Bab 13: me and myself (2)

the next problem that cain had was moving the souls in the first place. even moving the smallest shard put a massive load on his mana reserves.

'After thinking there are two ways I could go about this. one, I could increase my mana reserve by refining my form even more, and two, I could make something to contain the soul shards so I could move them and keep them away from the main cluster. the problem with the first one is that I don't have many other changes I could make to my form with my current bio-map collection. and with the second one, there is no guarantee that I could even make something to store the souls in the first place.'

after thinking even further cain realised that he didn't haft to surround the shard to move it.

'When you went fishing you didn't try to catch the fish only using a hand net, you would hook them with a fishing rod and then store them in a bucket.'

realising that he could just hook the souls to move them and make an isolated area to stop the shard from going back to the cluster he began to go to work on forming the mana in an orb around him and making a 'hook' to 'catch' the soul shards.

just as he was making progress in his work his main body was disturbed again. exiting the white room and slowly opening his eyes he heard a knock on his door. waking over and opening it he saw an average-looking man who had a butler-like suit on holding a tray of what cain assumed to be food. "why are you here?"

startled by the cold stare that cain gave him the man nervously said "u-um I'm here to give you your meal, sir." understanding that it was just food, cain took the tray and walked back to his room before eating it. because the food had been cooked the DNA and proteins had been ruined, he would need time to recreate the body of this creature in the white room so he could get its bio-map.

after finishing his meal cain went back into the white room, before going back to preparing to study the souls he first went to make the bio-map. when cain was in the forest he saw a prey creature use a fire-based attack to defend itself from a predator, the predator ended up being cooked and died while the prey creature was drained of energy and was killed by cain and eaten, he has since stored the fire MG and added it to his collection.

when he went to study the cooked creature he found that the bio-map was a mess. there were parts that were missing, parts that were damaged and parts that were incomplete and missing things ranging from miner and unimportant to things that were so vital that just missing one of them could ruin the whole creature.

when he realised that he wouldn't be able to use this bio-map he decided to try something new, after testing his different creature's genes he found parts that would allow him to create an embryo-like structure that would take the remaining genes of the designated creature and regrow it from infants to elders, he used this on all the bio-maps he had afterwards to have the different stages of life of all the things he had eaten stored for study.

the more damaged the genes the slower the recreation process as it needed to cross-match the genes that it had with the genes that cain had to find the most compatible genes to use as a baseline for the recreation.

after setting the new embryo to develop next to all the others that had yet to finish so he could study the complete life cycle he went back to his studies.

after putting the finishing touches and optimisations on the 'fishing rod' and 'bucket' unlike his first try of raping the soul in mana to move and separate it from the cluster the rod would hook into the soul, and drag it into the bubble that would stop it from sensing the cluster and returning to it. to stop it from moving small 'supports' of mana would keep it still as he began his study.

studying the soul took longer than he expected, while he could work on the other studies faster than he could find them, studying the soul was like trying to hold pure light in his hand and use it. as time went on the pattern of study, eat, study and eat again went on for several days before. he finally reached a breakthrough, while he still could understand the soul fully to do things such as damage it or create one on demand, he could make an amalgamate of shards that would function like a program, while the fake souls he made couldn't function like a real soul with emotion and independent thought they could still work like any other when given an order.

the way cain gave the fake souls orders was to attach a 'thread' to it and attach it to his own soul. the way he makes these threads was to take shards of souls and 'weave' them like you would wool or silk, when he first tried this he realised that he was just changing the shape of the shard as when he tried to attach it to his own it was absorbed like normal. and when he attached it to the amalgamate and then to his own the amalgamate was absorbed through the thread before the thread was absorbed itself.

after more in-depth research into this path of 'making' souls, he realised that there were two parts to a soul. the container, which would store the second part, and the energy. while the container acted like a shell to hold the energy it was eventually useless. the energy, however, could be further divided into three parts, the memories, the 'core' and the essence. when he absorbed a soul he would drag in the core which would in turn take the essence and memories as they would vanish without the core. what he was looking for to 'make' a soul was the essence, which was what made the soul 'work'. however, whenever he tried to separate the essence from the core both would vanish as the essence had no stabiliser and the core had no host to stabilise. the solution cain came up with was to make a 'fake core' out of compressed mana that had the property of 'healing' that he would add from the PMGs, this fake core wouldn't be absorbed by him as it was already part of him and it would stabilize the essence so that it wouldn't disappear.

the downs side of the fake core was that it had an upper limit before it would collapse and the essence would dissipate, however on the other hand he didn't need to add the 'thread' to connect him to the core, however, it would still strengthen the congestion and increase the limit before it would collapse, the threads where made of the shell as to didn't dissipate immediately without the core to stabilise it. the memories were absorbed and if not needed, would be discarded. discarding had a slight bonus to his own soul as discarding needless memories would give his 'main' soul some essence after recycling the memories in a process that he had yet to understand, and unlike the fake cores his own soul had a real core which allowed his one soul to hold much more essence and he could even strengthen it by absorbing other cores. Increasing the size of his own 'shell' with the unused shell of other souls also helped in the strengthening of his own soul.