Legacy of the soul

Well, I was right and it was BEAUTIFUL, so I quickly passed out from the shock of the pain... well, or more likely, I just died.

However, when I woke up I felt no pain, which was good... but after a while I also realised that something else was missing, and that was my body. However, the slightly glowing translucent thing that followed the human outline was not my body... it was rather my soul, and I was not happy about that.

I took a closer look around me, and an even closer look at myself, and I can draw the obvious conclusion that I am now a ghostly silhouette floating in a grey void.

- So it looks like I'm either dead or close to it, and maybe that's how people feel on the brink of life and death. - I murmured... and then a strange inscription appeared before my eyes:

≪System calibration in progress≫.

I was in the middle of the phase, and then I was in the middle of the phase, and the next thing I knew I was in the middle of the phase. When I looked around again, I noticed that there was a luminous cross in the centre of my chest, and all over my body-soul, strangely knotted and patterned strands of colour began to come out, and when they reached my head, I began to see a kaleidoscope of colours, and above it, another strange text.

This strange process went on for a long time, but then the light show was over and the text began to make sense and become familiar.

And then:

≪Calibration complete≫

≪You are welcomed into the adaptive system of spiritual development, 'ArkAnima', also known as 'The Ark of the Soul'. The creator of this system is your previous incarnation. More details in the introductory message.≫

Hello, future self. My name is Leon Astores and I am a Master of the Eastern European Mage Guild, which probably no longer exists, because when a decent chunk of a continent is ripped off a planet and teleported into the void with the accompanying explosion, the surrounding areas are not to be envied. And here I am, the only surviving human on this piece of continent, now floating in the darkness of space. To get out of here, I'm preparing to set sail for the only habitable world I've found, and if you're reading this, it means I've partially succeeded. But let's start at the beginning, just to clarify the situation.

In 1908 A.D. there was a meteorite about seven kilometres across, which vaporised almost completely in the atmosphere as it fell, but the debris fell on the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula. The fall of the meteorite caused a huge explosion and also awakened volcanoes in the southern part of the peninsula, making the entire peninsula not the most pleasant place to live. But apart from death and destruction, the meteorite also brought something else. The meteorite turned out to be mostly crystallised mana, which began to dissipate into the atmosphere as it fell.

After fifty years, when all the effects of the meteorite had subsided, and after two world wars, the mana began to show its effects on living organisms. Some animals and plants mutated, children were born with inexplicable abilities, and weak psychics and clairvoyants were no longer considered charlatans.

It was a turbulent time, the post-war period, so many people ended up at the table with the scientists. And the scientists had not eaten their bread in vain, they had found out that the fallen meteorite had provoked a very weak magical envelope in a large part of the population. However, as time passed and two or three generations passed, the influence of mana accumulated, resulting in a more visible effect of mana on the material world.

Most of the magic manifested in the form of spontaneous releases of mana in children with high mana reserves. Scientists have also found that while the magical background was densest near the epicentre of the meteorite impact, mana concentrations are slowly increasing throughout the rest of the planet.

Scientists and governments decided that if they couldn't stop the spread of magic and the emergence of mages, they should at least control it... or rather, they began to control the mages. Boarding schools were set up at the bases of the research institutes, where children with magical gifts and mana reserves were taken. The children were trained and used for further research into magic and mages.

As you can see, the training and research was very much in the military field, with the children being trained as living weapons for warfare. This lasted for about twenty years until a group of mages rebelled and staged a revolution, using suicide for those who did not agree with the freedom and independence of the mages. After a small war, the mages separated themselves from the direct influence of the government and founded the first Mage Guild, based in western Poland.

As time passed, the years from the fall of the Meteor began to count down. Magic became more familiar to people, mages themselves developed their mystical art, and two more guilds were opened in China and America. It also turned out that electronics didn't last very long in the hands of a strong mage, or in a place with a lot of mana, such as a place with a lot of mages. So very soon, a branch of magic called artefacting appeared - at first, mages tried to use it to replace their favourite and usual electronic gadgets.

In the eighty-eighth year of the Fall of the Meteor, I was born into the family of an artificer and a healer. I was named after my grandfather, a native of Italy - Leon. Because my parents had professions that required a relatively small amount of mana but good control, their son had an average amount of mana but only jewellery control. I trained at home with my parents and later in the guild, and by the age of forty I had become a master of two branches of magic - artefacting and healing.

Since no place is ever empty, and in a world with relatively new magic there were no patrons or gods, in the 130th year of the Fall of the Meteor five gods arrived on Earth: the God of Knowledge - Cion, the God of Wealth - Tiatjar, the Goddess of Love - Fuzuhi, and two young gods without a definite place of worship - Munlan and Mivor. These gods spread out across the planet, occupying specific territories. For example, Tiatjar lived mostly in North America, Fuzuhi in Southwest Asia, Munlan in South America, Mivor in Africa, and Zion in Europe.

For trained magicians not much has changed... so the gods appeared, so they perform miracles, that's no big deal, strong magicians can do that too. But for very weak and gifted people, who were very similar to ordinary people, the gods were gods. They worshipped them, prayed to them, built temples for them, especially the fanatics, even made sacrifices to them. The most active were young gods, who settled in areas with a population that was favourable to them. If wizards were born in the settlements in these areas, they could become respected shaman leaders of the local gods, or they could be burned at the stake as devil spawn by the local population. And when the young gods arrived in Africa and South America, they didn't waste any time, quickly establishing their order and starting to build religions with themselves at the top.

Now, the god Cion, who lived in our territory, was the most useful, because he shared some knowledge, not for free, of course, but for a reasonable price in mana.

Fourteen years had passed since the gods had appeared, during which time I had studied Soul Magic and Spatial Magic, as well as a few other areas. And like everything in the world, there is an opposite: Light has Darkness, Chaos has Order, so the Gods have Demons.

At first, the arrival of the demons went unnoticed. Devils and demons were the first to arrive on Earth, creating the undead to help them, and attacking the outlying villages. Except that we've had undead rise spontaneously in old graveyards, and sometimes just as spontaneously. So the attacks were dealt with quickly and not given much importance. But as it turned out, it was just reconnaissance, and the demons, huddled together, began to prepare for an invasion.

The groundwork for the invasion was laid in the still uninhabited south of the Iberian Peninsula, due to occasional volcanic eruptions. Five months later, they'd heard rumours of entire villages disappearing, and a few days after that, the demons opened a sustained breach in the Inferno, through which the tide of evil spirits began to surge. At the end of three days, the demons were stopped, but at the cost of the destruction of most of the cities of southwestern Europe and the deaths of civilians, soldiers and mages.

But the demon invasion did not end there. The war with the demons lasted over eighteen years, during which time the demons first built a stationary portal to Hell for a steady flow of reinforcements, and later began to invade less protected areas such as Africa, Oceania and South America. The local populations resisted, but quickly retreated, allowing the Demons to build three more weaker portals. From that point on, the demons became a problem for the entire world, not just Europe.

As time went on, the mages prepared themselves, and with the support and help of the gods, the humans began to fight back and even attack. So the Asian Guild, aided by the goddess Fuzuhi, destroyed the portal to Oceania. Emboldened, the humans attacked the demons even harder, thinking that the war might soon be over. Even the gods descended to Earth, for by helping the humans win, they showed their power and gained more admirers.

The Demon Lords, comparable to the gods, appeared during the Battle of South America and killed Fuzuhi by storming the portal. As a result of the battle, two Demon Lords were killed by the demons, and another one escaped, but promised to return. The portal is closed. As for the humans - many soldiers and mages were killed, including the archmage of our guild, a goddess was killed, and later we found out that Tiatjar had left Earth, refusing to fight anymore. Zion, the most powerful of the gods, was unperturbed by Tiatjar's flight, saying that he had expected nothing less from the merchant, and was surprised that he hadn't disappeared when the heat was on.

Zion used his knowledge of magic to cast spells that killed demons in droves, but he too fell at the hands of the demon prince with the five crowned horns and the red crystal in his forehead. Zion took the demon prince with him to the afterlife, along with another demon lord, before he died. This happened while closing a portal in Africa, the second largest demon portal on Earth.

Once again, we lost the Archmage and the God. After becoming a senior in the guild, I was offered the position of Archmage, but I declined, citing that it was wartime and I had mostly non-martial skills. So it was agreed that I would be an assistant and advisor to the new Archmage, a young talented mage who had recently become a Battle Master, but who had always stood out on the battlefield for his incredibly destructive spells of his own devising, and who was the best candidate for the position of Guild Leader in this time of war.

As the Archmage's assistant, I helped dismantle the aftermath of the battle in Africa, and I came across a few things. The first curious find was the upper half of the Demon Prince's skull, with the remaining three horns and a red crystal in the middle of his forehead. The second find was the upper half of Zion's spear with a blue crystal in the tip. And the third find was a pyramid made of an unknown metal with dark blue glowing veins. This pyramid was found at the site of the portal's destruction.

After the Demon Prince's death, the demons were silent for a year, giving us time to prepare for the final battle and me time to examine the objects we found. The red crystal turned out to be the Third Eye, which contained a great deal of demonic energy, which was also gradually being generated, with the excess being released to the outside. The blue crystal contained divine energy, and there was also some sort of magical structure woven into it, which I could only make out was there. The most interesting was the pyramid. Its peculiarity was its material, an alloy of various magical metals and an unknown additive, which must be the crystallised energy of space, giving the alloy the useful property of transmitting energy over great distances. Here's how the pyramid works: in brewing the alloy, the demons use magical metals that are good at conducting, storing and generating energy. Then they add 'Void Crystals' to the alloy... that's what I call the materialised energy of space. As the alloy cools, you have to keep pouring mana into it so that the energy in the metal is synchronised and the alloy has a single subspace to store the energy.

As a result of all this, if you divide the melted metal into one large piece and several smaller ones, and place the larger piece in a mana-saturated area where the mana will be absorbed by the alloy, or saturate it manually, you can draw energy over long distances through the shards. However, this energy turns out to be too unstable and heavy to control, and has a Void energy tint to it, which means it's ideal for powering stationary portals and other spatial magic, but almost impossible to use in other branches of magic.

As I studied these items, I noticed their effect on each other. The demonic crystal drew energy from the pyramid and began to grow. The divine crystal also absorbed energy from the pyramid and was used to power the magical structure, something I did not notice at first until I put all three items together. The energised blue crystal began to vaporise the red demon crystal, and an aura of strange energy was created. Later, a test of the effect of this aura on captured demons showed that this aura neutralised the magic of the demons, and the demons themselves felt very uncomfortable in this aura, some weak demons were even killed by it. Anyway, from these three findings I made an anti-demon amulet. From the metal of the pyramid I melted a cross, which I inlaid with demonic and divine crystals, connecting all the parts so that they constantly work to create an aura against demons. And now it was time for the final battle. On the side of the humans: two gods, practically all the mages on Earth, and many ordinary human warriors. And on the side of the demons: three demon lords, one of whom had already escaped death three times by fleeing the battlefield... well, and a bunch of other demons of varying claws and horns. The human army was divided into two parts: one to bind and destroy the demons, the other to close the portal. The gods, on the other hand, were to destroy the demon lords if possible. I was in the second group.

The battle was fought with varying degrees of success: first the humans overpowered the demons, then the demon lords came in and pushed the humans back, then the lords were taken over by the gods and the initiative went back to the humans. I broke through to the portal with the second group.

I teleported short distances while dodging, used my most destructive artefacts on the demons, healed wounds on myself and my mage companions. At the same time, the aura from the amulet cross protected me from demonic spells and weakened the demons beside me.

We were close to the portal when a huge explosion went off behind the first group, led by the Archmage, and aimed at the demons. The explosion instantly wiped out a quarter of the demon army. This was good on one hand, but on the other it was a last chance spell developed by the new Archmage, and as I was his assistant I was aware of his developments and even helped to refine it to reduce its lethality to the user. The spell was woven into the mage's aura and powered by vast amounts of mana, prana and emotion... the energy of the entire soul, transformed into a focused blast based on the element of destruction. Anything caught in the centre of the blast is destroyed... even the soul. But understandably, the price of this spell is the death of the mage... in the original version, in the refined version, the mage is completely stripped of his ability to conjure, and his life is reduced to five years, during which he can still attempt to recover.

Seeing the massive explosion created by the Archmage, many people understood what this meant, as such spells are not used against ordinary demons. Most likely, the Archmage saw that the gods were beginning to lose and decided to help with the most powerful spell in his arsenal. So our second group rushed up and burst through a portal into the citadel. Inside the building, there was a huge diamond with dark blue veins hanging from the ceiling, with four glowing blue crystals around it, pointing downwards, right at the archway with the active portal.

Just as we were about to destroy the portal, the Demon Lord flew into the hall and began to break through to the portal arch. The demon mages started to get in his way, but even though he was wounded, he quickly dispersed them. I was the only one left in its path.

The demon casts the same spell he used to clear the way for the other mages, and it fails because of the amulet. I wasted no time in setting up a spatial barrier as quickly as possible and began to power it as hard as I could, drawing energy from the amulet itself. When the demon broke through the barrier, I recognised it - it was the same demon lord that had participated in every portal battle, always surviving by running away while the other lords fought to the last.

And just as I thought the demon was about to break through the barrier, the ones he was running from appeared, the two gods, Munlan and Mivor. Both were ugly, one was missing his left arm and the other had a huge gash across his right eye. Despite this, both gods were burning with the desire to kill the demon.

The Demon Lord, on the other hand, unable to break through my barrier, realised his position and with a shout of "I'll take you with me!", first threw some sort of spell at the ceiling and then pounced on the gods. A few seconds later there was an explosion. I don't know how long I was out, but when I woke up outside in the night under a clear sky, the first thing I felt was a terrible pain. The pain was particularly bad in my chest and there was also a feeling of strength coming from my chest.

After dealing with the pain and healing, I began to look around. I was standing on a hill in the centre of a small circle, four metres in diameter, that had not been touched by the explosion. As I looked around I noticed the cause of the strange sensation in my chest, a bluish glowing cross fused into my flesh. When I touched it, I realised that I felt it as an integral part of my body.

A few days passed after I woke up, enough time for me to find out exactly what happened in the explosion.

Here's what happened. The demon lord cast a spell that destabilised the rhombus, causing the magical alloy to collapse and the subsequent explosion that killed both the demon and the gods. Particles of that magical alloy were still connected for a while, and managed to absorb the energy of the two gods and the demon, but failed to process it, so a large amount of the energy of the gods, the demon and the energy stored in the storage unit went through the energy link to the only surviving piece of that alloy, namely my amulet.

I held the barrier until the explosion to keep the demon out, and I held it until its last gasp. I was running out of mana, and I was drawing energy from wherever I could, and the energy was also flowing into me from the amulet. So during the explosion, I continued to hold the barrier and the energy in the amulet began to flow rapidly, well, I sent it to maintain and strengthen the barrier.

Later on I began to feel pain as a continuous colossal stream of energy flowed through me. The pain increased and was especially severe when the energy of the gods and demons poured into me. I couldn't stand the pain, so I began to treat myself, hoping to alleviate the pain while still holding the barrier.

I kept holding the barrier, treating myself incessantly, but the pain kept building up, but I kept going because if I let go of the barrier I would most likely die. When the energy flow dried up, I was in a state of madness, like in a trance, holding the barrier and treating myself until I passed out.

Now, when I checked myself, I found a change in energy; the aura had swollen, the energy was like that of a quarter demon, a quarter god, and half human mage... but my appearance had also changed to match the aura, horns on my head, blackened skin, black wings behind my back, and eyes shining with a heavenly glow.

My former amulet, now a fused cross on my chest, revealed ba-hion - the energy that makes a god a god and a demon an archidemon. And as I had only recently become a quarter god and a demon, I hadn't had time to have a ninth soul-shell to store the ba-hion in, so the energy was stored in a physical medium, a fused cross of demonic and divine crystals.

A few months later, having fully recovered and surveyed the area, I realised the reason why the sun did not rise. It was because there was no sun. I was in the void of space, on a small island about three thousand kilometres across. After exploring the island, I found no sentient beings, except for a few mutated animals known for their survivability. Anyway, I began to wonder how I got here and how I was going to get out.

After thoroughly exploring the area near the portal, I found an underground cavity of a vein of magical minerals, adjacent to the remains of a vein of magical ore capable of generating mana. I also found a huge cave, which most likely contained a huge meteorite fragment of crystallised mana that had recently been lying there.

Those four blue crystals near the Demon Portal were used as storage, storing energy for the stable operation of the spatial gates. These blue crystals were connected to underground veins of magical crystals and ore, and during the explosion they released enough spatial energy by feedback to convert the neutral energy stored in the veins all along into energy for spatial travel.

However, this island hasn't moved far, it's just fallen into a parallel reality... sort of. This means we can try to get back to Earth... hopefully it will work.

The problem with getting back was the distance, because as the magical scan showed, Earth does exist in this reality, but in terms of time, I'm in the distant past. So distant that the Milky Way galaxy had not yet passed through this place. From echoes in the infosphere and the astral, I have learned that all the closest parallel realities I can reach have the same time frame as this one. This means that I have been transported very far, both in space and in time... although I cannot complain, I am lucky to be alive, as such uncontrollable movements without parameters usually result in the scattering of the transported object throughout the space-time continuum.

Well, I'll just have to work with what I've got. After learning the approximate direction of the galaxy's movement from the echoes in the infield and the astral, I decided to go there myself. But I was unable to open portals that far away, so I had to use other means of travel.

I was relieved at the news of my possible return to my home planet, so I decided to make a plan for my return, or rather several plans. I could also see that I had a lot of time and energy, and a lot of time to think about what I would like to do if I could. More bad news, I began to notice that the amount of ba-hioni in the cross was slowly dwindling, so I decided to spend it and make myself a soul superstructure, similar to what the gods had given some of their apostles and priests. As I was a master of artefacts, healing, soul magic and spatial magic, and also had a little understanding in related directions, after I sat down in meditation to make myself a soul superstructure, it took me only seven years to finish, having spent all the ba-hyon and created the whole system of spiritual artefacts. I sewed the foundation of this system into the soul core.

The system had unlimited potential for development, as it took time to easily defeat opponents at the level of God Cion or Demon Prince. But I'm limited by time, there's no telling how long the light spatial barrier that holds the atmosphere of life on the island will last. I certainly haven't felt hungry in the last seven and a half years, but after catching and barbecuing a mutant beast, I realised how hungry I was, and I spent the day genociding mutants and devouring them. Eh, I wish I had another hunger to satisfy...

For another three years, I assembled a capsule ship to travel through dark space and hyperspace. I did everything I could to reach my destination safely: I gathered all the metal from the island, using some as material to build the ship, and some with heavy metals such as plutonium or uranium as fuel in the fission-matter engine. I used magic to create the ship's defences and a life-support system for myself.

I called my system of spiritual superstructures "ArkAnima" - "The Ark of the Soul". After all, it should help me to reach the goal in case of the death of the body, i.e. to return to earth in the form of a soul and to be reborn again and, if possible, to preserve my memory.

But even if so many years pass that even the protection does not help and my soul begins to decay, I have built the base of the system into the shell of the soul core. So the future me won't have to start a new life from scratch every time I die. For the sake of interest, I will place a year counter here to know exactly how much time has passed since the creation of the Soul Ark System: "5666 years".

And so, after another three weeks, the spatial barrier fell and the atmosphere on the island began to escape. I boarded my ship and took off at low altitude, activating a ritual that began to convert the island's matter into energy, powering the magic circle to open a hyperspace gate, which would only shorten the distance to my galaxy, as hyperspace is almost non-existent in Dark Space.

When enough energy was applied to the magic circle, a hole was created in space and the ship used the tracking system to find Earth and head for it. And I'm writing this message just in case, before I go into stasis.

Hopefully the future me will read this letter with nostalgia... well, which is not out of the question, the future me will remember nothing, and from this message will learn the origin story of the system and the story of my past incarnation.

≪ End of message≫