The shard of the Control Circle that represented Justice floated solemnly before him. Vastarael's body, already scorched from the raw integration of the Divinity of Love, was trembling now. He would not allow his body to betray him.
But gods, did it hurt. The shard pulsed once.
The Tether he intended to bind it to, Memory Implantation and Extraction, manifested before him. A brain hovered in midair, marked with etchings of runes that glowed and shifted with each breath he took. The Control Circle shard began to crack before it shattered.
A burst of particles rushed into the floating brain. The effect was immediate and devastating.
The pain tore into Vastarael's skull first, then slithered down his spine. It wasn't just physical pain. It wasn't even mental. His arms spasmed slightly, then locked back into place. His body was still in lotus position despite the internal convulsions. He let the pain rip through him. A ringing sound echoed through the glade but he didn't care about it. Only the pain made him since. His Body and Soul Reconstruction still wouldn't respond.
His body was on fire. His shoulders had blood running down the inside. The internal damage was monumental and yet he sat, refusing to scream even as his nerves begged for mercy.
Justice had been bound. Now came the Divinity of Protection.
As the third shard floated forward, Vastarael's breath slowed down and for a moment, the pain dimmed.
"This is going to be extremely painful."
The third shard floated forward. Its glow was gentler than the previous two, at least in appearance but Vastarael knew better. He didn't even flinch as the four representations formed before him. He opened his eyes for a moment to look at them.
An Energy Rune flickered to life first, scribbled in that ink he had once bled during the early days of his Rune Drawing training with his father. It reminded him of memories of failure, repetition and hundreds of sleepless nights trying to understand the basics of runes.
Then came the sapphire crystal representing Sapphire Materialization. The edges of the crystal bled with light so vibrant it was nearly white.
Next was the Healing Circle, the first Circlecraft Mystic he had painstakingly drawn for himself. The lines were uneven and imperfect but it worked. And that made it precious. He never used it ever since his Body Reconstruction got stronger but he sure missed it.
He always wanted to change it but for some odd reason, he didn't want to. He remembered it when he used it to heal Adelasta after the Minor God Stephos attacked them when he was thirteen. It was special to him and out of memory and respect, he never bothered to upgrade it. It would always be his first Mystic Circle.
And finally, the most grotesque of them all were two hovering eyeballs, each perfectly spherical and lifeless, yet they saw everything. His Mystic Eyes of Awareness had saved him more times than he could count but they had also cursed him for them to be permanent.
The shard pulsed once before it cracked. No sound came from it. The divine essence within it surged forward, drawn toward the representations like they were starved for it.
The rune sizzled. The crystal groaned. The healing circle twitched, its lines unravelling and redrawing in real time. But the eyeballs didn't take it in quietly. They began to shudder violently as if resisting the surge of divine power being poured into them.
Then the pain came.
"AAAAAAGH!"
Birds fled. The air itself recoiled. And yet Vastarael didn't move. He didn't break his lotus posture. His hands trembled, his skin blistered and veins burst along his jaw and neck but he stayed. The sapphire crystal cracked. Tiny shards spun outward like razor stars before pulling themselves back in and fusing again. He could feel every inch of it.
His eyeballs boiled, not physically of course but the Mystics that represented them sizzled, the nerves within flickering with divine information far too vast for an immortal structure. His body kept trying to activate Body and Soul Reconstruction.
It refused to work.
Vastarael almost fell forward but he held himself upright, gasping now, his voice torn from the scream. Then, slowly, the agony faded. The rune flickered once more. The crystal, once cracked, now pulsed steadily. The Healing Circle glowed brighter and the eyeballs... blinked.
He wanted to collapse. Every part of him begged for it. However, his resolve stood taller than his body ever could.
"Three done. One... to go."
Water was next and it would be hell.
Because this one wasn't about who he had become. It was about what he was. It involved his body and soul. The pain was already unbearable, but this was going to be close to death.
Vastarael knew it. Every corner of his mind screamed the same truth. What he was about to do wasn't just dangerous, it was soul-shattering. No one in Spheraphase had ever tried Divine Integration, not even the most crazed Divines of old. It wasn't theory but insanity forged into logic. It was something he invented that came from the deepest folds of his essence as a Divine. If he failed here, there would be no recovery. Not even Adelasta's Body and Soul Reconstruction could save him.
The fourth shard of the Control Circle hovered before him. It pulsed once, hard enough to make the air around it warp, as if reality itself resisted its presence. Then it drifted forward. The fifth shard, representing Time, vanished. It was now the sole Divinity, making it even more powerful.
Around him, the representations emerged.
Body and Soul Reconstruction revealed itself as a transparent anatomical body. It was skinless, genderless and humanoid, hovering midair like a dissected corpse suspended in liquid thought. Its nerves glowed faint blue. Omniphage appeared in the form of his nine pseudo-cores, spinning in the shape of a perfect circle, with his Divine Core floating at the center like a cursed sun. They throbbed with such pressure that the space surrounding them distorted.
Limitless emerged. It was a hovering puddle of liquid water that seemed shallow and insignificant, but rippled endlessly and unnaturally. And finally, Soul Vision appeared. It was a golden orb that radiated an eerie golden smoke, leaking memories, emotions, and faint echoes of thoughts that weren't his. It was beautiful and disturbing.
Vastarael's eyes lowered.
"I'm definitely going to be unconscious for a while..."
The shard hovered above all the representations. Then it shattered.
The second it hit, Vastarael's back arched violently as if lightning had shot through his spine and exploded inside his chest. His breath vanished. His thoughts scattered. The pseudo-cores snapped in unison like glass under pressure and his Divine Core cracked with a piercing sound that rang across the Control Circle before it shattered as well.
Then, all at once, everything inside him shattered.
His bones gave out with wet cracks, folding him inward like a collapsing marionette. His nerves snapped like threads on a puppet being torn apart. His Aeterium soul, meant to be nearly indestructible, cracked. A fracture spread through it, and then another and another. It shattered with a quiet ding, like porcelain dropped on marble.
His nine pseudo-cores disintegrated into dust. His Divine Core shattered. His eyes dulled. His pupils dilated. His breathing stopped.
For ten full seconds, he ceased to exist.
He fell from the lotus position as if lifeless, his body landing with a dull, wet thud on the glade's grass.
He screamed.
It tore through the barrier of silence he had placed with his Soundproof Runes around the glade, warping it violently. The runes barely held.
Every muscle in his body convulsed as if being reattached one nerve at a time. His joints popped back into place at wrong angles before snapping again to the right ones. His ribs reconstructed with slow, scraping movements like stone being chiseled by invisible blades. His Aeterium soul pieced itself back together, groaning under the weight of divine essence flooding into it. The golden orb of Soul Vision shattered now and the smoke from it rushed into his pupils, forcing them open.
The nine pseudo-cores reappeared, spinning rapidly. The Divine Core was slower, each piece dragging itself into position, as if unsure it even wanted to return. His mouth opened but the scream was now silent. His body was leaking so much Soul Energy that the glade around him began to die. The trees turned to ash. The flowers wilted instantly. The ground turned gray and cracked. His very presence had become caustic. And still, he forced himself to move.
With everything left in him, Vastarael activated Omniphage not by will, but by demand. The passive ability turned active, dragging in essence from every piece of his soul and around him.
Streams of blue and golden energy erupted from his skin. The floating puddle that was Limitless started merging into his chest and the anatomical body burst into thin blue light, fusing with his skin and spirit. His broken body reconstructed slowly but brutally. Veins reformed. Bones hardened. Muscles regrew. Nerves rewired. And finally, the last drop of the shard's power entered him.
The Water Divinity had completed its integration. A system notification blinked in the corner of his vision. He opened one bloodshot eye, saw it, and smiled faintly, his lips trembling with pain.
"Done..."
And then everything went black as his head fell to the side.