Vael stepped into his room and let the heavy black box drop to the floor with a dull thud, just as the door slid shut behind him.
The room was small, just a bed, a desk, and a single window that looked out into the endless black of space. Not much, but it was quiet.
He was currently aboard a ship returning to the academy. According to the original schedule, he and his classmates were supposed to remain at the fortress for another week, but a sudden attack had forced them to leave early.
"God, this is such a mess," Vael muttered to himself as he crouched down to open the box.
It had already been an entire week since his duel with Zathiel, and him returning back to when he was just a fresh eighteen-year-old academy freshman. He still hadn't found any explanation for how he had come back to this time, let alone the screen that floated constantly in front of his eyes.
--
Name: Vael Ashmere
Title: God of Flesh
Domain: Biomancy (Level 1)
--
This screen in front of him was perhaps the most confusing thing of all. In the world of Vornak, gods did reincarnate into mortal forms, and yes, it was common knowledge that such beings often saw floating text, as a way to easily access their domains and decipher the will of their world's consciousness.
Vael, however, wasn't one of those reincarnated gods; he was almost sure of that. Yeah sure, these gods did lack memories from their past lives and most of them didn't know they were former gods. Still, their divine aura could be clearly identified during their awakening ceremony, something that had not happened when Vael had awakened two years ago.
Currently, the only reasonable explanation he had come up with was him eating the flesh of Phyros.
Normally, drinking even a single drop of a god's true blood would be enough to incinerate any man from within. Heck, the only reason Vael had survived was because he'd received help from the consciousness of that dying world. Why it had helped him, an outsider, he still had no idea.
"Maybe the divinity had bonded with my soul? Argh, this is such a mess," he let out a dep sigh, while flipping the lid open.
Inside the box were two corpses of a creature called Iron Bess, a reptile-like beast considered a delicacy among mages due to their ability to temporarily boost focus.
Getting his hands on these two hadn't been easy. He had tried to steal some from the ship's storage, but in the end had been forced to bribe one of the kitchen workers.
"All right. Let's get to work, shall we?"
Carefully, he reached into the box, pulled out one of the Iron Bess, and placed it gently on the table wrapped in plastic sheeting.
"Let's see," he whispered, closing his eyes.
Although he had no idea what his domain was about or what it could do, its title did indicate that it had something to do with dead bodies.
He focused inward, searching for a mental switch, like he was casting a spell only this one a bit more instinctive, like a fifth limb, something that would activate his divine ability. When he found it, he redirected that focus toward the dead beast on the table.
Suddenly, his vision exploded.
A layered projection of glowing muscles and nerves began unfolding in front of his eyes
"What the hell…" he muttered, narrowing his eyes at the projection.
It was like staring at one of those old anatomy posters—only this one was floating in the air and still looked alive. He could see everything: the organs, the veins, even the millions of tiny muscle strands packed under the skin. But that wasn't all.
Streams of light ran through the Iron Bess's body, all converging toward a small, spherical object in its chest, pulsing with faint golden energy. Each pulse grew weaker, slower. Surrounding it, like a haze, was a cloud of orange particles suspended evenly throughout the projection.
"What is that?"
Vael reached out, carefully poking at the orange cloud, and was shocked to find he could interact with it—pulling it out of the projection with his hand.
[You have received: Earth Affinity (3%). [Do you wish to consume it or store it?]
Eyes wide in disbelief, Vael nodded instinctively in his mind.
Consume it.
[You have consumed Earth Affinity (3%)]
[Your Vessel has unlocked Earth Affinity.]
[Your status is being updated]
--
Affinities=
Water – 23%
Earth – 3%
--
Looking at the screen displaying Earth affinity caused Vael to nearly jump out of his skin, a wide grin spreading across his face.
He could do that?
One had to understand that in all the countless worlds discovered across the Grand Weave, no one had ever found a way to gain new elemental affinities, or if they had, they sure weren't talking about it.
He, on the other hand, had just gained a new affinity, from a dead beast, no less. What did that even mean? Could he collect every elemental affinity in the known universe and stack them all in his body? And if he found more creatures with, say, earth affinity, could he boost the ones he already had?
All of a sudden, thousands of possibilities began racing through his mind, but he forced himself to stop as something else on the projection had caught his attention.
Out of the corner of his eye, hidden deep within the center of Iron Bess's body, he spotted a faint wisp of something flickering, like a flame, growing dimmer with each passing second.
Perhaps it was his new Domain, but he felt certain he already knew what that thing was.
A soul.
It made sense the soul looked like it was fading. It had already been about an hour since the Iron Bess was killed.
Could he touch it?
Taking a deep breath, he reached into the projection and gently poked the wisp and plucked it out, a chill running through his body as he did so.
This…what could he even do with this?
He hadn't received a prompt from the screen, no message indicating he could consume it.
His gaze shifted to the second Iron Bess still lying dead in the box.
Could he?
Without wasting any time, he pulled the second Iron Bess out of the box and extracted its soul.
--
[Two lingering souls have been detected.]
[Do you wish to initiate fusion?]
[Y/N]
--
Vael nodded eagerly, pulling the two wisps, merging them into each other.
What happened next was completely beyond his expectations.
The two souls flared violently, fighting one another as if struggling for dominance. At the same time, the dead bodies on the table began to convulse, their muscle and flesh tearing free from their corpses like streams of liquid and flying toward each other, merging, shifting and shaping itself around the soul fragment.
Vael watched, stunned, as his mind received constant prompts asking how he wanted to sculpt the body, but he ignored all of them, eager to see what would happen if he didn't interfere.
The process was brutal. The flesh curled and fused into something entirely new, eventually encasing itself in a thick cocoon of blood.
For half an hour, nothing moved.
Then, a mental link clicked into place within his mind. The cocoon cracked open, revealing a reptile like creature coated in viscera. But this one was different.
Its body was easily twice the size of a normal Iron Bess.
It raised its head, staring deep into Vael's eyes, and took a weak step forward, before collapsing onto the table.
"What?"
Confused, Vael quickly summoned its projection.
Inside, the wisps of soul now combined into one were fading away, extinguishing into nothing.
Was it because the souls had already been a lot weaker when he had taken them out?
Vael didn't knew, and let out a long sigh. Despite the failure, Vael raised both hands in the air and let out a triumphant, visceral laugh.
"Hahahaha!"
Sure, he'd failed.
Sure, he still had a mountain of questions.
But with everything he had just discovered, the possibilities ahead of him?
He couldn't stop smiling.