Chapter 183: Three Imprints Upon the Soul

Ravian remained motionless for several seconds.

His body sat upon the bed with its eyes closed and its hands resting upon its knees. Its chest rose and fell slowly with every breath, while its features remained calm, as though he had merely entered a state of deep meditation.

Ravian himself stood before it.

Or rather, he floated.

His feet did not quite touch the floor, nor could he feel his weight or the warmth of the air surrounding him. He no longer heard his heartbeat from within his chest; instead, he heard it coming from the body seated upon the bed, like a distant sound emerging from behind a wall.

He looked down at his hands.

They were translucent and faintly white, with slender threads of light extending from them and gathering again around his arms and shoulders.

The gray crown hovered above his spiritual form rather than his physical body.

Its two crimson gemstones appeared more clearly than ever, while the crown continued trembling as though it could not settle upon that unfamiliar form—or... as though something were preventing it from stabilizing.

’So the problem really is within my soul.’

This was not the first time Ravian had separated from his body, which was why he noticed the imbalance within his spiritual form the moment he entered this state.

’Absolute Focus.’

He did not need to speak the ability’s name aloud.

He gathered the entirety of his awareness into a single point and pushed the room, his body, and the distant sounds away from the center of his consciousness.

He focused upon his spiritual hand.

At first, he saw only the familiar translucent white.

Then that color began to break apart, revealing lines beneath it.

Thousands of white lines, as pure as snow untouched by a single footprint, crossed and wound around one another in patterns so complex that no ordinary mind could retain even the smallest fraction of them.

They were neither blood vessels nor nerves. They were memories, will, emotions, Records, and aspects of his existence that had no names in any language he knew.

His soul did not truly possess the form of a human body.

The human form was merely the shape his consciousness had grown accustomed to giving itself.

Its true nature was that white network, which appeared to have neither beginning nor end.

Ravian approached the curtained window, passed his spiritual head through it without resistance, and looked down into the courtyard outside.

Several servants moved along the stone path below, some carrying small crates while others prepared one of the carriages.

Ravian directed Absolute Focus toward them while in this state, and their souls became visible within their bodies.

’Wow. This is insane.’

They were pale forms whose colors ranged from white to black, with countless shades of gray mixed within them. One possessed a light-gray soul, while another was dominated by black, and the two colors blended within a third in the form of irregular patches and lines.

Yet none of those souls was as purely white as his; not one contained the absolute whiteness entirely untouched by any other color that existed within his own soul.

’Strange.’

He did not know whether those colors reflected rank, nature, age, or something else entirely, nor did he assume that white represented good or black represented evil.

Nor did he care much. After all, he had not left his body to study House Viola’s servants.

Ravian returned to the room and focused upon his own soul once again.

This time, he ignored the outer white lines and drove his awareness deeper.

And there... he found something else.

No. Three things.

They resembled three foreign fragments implanted within the white network, or perhaps three seals bound to his soul to varying degrees.

The first fragment was a deep, voidlike gray, and it appeared almost alive as it moved.

It was not the gray produced by mixing white and black, but a color in its own right, one resembling emptiness that had acquired form without becoming matter.

It permeated the white lines of his soul so thoroughly that it was impossible to determine where one ended and the other began.

Ravian attempted to gaze into its depths.

For a single moment, the room vanished. His body vanished. Even his awareness of his own name and thoughts disappeared.

He felt his consciousness being drawn toward something that possessed no size yet was vaster than any universe he could imagine, something containing neither darkness nor light because both lost all meaning within it.

Ravian recoiled at once without conscious thought, driven by the pure instinct to flee.

The room took shape around him again, while his spiritual form trembled violently.

Had he not been using Absolute Focus, his consciousness might have dissolved merely from looking at it.

Even so, he knew the fragment’s identity without the System telling him. The connection between them ran deeper than any need for words.

’Sovereign Pride.’

It was not a remnant clinging to him. It was fused with his soul.

Perhaps it had even become an inseparable part of it, one that could not be torn away without destroying them both.

And that gray color held his element within it.

Void.

’So this is what the System looks like from the inside... or at least part of it.’

Ravian did not attempt to look into it again.

Instead, he shifted his attention toward the second trace.

It was black, but it was not an empty blackness.

Tiny points resembling distant stars were scattered throughout it, shifting slowly whenever Ravian changed the angle from which he viewed them.

It was not fused with his soul.

It merely clung to the outer layer, like something that had attempted to pierce it, been led astray, and failed to reach its core, yet had left its claws embedded within it before retreating.

Ravian approached it cautiously.

The star-like points moved before him.

Two of them gathered together, then stretched until they became narrow slits within the darkness.

Ravian’s spiritual form froze as his consciousness reeled in shock at what he saw.

They were not stars. They were eyes.

The eyes of the Star-Coiling Serpent.

’The Taboo of Fate.’

Ravian recognized it immediately.

It was the existence he had encountered in his dream, the one that had asked for his name. Ravian had given it his old name before it did something he had been unable to perceive at the time.

He had been right.

The Taboo of Fate had done something to him before he regained consciousness, but the attack had not struck him as intended.

Not entirely.

The black trace remained attached to the outside of his soul, forming only a secondary bond with it, unlike Sovereign Pride, which had fused with him completely, and unlike the third trace, which Ravian sensed had been driven directly into the lines of his soul.

Ravian focused upon the point where the blackness connected to his soul.

A single flicker of writing appeared before him in Prohiban—the language the System had previously told him about inside the cave—and he understood it in the same strange way he had once understood the Book of Sovereign Pride.

Then a name appeared, one he knew all too well.

Ryan.

His name from his previous life.