Soul power is a very mysterious energy, even more so than mana. At the very least mana interacts with objects and other energies in predictable ways so making it do what you want is simple.
The same can not be said with soul power. Anything from amount, quality, and intent could change how it is used.
As an energy, it was much more versatile than mana but at the same time many times more dangerous. From seals, to advanced skills and spells, to talent, to curses and many more, all of these were affected by, and sometimes used, soul power.
It still hasn't been captured or manipulated outside of a living being by a machine or even properly measured before so as far as the science community was concerned it didn't exist. As such, only those truly in contact with their inner self could have a chance at understanding it.
For starters, if you run out of soul power you die. It is consumed very slowly by your soul, leading to aging, so if you use too much of it at one time then one would rapidly age, or simply drop dead.
For those who use too much at one time, while in theory it could regenerate to normal levels for your age, you were much more likely to die before that. But for the more powerful, the soul power could be absorbed from fallen enemies to replenish and increase reserves.
Normally one would have to be at 100 in soul power to do this but Ray was a special circumstance. With a combination of body strengthening and his talent, all of his stats reached 99.99. Not quite 100 but infinity close.
Because of the equalizing effect of his talent, all of his stats grew and shrunk equally. Meaning that after the boost from the spell body strengthening they all reached 99 and with the 1% boost it became 99.99.
As he was in a sort of limbo, he could somewhat see the left behind soul power, but it was very blurry. What should have looked like a well defined and contained sphere looked like a black fuzzy ball.
As if something possessed him, he stretched out to grab onto it, absorbing it the moment it touched his skin.
"What the f*ck was that and why did I touch it." Feeling safer and a bit confused, Ray deactivated body strengthening but still felt undeniably stronger.
Looking over his stats he noticed that the 30.3 increased to 50.5. Shocked, he checked it a few more times to make sure he wasn't seeing things. But with analysis and the feeling coming from his body there was no denying it.
"I don't know what that was, but I'm not going to say no. If those two were so strong then there is no telling how powerful the other two are. Especially the girl, I don't know what it is about her but she gives me the creeps."
Moving onto the headless body he also collected the carcass and the soul orb, but this time instead of a 20 point jump, it was a modest 5 point leaving him at 55.55 and not 70.7. He wanted to complain but then he remembered that it took him 30 days to increase by 15, he felt somewhat satisfied.
"If that was so fast compared to the guild master then this is lightning fast." He looked over where the bodies of the chima were but didn't find anything.
Picking up the spear that wasn't destroyed, he teleported back to his soul sea.
"I really need a change of clothes, the ones that I am wearing are in tatters." He could barely be considered clothed. Rips, holes, tears, both his shirt and his pants were covered in all of them.
Looking at the dead bodies in front of him, he took the pants off of one of them before pushing them in the pit he made for the first body. He didn't know why he was keeping them but in the short term at least it wouldn't leave evidence behind.
"Not like they are going to rot any way, I have nothing so anything I find is invaluable. Though I hope that I find one of them that has a shirt, the female had one but it would be much too small for me."
Crudely butchering the two chima, he started to cook the little meat that he could obtain. There were many things that he should have learned before going to the new world and proper butchering was one of them. Thankfully he would have more than enough time to get better at it, and he even got more good meat out of them than the first one.
Because he didn't collect wood from the forest, he could only control the fire with his mind and contrary to what he thought, it wasn't that difficult. Compared to the hundreds of rapidly spinning while growing and shrinking orbs, keeping a fire's temperature stable to not burn meat wasn't as difficult.
Looking around he noticed that both the island and the fog seemed to have grown, the island had more mass and the fog was pushed back further.
Putting two and two together he quickly realized what the black orbs were.
"Are those things soul power? I guess that makes sense, only intelligent beings have souls and neither of the chima dropped the black orbs. And because of my talent what would have been just soul power increases all of my other stats. But if that's the case, how strong were the two of them really."
The realization of just how lucky, or how strong depending on how one looked at it, he was hit him. There are 7 stats including soul power and for all of his stats to increase by 20 that would mean that it was a total of 140 additional stats.
He was sure that not all soul power was condensed into the orb and most of it was dissipated after death, and he was even more sure that the hobgoblin didn't specialize in soul power. He knew this because those who specialize in soul power had certain special characteristics, like blacked out eyes. There were many of such people at the guild he had seen so he knew what to look for, even one of his instructors specialized in soul power.
That meant that the Hobgoblins he killed were so much stronger than him that even if he absorbed only a fraction of one of their weakest stats, he still had a major increase in strength.
"No use worrying about that now, they are dead and I am alive. Doesn't matter how strong they were if they are now a part of a pile of corpses."
Using mana to control the meat he had levitating over the fire, he remembered back to when he was in a rush to heal himself.
"It's slight but the bones in my left arm do feel stronger than before, even when I punched the goblin it felt more solid."
Using mana sense to look into his body, he noticed that the bones and ribs on the left side of his body had a slight blue tinge to them so he assumed that they had absorbed the left over mana to strengthen themselves.
It was similar to what he had done to the mandible and the spear, but seemed to not dissipate, probably because his bones were a part of his body. He wasn't sure if there were going to be side effects to this but if there were he believed that his talent would get rid of it.
He came to terms with the fact that his talent wouldn't make him any stronger, but would aid him in the pursuit of strength. From calming the mana in his soul sea, to clearing and building tolerance to the chima poison, and allowing him to get more powerful by absorbing soul power, none of the times it activated did it increase his power directly but it removed obstacles in his path.
The only thing that he could think of that increased his power was the extra 1% per level, but that would only matter if he had a lot of stats or found out a way to increase his level. Both of these would take a lot of time so now that he had an opportunity to increase his power in a somewhat safe manner, he wasn't going to pass up on it. Especially when he had two clearly stronger enemies looking for him in the forest.
If he wanted to find out where exactly he was and how to return to the old world, then he needed to be much stronger than he was now.