"So this is what Replace means."
Ren looked at his hand.
No. Gregory's hand. Or rather, the hand Gregory had been wearing for the last several hours, borrowed from an old alchemist Gregory had never once suspected. His hand, now, technically, but the distinction felt worth holding onto for at least another few seconds.
He turned it over, watching the light catch the knuckles.
It's like taking over a save file.
He had almost all of it. Gregory's memories sat in him whole, thirty years of guild politics and battlefield decisions and a daughter's face at three different ages, all of it accessible the moment he reached for it. Except for one corner. Anything touching the Goddess arrived shrouded, blurred at the edges, a word stared at too long until it stops meaning anything.
Makes sense, I guess. She's a god. And apparently a god who can mint Legendary-rank hunters on a Tuesday.
He tilted his head.
Hang on. Does that make me a god too? I make Legendary-rank hunters constantly.
System notification.
Cough. Cough. Arrogant twat. Cough.
Ren stared at the notification window for a long moment, saying nothing.
"Rude," he said finally, to nobody. "I have receipts. I have made several extremely powerful individuals. Ask any of them."
The notification did not respond.
"...Anyway."
He shook it off, rolling his shoulder, and reached inward toward the shape of Gregory's power, curious what it actually felt like from the inside rather than watching it land on him from across a battlefield.
Not mana. Holy power, warm and structured, running through channels his body had never used before tonight.
He tried the invocation.
It answered.
I can cast a Fated Declaration.
"Fuck," he said, delighted, "this is so overpowered."
He smiled, the specific smile of a man already planning what to do with a new toy.
That bastard Malvick won't know what hit him.
Actually, he thought, testing the shape of the vow more carefully now, what else did I get.
He ran through it. Causality reading, the kind that had let Gregory track a fight fourteen moves ahead. A staff invocation he didn't fully understand yet, tangled up with the corrupted section where the Goddess used to be. A vague, uncomfortable sense of thirty years of guild administration, which he decided immediately he would never touch again.
I don't need to know how to file quarterly reports. Absolutely not.
"Ahem."
Ren paused.
"Ahem. Father. Can you." A muffled cough, distant, like the voice was speaking through several layers of something dense. "Let me out now."
The sound was coming from inside his own skull.
Ren blinked.
"Wait." He tapped two fingers against his temple, listening. "Is that you?"
"Yes, Father. It is this old man."
"Huh." He kept tapping, like the gesture would somehow make the voice clearer. "You've been in there this whole time?"
"The entire time, Father."
"That's mildly unsettling."
"This old man agrees it is unusual. Though he would appreciate discussing it after being let out."
"Ah. Sorry. Forgot."
He reached up, produced a scalpel out of nowhere, familiar and automatic, and opened his own head along a seam only he could see.
Inside sat a second brain, gold and faintly pulsing, nested where a brain shouldn't have room to nest twice.
He pulled it out and dropped it on the ground.
The skull sealed itself over immediately, the body beneath it rearranging in a wet, efficient collapse and rebuild, and where Ren had been standing, Forceps stood instead.
Naked.
Ren looked down, took in exactly as much as he needed to, and looked away just as fast.
"Wear this." He tossed a robe at him without further comment.
"Hahaha. Thank you, Father." Forceps pulled it on, tying it at the waist with unhurried competence, the sequence familiar in his hands.
"I didn't think that was going to work," Ren said. "How did you even manage it? Being possessed and staying yourself. Simultaneously."
"Well, Father." Forceps smiled, gold skull catching the light. "This old man has experimented on human bodies for a long time, you know."
"You've mentioned."
"And the most fascinating thing this old man discovered is that the human soul is stored in the brain."
Ren's eyes went wide.
"That." He turned it over once. "That kind of makes sense, actually."
"Doesn't it." Forceps looked pleased with himself, delighted that someone had finally asked him about his hobby after years of nobody bothering to. "It explains why a person becomes simple when their brain is damaged. It isn't just the body failing. It's the soul itself, injured. And mental illness carries physical symptoms for the same reason. It's a disease of the soul as much as the mind."
"That's a very clean theory."
"Thank you, Father."
"I didn't say it was correct."
"You did not." Forceps seemed entirely unbothered by this. "But it is clean."
He held up one finger.
"Our consciousness lives in the brain. The brain is also where the soul is stored." He shrugged, palms open. "The two facts were sitting right next to each other. This old man only had to notice."
Ren's smile crept in slowly.
"So if I swapped a brain from one person into another."
"Yes."
"Would it be the same as stealing their soul?"
Forceps's eyes lit up.
"That's it exactly, Father. How did you land on it so quickly?" He clapped his hands together once, delighted. "In theory, yes. We would need to experiment to confirm it, of course. Theory is only theory until someone opens a skull and checks."
"We're doing that at some point. You understand that."
"This old man was hoping you would say that."
"Of course you were."
"May this old man ask a question first, Father?"
"Go on."
"What would you use it for? A stolen soul, permanently housed in a stranger's skull." Forceps tilted his head, genuinely curious rather than cautious. "This old man asks purely for research purposes."
"I haven't thought that far."
"You will."
"Probably," Ren admitted. "But not tonight."
"So we're clear," Ren said. "You've had a backup brain sitting in your skull this entire time. Just in case."
"Just in case, Father. This old man believes in preparation."
"You built a spare soul-container before you knew you'd need one."
"This old man builds many things before he knows he'll need them. It has served him well so far."
"That's either the smartest or the most alarming thing I've heard all night, and I have had an extremely eventful night."
"This old man will accept either interpretation."
"But that's enough talking about theory." He gestured at himself, at the robe, at the fact of his own continued existence. "This old man avoided the possession by building a second brain inside his skull ahead of time and storing his soul in it. That's how he survived."
He delivered it casually, like a man mentioning he'd remembered to bring an umbrella.