Trial of Shadows

Throughout his year of studying Damien had also been practicing using his soul itself. His soul which slots souls and unslots souls to himself. As of right now he had six slots to start with. Double that of a normal person as a grown adult. The only difference being is he didn't have to keep the souls he chose at first. He had no integration. With them.

What he could do instead of integrate was resonate the souls depending on their archetype. So if a soul was inherently used for fire he could resonate other fire type souls with it causing a drastic increase in power with less use of essence. The results for a baby weren't so spectacular as far as he was concerned, but he knew that as he strengthened his soul he could very well be the epitome of calamity.

Tepmin had a few souls he had locked away since he had not integrated his soul to capacity yet. He like everyone in his orphanage had at least 6-10 pockets for integration. How he kept snatching up kids with this sort of power only he knew. Tepmin was right below a Zodiac with eleven pockets for integration. He currently had only five integrations leaving him with six empty pockets, he had four souls lying around.

He allowed Damien to practice with these souls on the meantime as long as he could get them back. He also said if he ended up not needing them Damien could keep them. Since Damien could not access his mother soul as it seemed integrated somehow though not of natural integration, he had five slots to train with. His sister allowed him to move her soul around as well this way his training would go faster and he could get his first soul lock complete so as to start his first trial. After the trial he would have another way to train for his next soul lock.

According to his estimations he had to slot or unslot around a million times to unlock his first soul lock. This meant that from the moment he learned of what he had to do it would take him about a year if he constantly slotted and unslotted all five of his remaining soul pockets nonstop. It took him a minute to slot or unslot one soul so five would take him five minutes. This would leave him sixteen seconds of rest in between each mass slotting and unslotting. Every day he would have six minutes and twenty four seconds of unslotting moments in a twenty four hour period. So in his whole year of studying, training, and slotting/unslotting Damien only spent one day and fourteen hours not training his soul for his first soul lock.

Damien slotted while studying, eating, pottying, and everything in between. He was dedicated to getting his first lock at years end. He was constantly exhausted, but he knew he had to do all of this. He knew he would eventually need to protect himself from danger and the best way to do that was to grow. This was growth in knowledge, growth in training, and growth in the overall strength of his soul. Since his training was highly limited to just his mind in that first year he wholly lost himself to growing his souls strength.

But finally the year was up and he slotted the four borrowed souls and his sister's soul back to his one last time. His soul glowed lighting up and a door appeared on it. A key sat in the lock of the door and etched above the door in bold letter read (Trial Of Shadows). Damien sighed in relief "I've finally done it." At 1 years old Damien became the youngest living being to access his first soul lock.

After a year of almost no real rest Damien called for a break. He shut his mind down completely and slept for real. No combat training under his sister's supervision. No studying under Tepmin, no distractions of any sort. He fell into that sweet abyss of the darkness. He even chose to ignore the dream he knew was coming and had been excited for. That could wait for another day, for now he just needed the rest.