Left alone with Anise in our room, we both went to bed and prepared to go to sleep. As I closed my eyes, Ai's voice sounded in my head.
[Ethan, can I pull you inside your soul space for a moment?]
'Sure.' I was curious what this was all about since usually I was the one that requested to get pulled inside and not the other way around.
I felt a soft pull on my soul and the next moment I opened my eyes I was inside my soul space. Looking around, I noticed that the entire space was full of cracks and there were some black tentacle looking things extending from those cracks and turning the pire white area around them pitch black.
As soon as I appeared, Ai manifested in the form of a ten years old girl right next to me and said:
"This all started the moment your contract with Senna was broken. At the start I mistook them to be remnants of her dark soul and thought they will disappear in time, but it's been a while and they seem to be only growing in number and size."
The sight was quite scary. It was quite hard to wrap my head around the fact that there were black tentacles growing out inside my soul.
"If it's not because of Senna, did you figure out the reason of their appearance?"
Ai thought for a moment and said: "I'm not completely sure, but I have some conjectures."
Hearing the serious tone in which Ai spoke, I had a premonition and asked: "Can you tell me what those are?"
"First, I'll have to explain what a soul is. A soul is a miniature world in of itself, formed out of spirit and given form by a person's conscious thought. This world, is usually housed inside a body or vessel. As a soul accumulates more spirit, the world slowly expands to make room for that spirit. Once it reaches it's limit, it will have to evolve. To evolve, it will have to absorb a higher tier soul and take it's form for it's own. That is the stage you are at right now."
"Once a soul is damaged, like in your case after the separation from Senna, this is represented inside the soul space by the cracks that you see all around. The more damage a soul takes the more cracks appear. If the damage is high enough, the entire world can break apart causing your soul to crumble into pieces. If the soul survives the damage it will slowly mend itself and those cracks will disappear with time."
"Now to return to your case. Once your soul got damaged, cracks appeared like normal, but instead of starting to mend itself, those tentacles started appearing from the cracks. Since a soul is housed inside a vessel, and this is a closed system, these tentacles could only have come from one of them. The vessel was made by me using the Nexus and it's impossible for them to come from there."
I nodded in understanding and asked: "Then, where did they come from? Could they have been left here by Senna?"
"That's the same conclusion I came to initially, but since she is gone, without her soul to support them, they should have just disappeared with time."
"I see. You said you had an idea. What is it?"
"The only explanation that seems to fit the situation is that this world is not your entire soul but only a part of it."
"I don't understand. Didn't you first say that this is my entire soul?"
Ai seem to ponder for a moment before saying: "Think of it like this. What if the space we see all around us right now is not your entire soul but just a part of it that was isolated from the rest? Like a small dimension formed inside a bigger one. Your soul might be a lot bigger but you can only access this small portion of it."
Now I kind of understood and that only served to scare me more: "Are you saying that there is part of my soul that I have no control of and those things are leaking from there?"
"Exactly. Another part of your soul appears to have been sealed outside this space, but whatever Senna did actually created a crack in the seal. This seems to be the best explanation since those tentacles are actually formed out of spirit that has the same soul signature as you do."
"But how is that even possible. Who would seal a part of my soul and why?"
"I don't know. This seems to have happened before the Nexus pulled your soul from Earth and even managed to fool me. The worrying part is that those tentacles seem to be controlled by something and are trying to slowly take over this dimension slowly polluting it."
"So there's someone else sealed inside my soul? Another soul? Someone like Senna?"
"No. I told you that they have your soul signature. Whatever is sealed there, is still you, or some sort of previous incarnation of yours."
"Incarnation? Like a version of me from before getting reincarnated by the spirit well?"
"Exactly."
"But that also doesn't make any sense. Isn't the spirit well supposed to wipe a soul clean before reincarnating it?"
"I don't know what happened, but whatever is outside this dimension managed to fool the spirit well somehow. Maybe the seal served a purpose in that."
"And what will happen the moment it succeeds in taking over my soul space?"
"It will be like the you from now never existed. It has already started to influence your thoughts and feelings."
"What do you mean?" this conversation was getting scarier by the moment. Ai made it sound like there is someone controlling my mind and I had no idea about it.
"Some time ago, you freaked out the moment you killed a single human. In the last few days you killed millions of them and there was no reaction from you. It made sense before, when you were sharing your soul with Senna, but what about now, after Senna left? You told Velor that you felt bad, but did you really?"
Her question made me realize that indeed my conscience felt completely clear after I killed all those people. There was no remorse or anything. This realization made my entire spiritual body shake slightly, it was too terrifying.
"So it's already changing me.." I murmured in disbelief. In a fit of panic I turned towards Ai and said: "But I still feel like me, I'm me, how can I feel nothing wrong?"
"Calm down. The only thing it did was to inhibit your feelings of guilt and remorse slightly. The amount of control it has over your is still minimal."
I took a moment to process her words and analyze my behavior ever since my soul got damaged and realized that she was indeed right, but that didn't make it any less scary.
"This is not completely a bad thing. Eventually, you still would have had to kill a lot of people. I already told you before, killing a normal thing in the wide multiverse. The influence of this dark soul is only making you adapt faster."
"How can you say this is a good thing?" I yelled at Ai. A bunch of mixed thoughts, feelings and emotions passing through my mind and soul. I was scared of loosing myself, of turning into a butcher. Whoever this previous incarnation of me was, it was terrifying.
"I never said it's a good thing. I only said it's not a completely bad one. We still need to stop it's influence either way before it erases you from existence."
I didn't say anything and took a moment to calm down. Ai was right once again, no matter how much it scared me, this was the situation now and I had to find a way to deal with it. I was not about to lose myself and have my soul taken over by this thing. It didn't matter that it was also me, this was my soul now and not his.
Taking a look at the tentacles that were wriggling around I asked Ai: "Was that incarnation of me evil?"
"At the base of it, there is no such thing as evil or good, it's only a matter of perspective. You define evil as someone who stands against your principles, but what is evil for someone with completely opposite principles than yours? There is no point in thinking about it."
Nodding, I took a deep breath and said: "All right. How do we deal with these tentacles?"
"The short term option is to push them back and reseal them, but to do that we need to return to the Nexus or get your soul to evolve. If your soul evolves you will finally be strong enough to push them back inside the cracks and heal your soul."
Since going back to the Nexus was not really an option I had tight now, my thoughts immediately went to the girl I found sleeping under the town of Dramen. For a moment, the thought of killing her passed my mind, making me shudder. Banishing the thought from my head, I asked:
"Ai, is there any way to stop it from increasing it's influence over me? I can't really leave this world now and evolving my soul won't be easy.."
"I can at most slow down the process but that will consume a part of your spirit so you will need to recover it more often."
"With you slowing down, how long do I have before it takes over?"
"It's influence will slowly increase. I will pull your soul back to the Nexus before it takes over completely but I can only delay it for at most one year."
"So I have one year to either evolve my soul or save this world?"
"Yes, and that is if nothing else happens. For example, if your soul gets damaged again the time would shorten drastically."
"You said that it's slowly changing me, will remaking the seal undo those changes as well?"
"Not completely, but you'll still be you."
"All right. Start slowing it's influence down and send me back. Ai, thank you for always helping me. I know I'm not telling you this often enough."
"My pleasure. Please rest well."
Nodding, I disappeared from my soul space and woke up back in the inn room's bed. Anise was looking at me with a worried face as soon as I opened my eyes.
"What happened? You started shaking out of nowhere and wouldn't wake up no matter what I did."
Seeing that her eyes were red like she was about to cry, a feeling of gratitude engulfed me as I hugged her tightly.
"I'm sorry for worrying you. I'm fine."
She broke the hug and looked into my eyes before saying: "Like I'm going to believe that. What are you not telling me?"
Seeing that she won't let me go without an answer, I said: "My soul was slightly injured when I destroyed the first magic circle, but I'm all right."
Anise didn't seem budge as she said: "There's still something you're not telling me. What is it?"
Sighing, I decided to tell her the truth. There was no point in hiding it anyway: "Something bad happened to my soul and I have around one year to fix it."
"What will happen if you don't manage to fix it?" asked Anise with tears already forming in the corner of her eyes.
"I won't die, but I might be forced to leave this world without you. Don't worry, I won't let it come to that. I already know a way to fix all this."
"What is it?"
I looked straight into her eyes and said: "I can't tell you that. There are a lot of things that I wish I could tell you but I can't for now. I need you to trust in me. I promise everything will be all right."
She seemed unwilling but eventually relented and said: "All right. I trust you." Following that, she rested her head on my chest and continued: "Don't forget you can also trust me. I'll never betray you."
"I know, but that is not the reason I can't tell you. Once everything is done, I'll explain everything to you. I promise." I said while playing with her hair.
"Mhmm."
'How I wish I could tell you everything...'
We stayed like this for a while before going to sleep. An hour before out meeting with the other members of the party, we woke up and started heading in the direction of the northern gate.
On the way there, Ai said:
[I managed to suppress the dark soul's expansion. According to my calculations, you have exactly 321 days and eight hours before I will have to pull your soul back to the Nexus to prevent it from causing any major changes.]
'So less than one year. I'll make it happen somehow. Ai, please put a countdown in the corner of my vision.'
[All right. Also, now that you have a party, you can set the experience distribution for yourself.]
'How does that work?'
[They will still receive the world energy for everything they kill , but you can choose to distribute a part of yours or even all of it to your party members. This will help them keep up with your level.]
'Ai, do you think I should distribute a part of it to them as well? Isn't it better for me to get stronger as fast as possible?'
[They are too weak and you can't possibly do everything on your own. Once you have to face high level demons, you'll need all the help you can get. It might slow down your progress at the moment but it will help in the long run.]
'All right. Set it up so that we all reach level 60 at the same time. This will also serve as a back up plan in case I fail and had to return to the Nexus eventually.'
[Experience distribution set. A total of 54 390 000 experience required for all of you to reach level 60. I'll constantly check the amount of world energy they gather and adjust the distribution accordingly.]
'How many members of the demon army do I have to kill?'
[Most of their members only give one experience since they are normal humans with no levels.]
'So 54 million kills or so..' I closed my eyes and strengthened my resolve. There are probably not even that many in total, but I still had to take out as many as I could. Unlike before, there was now a huge threat hanging over my head.
'I wonder what Alison would think if she saw me planning to kill tens of millions of people..'