First Pov
I´d been walking for almost an hour before I saw a village in the forest, it was small and remote, perfect for what I was planning for it. I waited until the sun went down and people started going to bed before I carefully made my way in. While staying in the shadows, I sensed which souls were sleeping and how many were in the house with it. After a few minutes of searching, I found the perfect target, an old woman living alone with her daughter.
Making my way around the house I silently entered through the back door. I knew that I needed to make sure that I wasn´t suddenly disturbed so I made my way to where I could feel the sleeping soul of the daughter.
As I stood before her door, I slowly opened the door, careful not to make any sound. Once I stood in front of her bed I saw her, bathed in the moonlight that was coming through the window, she was a rather beautiful woman with long brown hair but all that didn´t matter right now, I had a purpose for coming here and I could appreciate the sight later. As I reached out my hand to try to pull her soul out of her body so that she couldn´t disturb me while I experimented with her mother, she opened her eyes.
''Mom, is that you?'' she asked with squinted eyes. I knew I had to act fast so I immediately clasped my hand before her mouth to which she instantly lost all her sleepiness. ''HE…'' she tried screaming for help but was interrupted as I violently tore her soul out of her body.
I stood there silently for a whole minute to see if any of the nearby souls were coming this way but luckily no one seemed to have heard her. Shit, that could have gone bad, I really need to find a way to interact with living souls without having to touch them.
So here I was with her soul in my hand, thinking about what I should do with it because if I were to let go it would pass to the afterlife and I couldn't allow that, I still needed her for my experiments after all. This was a problem I hadn´t considered but after thinking for a while I came up with a solution, I extended a part of the energy in my soul, which I have simply named void energy, and connected it to her soul while making sure that the void energy didn´t corrupt and erase her.
After concentrating on not erasing her for a while, I felt something in my soul change and the tendril of v. e. stopped erasing her. Curiously, I made my grimoire appear and just as I expected, there was a new spell in it, soul anchor. That was a decent solution for now but I still needed a way to store souls, more things for the to-do list I guess. Now onto the next one, her mother was way easier to subdue as she didn´t wake up even when I accidently kicked her night table.
I was currently sitting in one of their coaches while inspecting the two souls, after closer inspection I could see their attribute and mana capacity. The tricky part was something else, each soul has a soul core in its center which makes up their entire existence, containing memories, personality, talents, and ego, and around the core was the simple soul, containing attributes, mana and more, what I needed to do to create my soul devour or absorption spell was to either find a way to extract the core so that I could absorb the soul without being affected by the core or devour the whole soul without being affected by the core.
While both ways seemed almost identical, the result certainly was not. If I absorbed a soul without a core I would gain its attribute and energy but I needed to separate the two with absolute precision and that would take time, should I however devour the whole thing, then I would gain not only the attribute and energy but also the memories, talents, personality and ego which is both useful and potentially really bad. I had the theory that wouldn´t be affected by the ego and personality due to my unique soul but it was risky so I was planning on trying it on a newborn soul first, as it didn´t have a developed memory, personality, and ego. So, for now, I was going to absorb the two souls here which would not only boost my below-average energy capacity but also give me their earth and analysis attributes and I already had plans for these attributes.
I worked through the whole night trying to separate the outer layer and the core of these two souls and I finally finished just a few hours before sunrise. In front of me were two balls and two inconsistent shapes, this of course were the cores and the outer layers that lost their form the moment the core was extracted.
I honestly couldn't wait to absorb the souls but I didn´t know how long the process was going to take and I was already starving, so I looked around the house until I found the kitchen. I honestly couldn´t cook and had no plans on learning it and was hoping to get the knowledge from a soul but I still managed to make something edible.
After a quick break, I released the two cores as I did not need them anymore. As I sat there I decided it would be better to absorb them outside the village, just in case someone came to visit as being seen in a house where two dead bodies were lying was not a good idea, if he left now people would just think that the two just passed away in their sleep at the same night, unusual and unlikely but not suspicious.
I was currently sitting on a rock in a rather nice-looking clearing inside the forest a few minutes away from the village, and floating next to me were two masses. I didn´t hesitate for long and pulled both souls into my own using the tendril that kept them in place.