Sparing the boring detail, the Lord of the Shepherds of the Golden Horns showed off a certain mystique and majesty that was indisputable to the guests that were summoned to the island on such short notice. Specifically, Aaradhya appeared with such a divine radiance that it was unlike anything any of the guests had seen before. He wore glowing regalia made of pure Verdant and spiritual energy while a massive wheel floated inches from his back. He looked divine even though his control over the wheel and his clothes was superficial.
Of the things that he had to focus on, controlling the appearance of the wheel and vestments that he had created was the hardest thing that he had ever had to do bar none. He was so engrossed that he did absolutely nothing to contribute to the conversation as Masih Sr spoke on his behalf. The High Priest, in that moment, was the perfect mouthpiece as he interpreted his Lord's emotions like a champion conduit. What the conversation boiled down to was the guests asking questions about Aaradhya and Masih Sr responding with the most out of pocket religious mumbo jumbo possible to make his son seem divine. The boy's presence, at the end of the day, was the nail in the coffin that swayed the guest over to helping the Shepherds in some capacity.
The exact details were lost on Aaradhya since couldn't spare an ounce of focus to listen in on the translations that his father gave him through their connection that particular day. Thus, Aaradhya and his father joined the festivities that took hold of the guests.
The third day of the conclave was full of pure festivities that members of the Shepherds and the guests could partake in. There were streamers of red, black, and gold hung from every conceivable surface, children ran around with masks of black sheep with golden horns, while adults drank from golden chalices that were shaped like horns. There were many events all throughout the island with one of the games involving rings that would be tossed over bones and one of the activities being a reading that almost always ended with a blessing from the Lord Aaradhya being in the subject's near future. Some adults dressed up in costumes that looked like bloody rags to both honor and remember the deaths of sacrifices past. Other adults held little sideshows as they told stories that were attached to what they wore.
To give context, some members that donated a lot of money or food or offered a service to the Shepherds like legal counsel or medical consultation or whatever else they could provide, were gifted with and wore the clothing and jewelry of the honored dead. These people, who wore momento moris of the cult's victims, told stories of how they acquired their gifts while those that were dressed in bloody costumes sang and danced in troupes all over the island. Other than that morbid reality, the food was on point and the atmosphere was lively despite the attack that left some of the island's forest burnt down, buildings destroyed, and some followers dead.
Aaradhya, the Lord of the Shepherds himself, was not allowed to go anywhere without an escort of at least eight to ten honor guards or soldiers which meant that he did not leave his room at all for the third day. He did not complain and instead used the time to delve into the information that was given to him by Big G about the four heroes of the Gods. Specifically, he focused on the details that contained information about Wilfred and what he got up to as a hero. He also looked into what Death prepared about the Shepherds. The last thing that he did on the third day of the Conclave was search the system messages that he had ignored or rather, skimmed the moment that he woke up.
What he found left his stomach churning and his mind racing as he thought about how to stop the Shepherds from continuing with the rituals that were essentially a habit. How could he break the habit of an entire religion? He didn't know but for his own peace of mind, he vowed to try.
What he learned was that on the first day of every month, the Shepherds would kill one or many people depending on some inane and randomly chosen number by the Grand Elders.
When he brought up the timing and acquisition of souls to his father, Masih Sr told him that depending on how much money the Shepherds needed to turn a profit, the Grand Elders would choose to kill more people. The reason being that the most important items of the sacrifice would be auctioned to the elders of the faith after every ritual killing. The items never went for less than a few tens of thousands thanks to the wealthier members of the faith, where most of the trophies went.
In the week after learning that information, Aaradhya counted down the days to the first of the next month. Just because he was wary of the day that he would be forced to watch his father kill someone, he did not stop his curiosity and drive to better himself, especially since he had a guide to getting stronger. Thus, after some deliberation, he ordered his followers to collect and bring different things to him. It was odd at first since they didn't know why their Lord needed these things but Mrs. Lagrange whipped the staff into shape, reminding them that there was no need to question their lord in his infinite wisdom. As such, pesticides and poisons were brought to him along with an ant farm.
The goal was simple as Aaradhya thought, kill some creatures in a way that required the least mutilation and use the capture perk to collect souls. He didn't know if poison would work but he hoped it would. The moment he tried, he heaved a sigh of relief upon getting a NOTICE message when a few ants curled up due to the pesticide that he personally sprayed. The next phase was simple, increasing his menagerie and his control over them. He called to have at least two of every animal or insect on the island to be brought to him. He managed to collect the souls or at least the echoes or spiritual forms of a few critters. That was the first great experiment in accessing the powers that Wilfred had to learn on his own. His capture perk collected and stored the souls, echoes, or spiritual forms, of the creatures that he had killed within his sanctuary. He didn't end it there as he had all of the poisoned corpses frozen or placed aside for later use, even the small bodies of the ants that he had killed were kept in a glass tupperware.
There was a problem that he found after he had collected a few dozen souls and tried to wrangle them. The insects that could fly would often leave the radius of his blessing, or at least they could leave the area that he could see and flew beyond his grasp. The crawling critters did the same and went away the moment that their souls were extracted from their mortal coils due to some poison but they at least couldn't just leave the confines of his quarters.
Which brought him to his problem. There was a limited range to his blessing that
'That explains why the lost soul that was apparently attached to me was falling apart. I couldn't protect it with my blessing when it was far from me. It makes sense why It tried to stick close to me after it broke apart and began to look like an undead monster, it would deteriorate at a slower or even negligible pace near me. It possibly even rejuvenated itself at a rate that was not visible to the naked eye while it was within the reach of my Blessing. There is also some sense in why it supplemented itself on those the people that awakened their power,' he thought about the random lost soul that was with him throughout his stay on the island. It may have looked a certain way but it was most definitely female. He realized far too late that that soul may have belonged to his mother or another woman that was killed whilst he was under the effects of
All he knew was that the Shepherds killed people on the days that his basic soul counter went up. The souls that were connected to him according to his blessing could be human but they could very well just be bugs and insects that he accidentally killed while he wasn't paying attention. Then there was the matter of connecting to those souls. If they were humans, that meant that they were busy supplementing their souls in some distant location because he hadn't seen any human lost souls other than the one that followed him. If they were insects, then he should have seen them skittering or flying around his body by now since they would disintegrate in the Verdant after a day or two without his protection according to the record that he kept over the past week or so.
Some days later he sat in his room with spiritual energy threads hanging low all over his body. A few blue beetles of different looks, ants, and mosquitoes surrounded his body. A few blue mice ran circles around his bed. A dozen butterflies and moths landed in his hair and waited there before they fluttered off after he moved his head. Out of the dozens of animals that he had poisoned over the last week or so, only these remained connected to the threads that came off of his body. He had already watched several dozen animals, bugs, and insects get swallowed by the Verdant after they got more than ten meters away from him. A day later, like clockwork, his simple soul counter would always drop back down.
The mice, for instance, were slightly yellow and had cracks all over their bodies as they periodically left the unspoken radius of his sanctuary and returned after being torn to shreds by the Verdant. It seemed to him that critters of a certain level of sentience were smart enough to avoid the Verdant when it did constant damage to their spirit bodies. The bugs and insects, unfortunately, were either not smart or strong enough to make the journey back to him after they left.
The real discovery or rather, the next breakthrough in deciphering the powers of Wilfred, occurred around a week later, a few days before the first of the next month. He had been trying to accomplish this one since the very first day of his practice but it was only after this day that he managed it. Aaradhya knew, thanks to the information that Big G gave about the original story, that depending on the simple soul within his Sanctuary, he could control a corpse. It was why he opted for poison and kept the remains.
For example, if a person died, he could use the soul of a human that was within his simple soul storage to control the body. The caveat was that the damage done to the body would not be repaired so if someone was squished to death so that not even their bones remained intact, there was no way for a soul to control that body. The same went for all of the insect, bug, and rodent souls that Aaradhya collected. The worm that he had yet to name, could control the remains of worms that had died out for any number of reasons. The same went for his other simple souls that he had collected.
His collected souls could be used to control the corpses of creatures that they hadn't been when they were alive as we;;. Using the worm again, he implanted it into the body of one of the mice that he had poisoned and found that it tried to wiggle around without using its limbs. He tried implanting the rodent into an ant's body but it scurried away on four legs and revealed a problem with his blessing. The soul of the rodent was immediately ejected from the ant's body the moment that it passed the ten meter mark of what he could see. The mouse suffered some damage in the Verdant and came back to Aaradhya with a squeak.
There was a definite cap of how far he could control a creature, or rather, there was a limit to how far the Sanctuary part of his blessing operated. Using the boiling pot and egg analogy, the size of his pot was around 10 meters while he could create spiritual constructs, or eggs, anywhere within that space but anything beyond that would destabilize and fade.
The third discovery was less interesting but it was nonetheless still a good one. It revolved around the tether that the father and son duo possessed. Masih Sr could see and interact with all of the souls that were in Aaradhya's sanctuary as long as they were within the set range of his son and himself. For example, anything further than ten meters of himself or of his son and the souls looked like frightening shadows.
A few days later, the ritual came. To make long matters short, Aaradhya closed off his connection to his father and kept his eyes closed so that he would not interact with what was going on at all. He couldn't understand the elders so he likened the entire ordeal to listening to a foreign horror film. He did know, based on the notification that came, that the souls of three people entered his control since a force designated as his following killed in his name.
After the ritual, after Mrs. Lagrange carried him back from the horrid scene, he dove into his work that had been interrupted. Now armed with three human souls, Aaradhya proceeded to a test that he was waiting to do. As a result, he learned that souls lost their egos and were thus, the exact same as the critters that he collected. They behaved based on their habits in life.
'I understand why even human souls are called Basic,' he couldn't stop the human souls when they foolishly pioneered their way through the Verdant and stood around him like mindless objects. Their faith in life powered their drive to stay beside their lord in death. Once they found their way to him after the ritual had ended, he placed a hand on each of them.
'I am your master, you listen to me. Now stay here and don't go into the fog. It hurts you,' Aaradhya sighed and advised the human souls but it was absolutely useless as their freedom and curiosity overpowered their faith. From time to time, each of the human souls would leave the radius of his blessing and endure the corrosion that the Verdant had on spiritual bodies that were not tied to bodies or his Sanctuary. Even the small critters were not as curious as the human souls as they crawled, skittered, and floated either on or around him.
He had no way to keep these souls from leaving his protection so weeks passed by as the souls of the humans slowly decayed and warped. Within a few weeks, the human souls, which had looked like relatively healthy individuals, bore similar appearances to the one lost soul that had been attached to him by the hip. They each looked like gaunt specters with no eyes and wiry hair. Their spiritual flame turned red while glowing yellow and orange wounds appeared all over their bodies. He could only hope that one day, they would learn to stay beside him like the one lost soul that remained near him.
'Where is that lost soul? I haven't seen it, her, since it ran away in the caves,' Aaradhya thought about it for a bit one day but ultimately, it wasn't a pressing matter like furthering his control over the creatures within and improving the scale of his Sanctuary.
Wilfred was a smart character in the book, but he was not smart enough to realize what William did about their Soul Sanctuary. To put matters simply, his control over the souls within his sanctuary improved the more that he knew about the physical forms that they came from.
For example, to control the souls that he collected, he needed to use soul tethers or the spiritual strings that the worm had been capable of drawing out of him. He could use those strings to connect to the soul that he implanted in a corpse. Meaning, he needed to know more about puppeteering and good ol' biology so he knew what parts of the body to connect his threads to..
After coming to that conclusion and speaking with his father about a solution, Aaradhya learned something about Masih Sr that was not described in Death's notes. It was something that probably should have been mentioned even in a footnote. Apparently Masih Sr, when he donned a disguise that he had been cultivating since childhood, was a world renown surgeon and biologist.
A little side tangent but entirely relevant, Aaradhya's mother was the daughter of a medical dynasty of healers and doctors that stretched back to the founding of medicine. Masih Sr met and fell in love with her during his residency at a hospital that the Shepherds owned. Tangent over, it was just something that he had learned while speaking with his father through their tethering.
Within the first two weeks of making this discovery and having nothing else to do on the island other than study and be worshipped, Aaradhya decided that he should first learn the anatomical structure of the human body until he knew it like the back of his hand. Therefore, his father set aside some time to teach his son some basic science.
The fifth discovery over this time period was something that made Aaradhya a bit annoyed since he was expecting to just start it without issue. The mountain breathing technique that he had given to his father was fully deciphered within the fourth month of his new life but it wasn't a joyous day when it occurred. Instead, he was left speechless when it turned out that he needed to get something from the store to make his practice viable. Well, not viable. It was more like learning that you could create fire with a flick of your wrist but instead of a flamethrower like you were expecting, you find out that the flame is just the size of a candle wick. He was happy that it would help him breathe better and control his senses but he wanted more.
At the five and half month mark since his birth, he managed to fully adjust his breathing and throat muscles to accommodate the quick and deep breaths that he would be able to take once he started practicing the Mountain Breathing method that was described within the chicken scratch. It was all so that he could attract and control the Verdant in his surroundings just that slightly better..