Soul Use

Faced with these two options, perhaps the best option might seem to be the Priest since it meant having its resurrection assured, but the treasure thought otherwise.

While the Priest would be able to become an Archbishop at his strongest point, that was not what it wanted.

After all, if it were to settle for an Archbishop, it already had its previous owner, who was not a future Archbishop, but was, in all his right, a real local Archbishop to be feared.

The Priest's fate was easy to predict, and easy to guide, but it was also for those very reasons that the treasure determined that it was not enough.

In contrast, the human's fate was anything but predictable.

Starting with the fact that he was in this world, adding that he had been tainted by chaos but survived, continuing with possessing such a will that he was able to fight even until his last breath.

And finally, possessing a secret inside him that not even the treasure was able to decipher.

Any one of these reasons was enough proof to believe that this young man's destiny was anything but simple, fulfilling the requirement of unpredictability that the treasure sought.

While this was enough for the treasure to choose him, the treasure could not deny that deep down, it had already chosen who it would save when instead of dying quietly like the Priest, the young man made sure to take his enemy with him.

This might seem petty to some, but to the treasure, it was something that reminded it of beings that long ago vanished into the river of time.

Swoosh

With a pleasant feeling inside, the treasure then began to give off a strong reddish aura.

----------

As time passed, various changes took place in the bodies of the young man and the Scarlet Priest.

Although they had started out as nothing more than gradual changes, thanks to the time that had passed, these changes were now visible to the naked eye.

The Scarlet Priest's body, which had once featured healthy and powerful muscles, was now much leaner than before.

This wasn't quite to the point where it was just bones and skin, but with the current rate this was going, it was only a matter of time before it happened.

On the other hand, the young man was in much better shape than before.

Starting with all the cuts and bruises on his body, these had completely disappeared, his now paler skin being almost intact.

His breathing had also become more stable, but there was one thing that undoubtedly seemed to be the most important and still didn't seem to have healed completely.

In the center of his chest, the hole that the Scarlet Priest had made in him was still present, although it was no longer the same as before.

While it hadn't been completely healed, the treasure had worked on this as well, mainly fixing as much of this part as it could.

Before, the hole had uneven and bloody edges, but thanks to the treasure, it was now more of a circle than anything else.

Now, this really wasn't because the entity didn't want to fix this damage, but for the moment, it was the most it could do.

Despite the treasure's capabilities, Noah's body was still human, meaning that there were limits to how much his body could be altered without consequences.

To make matters worse, after focusing entirely on the young man, the treasure also discovered something else about the wound, and that was that this was not a normal wound.

While this was unexpected, it resolved some doubts the treasure had.

Doubts such as why the chaos in the young man's body receded so quickly, completely ignoring the life of the body it had occupied.

Initially the treasure had thought that this was due to the fact that the body of the human had sustained damage beyond what was possible to recover, thus the chaos deciding that it would be better to retreat.

However, the reason was not that, but in reality, it was that the Scarlet Priest's attack contained something special.

'Soul use... permanent damage...'

Just as the treasure had said, it turns out that the Scarlet Priest, in order to finish Noah off, what he had done, perhaps to definitively eliminate an opponent who did not seem to fall, or perhaps unconsciously, was to make use of his soul.

This was incredibly rare, so much so that even the treasure, as old as it was, had only seen something similar a handful of times.

'Truly... good potential.'

Soul use was something that was only available to certain entities that it was best not to have contact with due to the high risk involved, being considered an enviable talent even in the upper ranks of the mirror world.

As for what was the effect that the use of the soul had, it was simple, it granted the user an incredible destructive capacity, in its highest degree being able to greatly damage not only Archbishop level entities, but even greater forces such as chaos, which normally were almost truly invulnerable.

Fortunately for the young man, the Scarlet Priest only used an extremely small fraction of this power, and to a very low degree, only causing the chaos within him to retreat.

Otherwise, this definitely wouldn't have ended up with just a hole in his torso, but with his entire upper body being destroyed.

'How troublesome.'

Analyzing the wound, the treasure couldn't help but voice its true thoughts.

If the damage had only been physical, then it could have dealt with it with its Blood Connection technique as best it could, but now that it knew the use of soul was involved, things were going to be much more difficult.

----------

A couple of hours had passed and again, the scene on the second floor of the house had changed.

Before the most striking thing one could see was the bizarre little bridge of flesh coming from the treasury connecting both Noah and the Scarlet Priest.

Now, although the two were still connected, the way this happened was completely different and visible.

Coming out of the Scarlet Priest, small red threads that were nothing more than streams of blood were in motion, all concentrated in the hole in the center of Noah's chest.

Each of these red threads, when they made contact with the hole, plugged it as if they were thread pulled by an invisible needle, creating a kind of bloody tissue inside the hole.

It was a process that seemed and was complicated, only being possible thanks to the fact that the one who was performing it was none other than the treasure.

The reason for this was because after much thought, the only way the treasure could think of to fix the damage left by the soul use, was to completely replace that part of Noah.

While its Blood Connection technique was able to fix Noah's physical damage such as cuts and bruises, the hole in his chest was a completely different matter.

Thanks to the soul use, that part of Noah was now missing, and it wasn't going to be able to be recovered by any means, as it had been unlinked from the body on a level beyond the physical.

Which meant that even if the young man obtained a miraculous healing or even had a monstrous regeneration factor, his body was simply not going to heal that part and would violently reject any healing that was applied.

This was the way the soul use worked, forcing the physical to follow rules that only the user could know, and in this case, it seemed that what the Scarlet Priest wanted was for Noah to be unable to recover from this attack.

This obstacle was difficult to overcome, but thanks mainly to the fact that the soul use had been weak, it was possible to cheat this effect.

While Noah's body was not going to fix that part and would not accept it being healed either, then the solution would be not to heal it, but to replace it in such a way that the body could not recognize it at all.

Replace it with a part that would perform the same functions but would not be recognized as healing, but something foreign to the flesh, bones and blood that Noah's body was composed of.

It might seem difficult and even impossible, but the treasure already had a perfect candidate for this.

Using its same Blood Connection technique, the treasure would take it upon itself to manufacture a perfect duplicate of everything Noah lacked using nothing but the Scarlet Priest's body.

While this would bring certain problems to the young man as the two were not even of the same race, there would also be benefits to consider, not to mention of course, that he could live on.

'Almost...done-'

CHACK!

At that moment, just when the treasure was about to finish its work, it felt as with an overwhelming speed, the blob of chaos inside Noah moved to occupy the young man's new part.

The treasure tried to take action, moving the blood threads to block the chaos, but it was too late.

In a matter of seconds, the part of Noah that had been made from the Scarlet Priest's body was completely filled with all the chaos inside the young man, turning the circle in the middle of his chest to a dark color.

'...'

Looking at the black circle on Noah's chest, the treasure was surprised to say the least.

It did not expect that at the last moment, the chaos in the young man's body would do something like this, nor could it understand the point of it.

Normally chaos didn't care where it was as long as it was inside the infected, so moving to be specifically in this part was strange.

Investigating this was in order, but unfortunately for the treasure, it was sensing how little by little, it had been extending the limit of how long it could remain conscious.

Couple this with the fact that it had expended far more energy than it had in many years of being in possession of the giant in just a few hours, and it only made matters worse.

'Leave...Message.'

However, the treasure did not want to simply go to sleep, for if it did, the young man it had just saved would most likely be killed again.

It wasn't because he was facing another monster or anything like that, but because after having performed this complicated technique, there were certain precautions Noah had to follow.

Among them, the most important of all was that from now on, the young man had to keep the treasure close to him at all times, otherwise, the technique would lose power over time, leading to his wound opening up again.

Unfortunately, it would not be able to communicate directly with the young man to explain everything, so the treasure would have to resign itself to just leave a reminder.

---

About half an hour after the treasure fell asleep, the person who had been the main cause of this, Noah, woke up.

"...?"

The first thing he felt was confusion, for when he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was the corpse of the scarlet monster, now incredibly thin and dry, next to him.

For a moment, he didn't know exactly what had happened, as he felt as if he had slept the deepest sleep of his entire life.

Quickly, memories of everything that happened before he fell asleep assaulted him, or at least, most of them.

Immediately, Noah brought his hands to the center of his chest, but as soon as he finished doing that, an expression of confusion then appeared on his face.

"...Why am I touching my chest?" He wondered, not understanding why he had instinctively brought his hands to that spot.

Not worrying too much about it, Noah simply began to inspect the rest of his body, where the wounds that had led to his death were, the cuts on his sides and so on.

To his surprise, he found nothing but smooth skin, something that made him doubt for a moment whether he had dreamed everything that had happened.

However, remembering the pain and the sensation of life slipping away from him before, Noah was sure that he had indeed been attacked.

But more than that, there was something else that seemed strange to him, a feeling he couldn't shake.

"...Shouldn't I be dead?"