Chapter 41 - Spirit jellyfish

  Time no longer mattered to Adam as his spirit floated in the endless astral space. His fragment had proven that reincarnation was possible, but he would need to regain his strength before attempting it. To that end, he was intensely focusing on the effect of the strange haze surrounding him.

  It had helped fuse his soul back together and had been responsible for creating his spiritual body. Yet he knew little of it, the biggest hint he got was that he was able to see it while he was simply a remnant soul, that had never happened before, so it was clearly a spiritual energy that can nurture one soul.

  With that idea in mind, he tried to observe its effects on himself and eventually noticed that it wasn’t actually being absorbed by his soul, rather, it was disappearing before it even reached his silver essence. This strange discovery seemed to explain a little more about the metaphysical.

  Despite him literally being a soul magic user, he knew surprisingly little about the soul. He knew that it had something to do with controlling magic and had complex connections with the mind, yet now he knew that the was so much he was missing. When he ‘observed’ his soul, it appeared as a blurry light with flowing patterns as if covered in a heat-wave effect.

  His soul clearly had several layers to it, and one must be this spiritual form encompassing him. If the soul is a small flame, then the spirit is the smoke around it.

  This new path of questioning enabled him to be able to somewhat sense the outer shell of his essence. It wasn’t as clearly visible as his soul, but he could sense that something was there, just out of reach yet intrinsically linked to himself.

  Adam might have spent days or even weeks in a trance-like state as he became one with his surroundings. He had no heartbeat to ground him or any markers to orient himself, so he simply watched and felt the effect of the haze on his essence.

  Time passed and one might think he was an unmoving statue floating adrift in the astral sea. But eventually, something clicked. Adam had been so entirely and singularly focused on that strange warmth and the invisible part of him lingering just out of view, that he finally managed to understand it.

  It was similar to observing the rotation of a far-off sun and determining the planets in its orbit based on its slight rotations and tilts as the planet passed by it, invisible to us yet leaving a barely visible effect on the far-off sun. His soul was indirectly fueled by this mysterious haze but the real effect wasn’t happening in his soul, yet the trickle-down effect proved that something else was at work.

  And so after all that time, he moved.

  Slowly at first, he mentally grasped the invisible edge of his spirit and dragged it forward. He had become a lot more in tune with the haze by now and could see patches that were denser than others. They appeared to be wavy clouds with the barest hint of a blue tint to them.

  Having learned the equivalent of crawling along in his spirit form, he pushed himself towards the patches with the highest density of warmth and mentally grinned as he felt the energy getting absorbed and fed to his soul. It was a lot denser than before and it was having a clear impact on his silver essence.

  He continued to navigate the white space as he pushed himself from cloud to cloud every time the density of that nurturing energy depleted. The was no up or down in this place and he had no idea where the most effective haze was located so he simply navigated at random.

  The more he absorbed and moved around, the better he began to feel that edge of his blurry soul. It was different from his silver essence, it seemed more solid and constant. Perhaps it was what contained his soul's essence like a jar. Or perhaps it was a protective layer like a metaphysical body for the metaphysical laying beneath, after all, it had literally formed his spiritual body around him. He had no way of knowing, but you don’t need to know how something works in order to use it.

  Therefore, after all his effort and hard work, he was healed enough to truly attempt his escape from this empty place. His soul had not ‘evolved’ like he had felt during his experiment but it had visibly grown in density and brightness. He no longer felt on the brink of dispersing, so the time had come.

  He covered his hand in that silver magic and extracted a portion of his being that could enter that place. He had only done that as a test on his first try, after all, he knew that the soul had a more uniform function so every piece had the same information, whether he used a portion of the soul extracted from his leg or head, the entire soul was like a circular flowing river, each part of his essence could travel all over the place so it was all the same essentially.

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  He thought of it like a hard drive, no matter how many processors you add, the information on the hard drive would stay the same, only the processing power would change.

  He once more extracted a piece of himself, this time a rather larger one than before. It was about a fifth of his soul, a daring thing to do considering he still hadn’t properly recovered from the damage his death caused. But no use only sending a tiny fraction if he wanted his reincarnation to succeed. The glaring issue, of course, was that even if it worked, he still wouldn’t be free of this realm.

  His soul couldn’t entirely enter the soul realm as of yet and he didn’t know if it would ever be able to. So even if his fragment succeeded, it would live its life in the body of another, no doubt also in another world, and he would be stuck here. He didn’t want a clone of himself to go live out in the world, he wanted a way to properly reincarnate or at least escape this place and return back to the land of the living.

  After all, he didn’t want to walk around in someone else's body, but right now, it was his only chance to learn about his magic and the magical worlds in general. Without any understanding of this power, the was no way he could hope to properly utilize it. His innate reincarnation ability was a mystery to him. It was incredible yet also unfathomable.

  He paid close attention to his soul mana reserves as he launched the large portion of silver energy into the distance. On his last trip to the soul realm as a fragment, he had pondered on what could be fueling the ability, yet as he felt his connection with the fragment disappeared, he found no loss of magic or change to his soul.

  It had of course spread out and become a lot less bright since a fifth of it had been removed, yet like a pond, it simply became less deep rather than a large hole appearing in it.

  When the fragment vanished, he wondered what would happen if he managed to rebuild his soul's density before the fragment returned, hopefully with some useful information.

  Status: Rogue spirit - Level 2

  Soul mana: Level 2

  His status as a rogue spirit had diminished a level after extracting the fragment so if he managed to get back up to level 3 by feeding off the haze, could the return of his soul boost him to level 4? And what does a higher spirit level even mean?

  That was when he noticed his soul mana hadn’t diminished at all. His mind churned with ideas as he pondered what using soul magic could do to help him currently.

  Until now, his ethereal silver magic had been his trump card against normally undefeatable enemies, yet burning their souls clearly wasn’t its only function. He had a spell that helped him feed his magic directly back into his soul which is similar to what the haze was indirectly doing.

  It didn’t take that much magic to extract his fragment despite its larger-than-usual size, so he decided to go all out on growing his soul using all the resources available to him in hopes that his fragment would return with information usable with a stronger soul.

  He continued to awkwardly push himself in different directions, mainly working his way through feel in order to determine the best spots in the haze.

  He spun his body upward when he felt the warmth becoming stronger and for the second time since his arrival in this place, saw a jellyfish swimming above him.

  He had no idea if it was the same creature as before, but he struggled to move closer to it either way. As he got closer, he noticed that it was indeed a spirit creature like him. Its body was semi-transparent but he presumed that it wasn’t because it hadn’t absorbed enough of the haze but rather that that was its natural state.

  The creature was about the size of a person with multiple tendrils floating behind it. It pulsed with a yellow color every time its body inflated and returned to a purple color when releasing the built-up haze. It moved in small bursts as it navigated the white space but didn’t seem to even notice his jerky approach.

  ‘You're a lot better at swimming than me’ He thought as he neared the large spirit.

  At this distance, he could see the creature's soul flowing calmly under its fluorescent spirit body.

  It was a new discovery that he hadn’t been able to properly unpack after returning from the soul realm the first time. Back then, his soul magic and divine ability had been intertwined somehow, so neither was working the way they should. When his soul returned with new information and discoveries, souls became visible to him without conscious thought.

  It was strange to see since the soul was clearly connected to the spiritual body of the jellyfish. It meant that he now mostly saw them as a single entity rather than a silver light hidden behind a wall.

  The jellyfish was able to move through fairly vast distances with every jump, so he struggled to keep up with it. Every time he managed to catch up, it would have built up enough energy to release its yellow pulse and be propelled forward once more.

  And so he continued his game of cat and mouse with the spirit being. He was happy to simply have a friend to hang out with since this place was rather desolate. The spirit would sometimes orient itself on different angles as he moved along, and everywhere it went a more concentrated cloud of spirit energy would be left behind.

  He found that simply following the jellyfish provided him with a denser spiritual haze than trying to locate denser patches himself. Since gravity wasn’t a thing in this place apparently, he followed the spirit as it moved with mesmerizing pulses.

  His soul was beginning to noticeably refill the density it had lost from the soul extraction when something new finally appeared. Following the jellyfish seemed to have been a good call, not only for the dense spiritual energy it was emitting but also because it had led him to what looked like solid land.

  His mind raced as the low fog cleared to reveal the ground beneath him. He was finally able to use it to orient himself as he was actually facing the ground head first.

  The jellyfish didn’t move towards it but rather continued on its way as it passed by. He was thankful for the spirit for bringing him here, unknowingly or not. It trail of thick haze it created as a product of its movement was useful to Adam but not as invaluable as reaching the ground.

  As his feet touched down, they thankfully didn’t pass straight through like a ghost but rather made contact with the ground as one would expect.

  It was as if he hadn’t been floating about in the air only moments ago when he took his first steps. He didn’t fly off back into the air but simply walked forward as expected. He tried jumping as high as he could and found that he could indeed lift-off back into the air as before.

  His movement in this place was jerky and awkward. If he were to navigate this realm, he would need to be able to learn to walk instead of crawl, and solid ground was the best place for that. With his feet touching the flat grey matter, he now had a reference point, he put his discoveries about the outer shell of the soul into practice as he worked on controlling his new spirit form.

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