Chapter 457: The Balance (Castle Bonus 3/5)

With a sigh, I released my titan form. All this while, I had been holding on to it, expecting a new wave of danger, but enough time had passed, and if danger was coming, it was still distant.

My body folded into itself, and I went from a titan to a man in about ten seconds. When it was done, I was still sitting beside the skull, and I called towards me the pen I had dropped when the blade came into me, and looked at it fondly.

It was true that the right tool made the mage, and the journey to gather materials for my Grimoire no longer seemed so foolish. If I could control so much power with one Magus Tool, the Inscriber Pen, then my Grimoire would have more spectacular surprises waiting for me.

I glanced down at my body, and I was surprised that there were still strips of clothing clinging to my form, and as I watched, they were mending. Faint white fog drifted from the valley and was absorbed by them, and slowly my clothes were reforming from their pieces.

It would not take long before they were whole, and there would be no sign that I had just fought one of the most grueling battles of my life.

Damn, Dorrik did good work. The debt I owed this god was growing.

I chuckled and closed my eyes as I turned my thoughts inward.

If my flesh was outgrowing my soul, I needed to know by how much. I could not balance something I could not see.

With most of my senses still sealed, I had to use Eldritch Perception, which had been growing by leaps and bounds during the battle. Every growth in this skill gave me more control over it and a deeper insight into how it functioned, and even without actively using it to search for my companions, I could tell that the warband were not dead.

This skill was very mysterious, and turning it on my own soul felt like trying to look at the back of my own head. But I had become used to twisting my mind to accommodate magic like this, the kind that stretched the limits of my sanity.

My perception twisted, and I saw my soul in the center of me. It was crystalline, still unfinished in places, and brighter than I remembered, and around it lay several dark facets enclosing it like a net... the seal.

I could see where the net was tight, and I could see the crack I had opened with the pen, a thin bright line running through the seal where the Anima leaked through. I could see my body around it, as my channels linked to my soul, connecting every part of my flesh to it... and I saw the problem.

My body was enormous. I do not mean its size. I mean its weight. The Law of Flesh ran through it like the frame of a fortress, and the marrow burned in every bone, and now the Law of Blood was moving through all of it in a slow red tide, and next to all of that my soul looked like a candle someone had set down in the middle of a cathedral.

It was a very bright candle... but it was still a candle, and the tide was lapping at it.

Every time my new heart beat, a faint red pulse went out through my body and washed up against the edge of my soul, and when it drew back, it pulled, very gently. My channels held my soul firmly in place, and it did not move. But I could feel the pull on it now that I was looking, and I understood what I had felt earlier, when my soul leaned after my body.

It was as if my body was inviting my soul to dwell inside it, merging them into one entity.

I opened my eyes.

The Loop was anchored in my soul. Every death I had ever come back from, I had come back from because my soul remembered its state perfectly, almost like the Law of Flesh remembers my body. If my soul drifted into my flesh the way a god’s power sits in its heart, I did not know if it would go back anymore. Perhaps it would go back, and my body would not follow. Perhaps nothing would change at all... I did not want to find out by dying.

I thought about the solution to this problem, and it was not hard for me to determine that the seal over my soul was one of the greatest factors in what was happening.

My soul and channels were ridiculously powerful, on a scale that even I had not fully determined. My body would always play catch-up with my soul, but that balance shifted when my soul was sealed, denying me access not just to my skills and spells, but to the very foundations of my existence as a mage.

At first, I had believed that only my spells had been denied to me, but I was now realizing that the danger went even deeper. I could suffer a fundamental loss of identity if my soul remained sealed like this.

It was as if, in this age, the presence of a mage was being denied.

The obvious solution had been given to me by the System when I arrived in this time period.

[Soul Condition: Sealed]

[The bearer’s soul has been bound by an external authority. Access to core Celestial functions is restricted. Warden authority is suspended. Law comprehension is limited. The bearer’s true nature has been obscured, even from themselves.]

[Unlock Condition: Locate the Temple of your Patron god and complete the Rite of Unsealing.]

Who was my Patron god, and what was the Rite of Unsealing? I did not know, but I had never once considered trying to follow this path to unseal my soul. Maybe I would have considered it if not for the fact that this seal could not hold any of my abilities that had reached the Sovereign Tier.

So Adamantium Titan, my Lightning Resonance, and now my Inscription had all broken out of this seal, with the last giving me a surprise as it directly bored a hole in the seal.

If I could ascend with my own effort to a position where I could not be bound by any external power, I would take it over bowing my head to a god. It was not just a matter of pride; there was simply no other path for me to follow... The task before me was so great that even gods were not enough, and submitting myself to the authority of one, even for a short while, was not something I was going to do.

∞

The path ahead of me was obvious. I needed to bring more of my skills to the level of Sovereign, especially my Anima Depth. The one way I knew my skills could reach the Sovereign Tier was by applying the power of Laws to them.

The seal stopped me from accessing my Titles and touching the other Lightning Law Shards in my soul, but I believed that with this hole in the seal, I might be able to slowly access and decipher at least one Law Shard, and if I did that, I knew the next skill I would be bringing to Sovereign, and that skill would be... Mortal Shell.