The first assignment Iznana gave me was to see Stormsgate directly. Unless handing me two dozen books to read counted.


    I had seen the city from golem back when arriving. But that did not let me experience it up close. I had not really seen any alma settlement that way since the outpost.


    We stopped at public houses for single nights or supply stores for a few hours. And I had little time to explore before we moved on.


    They insisted I walk the city as an ordinary alma. And it proved good advice.


    Wandering the streets and perusing shops gave me a better sense for food, clothing and enchantments. I also understood how common the undead really were.


    They usually looked like normal alma. And those with odd features were not outside plausible deniability. But their appearance had no effect on my awareness of their souls.


    One in twenty to thirty alma I saw used unlife animus. Some had bodies physically identical to an alma. Others were using illusions to change their outward appearance.


    Those ones had a variety of shapes behind the light constructs covering them. A few were corpse-like. Yet others had skin tones or bone structures alma could not. And some did not seem organic at all.


    I had spotted two undead with a strange second layer to their souls during the last week. It was a thin non-functional shell that covered all the parts I now knew soul analysis spells interacted with.


    It was similar to the false outer soul I noticed on the outpost’s manager. But he had life animus in both the shell and his true soul.


    The undead used unlife animus. Yet it somehow transformed to life animus when feeding the shell.


    There was also the difference in total animus. The manager had many times more than I had seen from any other alma. And his shell looked like a soul barely above average.


    I could probably create as much or more animus if I converted most of the essence I now controlled. That still did not tell me why he was such an outlier.


    Priest ?fron was outwardly supportive of me exploring. The only problem being his insistence on monitoring me the whole time.


    He did not say I would be followed. But their had been half a dozen souls tracking me since I stepped out of the grand temple.


    Three changed their physical appearance and demeanor frequently. Three seemed invisible and intangible. And one of that second group had something like a shell that I suspected hid their soul from animus detection entirely.


    None of it helped. Their distinctive souls were obvious no matter how well hidden they otherwise were.


    The third day I decided to ditch my stockers in a public restroom. Becoming an amorphous mass of flesh and slithering down the pipes was quite effective.


    I swam through the sewers and came up in another store’s bathroom a few blocks away. Dissolving my soul and creating a new one when I took on alma form again might have been unnecessary.


    It worked. None of my followers tracked me down. Not until I did the same thing in reverse and returned to Special Situations.


    Priest ?fron did not mention the trackers or my maneuver. But Iznana seemed amused at his expense.


    I took a bite of the folded meat pie in my hand. My legs absently kicked in the air behind me.


    The idea to rent a room in one of the middling inns occured on the fourth day. The soft bed I was lounging belly down on told me it was a good choice.


    Some of the kaithsh came from the stipend I was already receiving from Special Situations. The coins were small enough to fit through public plumbing.


    Another portion was telekinetically lifted from the sediment on the bottom of a couple canals. It was surprising how much coinage was under the water.


    The rest of it was involuntarily donated when I wandered through a derelict part of the city in the form of a diminutive alma. I still did not know if the four alma were trying to sexually assault or simply rob me. They had not clarified.


    I learned two things from the experience. It was true alma needed oxygen. Just filtering the gas out of the air around their head quickly made them delirious. The second thing was that alma tasted pretty good.


    I based my current form on my natural appearance. Altering the anatomy to match an alma female left me unrecognizable as myself or Rekon.


    A soul floated before me. It was taken from one of the alma I engulfed as a writhing amalgam of flesh and teeth two days before. Preserving their souls was easy enough.


    I carefully broke several components. The spark vanished. They were repaired an instant later. Then the spark of consciousness flickered back into existence.


    I smiled. It took months of practice. But I could revive a soul. And not just simple ones.


    The soul died and revived a few more times. It was easier every time I did it.


    I had already cut off its ability to feel pain or distress. Nith was entirely capable of doing the same. He simply enjoyed feeling his subjects’ reactions.


    My newest essence pattern fed a treatise on natural irregular animus prisms into my mind. Stripping the reading spell down and letting it give output to me directly allowed me to speed up the process.


    I could handle ten to twenty thousand words a second before I started losing details. It was far easier to track than the quadrillions of molecules I was constantly aware of.


    That comparison was not entirely fair. The part of my mind that tracked the composition of my body and anything in close proximity was not the part that handled thinking like a person.


    They were both me and not truly separate. But making sense of an author’s words and processing that information into my own knowledge was a person skill.


    Iznana was appalled when they realized I could absorb the thicker tomes in around ten seconds. Less if I scanned them and received the output later.


    It somehow made the fact I took five minutes to read a hundred words even more frustrating for them. I thought it made physical reading even less useful.


    Over two hundred separate books were waiting in the pattern. I started with five times that. Hopefully there would be more waiting at Special Situations.


    I shoved the rest of the pie in my mouth. The meat-filled bread was a popular street food. It was easy to eat with your hands and could be reheated as sales demanded.


    The history of hand held foods in Rojin and cultural shift towards fast food after Rillan separated from the kingdom was easily accessible in my mind. I knew every regulation that prevented the spread of foodborne illness and what outbreak motivated it.


    I was starting to understand why Iznana held books in such high regard. The format was flawed at best. But collecting so much information in a stable form was amazing.


    I rolled off the bed and to my feet. The room was small. Yet large enough to pace comfortably.


    My hand dug through one of the bags on the table. I pulled out a fist sized red brown loaf.


    I continued walking and tore a bite out of the savory blood bread. The alma had a surprising variety of cuisines that were actually good. It made all the porridge I ate in the outpost feel like a waste.


    The four alma souls broke and reassembled in different ways as I ruminated. Things were going well. Better than I could hope in most ways.


    I was scheduled to meet with the Rillan empress in the morning. That would be the first obligation to the church. Although it was something I would have needed to do in my identity as Rekon either way.


    Priest ?fron had been obtuse about the purpose of the meeting. It was officially to award Rekon and his mentally scarred followers for their service to the empire.A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    I inferred there was more to it. Something I would be obligated to address. Which the priest had his own plans for.


    I intended to play along. Provided I would get further access to the knowledge of Special Situations. Not that I expected that knowledge to help my current problem.


    I was confronting a wall. One that I had suspected since before I left the Moors.


    The nature of the spark of consciousness was debated at length. Iznana was surprisingly willing to share works on theoretical animancy.


    It seemed like they were trying to test how fast I could learn. An experiment I was entirely approving of.


    But I quickly realized the alma barely knew the spark existed. Only a few authors talked about it in terms of first hand analysis. And they mostly determined what it did.


    It was the source of animus. It was in all souls. Everyone had only one. The energy it emitted had to be filtered into a usable form by the prism. Reviving someone meant bringing it back.


    I could revive alma now. It would require me repairing their bodies as well. Or altering the prism to produce unlife animus.


    And that did not fix my problem. Gam had no souls to repair. The essence spiral and cultivated patterns it fueled would dissipate as soon as the will was gone.


    The consciousness that possessed that will still remained inside me. But the dead gam slept. And I did not know how to awaken them.


    It made me think of the alma’s idea of a Creator. I had no primary evidence for or against its existence or the story of their gods. The nature of myth and legend suggested the truth was more complicated even if the rough idea was accurate.


    The creature in the Divine Discord seemed like a ruthless monster. It had made conscious beings capable of acting on their own.


    Sheth and the other dark gods changing things proved they were independent from the entity that made them. That meant they were essentially offspring.


    I flopped onto the bed. My gaze on the enchanted light stones embedded in the ceiling.


    Maybe I was being hypocritical. I killed creatures for practicality. That did not bother me. Not when I was simply changing when and how they died.


    As opposed to giving them the innate ability to die in the first place. Making for the sole purpose of destruction. Letting my offspring die. Allowing myself to die bit by bit.


    I paused. Were the gam part of me? I felt like they were. I had always felt it. But what did that really mean?


    My attention turned inward. The cosmos of specks filled my void.


    The void came before everything. It was me more than the collection of particles and energy I claimed as my own and walked around in.


    I had not been able to revive the gam in my void. But I was not the same before.


    My tightly packed essence network relaxed. I let it stretch beyond my body.


    Essence threads filled the room. Then they engulfed the building.


    Soon my essence spiral encompassed the collection of higher end shops around. Then the neighborhood. Then the city.


    I faintly felt the outline of the hills bordering the valley Stormsgate rested in. The feedback was vague. Nothing I could use to get details.


    I stopped when my essence was at the density it had when I left the Moors. I then pulled it all back.


    Some essence was left in the city. But the losses would replenish in minutes.


    I had a level of power I doubted any gam had approached. Yet what was that power?


    The quantity of essence I controlled was a byproduct of the true change. My will. My influence over the reality outside myself.


    I stretched my hand to the ceiling. Fingers splayed as if preparing to catch a ball.


    My will pushed against the edge of my body. I slowly moved past the skin and claimed the air beyond.


    Essence bled off my cultivation as my influence shifted to a new target. A sphere of air above my hand became as much me as my own body.


    I saw all that it was. And I saw what it could be. My will regected reality as it was and substituted what I demanded it become.


    A smooth weight dropped into my hand. I turned it to inspect the shiny orb.


    It was about two inches in diameter and solid gold. The purity was not perfect. I based the molecular composition on that found in the crown coins that represented one hundred and forty four kaithsh.


    The coins had traces of other metals and elements. But they were mostly gold. A metal alma attributed high value to.


    It was not magic. I had used no essence. All I did was force a tiny piece of the world to replace its reality with my own reality.


    I lost four fifths of my essence in the process. But only because I could not control it while focused on creating the sphere of metal.


    Pulling it back in brought me close enough to where I was before. The rest would dissipate over time.


    Essence was a tool I used to collect and extend my influence. A trick for stabilizing it as something usable outside my current focus. But it was all the same in the end. All me.


    I pondered my void. Was I thinking about this wrong?


    Awakening created my void. Or left it as an empty space. And before that it was filled by the figments of my unformed mind.


    I had been much like the sleeping gam within me. Trapped in myself. No will to let me go beyond that.


    Gam needed will to exist. They could not be restored because they had no will in their dreaming state.


    I had always tried to connect them to the world to wake them up. But I had been awoken and willed myself into the world.


    Did I have to wake them up first? Was having a conscious will needed to connect them again?


    I could not make them lucid before. But I was different now.


    The dreaming minds glittered throughout me. I reached out to them.


    Memories and experience flowed through my awareness. The texture of moss, rage at a petty slight, the tingle of a lover’s touch and hard smoothness of a stone licked simply to know what it was like.


    The person part of me was swept away. But the rest of me reached further. My essence spiral began to unravel.


    I held many thousands of lifes. Connected to and part of them all. And pulled them together.


    The sparks resisted my desire. They were as they had always been. Changing was beyond those innate limits.


    I rejected those limits. Within myself I was all. Reality was me and I was reality. Any restrictions had to be part of me as well.


    The connections shifted from my consciousness to those I held. Sleeping minds touched and overlapped.


    Something shifted and the links began forming on their own. The cosmos of separate consciousness became a web of nodes all aware of each other.


    An amorphous impression started forming between them. There was no physical space within me. But the illusion of one took shape.


    I opened my eyes. The mattress was soft below. The weight of the gold ball pressed on my stomach.


    My cultivation was gone. The essence forming it was thick in the air. Yet it had all left my control.


    I sat up. The heavy orb rolled off me.


    My flesh should have been dying. I refused to allow it.


    The chaotic collective dream within me solidified. I watched the disparate memories and perspectives overlap and reinforce each other.


    What else did a reality need? A common agreement of what was real and what was not seemed good enough to make a world real.


    I slid off the bed. My heart beat. Blood pumped. I lived. I willed it so.


    My hand clenched before me. Bone and tendon moving because I demanded it do so.


    It was all different. Something changed when I restructured my void. Restructured myself.


    A layer of removal between me and the world I infringed upon was gone. That unnoticed barrier had let me forget I was not part of this.


    There was a mounting pressure. One forcing down on my will. Pushing back my influence.


    I turned to the side. My body stayed where it was. An abyss of absence stretched out to eternity.


    It was nothing like my void. The place inside me was not an independent existence. But the abyss was real. Yet it had neither time, space nor substance.


    A will mirroring my own looked back at me. I knew it. I had known it since I first appeared in G?ri The’s workshop.


    It had always pressed down on me like the weight of the atmosphere pressed down on my body. Constant and forgotten.


    I only noticed the opposing force when I pushed against the limits of my ability. Holding too much essence. Pushing my presence too far. Creating the golden ball from nothing.


    It reached out now. Crushing will like I had never experienced pressed down. I tried to resist. To impose my existence over the truth that I did not. That I had never existed in its eyes.


    My body would have collapsed to the floorboards. But time was no longer passing. We fought in the gap between two moments.


    The will crushed me down to a point of presence. Yet it could not force me out entirely.


    I remained anchored to the world by the body I inhabited. By the essence in the air. The gam in the Moors and former alma beyond. By everything my influence touched.


    It was very slowly losing ground. I was weaker. But it could not win completely. And I would resist until I won out.


    The force abruptly pulled away. I felt it move around my body without suppressing me directly.


    Reality bent and broke in a way reminiscent of my own power over it. Except this was far stronger and outside my control.


    Space collapsed around me. And I was in the abyss.


    No body. No form. Only me.