Chapter 1: Left-overs, cursing and reinventing oneself

“Pitiful, those greedy human insects don’t deserve divine assistance if this meager offering is all they will give to their Goddess.”~Goddess

“Huh?” Hearing what is apparently a Goddess’s disembodied voice immediately after waking up is somewhat frightening. And...why can’t I see anything?!

“Oh, you’re conscious. Actually, you’re the one without a body, which also explains why you can’t see.”~Goddess

“...” Great! She’s reading my mind! Wait, what did she just say about my body?

“Well, you can think things through slowly on your own later. Let me give you the highlights so we can speed things along. The reason that your memory is somewhat fuzzy on the specifics of your life before is to prevent cultural contamination and harmful advancement of my world. Vague ideas of what you use to know are still there, however, you will need to ‘reinvent the wheel’, so to speak. You died and were randomly selected for soul transmigration to become a summoned hero in a fantasy world. Or at least that was the plan. Unfortunately your soul potential is too lacking to become a hero on your own, and what’s left of the offering after the first five were summoned is only enough to give you a single lowest tier blessing. Since I won’t be giving you the standard hero package and you’re the one stuck with it, I will give you temporary control over your transmigration profile so you can decide things for yourself. Take your time to decide. You won’t hear from me again. Just hit the finalize button when you’re done and enjoy your new life.”~Goddess

“Hello? Anyone there?!” Seriously, she just left, just like that! FUCK!

There was a classic ‘ding’ sound and a screen popped up in my mind. Yeah, my mind. Don’t really have any eyes as a soul now do I? After scrolling through the menus for a little while, I realized that she actually gave me complete control over every aspect of my profile, not just the blessings menu and if I think of wanting to know more about something in the menu, it tells me. There are menus for attributes, cultivation stage, bloodlines/traits, appearance, skills, blessings and…curses? Interesting. Curses actually cause an increase in soul potential due to the decrease it causes to the subject’s ability. Soul potential is the available expansion of a person’s soul to gain, activate or improve attributes, skills, and traits. Perhaps I can work with this…

A little while later and I’ve managed to scrape together a fair amount of soul potential(sp) by extensively cursing myself. Some were already in the system and others I had to design for myself.

<Curses>
[Mute](+20sp), [Glass cannon](+20sp), [Slow Learner](+50sp)
[Destined to Serve(Master: tbd)](Attribute control is locked at 1 until the first initiation)(+100sp)
{Orders}{Punishments}{Empathic Link}
[Servant’s Attire(Linked: Destine to Serve)](+0sp)
{Attire}

Why I selected the mute curse is partially due to how very pissed off I am right now. I’d definitely end up offending the people summoning me if I can talk and it’s not like I won’t be able to communicate at all. Once I have a master, I can just talk through them using the link. Glass cannon doubles efficiency of raising my mind cultivation while making my body cultivation twice as difficult. An obvious choice to lock in my role as a mage who will be staying as far from the fight as possible. Slow learning makes it ten times more difficult to naturally acquire or raise any skills. It does not affect my intelligence or knowledge. The flavour text for the destined to serve curse reads: “The servant must dedicate oneself entirely to the master, always being close-at-hand(100m). {Orders} must be followed, {Punishments} received, and {Empathic Link} established to share the master’s burden. This curse will transfer to the master if the treatment of the servant is abusive.” Pretty self-explanatory. I added the servant’s attire curse just so I could wear modern clothes. It balances giving me cheaty free clothes by giving control over what I wear to the master.

Yeah, those last two might seem somewhat really bad, but I’m planning to sneakily designate a young princess or another girl as the master because I really don’t want to fight for the people who had summoned me with such an inadequate offering that even that indifferent goddess seemed to pity me. With the soul potential from the curses and the whopping thirteen soul potential I got from the left-overs, I now have a grand total of two hundred three soul potential. I would have gotten a lot more from the destined to serve curse if I hadn’t included that line about abusive treatment. That one line made it give one third the origional amount, but also prevents such things like suicide orders. I plan to outlive my master and live normally afterwards. The attribute lock was also necessary as a one time condition so the curse would at least be truly activated. Without that, the soul potential given was reduced to a tenth. Just to give you a stick to measure by, the ‘standard hero package’ costs five hundred soul potential. Now to get some serious benefits for myself…“OUCH!” Damb, that hurts!

Probably the most genius idea I’ve ever had hurt like a bitch! First thing I did was give myself eidetic memory for twenty soul potential and hit the update soul button. Which hurt! A lot! This opportunity is seriously way too good to pass up. The freaking complete list of skills with descriptions, acquisition requirements and basically the whole outline for the power system of my soon to be new world is literally right in front of me. Of course, I’m totally going to memorize it.

Ugh! That probably took years to completely memorize, though I have zero concept of time in this place. I wonder if I’ll overshoot my summoning ceremony by a few decades. That would be nice. Though, I have a feeling that time just isn’t a thing here. Next up is to choose my bloodlines, gonna pass on human though since they’re the bitches who summoned me and I’ve done that once already. After much tweaking and fine tuning…

Race: {Vampire(50%)}{Blood Demon(25%)}{Dragon(20%)}{Dryad(5%)}

Vampires are cool, right? And they have some great abilities among the immortal humanoid races. At fifty percent, they are perfectly balanced with having only benefits from their race, but none of the demerits. Blood demon complements the vampire bloodline really well and gains the adaptive blood trait I wanted at exactly twenty-five percent. The rest is just filler, but who would say no to being descended from a dragon. Any higher than twenty percent and I started growing scales on my body model though. Threw in the dryad bloodline just to fill the left-over.

<Traits>
[Vampiric Bite], [Agility Boost(activate: 25sp)]
[Regeneration(activate: 50sp)], [Body Manipulation(activate: 100sp)]
[Dragon’s Perception(activate: 150sp)], [Adaptive Blood(activate: 200sp)]

Traits available due to my vampire bloodline were vampiric bite, agility boost and regeneration. I quickly used up ten soul potential to activate my vampiric bite. Girl has gotta eat. The trait lets me drain qi and mana from others to replenish my own along with some other vampire things. Agility boost doubles the effect the agility attribute has for my speed and reactions. Regeneration allows me to heal from any injury so long as I have enough blood. Blood demon bloodline made available the regeneration, body manipulation and adaptive blood traits. Same traits would stack to have increased effectiveness. I would be able to shapeshift somewhat due to body manipulation, though I would be limited to female humanoid forms. Female limited because I have dryad bloodline who can only be female and humanoid because of the limitations of my physically humanoid bloodlines. Adaptive blood enables me to gain additional traits from drinking blood. Finally, the dragon bloodline added dragon’s perception to my traits which can perceive all energies and see through illusions. No traits were gained from the low percentage of dryad bloodline. The best part is that the bloodline traits can actually be activated later as long as you apply the appropriate amount of soul potential. There’s now one hundred seventy-three soul potential left. Gonna do the appearance next…

After a ridiculous amount of time that I won’t specify, I’ve finished my Ideal body which is a nearly uncanny-valley level beauty. Golden ratio except a slimmer waist, short height at five feet, firm yet soft perfect-sized breasts(no painful ‘boing-boing’), slender hands, small feet, ivory-white sumptuous skin, a delicate oval-shaped face, large watery eyes with golden irises, dainty nose, luscious pink pouty lips and waist-length slightly iridescent silver hair(no body hair). I now dread that that goddess might come back and foil my evi...uh perfect plans. Moving on to the skills…

<Skills>
{passive}
[Soul Devourer 1](-100sp)
{active}
-none-

Just the one used up a large chunk of my remaining soul potential now sitting at seventy-three, but this is absolutely necessary in order to offset that slow learner curse and propel my strength further in the future. Soul devourer causes the souls of the recently departed in my vicinity to be drawn in and stripped of some soul potential before ‘moving on’; skills not possessed by user are stripped first and gained, then the remaining is absorbed purely as soul potential. Next is the blessings…

<Blessings>
[Eidetic Memory], [Don’t Mind Me](-50sp), [Status Manager](-20sp)

I receive immunity to mind altering effects from the don’t mind me blessing. Things like mind control, memory intrusion and others won’t effect me. Status manager let’s me disguise my skills and traits, even letting me toggle them on or off. I’ve verified that there is no way to see through status manager disguised status unless you have access to the world admin system. This is a must since I will need to hide much of my status so I won’t be immediately killed or enslaved. My bloodlines are basically all demons or monsters, and I’m about to get summoned in a human territory, probably in front of the king’s court and church too. I set up some default info for the status manager and made newly gained things to toggled off by default. The don’t mind me blessing is necessary to, among other things, prevent my master from irreversibly altering my ego with orders. While I will not mind being told what to do by a pretty mistress, I want to do it as myself. With this, my soul potential bank is mostly empty. Cultivation and attributes can be improved later. One attribute point is equal to a baby. Ten is average for an adult who has never trained. The percent in parentheses denotes the amount of control a person has over that attribute normally. It increases with training and will decrease when adding points to that attribute until further trained. Max attribute values for each cultivation stage is ten times higher than the last. Ten for stage zero, then one hundred at stage one and so on. By the way, this is the status those asshole humans will see if they appraise me…

<Status>
Name: Lilia | Age: 20 | Sex: Female
Race: Human
Cultivation Stages: {Body: 0}{Mind: 0}{Spirit: 0}{Divine: 0}{Law: 0}
Energy Reserves: {Qi: 10/10}{Mana: 10/10}{Spirit: 10/10}{Divine: 0/0}
Attributes: Str: 10(10%) | Vit: 10(10%) | Agi: 10(10%) | Int: 10(10%)
Soul Potential: 3
<Skills>
{passive}
-none-
{active}
-none-
<Traits>
-none-
<Blessings>
[Eidetic Memory], [Don’t Mind Me]
<Curses>
[Glass Cannon], [Slow learner], [Mute]

And,  Finalize!

“So, she finished. I wonder what took her so long to decide...WTF! Interesting! Let’s mark her for further observation to see how things turn out. This girl is perhaps the most entertaining thing to happen in the last few millennia. Hmm, let’s mess with her just a little bit. Tweak this here...and...a little over there. Heheheh. This will be FUN!”~Goddess