Kline and I rushed through the portal after Reta. Kline teleported in front of her to cut her off, and I approached from behind.

  Reta stopped fluttering. “Oh, so you’re threatening me now?”

  “Of course not. But you do at least have to acknowledge me. I mean, you said that you’d help me if I found the pathway—and as you can see…” My face contorted as I stopped myself from summoning them. “As you saw, I did it. I gave soul constructs their magic back.”

  Reta turned and looked at me. “Yes, great job. Now… What do you want from me?”

  That question seemed offensive at first, but I couldn’t answer her. I genuinely didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m a soulmancer, Mira. I fight with magicless soul puppets. If you want to learn how to fight with living beasts, you need a beast tamer as a teacher. Now come. You can apply what you learn here when you train your friends.”

  Reta flew forward, and I sighed a breath of relief. Reta was so miserably hatable, but she did care, and I had to accept that.

  I dropped off my belongings at Brindle’s bungalow and then met Reta out by the lake. She was sitting on a log. When Kline and I arrived, she summoned a tiny cat the size of a candy bar. I watched in wonder as it got closer. Kline put up his paw, preparing to toy with it.

  Suddenly, it ballooned to his size and attacked back. Kline jumped back and then pounced. His attack looked like it would make contact, but the tiny cat shrank to the size of an eraser, jumped between Kline’s legs, and then grew to the size of a war panther and lunged at Kline. Kline navigated, but it was no use. The creature kept morphing and following him, teleporting from one location to another. Kline tried to use Sharp Bite on it at one point, and Reta’s cat bent in half to avoid its jaws. Another time, Kline did bite through, only to get a jaw full of gas. He expected the beast to reform as usual, but instead, it developed new jaws from its spine and latched onto Kline’s throat.

  “Wait!” I cried. “I thought transfiguration was a sixth core skill!”

  “Transfiguration is a sixth core skill,” she said. “This isn’t transfiguration. Transfiguration means you’re changing the soul into something else. I’m simply shaping on top of a construct.”

  She lifted her hand, and a sword formed in her palm. It then morphed into different instruments, all solid.

  “You can do this, right?” Reta asked. “Without Kira?”

  “Not that good,” I said. “But yeah… well, basic stuff.” I summoned a machete of aura and a drill. Then, I looked at the beast morphing and twisting, and biting. “You’re seriously creating this?”

  “Yes. You can create beasts from raw aura—but the nearan pathways are too complex unless you transfigure nearan pathways into new constructs. That’s why you capture souls. The beasts already know how to walk, fight, think, learn, and grow—you simply strip autonomy and learn how to communicate with them. But that doesn’t change the fact that you can still manipulate soul force.”

  Reta gave her battle cat spines like a porcupine, and then wings and horns.

  “You cannot break apart a soul, but you can physically add to it in the moment,” Reta said. “The additions won’t be permanent until you can mold souls—but it allows you flexibility before battle. Just remember: your summons learn and grow independently. If you train them without spines or plating, they won’t know how to use their body.”

  “Wow… that’s cool…” I muttered.

  “It is. Now watch closely with Aura Sight—I’ll break things down to show you what I’m doing.”

  I watched carefully and saw Reta separate the cat’s body into soul mist. Then, she used shaping to rebuild the body and used illusions to smooth it out.

  “See?” Reta said. “You’re not changing the shape—you’re separating. You can also…”

  She summoned another soul beast in the space of a dissolving one. It gave the illusion that the beast grew another head out of its back, but it was actually a second summon coming out of the distortion of a first. Reta cycled the beasts to dissolve and resummon in fast succession, and it looked like the beast was teleporting and forming out of smoke. She also added illusions to make it appear to be the same beast. The whole thing was so disorienting that it quickly overwhelmed Kline.

  “Soulmancy provides flexibility,” Reta said, retracting the soul beast and then recalling it in another position for a teleporting effect. “Your beasts can die, reform, decrease, or increase in size, and you can augment them.”

  Her beast started steaming with fog. It then increased in speed tenfold, and Kline stopped playing. He started teleporting around, throwing slashes, and fighting for his life. Each attack was large, but the attacks hit barriers around us to protect the ground from destruction.

  One attack landed on her beast, and the claw mark didn’t even make a dent. Kline’s eyes widened, and then he ran for his life.

  “As a soulmancer, soul aura is your weapon,” Reta said. “You can add more to beasts to make them stronger, or split it into more beasts…” She summoned five more beasts, and the situation became more hopeless for Kline. He responded by activating One Beast Army to fight back. It was futile. All of her beasts were just as flexible as the others. The mental processing power she had to have to shape them was unbelievable. Unless, of course, she trained her soul beasts to do most of it. Soul constructs could learn and grow—they just had autonomy. Still, I wasn’t sure how they would learn something so unnatural. The whole thing was surreal and confusing to watch.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “Each time you come here, I’ll teach you different aspects of soulmancy combat,” Reta said. “The strengths, the weaknesses, the strategies. It’ll take till the auction just to make you proficient. Everything else—your alchemy, your beast taming—you’ll have to learn on your own time.”

  I smiled wryly. “Couldn’t you help… experiment with magic strategies as well?”

  Reta thought about it. “Give me the next five years. After that, I’ll dedicate half your time to magic combat.”

  I grinned. “Okay… let’s do this.”

  That day, while Reta trained Kline on One Beast Army and amplification, she had me dissolve soul constructions and summon new ones from inside them. We did that for about a week. The next week, we worked on increasing and decreasing the size of constructs, as it didn’t change the shape of a soul. Throughout it all, I realized that I had a massive limitation—my soul was weak.

  It was unbelievable to think that a second evolution person could technically evolve after threading a few third evolution cores, but soulmancy was different. Perhaps it was my profound control over my soul, but filling my soul core was like trying to plug a black hole.

  To get around this, Hellfine fed me fourth evolution beast meat, which was a gruesome ordeal. There was a massive gap between the third and fourth evolutions, and so the first time I ate some jerky, I was on bed rest for an entire day. I was glad I poisoned the fourth evolution beast I killed, or it could’ve killed me.

  Once I woke, I took a soul-cleansing elixir and returned to training. Two days later, I ate more meat. By the second month, I was eating steaks, and my aura had ballooned. I could make my ghost elk ten feet tall—fifteen including the antlers. Making it smaller was vastly more difficult, but the control I obtained from it increased my power immensely. Soon, I could make it the size of Kline’s house cat form, and the two started fighting cutely as we continued on.

  Weeks blended by, and soon I was able to summon three beasts in the same location, weaving together dissolving and appearing beasts. It felt like I was learning how to braid, but it became more complex as she had me fight my clones against Kline’s One Beast Army.

  Kline treated my clones like they were a mob of fifth graders, but my beasts started learning on their own. They were, after all, intelligent beings—they just didn’t have an ego. So I could eat lunch and train them, a very powerful tool indeed.

  I also improved them through soul enhancements, shaping, and recall-summoning strategies.

  Kline was my new training partner—and that felt awesome.

  It was a fulfilling summer, and I felt sad when it came to an end. I sat beside Reta on the final day. “Are you going to teach me some shaping?” I asked. “I can practice when I’m at home.”

  She shook her head. “It works the same as Amplification—you need to evolve your core. And we won’t take shortcuts. We’ll evolve you sometime next year.”

  I nodded. “Thanks, Reta.”

  Reta nodded. “And take this.” She pulled out a small bag.

  “What’s this?” The bag had a cloudy marble.

  “It’s an artificial nearan brain,” she said. “You can copy your nearan pathway into it, and it will allow you to use your body in a dream world where illusions become semi-permanent. If you mix it with soul beasts and illusions, you can create an entire world. Also…”

  I looked up from the marble. “What?”

  She stood and considered whether to tell me—and surprisingly chose to. “Those beasts in your core—they’re living. Three months would pass by in two seconds to them—but I imagine it could be disjointing for them to come out, only to realize they missed months or even years. If you want to give them a life, you may want to make them a home. We’ll figure out how to give them some children later… or something.” She fluttered away as my heart welled with emotions.

  I was speechless, welling with powerful emotions. I almost didn’t catch her, but I yelled to ensure she could hear me. “Thank you, Reta!” I yelled with passion, hoping it would reach her.

  I liked to think that it did. I then held the marble against my breast and packaged it in its bag, and said goodbye to Tinus and the others. They loaded me up with about a hundred pounds of fourth evolution meat. It was time to go home.

  —

  It was only 5 p.m. when I got home, but my and Kline’s antisocial asses glided into Wraithwood under Cloak of the Predator and Active Camouflage and snuck into our house. A vacation without an extra day off is worse than no vacation at all.

  Besides—I had something important to do.

  I hit the bed, pulled out the Dream Realm, as I called it, and copied my nearan pathway into it, linking my mind and the realm. I had work to do.

  I summoned Sina, Ryn, and Dain the next day. They looked around with sad eyes. They were supposed to get training—but three months passed by just like that. They missed all of it, and I’m sure they understood the profound terror that could come with going to sleep and waking up three years later, when Kael had children and they were already grown. Reta was right—there were serious problems with my power. But…

  “Hey,” I said, sitting crisscross. “Reta can’t train you ‘cause she doesn’t know how to—but she’s teaching me how to train you. And not just that…” I pulled out the marble. “She gave you a home. You wanna see it?”

  The three looked at each other, then studied my grin. I didn’t wait for their reply. I sucked them into my chest and activated the Dream Realm. We opened our eyes on a mountain peak in the forest. It had beautiful scenery and sounded beautiful as well, but it was mixing textures. It was gorgeous, sounded real, but was still an illusion. I crouched and petted the lurvine—the sensation was just as physical as in the real world. “I know it’s not much now, but over time, it’ll have textures. You’ll be able to train here, and since you’re using my mana, you can use your fire.”

  I sat down as their eyes welled up with tears.

  “And you can always disconnect from this space if you’re lonely. A second later…” I snapped my fingers. “You’ll wake up when I summon you. There’s also…” I turned, and the elk walked through the forest. “My summons. They’re… well… they’re not exactly autonomous, but they have personalities. They’ll make great practice partners. And who knows… I’ll probably have more real friends for you soon.”

  Sina stared at me with trembling eyes. For the first time, she broke that hard-girl-soft-heart routine and jumped into my arms as Ryn and Dain snuggled up on me.

  I cried as well. “I’ll give you a life. A real life. No matter what it takes—I’ll give you a real life.”

  After our moment, I exited and linked Kline’s mind and body to the marble, so we were all in my battleground. I transformed the environment into the inside of a volcano. I make the sensations yet—but it made for an epic backdrop.

  Kline and the lurvine looked around.

  “Welcome to my battleground,” I said. “Everything you learn here will transfer to your real bodies—so take your training seriously. Okay?”

  Excitement flickered in all of their eyes.

  “Kline, One Beast Army,” I said. He multiplied a dozen times. “Lurvine, get those flames ready. You’re all immortal—so you can take out all your petty feuds with raw force. You may begin.”