Saintess Summons Skeletons

After some reflection, Sofia decided against continuing to pursue space flight, and chose to wait for the shuttle.

She felt that with [Runeforged Overlord]’s flight and help from the Engineer skeleton, she might be able to actually leave, but then she would face the problem of having to chase the moons as they flew through space and to somehow land without killing herself, and that felt like a lot of things which could go wrong. Too many things. When she could just wait a bit.

A week was not too long, considering she had a full year ahead of her, and considering the speed at which she was collecting imprints so far, she probably wouldn’t need that much time. The more troubling matters were finding dungeons for heart catalysers and finding Cerberus Alpha.

It had been night for about an hour when she came down from the tower. Sunless drones roamed around the hills like the brainless blobs of black goo that they were.

It’s seriously weird. Not just them but also the cocoons that appear around the other monsters at night. And what about that Tarren guy? He wasn’t a monster…

Have I ever heard of another species mixing people and monsters? Goblins and Hobgoblins are closely related but they’re not really the same species… Supposedly they have a common ancestor or something?

I’ve never even seen a real goblin yet, have I?

What differentiates people and monsters is a bit vague in the first place…

Right, I wanted to check these things’ spiritual body.

Sofia summoned the graveyard skeletons as well as a big block of bone and got them to bring her inside it. From in there, halfway in the spiritual realm, she watched the Sunless drones in the distance.

In the all-white spiritual realm, one was able to see spiritual matter, that was, usually: the soul of people, and the spiritual body of monsters and animals. Added to that were the vague transparent and fog-like shapes of physical matter. Oftentimes spiritual matter could go through other spiritual matter without too much trouble, unless it was really dense like the sap of the black primus trees of the soul of a very high level individual.

What Sofia was looking for, now, was whether the Sunless had a true soul, the kind which Sofia thought was what would usually prompt the system to call a kill ‘murder’ or a simple spiritual body. The difference was quite hard to make out. Usually, someone’s soul would look much like their physical body, just white and very blurry, with natural mana veins spreading throughout. Spiritual bodies were the same. What made a soul a soul, though, was a sort of small knot in the mana veins, an origin point, a core. The same thing that the Scribe had to protect when Sofia combined her classless skills into [DODGE - ME].That was it.

Beyond that, there are Saints and Oracles souls which look nothing like their body because we get slapped with divine essence. Apostles get a mangled body and Saints get a mangled Soul.

And then there’s me who has both.

Looking at the Sunless drones from afar, it was hard to see anything. To begin with, it was hard to see the mana veins on a willing person up close and standing still. The mana veins in the spiritual body were the ones which connected it to the physical body and allowed mana to flow from one to the other, not the actual pathways used for magic, which mostly resided in the mana plane and showed through in the soul as little capillaries spreading everywhere.

Finally, for the sake of her experiments, Sofia bolted all the drones in the area save for one, which she had Pareth wrestle while she observed it from underground in the spiritual realm.

The Sunless debris acts like a core for the mana to build around, no actual mana veins there, just like a golem. And yet it still has a spiritual body…

The core kind of looks like a mana knot, looking at it like this, but I don’t think it’s one.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

In the first place the other Sunless I killed just now didn’t leave any lingering soul so they were clearly just spiritual bodies.

That was the last difference between a spiritual body and a soul. Upon death of the physical body, a spiritual body would quickly scatter, while a soul would linger and slowly fade over hours, days, or weeks, depending on the individual. That was what Sofia had learned in Eternams necromancy lectures, at least.

True death was when the soul completely faded. Beyond that point the person could never be brought back. Before that, there was always a possibility.

Sofia ordered Pareth to kill the Drone.

‘You have defeated [Sunless Drone - Lv. 203]’

The spiritual body started to scatter almost instantly as the Sunless Drone’s physical body disappeared, the mana making it up its shiny black form spreading back into the air.

Just as I thought, not a sou–

Under Sofia’s eyes, the scattering spiritual body was sent flying up in the sky, like attracted by a great suction force. Sofia watched the blurry white cloud get dragged up until it disappeared past the wild mana currents above.

Excuse me, what?

Sofia moved around a bit and repeated the experiment on more Sunless drones. The result was always the same, after being killed, their scattering spiritual body would get sucked into the night sky before it could truly disappear.

The graveyard skeletons let Sofia step out of the spiritual realm.

“There’s something seriously wrong here. But… Is that how the Sunless form? The inverse of that? If every night their spiritual body comes down from the sky and then starts to gather ambient mana to form a core and a physical body…”

Sofia wanted to try her theory, so she waited for Sunrise, keeping another drone in her sight, held by Pareth. When the Sun started to rise, the Sunless drone burst as if it had been killed, and as Sofia expected, its spiritual body was sucked out, but surprisingly not into the sky. She watched as the Sunless drone’s spiritual body flew along the ground for a few hundred meters before gradually disappearing underground.

What the heck.

Again Sofia stepped out of the spiritual realm, and looked at Pareth. “Did it leave a debris?”

Pareth shook its main head.

“Interesting… If we follow the direction the spirit of the Sunless went… I think they’re attracted to the middle moon. It should be opposite to the rising sun right now, so from here, considering the curvature of the planet, it has to go through the ground if it’s going for the middle moon in a straight line, while during the middle of the night it could just go straight up.”

Hmmm…

“What are the chances that Fenrir is the middle moon?”

Pareth shrugged.

“Yeah, we’ll get to know in a few days, I suppose… Do you think we could get a weak Sunless inside the Shuttle? With proper preparations we could trap it inside of a blessed construct and hold it there for a while. It’ll be much easier to see where exactly the spirit is going from there.”

While Pareth and Sofia were pondering over that idea, a blinding light illuminated the morning sky.

Sofia’s first reflex was to bring out her shield while Pareth’s was to stand above her with his own shields ready.

The light came from right above them and seemed to be getting bigger and bigger like a second sun.

Meteorite?!

Then came the sound, and Sofia relaxed, this was no rogue space rock, but the shuttle slowing its descent toward the tower.

Already?

Is it Ihuarah coming back?

Sofia observed the bright light disappearing into nothingness as it entered the invisible tower on the distant hill. She pulled on her [Reign over shadows] skill to get an idea of the mana needed to use her ability to swap position with Ihuarah, it did not ever give a precise number but she could tell whether she had enough or not, and at the moment she had more than enough.

Let’s do a neat party trick.

Sofia switched places with the hero shade, which cost her just about 110 000 mana, and she found herself sitting inside of a loudly landing space shuttle, the interior of which looked a lot like a sized down version of the one that had taken her to the trial. It had to be said that Ihuarah had to accept the teleportation for the swap to take place, so the situation was likely a surprise to him but not a jumpscare.

“Of course you would accept instantly,” Sofia said out loud as Pareth teleported to her, holding the arm of a fully black shadow of a man in one of his oversized hands.

“Well of course, Lady Sofia. What a pleasant surprise to cross your path on this beautiful morning, the Merciful Mother blesseth my day,” he answered with a deep bow.

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