Hermes felt invigorated.
A thrum started from his chest — not painful, just present, the way you feel sound more than hear it when standing too close to a speaker at a concert. His whole being seemed to vibrate at a frequency he had no name for, as though something deep inside him had been waiting a very long time to be switched on and had finally received the signal.
The energy filled every part of him. His mind sharpened first, the familiar fog of exhaustion and anxiety dissolving as though it had never been there. Then his body followed.
It was not a gentle process.
It felt like a reactor powering up in the centre of his chest — waves of heat radiating outward, slow and inexorable, moving through muscle and bone and blood with the particular thoroughness of something that intended to leave nothing unchanged. His bones. His muscles. His organs. All of it rebuilt, refined, brought to a standard of physical perfection that the original body had never come close to achieving.
Then the heat cooled.
It was replaced by something cold and profoundly soothing, washing over him in a slow tide that moved upward through his body, through his chest, through his throat, into his skull and finally, gently, into his eyes.
His vision doubled.
He could still see the void — the endless black populated by its silver net of stars. But alongside it, overlaid and separate and entirely real, something else appeared.
A sea.
Silent. Calm. Stretching in every direction without horizon. Its surface illuminated by a sun that burned not gold or white but a deep insidious emerald green, casting its cold light across water that had no waves and made no sound.
His Sea of Soul.
It was a lonely thing. Of course it was. No memories orbited that emerald sun. No echoes. Just the sun itself, burning quietly in an empty sea, and the vast potential of all the space around it waiting to be filled.
It won't always be empty, he thought. Hopefully.
He pulled his attention back and took stock.
No kills. No memories. No echoes. His offensive capabilities amounted to a water spell and whatever his Aspect ability turned out to be once he had something to work with. He was going to be a fragile fighter by any reasonable measure.
But a versatile one. He was certain of that much. The moment he started experimenting with runic sorcery properly, with a real soul core and the expanded essence capacity that came with awakening — the possibilities opened up in ways that were genuinely difficult to overstate.
One problem at a time, he told himself. Worry about everything else after.
The Spell's voice pulled him back.
[Awakening Aspect Ability…]
Hermes straightened slightly. After this came the flaw. He tried not to think about the flaw.
Sunny couldn't lie, he reminded himself. Whatever it is, it can't be worse than that.
He wasn't entirely sure he believed that.
[Aspect Ability Acquired.]
[Aspect Ability Name: Spagyria.]
Ho.
He sat with that for a moment.
Then he summoned his status and skipped straight to the ability description.
—
Aspect: [Grand Alchemist]
Aspect Rank: Supreme
Aspect Abilities: [Spagyria]
Aspect Ability Description: [You may distill the essence of the slain into a draught. Drink it, and become them. You are the crucible.]
—
That is very broken.
He turned it over carefully in his mind. He was essentially a mimic — like the one Sunny had fought on the Chained Isles, but with considerably more complicated steps. His own blood as a catalyst. The blood or body parts of whatever he wanted to become. Monster or human, it didn't matter. Aspect, attributes, flaw, everything included. A complete temporary copy of another being bottled into a potion he could drink.
The question was whether it worked on others — whether he could make a potion for someone else using their blood as the catalyst instead of his own. If he could, the implications were genuinely difficult to contain in a single thought.
He filed that experiment away for later.
The Spell's voice resounded in the void.
[All power has a price.]
[You have received a Flaw.]
Hermes gulped.
[Your Flaw is: Foreign Soul.]
[Flaw Description: You are prey to things that have never tasted your kind. They are curious.]
Ah.
Fuck.
He stared at it.
Monsters would go out of their way to make him lunch. Not because he was weak — because he was interesting. Because he smelled different. Because whatever his soul was made of it was not native to this world and the things that hunted by soul sense would find that absolutely fascinating in the worst possible way.
If a soul type monster got to him he was done. No defensive memories. No echoes. Nothing between him and whatever decided to investigate the strange foreign thing it had never tasted before.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
There are memories that defend against soul attacks, said the rational part of his mind.
As if I'm going to pull one out of my ass, said the rest of him. Where would I even get one? You have to defeat a soul type monster first and even then it's not guaranteed. It's a gacha system. An actual gacha system. I've been shafted. Royally, completely shafted.
He thought about every gacha game he had ever played. Every ten pulls that had produced nothing. Every rate up that had lied to his face and laughed about it.
Fuck whoever invented gacha games, he thought with considerable feeling. Fuck you and your nineteen generations.
[Wake up, Demon of Arcana!]