Chapter 141: Chapter 141

With Sophie gone at school all day, Nick gone at work, Irylax being an irritable dragon, and Bianca being out doing… something, Elise was left with no one to ethically practice on in the morning when she woke up. She was irritated for all of two seconds before she remembered that she wasn’t on a time limit. The warg was far away and no threat. No one she knew needed rescuing. Well, Jag still did, but until either Ostra or Maggie found a qualified soul healer, there was nothing she could do about that. Elise would have been annoyed at how difficult it was to find a soul healer if she wasn’t experiencing firsthand how difficult it was to even know about aether and souls, let alone work with them.

Regardless, since she was not on a time limit, she decided to stop stressing herself out about it and simply went back to her books. After about an hour of reading though, she closed her book and set it aside, annoyed. She couldn’t focus, and she knew why, and she was annoyed that she knew why. Despite having no time-sensitive obligations, now that she had seen the state of her soul, she felt guilty about doing anything else but fixing it. She knew that would happen, which was why she had put it off, and now that she had seen it, she couldn’t not do it.

With a sigh, she lay back on her bed.

I don’t wanna do work, she whined internally.

She lay for a full half hour, not wanting to get up and be productive, but not able to relax either. At the end of the half hour, she groaned, then reluctantly sat up. She had already crossed the point of no return. There was no point in delaying any longer.

“Looks like my vacation is over,” she muttered grumpily.

She crossed her legs and closed her eyes entering soul meditation. It didn’t take long before she was back in her soul, once again in her soul form. The room within her soulspace was mostly as she remembered it from her time inside with Irylax. It was still an odd amalgamation of all the various places she had enjoyed living in. She saw pieces of her dorm, the dwarven castle, and Oberon’s castle, and while she hadn’t noticed it before, the lights on the walls were shaped like the fruits of the Mother Tree from the drow cavern.

It was interesting, from a psychoanalytical perspective, but she didn’t spend much time pondering it. According to Irylax, the shape of her soul was supposed to mimic her physical form, and that her physical form would mimic the shape of the soul. Shaping her soul could influence her evolution options, and her evolution options would shape her soul. If she wanted to have a firmer soul shape, she needed to think about what she wanted to become.

If she had been asked back when she was still in the caverns below the forest, her answer would have been immediate. She wanted to be a human. She would shape her soul into that of a human’s, and would therefore evolve into a human, or at least something that looked like one. She suspected that was probably why her evolutions were steadily getting more skinwalker-like. The System was trying to fit her body to her vague idea of herself, making it steadily more and more humanoid.

However, now that she had {Transformation}, that resolve had faded significantly. Did she really need to evolve into something human-shaped? She already had a human shape that she could maintain indefinitely. Besides, there were some benefits to being a rabbit. For one, sleeping was much more comfortable, as indicated by the fact that she somehow kept waking up in her base form, even when she fell asleep in her human form. Another benefit was her hearing. When switching to her human form, she almost felt deaf compared to what she could notice as a rabbit.

That said, she still liked having opposable thumbs. Having four paws was nice for running across rough ground and not slipping and falling, but she could fly. Why would she need that? Opposable thumbs were a necessity. She could become a rabbit centaur thing, maybe. Four rabbit legs, and then a human torso with hands?

She let out a small giggle at the thought. That would be ridiculous. She didn’t want that. But thinking about it gave her some ideas on how to figure out what she did want. If she just made a list of what she did and didn’t want, she would eventually narrow it down enough that she would have a relatively final form.

She immediately vetoed anything weird, like the rabbitaur. Rabbityr (rabbit satyr) was also out. That wasn’t as bad since it would look more normal, and would theoretically let her jump like a rabbit, but once again, she could fly. Anything creepy was also out, meaning anything vaguely resembling her current base form. She also decisively crossed off anything that resembled a furry. If she was going to be shaped like a human, she was going to have skin, not fur, and she would have hands and feet, not paws.

She was fairly certain anything not rabbit and not human was off the table by default, but at the same time, she kept getting offered demon options. Based on what she had seen at Ostra, being a demon usually involved colored skin, horns, and big muscles. She didn’t really want colored skin, and she didn’t want her muscles too big, but as she thought about it, she wasn’t entirely opposed to horns. No one would really be seeing this form, right?

That brought on a new thought: who would be seeing her base form? What was the use case? She expected she’d be spending most of her time looking like a human and blending in. The only times she would be in her base form would be at Ostra meetings, or if she needed a power boost, since her aether skills were much stronger in her base form. And with her aether skills already so strong in her human form, she wouldn’t really be needing to use her base form that much. Especially in an evolution when she had even more stats, Skills, and aether.

There was the possibility of being forced into her base form. She had heard about Skills that could cancel transformation Skills, and while she wasn’t sure they would work that well on her, getting her transformation force cancelled was another use case. With that in mind, she added another caveat: she had to look good. It was a bit vain, but if she was going to have her disguise forcefully stripped, she couldn’t look creepy, and she definitely couldn’t look scary. She imagined a scene where she was at a teleporter checkpoint or something, and her disguise got removed, revealing her skinwalker form, causing her to be immediately assaulted by attacks from all sides. That wouldn’t do. She needed to look good, and she needed to look relatively harmless.

With that in mind, she continued mentally striking out things she didn’t like, while also keeping a list of things that she did like. She was feeling good about her progress until she got to the point where she had nothing left to add, then reviewed her list. At that, she frowned. Or she would have, if she had a mouth in her soul. She wanted human hands, human skin, a generally human appearance, no extra limbs, no weird animal body parts, and nothing scary. In short, she wanted to be… a human.

She scratched her head, as she thought further. She wasn’t really against being a human, but she had the unique opportunity to literally choose her form, and she was going with a regular old human? She could already be a regular old human. She wasn’t taking advantage of her situation at all.

Alternatively, she could take the opposite extreme and go all in on being a cute rabbit. She would be cute and soft, she would have great hearing, and she would still look harmless in the rare case that her disguise might be removed. She wasn’t a huge fan of that either though. If she needed to increase her power in a fight, as funny as turning into a cute bunny for a power boost was, she wanted to maintain her hands.

So, she was right back to human. She scratched her head again, pausing as she felt the vaguely rabbit ear-shaped protuberances poking upwards. There was another option if she didn’t want to be a plain human in her base form. She didn’t want to think about it because of the implications that such a form would have had on Earth… But that magazine didn’t exist here, did it? There were no implications. She could have the best parts of her human form while also having rabbit hearing.

She was still hesitant, but for whatever reason, she felt drawn to that form. It did everything she wanted, and didn’t have any downsides other than referencing that thing, which didn’t even exist in this world. She was the only one from Earth, and therefore, the only one who would know.

After a few minutes of back and forth, she managed to convince herself. The more she thought about it, the more sure she was in her decision. She didn’t really want to be anything else, and this form would have everything she wanted. Not taking it for some silly Earth memories would be—well—silly.

She looked down at her stumpy arm, and while it was only the vaguest sense, she felt that the end looked a bit more flat than it had before. Like it was slowly morphing into a real hand. She studied further, and couldn’t decide if she was just imagining things or not, so she decided to let it be. She doubted changing her soul’s shape would be as simple as coming to a quick decision like that. She had other things she could be doing, so there was no point in checking for tiny changes like that.

Instead, she started experimenting with modifying her soul realm. As Irylax explained, it was her own soul, and she was in control of it. She should have been able to shape it however she pleased. It wasn’t quite that simple, but thankfully, progress on that front was much more visible than progress on solidifying her soul form. While it was difficult and tedious, she could actively see the changes she wanted happening.

The first thing she decided to do, since she had nothing else in mind, was to make the room she was in whole. It was disjointed right now, with lines between different segments, and a few holes looking out into the white void of the rest of her soul, and she didn’t even have a door. She first set to fixing the holes, planning on making the room airtight by sealing the cracks and adding a door afterward. She only got partway through filling the holes though when she was pulled out of her meditation by Sophie returning home from school.

For the next two weeks, Elise spent much of her free time in her meditation, either trying to fix up her soul realm, or learning how to control her dreams. She made progress on both fronts, but the dreaming part was causing her a lot of trouble. It seemed that she had reached a bottleneck in her progress, and barely got any further than she did the first night. She completely lost that sense of Sophie’s presence within an hour of gaining it, so every night, she had to spend time getting it back. It was a bit faster each night, but nowhere near as fast as she was hoping.

Additionally, it seemed that her connection with Titania was a special one. She could sometimes get back to the state where she could sense the other aether threads, but it was only ever Sophie’s and Titania’s threads that she could pick out. The others were all a jumbled mess, and she couldn’t focus enough on any of them to make any other dream visits.

She asked Irylax for advice, but the dragon had dismissively told her to be patient and keep working. Elise tried, but she really wished that there was an easier way.

The soul realm progress was satisfying though, at least. It was slow going, and it sometimes felt like she was barely doing anything, but whenever she took a step back to see how far she had come, she felt good.

On the day before class started, Elise had finished patching up all the holes, and decided that unifying the room’s style would wait until she had a door. The door was a bit problematic, and making working hinges had taken the better part of three days of practice, but as her meditation session was winding down, she finally got something functional. It wasn’t pretty, since it was essentially just a white slab of nondescript soul matter on a set of hinges made of the same odd material, but it worked. She could open it and close it, and while it wasn’t quite airtight, if she sat on the bed, she couldn’t see through the gaps in the side, so it looked mostly normal. ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ꜰʀᴏᴍ novęlfire.net

She took step back to admire her handiwork, then took a few more steps to flop onto her soul realm bed. Despite everything, it had been a productive two weeks. Productive enough that she was even able to get plenty of reading and snacking in because she no longer felt guilty about not being productive. It was an odd cycle for her. She couldn’t be unproductive because that was unproductive, but if she was being productive, then she could afford to be unproductive. It was a funny thing to think about.

She raised an arm upward, examining it as she did. After two weeks, she could tell it was definitely changing. It wasn’t close to her ideal form yet, but hands were starting to form. They weren’t detailed at all yet—she didn’t even have fingers, though she did have a vestigial thumb— but it was most definitely becoming a hand. Yet more progress, and that was satisfying.

She still felt occasional qualms about her target form though. She always dismissed them as irrational, but they kept coming back, and she was experiencing yet another one at that moment.

No one will know, she told herself. It’ll be fine. Now get out of here and start getting ready for school.

“Fuck me, I could go for a coldie right now.”

“You cannot speak like that.”

The Saintess sighed as her servant scolded her for what felt like the thousandth time. She missed Earth. She missed freedom. And she was very excited for school the next day.

“Right, I won’t,” she said. “Sorry about that.”

“Do you have everything ready for tomorrow?” asked the servant.

“And you remember your lessons? Don’t forget-”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” interrupted the Saintess. “I got it the first time you explained it, and I got it the tenth too. I don’t need an eleventh. I’ll be fine. Now, could you get going so I can get some sleep?”

The servant hesitated for a moment, then sighed.

“Yes, Saintess. I will return in the morning to wake you.”

“Right, see ya then.”

As soon as the servant left, the Saintess smiled. She was more than excited. She was practically vibrating. She initially wasn’t thrilled about school, especially since she felt her disguise really didn’t suit her, but after registration day, everything changed. More specifically, after she found the Aetheric Illusions class.

She didn’t know how it worked, but she somehow managed to give her wardens—or caretakers—the slip and get into the room and there, she found gold. The bishop had mentioned aether before, but said it was too early for her to learn about it in more detail. It was apparently some kind of forbidden subject. The Saintess thought that was bullshit, and that it was just another item on the long list of things she wasn’t allowed to have because they were dangerous or something. Yet now, she had a way to learn about aether without the church knowing.

For some reason, they didn’t suspect a thing when that random class about trout appeared on her schedule, and she was approved to attend without issue. There wouldn’t be any guards watching her every move at the academy either, so she could move fairly freely. Well, there wouldn’t be any direct guards. She wasn’t foolish enough to believe that the church wouldn’t have any eyes within though.

But they wouldn’t be able to get into the Aetheric Illusions class if it was anything like the registration! And there would be so many interesting people there. The Saintess suspected that her disguise and false identity weren’t even the biggest secrets in the room there. Everyone was hiding something, some more obviously than others. Intrigue and politics weren’t her specialty, but after a year and a half of boredom, she welcomed anything that would bring some spice into her life, even if it also complicated things.

She lay back in her bed, hugging a pillow and using it to cover her smiling face. She couldn’t wait until the morning. It was going to be so fun!