Chương 26: A Body That Wastes Nothing

The purple-black magic circle unfolded slowly. Unlike the blink spell she'd used to run earlier, this time Rachel was casting soul magic.

"Soul magic usually needs a focus. Something that can anchor and stabilize a soul's state at the critical moment. Your golden apple happens to work perfectly for that." At Rachel's direction, Kaelvorn set the apple down in the center of the circle. Then he went back and stood across from her again. The girl raised both hands, fingers spread wide, palms aimed at Kaelvorn.

"Back at Azarath, my magic teacher used to walk me through the theory of soul conflict magic. Your soul's showing exactly that kind of pattern." As the circle kept building and refining itself, Rachel talked through what was actually wrong with him.

"That stretch of your past you've been hiding carries a spirit that runs flat and colorless. Barely any charge to it at all. Which is exactly why forcing yourself to absorb Viltrumite culture and belief hit you with this much rejection."

"That kind of violent ideological conflict, combined with years of forcibly suppressing your own emotions just to survive."

"It split your soul. Cut a piece of your own spiritual strength clean away from the rest of it." Kaelvorn's eyes rolled around in their sockets, watching the purple-black magical smoke sink into the top of his skull like tendrils, and he shook his head, uneasy.

"Uh, are you saying I've got a split personality?"

"Don't interrupt." Rachel snapped it out cold, then shot down his question outright.

"I don't know how Earth medicine classifies this, but you're not dealing with a split personality. This is a genuine tear in the soul."

"To keep yourself from getting driven insane by that hellscape of an environment, your soul started splitting into two pieces starting from age three. The exact age you became a Viltrumite."

"One piece is the ordinary Kael, still carrying some hope for a stable, peaceful life underneath everything."

"The other is the Viltrumite Kael. No real feeling left in it, adapted fully to Viltrum's culture and rules specifically to protect the memories underneath, willing to actively compete and claw forward on its own." The girl went quiet for a moment, like she was thinking back to that boy with the hollow, gray eyes she'd just watched in the memory.

"Because of what you already knew from before, you picked up Viltrum's survival rules easily. You understood that performing well kept you safer, and that it raised your odds of actually escaping someday."

"But every step you took toward being excellent, by their standard, tore your original soul open a little more." Right as the ritual seemed to hit some critical point, Rachel suddenly stopped talking. Her ten fingers kept moving with real precision, her expression close to a surgeon working through some brutally difficult stitching. There was one thing she hadn't said out loud. Left unchecked, that ongoing split would eventually have turned Kaelvorn's soul into two fully separate entities.

At that point, it would have genuinely become something close to a split personality. The Viltrumite half would likely have stopped recognizing the original Kael as himself entirely, and tried to kill that earlier self off at the level of pure thought. Except Kaelvorn had cracked, mentally, once, at age ten. That single break had kept the split from finishing. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Under a magical lens, what hung off his back was a figure with only half a face, expression flat, giving off a heavy reek of blood. A boy soaked red. As the soul magic finished its stitching, that bloody figure sank slowly back into Kaelvorn's body, merging fully with his original soul. Sweat had actually broken out on Rachel's forehead. The procedure had clearly hit its most delicate stretch.

Kaelvorn wasn't having an easy time of it either, his brow locked tight, his brain apparently working through something close to real pain. He was getting back, piece by piece, the emotional range he'd lost for over a decade. Killing other "substandard" Viltrumite children. Destroying "defective" infants who hadn't even hit a month old. Getting a dozen-plus bones crushed as punishment for failing to hit a training benchmark. Traveling to other planets on assignments whose entire purpose was extermination.

Years of backed-up negative feeling released all at once into the original soul underneath it, the one that had only ever wanted peace. Kaelvorn's face went bright red, steam actually rising off the top of his head, his brain apparently boiling under the pressure.

"AAAGH..." This kind of pain ran on an entirely different register from any physical injury he'd ever taken, and he couldn't hold back the scream that tore out of him. Out in open space, meanwhile, a ring throwing off a blinding yellow light was streaking straight toward Earth. Some kind of mechanical broadcast, audible only at the soul level, kept repeating itself.

"Sentient life confirmed. Zente Thragg, of the Virgo Supercluster. You possess the ability to instill great fear in others!" Rachel's eyes went sharp. The apple sitting in the center of the circle jumped, unprompted, into the air, and the artifact that hadn't shown so much as a fingerprint under Kaelvorn's unconscious grip earlier was now bleeding out gold liquid, like it was being squeezed dry.

The liquid rolled through the air and condensed into a ten-meter thread of gold, sinking straight into the space between Kaelvorn's eyebrows. A second later, a sudden wave of cool relief wrapped around his soul and mind, and he let out a breath. Rachel let out a hard breath of her own, dropping her hands, and studied Kaelvorn's soul state again. The black residue of sin was draining away fast, the blood-colored soul no longer mottled, clearing into something pure and transparent.

A gold, diamond-cut gem, matching the one on Rachel's own forehead, was slowly forming between his eyebrows. Then, out of nowhere, Kaelvorn let out a strange, muffled grunt. That itching sensation from three days ago came roaring back, stronger than it had ever hit before. The yellow ring, which had already broken through the atmosphere, started to slow down, its recruitment broadcast growing choppy and intermittent, like it had lost the target.

But a burst of the fear spectrum's power still washed briefly over Kaelvorn's whole body. Rachel's expression changed fast.

"What is happening?" Through the magical lens, Kaelvorn's soul, that field of red, was breaking apart at incredible speed. Even the gold gem forming on his forehead was melting, like ice cream left out in the sun. Elsewhere, in Coast City, Hal Jordan, who Batman had specifically warned to stay well clear of Gotham lately, had officially run out of patience. That yellow ring was currently hovering a few thousand meters above Gotham, and its presence alone was an open insult to his entire profession.

A streak of green light shot skyward, and Hal Jordan gritted his teeth and flew straight at it.

"Get lost. There's nobody on this planet you're looking for." Green light and yellow light collided directly over Gotham. As the Green Lantern ring, running at full output, lit up the sky above the city, Kaelvorn let out another muffled grunt, though this one carried something closer to actual relief in the tone. Which was exactly when the Batcave lost its mind.

The Dark Knight watched a tangle of energy readouts spike wildly across the display, the observation chamber's Viltrumite particles kicking into another burst of rapid evolution. Whatever this feeling was, being completely outside his control, Batman genuinely hated it. His cape snapped as he turned. He skipped the Batwing and any plan to fly up and interrogate Hal directly, because the yellow ring showing up uninvited genuinely wasn't Hal's fault. The guy was just doing his job.

The Batcycle's engine let out a low growl and shot forward like an arrow, straight toward Nightwing's tracked position.

"Tell me you've found Kael." Nightwing, who'd spent a solid stretch of time relocating both Kaelvorn and Rachel, was already suited up in full costume, lying flat on the roof of an abandoned factory, peering down through a rusted hole in the metal. Hearing the commotion in his earpiece, he glanced up at the yellow and green light flickering across the night sky. He shifted carefully, keeping his voice down to almost nothing.

"Yeah. I've caught most of it firsthand."

"What's his condition right now?"

"How would I know, it's magic! But going off his face, seems like a good thing?" Rachel, watching Kaelvorn's whole body run through changes she couldn't make sense of, tension all over her face, finally couldn't hold the question back once his expression settled back into something calm.

"What happened to you?" Kaelvorn looked himself over, flexed one fist, genuinely surprised.

"No idea what caused it, but I think I just... evolved?" Rachel blinked.

"That's what you're calling this?"

"Do you have any idea what just happened from where the magic side is standing?"

"Your soul. The apple's divine power. The magic itself. Your body just absorbed all of it.".... 🎉 Annual Memberships Are Finally Here! 🎉 To celebrate, I'm giving away an exclusive 80% OFF on the Annual Membership! + 1 free chapters on Patreon [email protected] /YATOOOO Not satisfied? Full refund, no questions asked.