Blake had about two hours until Sunset Bell—and until he had to be ready for the tournament. Sure, the sun was already dipping below the horizon, but it was winter. Sunset Bell wasn’t always perfectly at sunset. It was about eight o-clock every day. That was more than enough time to run a few experiments with his soul.

  He gathered up all his equipment. He still had his injector from the Hunters’ Pavilion, which he carefully inserted into the membrane of the veiling organ. If Blake had to guess, it was some special organ that the Veiled Spider possessed, and as it became more fiend-like, the organ improved.

  So there was the problem that Blake encountered. If what the Path Paladins said was to be trusted, then fiends and the ‘true’ darkness wasn’t actually darkness or Vir energies or any of that—it was chaos.

  Fiends, seemingly, lacked a soul. They wanted to destroy, to return things to the void. Which, in theory, was the final goal of chaos. It was a void entirely out of balance. The notion that a void itself was evil was ridiculous. Hel, they pretty much needed voids to breathe, or at least the concept of a vacuum, to suck air into their lungs. Voids were necessary for life as much as existence was.

  And if you put existence and matter out of balance, that would absolutely be terrible for all life in the universe, too. Aes energies out of balance would be a bad thing.

  But all that to say, if he used this veiling organ and drew on its energies, would it destroy his soul? This was seemingly what turned the Veiled Spider into a fiend in the first place. It got infected with the Dark Surge and lost its soul?

  If he felt it destroying his soul, and if he and River couldn’t repair the damage done, then Blake had to stop. He wasn’t going to let himself become more of a Fiend.

  Sure, he had accepted long ago that being part-Fiend was necessary. It was who he was now, and he still had a soul to make choices about what he did—and that was what mattered. But that didn’t mean he could just accept that the Fiend part ruled him. That didn’t mean he got to let it win, to take the easy way out.

  Drawing back the plunger, he pulled out a glug of the liquid from within the membrane. It was dark gray and misty, like liquid smoke. Blake filled the syringe all the way, then tapped the side to let the bubbles drift to the top. He let them out with a flick of the plunger, then aimed the needle at the back of his neck.

  “What are the chances that it goes right after my soul?” he asked.

  Before, the fiendberries and other resources he’d used to reforge his body had been relatively effective at staying where he’d injected them. The same, in theory, would go for his soul.

  “I don’t know,” River replied.

  “I think they’re high,” Blake said. “It seems to be how this kind of thing works.” He cast her a grin filled with forced confidence—because what else could he do?—then injected a tiny wisp of the veiling organ liquid into his neck. It was a nudge of his finger, barely moving it a fingernail’s width.

  The liquid entered his body, but his internal sense failed to pick up on it. He couldn’t figure out where in his body it was.

  Until it touched his soul.

  He still couldn’t detect the liquid itself, but he identified its effect. Closing his eyes, he focused on the tiny sphere of misty energy at the top of his spine, the soul—where his senses had come from.

  It was difficult to identify the soul. He didn’t have much practice with finding it specifically, and he’d really only had a day to practice with his senses. But he saw enough to identify the veiling liquid corroding a layer on the surface of the soul.

  At first, he didn’t feel anything. If he hadn’t been focusing on the soul, he wouldn’t have known that anything was happening. But the longer it went, a slight haze crawled over his mind, followed by a deep sensation of emptiness, like something important had been taken from him, but without remembering what.

  It wasn’t too far gone, but that sensation, if left unchecked, could be more painful than anything else he’d ever felt before.

  But within a matter of seconds, the corrosion stopped. It only affected a tiny patch of his soul.

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  “Right, then,” he said to River. “Let’s see if you can heal that.”

  He triggered River’s echo ability, and a sense of cool, healing energy whispered through his body. There weren’t anymore wounds to fix, so instead, the energy simply circled around, looking for illnesses to purge.

  When it passed by his soul, it left a cool, trembling sensation, like it knew something was wrong, but it didn’t touch the surface of the soul. It just carried on right by, without caring. Some of the energy dispersed, and most of it would probably fade given time, but some of it did find different cells of other ailments it wanted to heal.

  Blake shut his eyes, then tried to guide the energy like it was his Honour. It responded to willpower, though not as readily as Honour did, and flowed up to his soul again on his command.

  For a few seconds, it resisted, but the healing energy couldn’t hold back against his willpower for long. It flowed into Blake’s soul, then willed it to repair. The corrosion on the surface of the soul disappeared, restoring it back to its original state. But just that one, surface-level healing was enough to use up what remained of River’s healing energy.

  If he reforged the entire soul, it would take weeks with what little energy River had available. Maybe even months.

  Blake grimaced. He didn’t want it to take that long, but if it had to…

  He turned to River and said, “How strong are you, now?” Then he paused for a moment. “Wait a second. I can just…”

  He extended his senses toward her, scanning her. It was hard, because he hadn’t had much time to practice and didn’t have a perfect frame of reference, but she seemed to be around the Tempering stages. It would make sense. When he’d first met her, she’d been quite weak, but she’d advanced soon after.

  “If you get stronger,” Blake said, “will that improve your echo skill?”

  Especially since Foundation was next, and the whole point was to improve your echo and your connection with it.

  “I think it would,” River chimed. “If Blake keeps feeding me, will that help?”

  “Perhaps,” he replied. “But I think we’ll need something stronger than regular food. Ethbin said something once about how monsters and spirit beasts advance differently than humans, so we can’t just reforge your body…”

  “Perhaps Blake should wait until the old man in the ring wakes up. Then he can give help.”

  Blake wanted to say he’d figure it out on his own, but he had no idea how. He could go talk with Dust Broom. That would probably help a little bit. Dust Broom seemed pretty knowledgeable.

  But the longer he waited, the longer it was going to be before he started advancing again.

  And there was a bigger problem: if the Foundation stages were supposed to be about your echo, then how did your soul and your spiritual senses relate to that? There was one last piece of the puzzle that Blake hadn’t put together yet.

  He told River, “I’ll keep working on it over the next few days. We’ll figure out how to make you stronger, then we’ll be able to reforge my soul faster. And Ethbin should wake up any day now, which will make things so much easier.”

  For now, though, he needed to get ready for his first fight of the tournament. He was an independent contestant—no one had registered him on behalf of a sect or anything—so he had to come up with his own look, and he had to be somewhat presentable.

  There were a few considerations to make. He’d registered in the tournament under his own name and information, so there was no hiding who or what he was. But technically, he wasn’t a fugitive anymore.

  It didn’t change the fact that most people here knew him as the guy who killed the Steerman’s son and caused chaos on the ground. He’d disrupted trade and the normal business of plenty of Centertown sects.

  So he was going to bring his Redcloak with him, of course. He had to show the crowd that he’d gotten a pardon from the prince, and that he was at least someone to be respected. Then he had to think about creating a name for himself. Wearing the shirt he’d gotten from Ulfreld was one option, but it was a nice shirt.

  His first concern was that it would get shredded in the tournament. His second was that it wouldn’t look common enough. Technically, he was a thrall, so he’d better look the part. That way, he’d start making a better name for himself, and people would underestimate him.

  His opponents would, and the audience. Most people would bet against him, and lots of money would be changing hands, which, from what he understood, would mean that he earned more for each fight.

  So he changed into an older, tattered shirt and tied it at the waist with a simple leather belt.

  Once he was satisfied with his appearance, he held open his backpack for River and said, “Let’s get going. We don’t want to be late.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The tournament took place in Iron Hide Central, and Blake used a taxi longboat to travel over. It was nearly impossible to miss the arena. In the very central ring, there was a stadium off to the side. It reminded him more of those old pictures of the Colosseum, but it’d been a decade since he’d actually seen any of those pictures, and he might have been remembering wrong.

  The arena was a massive ring of white marble with crowd-filled risers on all sides. Mana-powered lights cast a bright turquoise glow onto a patch of sand at the center, and a chain-link mesh stood between the fighters and the audience. The mesh itself was probably for the audience’s comfort, and there would be a proper mana barrier, like he’d seen in the gym earlier today.

  With a roar of its thrusters, the longboat taxi set down on a bustling landing strip in front of the arena. Blake nodded to the driver and jumped out, then marched toward the arena for his first fight.

  https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/155582/the-soulstealers-war-military-litrpg-skill-merging

  https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/155582/the-soulstealers-war-military-litrpg-skill-merging