Julius was tired. He had been spending countless hours frantically trying to hold his soul together while simultaneously patching it up. To be honest, he was worried he was doing a poor job of reconstruction and doing more harm than good.

  He grimaced when he saw the large, ugly patches where he had failed to completely knit the broken sections of his soul together. It was like he was trying to make a quilt with a bunch of mismatching pieces, but without proper hands to help him.

  It was very ugly work, nothing like he had planned in his head.

  Drasil was very helpful. If not for the little guy, Julius would not have been able to concentrate so much on the reconstruction of his soul. Still, it was a slow grind, and every inch of progress came at a price.

  He was pretty good with pain, but it was starting to become a little too much. It was reaching excruciating levels to the point that he was getting a little delirious. Seraphyne was talking to him, trying to help keep his mind distracted from the pain. It was only helping a little, but at this point, every bit counted.

  He experienced another wave of pain, and for the briefest of moments, he felt his hold over his soul slip. It wasn’t for long, but unfortunately, his damaged soul didn’t care about that, and he cursed loudly when he felt the portion of his soul that he was working on fall apart.

  Even worse, this created a cascading effect, and the other parts of his soul he had already fixed were falling apart as well. The patchwork he had worked so hard on began to crumble, and he was left with another huge mess.

  He threw a blast of aura out into the void, mostly out of frustration and anger. Weirdly enough, it reminded him of the time he had assembled a cabinet from IKEA without any instructions. That had been a truly arduous experience.

  He forced himself to take several long and deep breaths despite not needing to breathe in this space. He also did his best to ignore his own thoughts. They were whispering to him that he should just give up. To simply concede to the pain and the futility of it all. There wasn’t even any proof that what he was using was the right method. He was mainly just floundering in the dark, hoping that anything he did would help.

  However, he subconsciously started to channel his Concept of Will. Drawing on its power to fuel his own resolve and stubbornness. He wouldn’t give up. If it was a waste of time and effort, then he could simply complain about it in the afterlife. For the moment, he needed to buckle in and get to work.

  ***

  That was only the first of his many irritating failures. Admittedly, some were his fault, but most of them were just a combination of his bad luck and circumstances. The only thing that kept him going was the fact that he was making headway. His soul looked better than it had when he started.

  But he quickly realized a massive problem. Drasil wasn’t going to be able to keep up this pace. In fact, Julius was already astonished that Drasil was still going strong despite having used so much of his life essence.

  It was one of the few times when Julius was actually glad for Drasil’s gluttony. The little guy had quite a store of life essence.

  Upon realizing this, Julius quickly decided to take a break. He didn’t know if Drasil needed time to recover his life essence or if he needed Julius to infuse life mana into him to refill his depleting stores.

  The other issue was his own life mana. His healing skill didn’t really require all that much to keep him stable. But healing his soul required much more. It wasn’t like he wasn’t regenerating any mana whatsoever, but his damaged soul clearly had an impact on the regeneration rate.

  He was floating in the void as he waited for his mana to regenerate. It was a snail’s pace compared to his usual speed. He did some quick estimating and let out a dejected sigh when he realized how much more time he would need based on his current progress.

  It was looking bleaker and bleaker the more he tried.

  He was trying to motivate himself to keep on going when he felt a sudden disturbance in his soul. He was expecting the worst and had already exhausted his willpower in the framework he had built around his broken soul. He couldn’t afford anything happening to what he had already worked on. That would be devastating.

  However, to his bafflement and shock, he felt a presence appear in his soul. It was a familiar presence as well. Not Cain or Freya, he would have recognized their auras immediately, but this one felt vaguely familiar.

  His main question was how this presence even managed to get inside his soul in the first place. He didn’t think it was possible for someone to enter such a personal place. Was his soul in such a dire state that anyone could just walk in uninvited?

  “Who’s there?” Julius asked loudly in the direction where he sensed this presence.

  He heard a light chuckle echo throughout his soul space. “Ah, it’s quite impressive that you managed to sense me at all,” the voice said with an amused laugh.

  Julius frowned because he recognized that voice. It was a voice that he hadn’t heard in a while, and it was certainly not the first person Julius expected to hear from. His shoulders sagged, and he turned away with a disappointed sigh.

  “Hey! What kind of reaction is that?” Doren said in an offended tone, appearing before Julius as if materializing from someone’s soul were an everyday occurrence. Which, to be fair, for someone of Doren’s supposed skill, was likely nothing too spectacular. However, it was important to note that Julius noticed the man looked far more tangible than his own form.

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  “Did Cain and Freya call you?” Julius asked as he kicked an imaginary pebble.

  “Yeah. They were worried about the injuries you sustained and asked if I could help,” Doren said with a nod.

  “So Freya wasn’t able to heal me on her own?”

  Doren shook his head. “She probably could have healed you all on her own. In fact, her mastery of the healing arts is better than mine. I merely have more knowledge in unique situations like this, and she wasn’t confident that she could heal you without damaging your identity or your foundation, which are both very understandable concerns.”

  “And what did you ask of them?” Julius asked the powerful man.

  He knew that he should be more grateful for Doren’s help at all. After all, he knew better than anyone how bad the current state of his soul was. However, he had talked to Cain and Freya about Doren several times. During those conversations, they made it well known that if Doren were to ever make a deal with Julius again, he should be wary of the consequences. The man didn’t make deals that didn’t help his own goals.

  “You too? Why does everything think I have a hidden agenda?”

  “...”

  Julius didn’t respond right away and looked at Doren with a probing look.

  Doren glanced off into the distance before looking at Julius’s blank face once again. “Okay, fine. I might have something I want from your masters. Which, by the way, congratulations. I knew that Cain would be a good fit for you to learn the intricacies of kinetic energy, but I didn't think that they would take to you so well. They both seem very attached to you.”

  “What did you ask of them?” He asked curiously.

  “That’s between them and me,” Doren said with a grin.

  Julius sighed. “Well, thank you for coming, regardless of your intentions,” he said with a genuine nod of gratitude despite knowing the man was going to retrieve some kind of payment from Cain and Freya. Julius couldn’t help but feel bad about burdening the two of them due to his own weakness.

  If he had sensed Casey beforehand and not been so distracted, he could have avoided all of this.

  “No worries, I suspected that something like this would have happened eventually,” Doren said with a cheery tone.

  Julius narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean by that?”

  Doren looked at him like he was surprised by Julius’s confusion. “Come on. You didn’t think something like this would happen to you?”

  Julius firmly pressed his lips together but didn’t answer.

  “I mean, you have that scary healing skill of yours. Any enemies who know about it will plan for that and find a way to work around that skill. Soul attacks and attacks that cause ‘permanent’ harm are often used to get around such skills.”

  “But they should not have known that I have a powerful healing skill. I made sure not to show it. Even the attackers didn’t seem to know that I didn’t have one when they ambushed me,” Julius pointed out. He hadn’t even been able to demonstrate his healing skill because it was busy holding his soul together.

  Doren looked at him with a disappointed huff. “You’re forgetting that almost everyone knows that you are connected to Freya. A healer of her renown could technically bring you back to life, given that you were only dead for a short time. They clearly didn’t want this and employed such measures against you. Which, I gotta admit, is quite the compliment considering you are still only Tier 3.”

  “Yeah, I appreciate their courtesy and respect,” Julius said sarcastically.

  “Well, you still survived, so the joke's on them. Thanks to your little healing skill and disturbingly strong willpower, you came out somewhat intact. Now, it’s time to help you put the pieces back together.”

  Doren pointed at his soul space. “I noticed that you have already begun the process yourself. It’s not a bad first attempt. You would probably only lose some of your memories and develop a number of personality disorders, but for the most part, it’s not horrible. I remember the first time I tried to stitch a soul together.”

  Doren shivered. “The soul managed to escape, and it eventually stole the body of some poor beast and turned into a monstrous chimera. Not one of my proudest moments, but I learned a lot from it, and my next attempts were much more fruitful.”

  Julius pointedly ignored Doren’s terrifying confession. He didn’t really want to know the story behind that one. Well... maybe a little bit. Perhaps when there was more time and his soul wasn’t on the verge of collapse. He also tried to ignore the other part, which basically said he did a shit job and that Doren was here to fix it.

  “What do I need to do?”

  “Eat this,” Doren said to him with a grin and handed him a small marble.

  Julius examined the marble. “What does it do?”

  “It is something of my own creation. It’s essentially a super-packed soul-healing potion that aids the soul's recovery. Don’t worry, it will work.”

  Julius continued to inspect it. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but I sense some very confusing energies coming from it.”

  Doren smiled proudly. “Ah, yes. There are several little enchantments I have placed on the shell of the marble. One of them is a time-aspected enchantment. Its purpose is to capture a snapshot of your soul's natural state without injury. Or how it looked a week ago. While it is not a perfect blueprint, it provides a very detailed diagram of what goes where. Think of it as making a sketch before creating a very detailed self-portrait.”

  “And there aren’t any side effects?” Julius asked, his expression fascinated, as he stared at the marble from every angle.

  Doren laughed loudly. “I wish.”

  Julius’s mesmerized expression faded quickly, and he stared at Doren with a questioning look.

  “What are they?”

  “Well… the item was created mostly as an advancement aid. Meant for creatures I wanted to see advance to Tier 4 or Tier 5, but had certain limitations due to their souls,” Doren admitted.

  “Have you ever used it on a human?” Julius asked the important question.

  “Technically, yes. I have used it on a human before,” Doren said with a nod.

  “How many humans?”

  “One.”

  “And how’d that go?”

  “...”

  “They died, didn’t they?” Julius asked with a sigh.

  “Yes, but they died a few days later from a totally unrelated issue,” Doren said with a guilty look.

  Julius didn’t say anything, but Drasil, who was sitting on Julius’s shoulder, threw a mass of mana that looked like a pebble straight at Doren, hitting the man straight on the head.

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