The fact that the System had defined me as an "Astral Phantom" was an extremely unpleasant discovery.
According to Kopusha's memories of the Animancy lecture, phantoms were creatures of the Astral that only sought to devour life. I had likely gained the cursed affinity when I had absorbed the soul of the Dryad within the tree.
Another lecture segment suddenly swam to the forefront of my mind.
"What if I were to integrate the soul of another human being with my own professor?" One of the students asked.
"From the tests we ran on death-row subjects… such an action would be very unwise. If a full soul is injected into a human, the end result is split-personality and insanity caused by extreme personality dilution and massive soul-decay. Essentially, the merger of two souls produces a schizoid. Such unfortunates are defined as… aberrations. The corrupted soul becomes so addicted to extra power that it craves more and more, the affliction driving it desperate for warmth it cannot ever attain. If the afflicted individual is fed more souls, the original personality vanishes completely, diluted into nothing," the Animancer explained.
"What about just a fragment?" The next question came from the auditorium.
"Ah, an excellent question. An integration of a small soul-fragment into the soul produces small degree of split personality. Partial soul-decay occurs as the original soul absorbs and rejects various bits of the new soul-fragment. While it is less dangerous compared to a full integration it is still... extremely inadvisable due to the soul-decay and loss of your own personality."
The students made whispering noises at each other at the revelation.
"Yes, consuming the souls of others is extremely dangerous, akin to cutting your chest open to insert the organ of another being," the lecturer concluded.
I shuddered.
Devouring human souls would set me on a very dark path towards madness.
I definitely felt it then, a gnawing, animalistic compulsion, an unnerving desire to consume more fragments of hollow people around the tree.
Damnation!
I now knew that the compulsion would get worse if I ate more people, turning me into an aberration. I was lucky that the dryad was so young and incomplete when she died - her Astral imprint wasn't as dangerous as the consumption of a full human soul. Her [Chrysalis] was interrupted by the apocalyptic destruction of the Alanian civilization before she managed to evolve her shape from the base tree.
The mere thought of eating more imprints in that moment made the rational part of me feel disgusted, sickened by the desire for power and warmth.
I looked up again. The blue thread was incredibly suspicious.
Kopusha's memories suggested that it looked like a soul thread-trap, something that could have been set by a Novazem mage with the knowledge of souls. According to what she knew, the vision of Yuri Gagarin could have been created by a [Charisma] spell-song tacked on its end like a lure to resemble a generic, desirable outcome to [trap a soul in a soul-battery to power a golem, or worse... ]
If this was a spell-singer's trap for souls, then it would lead me to a phylactery from which I would not be able to escape.
I considered the information of the dead mage. Could such really be the case? This blue thread as far as I knew... had somehow reached Earth, my world, not Kopusha's...
Maybe the thread left this place too and went elsewhere? It was possible. Anything was possible, considering that I died on Earth and was now in some kind of an afterlife for mages.
Either way, I didn't trust the blue thread, had no faith in the words of the pretend Yuri Gagarin.
Just the appearance of something that used my own memories to lure me to follow it was incredibly suspicious. If someone was really fishing for souls to devour or to experiment upon... then a god-like being promising 'a narrative continuation' seemed like the perfect lure.
I had to get stronger.
I had to gain power and learn more before leaving the Astral to the world of the living. I floated out of the tree, scouting the gloomy terrain for anything else Kopusha could recognize.
If there were currents in this cursed Ocean of death, they were caused by something. Something had to gather or leak power. Of course!
I swam against the current that pushed me away, hoping to find an imprint of power.
After a while, passing through the seemingly endless field of dead things… I saw it. An old, cracked, looming black obelisk!
An Alanian Astral Engine. Yes! As far as the Agromancer Acolyte Kopusha recalled, this machine gathered power and kept wild beasts and Astral Phantoms away from houses as its core function.
I flew towards the looming obelisk, circling it. The dark obelisk tried to push me away, but I fought the current stemming from it with all of my strength.
There! A glowing crack in the base of the structure! I flung my tiny body into the small shear located on a hexagonal snowflake-like base and clung to it for dear life. Something sparkled, shimmered within the small crack.
An Alanian power battery imprint! Yes.
I shaped my body into something akin to a riftia pachyptila, commonly known as the giant tube worm, a marine invertebrate denizen of the Pacific Ocean that lives near hydrothermal vents.
I sacrificed some of my threads, pulled energy from them and they turned pale, calcifying me to the crack in the battery.
I extended most of my threads into all directions, trying to catch the current of power leaking from the old battery imprint.
It felt warm and didn't fill my mind with new, painful memories. Perfection.
The current started to feel like it was burning me. My small, insignificant body wasn’t strong enough to handle it.
The memories of the Dryad told me what to do next. I had to change, had to adapt to the environment I was in… had to grow and evolve into something else, something that could naturally survive the Astral Ocean.
I activated the [Chrysalis] skill. I wasn't too sure exactly what I would metamorphize into, but it was a lot better than simply following whatever dastardly trap was set for me at the end of the blue thread.
My mind slowly faded into the sweet embrace of dreams as most of my body folded into itself, calcified and hardened, gathering power for my next evolution.
I knew that I was dreaming because I was floating in empty nothingness as if my mind was swimming through and endless dark mire. Occasionally, flashes of comprehension emerged, but they were very brief and far in between. The Dryad part of me told me that this was normal, the whole point of being a dryad was gradual, incremental, slow growth.
The brilliant and now long dead Agromancer Kopusha had designed a masterpiece, a pinnacle of Magecraft achievement - the [Chrysalis] skill. The Acolyte of Tricameron didn't do it alone in a vacuum - she had scouted countless libraries of the Citadel, combined Animancy with Agromancy based on thousands of research song-spells and used incredible artifacts produced by her now fallen civilization. Kopusha's dryad was a "magibiotek" experiment, a mag-organic-anima-construct as she labelled her thesis on Mag-organic life. Its seed, its magical programming, was set up in a way that the dryad could survive almost anywhere on planet Novazem.
Kopusha had chosen to plant her tree in her favorite park, close to Skyisle Valley town, surrounded by lush boreal forests and glacier covered mountains. In her final evolution, had the Seditionist uprising never occurred, Leemy would have emerged from her tree as a lovely, human-shaped girl formed from moss, bark and ferns, a crown of branches and flowers topping her head.
However, Kopusha could have chosen to plant the dryad's seed somewhere else. For example, she could have planted a seed near a volcano, and then Leemy would have turned into a volcanic tree and become a spirit avatar with her hair made of flames.
Or... the Alanian Acolyte could have planted Leemy into a glacier and then the final result would be a girl made of mosses and lichens, rocks and a head covered in icicles, a very cold creature indeed, able to survive the harshest and coldest climate.
There was of course a downside to every choice being made here. A tree made of bark did not survive the wall of flames. A girl made from fire would not survive a snowstorm and a girl made from ice would melt and suffer as soon as she came down from the mountain.
As the Astral tree slowly absorbed power leaking from the broken Astral Engine battery, it grew in size and ever so slowly evolved to survive in the Astral. Whatever would come out of the tree, would be a creature of the Astral Ocean, one that would feel at ease in this place and be incredibly weak and fragile elsewhere.
In the brief flashes of awakening, I realized that I could ever-so-slowly, mentally nudge the process of evolution in a direction that I desired - something that Leemy had never done because she simply lacked the mental capabilities to do so as a small shard of Kopusha's soul.
Could I produce viruses or bacteria? The answer to that was a big NO, since my Dryad skills were pathetically weak and couldn't manufacture something so minute... but something the size of a large spore could actually work!
I thought of the most effective, the most dangerous creature from earth and arrived at a very satisfying conclusion. Mold. Mold fit perfectly within the Green-magic-design of the dryad. The tree could actually create mold... and not any random mold. Because I was evolving into an Astral tree, I could begin producing Astral fungus inside of the Life Furnace within the tree.
One of the most dangerous types of fungi from Earth was the Cordyceps fungus. A few Soviet biochemistry researchers like myself had explored the bewildering fungus that was found in the Amazon jungle.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, an insect-pathogenic fungus, was first discovered by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859. Most Cordyceps species of fungus are endoparasitoids - meaning they posses the terrifying ability to control insects and other arthropods, some even able to become parasites on top of other fungi.
O. unilateralis infected ants of the tribe Camponotini, with the full pathogenesis being characterized by alteration of the behavioral patterns of the infected ant. To put in plain terms, the fungus turned the ant into a zombie version of itself. Once infected, the ant left its colony and foraging trails, heading up to an area of humidity suitable for fungal growth. Controlled by the monstrous fungus, the ant then attached itself to a vein on the underside of a leaf and slowly died as new fungal spores grew inside it. The ant took four to ten days to die, resulting in a mushroom-like structure growing from the ants head that bloomed and ruptured in the end, releasing more fungus spores into the air.
Interestingly enough O. unilateralis was also susceptible to fungal infections, which limited its spread. Otherwise, it was known to devastate huge ant colonies, spreading unabated.
I very much doubted that there would be another type of Astral Fungus around, as this place seemed dead and devoid of life.
. . .
As I discovered, [Chrysalis LV 0] skill was... ridiculously slow and inefficient.
Something had interrupted my dreaming. A glowing... something emerged from the gloom.
A strange, fractal jellyfish thing was roaming the wasteland of broken men. Its shimmering tentacles sucked the remnants of life and memories out of the hollow, dead things as it moved towards me.
Shit! That was a phantom. A creature of the Astral Ocean.
A local killer whale!
The silver-blue, jellyfish-shaped hunter whale saw me, grew in size as it got close. Its razor covered tentacles spread out, aiming for me.
It reached the black Obelisk and then... comically slammed into an invisible wall.
It screeched horrifically in what sounded like ultrasound and began to circle the perimeter of the invisible field, searching for a way to reach me... to get to my lovely, glowing, emerald tree.
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