This time Nick took the soul from the body and killed the body before immediately stuffing the soul back into the body rather than letting the death set in first. Unlike the first time the beetle didn't twitch or anything after the soul was replaced and even went about what it was doing previous until it's body lost all energy and the death state it was in caught up to and dispersed the soul. 'So a fresh corpse will still function for a while before the dead state of it forces the soul occupying it to disperse.' He thought intrigued.-
Next he grabbed a rat and redid the previous three experiments with similar results if more dramatic and drawn out since this soul and body was larger and stronger. 'Now to see what would happen if I swap the souls of a rat and a beetle.' Nick thought as he retrieved new test subjects. First he retrieved the beetles souls since that was the easiest and then he took out the rats soul while leaving the beetles soul in the living rat body. Immediately the rat body started to violently change as the fur all fell off and the skin grew dark and hard while the rest of the body took on beetle like properties.-
Nick didn't waste any time stuffing the rat soul into the beetles body as well after seeing this result and watched as both bodies violently mutated and shifted in size and appearance. After fifteen minutes both bodies looked nothing like their original forms. the rat body was now half the size and had thick hard carapaced skin while a third pair of legs had grown out while the eyes had divided into two for a total of four eyes on either side of it's head.-
It was a monstrous thing that looked like it fit in the magical world perfectly. The beetle body on the other had died from the drastic shift in anatomy that clashed with the preexisting stuff. 'Was it because there was not enough biomass for the transformation to finish or was the soul too different from the body for the changes to finish to begin with?' he pondered as he disected the body to find the anatomy mostly hollow which he figured was the cause of death. The rat body on the otherhand was slow moving and for lack a better word , retarded.-
'The beetle soul is clearly unable to handle the strain of piloting a larger more complex body. In fact I believe that this rat body is pushing the limits of it's ability to adapt.' Nick noted seriously. Nick then grabbed another rat and beetle before extracting the beetles soul and placing it in the rats body without removing the rat soul so he could observe what would happen. The body thrashed and made ungodly sounds for a good thirty minutes before it stabilized and began to mutate like the previous experiment.-
This time however the changes were much less drastic and the body remained mostly rat like and even gained some size in addition to it's new armored body. 'Hmm so the rat soul devoured the beetle soul and took on some of the latter's properties causing the body to change into an overall more powerful creature to match the newly empowered soul.' Nick noted and then had an idea. He then extracted the new soul that was no longer rat or beetle and then stuffed it in the struggling body of the first experiment. The body also thrashed about violently for some time as the two souls battled to devour the other and once that was finished the body began to mutate again.-
The imperfect rat beetle fusion that it was previously began to shift into an new more powerful form that discarded the unneeded traits and added the more advantageous ones. The resulting abomination was a fierce looking creature the regular size of a rat with thick black armored skin and streamlined body with a terrifying looking head of split jaws like a beetle with a rats teeth. 'The more powerful rat soul has grown drastically after devouring the two beetle souls but is showing signs of instability.' Nick noted.-
'Now lets see what happens if I dramatically change the shape of a soul myself without adding a new soul or having the original devour another soul.' Nick thought eagerly as he was learning so much from these experiments. For example he learned that souls could forcefully fuse if trapped in the same body as well as that the soul in the body heavily determined the shape of it. For this next experiment Nick hoped to see if he could modify a soul and then put it back into it's original body and get a more powerful version of that creature at no extra cost on his part.
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