.

"Are you sure about this?" Elias asked Dwayne, looking at the man with a deep frown.

"Sir," Marvin piped up from the side, clearly not happy about the topic of their discussion.

"They were our men. We can't just abandon them.""'Were' is the key word," Dwayne said from the side.

"I doubt they 'are.' We did not receive any ransom demands, we did not see a fight break out, and if the fight with the doctor was as your empath described, then I doubt they are alive anymore. Besides, they were our informants, not our men."

"No fight and no bodies," Marvin spoke up again, putting emphasis on 'bodies.'

"And how would we look if we left the disappearances of our informants unattended?" Dwayne chuckled at his words.

"I'm sorry. They wouldn't be the first people to die like that. Did you perhaps give them any assurances? Something like, 'Tell us what happens in those tunnels, and don't worry about your families'?" Marvin gritted his teeth.

"We should send in our team." Dwayne turned back to Elias sitting behind the desk.

"The delicate approach is clearly blown. Now is the time to strike. We send our own team into the tunnels, you take that mage of yours and our best men. We show what we've got. We see what he's got, and we can talk it over after." Elias clicked his tongue at that.

"I'm not sure about sending that man with our team into the tunnels."

"Sam hasn't done anything bad to anyone so far," Marvin cut in from the side.

"Aside from a few comments here and there and his attitude, he seems trustworthy." Dwayne scoffed at the idea.

"God, you're naive."

"Well, we might have antagonized him with the last trick."

"We entertained him," Dwayne continued.

"You showed what our intelligence can do. Now we show what that assault team of yours can do, and then we sit down to talk. If you don't show him some power, he will treat you as a joke, I guarantee you," Dwayne said, his voice firm. Elias mulled the exchange over, looking up at the ceiling before giving a short exhale, bringing his eyes back to the scene.

"Fine," he said.

"Try to interrogate anyone left and assemble our team. And call Sam." He looked to Marvin.

"But don't rush. I'm sorry, but some things are more important than others. We do it properly."

"I'd think human lives are the important thing," Marvin barked under his breath, loud enough for Elias to hear, as the man just gave him a sad smile.