Walking into his room, Vael dropped the large black cage on the floor just as the door behind him slid shut.
His room was a simple one, just a bed, a table and a small cabinet attached to the wall right besides the bathroom door.
"God, this is such a mess," Vael muttered to himself as he crouched down to open the cage.
It had already been an entire day since his duel with Zathiel, and him returning back to when he was just a fresh eighteen-year-old academy freshman, yet he still hadn't found any explanation for how he had come back to this time, let alone the screen that floated constantly in the corner of his eyes.
--
Name: Vael Ashmere
Path of Progression: Mage
Cultivation: Spark (Mid Stage)
Title: God of Flesh
Domains: Biomancy (Level 1)
--
Aside from his mysterious regression to past, this screen in front of him was perhaps the most confusing thing of all.
In Vornak, his world, gods did reincarnate into mortal forms, and yes, it was common knowledge that such beings often saw floating scripts that helped them to easily access their domains and decipher the will of Vornak's consciousness.
Vael, however, wasn't one of those reincarnated gods; he was almost sure of that.
Yeah, sure, these gods did lack memories from their past lives, and most of them didn't know they were former gods. Still, their divine aura could be clearly identified during their awakening ceremony, something that had not happened when Vael had awakened two years ago.
Was it because he had eaten the body of that thrice-cursed Pyhroos?
Maybe that was it. Normally, drinking even a single drop of a god's true blood would be enough to incinerate any man from within. Heck, the only reason Vael had survived was because he'd received help from the consciousness of that dying world.
"Maybe Pyhroos divinity somehow bonded with my soul? I mean… that seems like the only explanation. The consciousness had said that he wanted to rid his world of Pyhroos's essence." he let out a deep sigh, while flipping the lid open.
Inside the cage were two corpses of a creature called Iron Bess, a reptile-like beast considered a delicacy among mages due to their ability to temporarily boost focus. He had bought these two only an hour ago from one of the nearby monster corpse shops.
Whatever that reason was, right now he needed to put it aside and focus on the thing in front of him.
Carefully, he reached into the cage, pulled out one of the Iron Bess, and placed it gently on the table wrapped in plastic sheeting.
"Let's see," he whispered, closing his eyes.
Although he had no idea what his domain was about or what it could do, its title did indicate that it had something to do with dead bodies.
Taking a deep breath, he focused inward, searching for a mental switch, like he was casting a spell, only this one a bit more instinctive, like a fifth limb, something that would activate his divine ability. When he found it, he redirected that focus toward the dead beast on the table.
Suddenly, his vision exploded.
A layered projection of glowing muscles and nerves began unfolding in front of his eyes.
"What the hell…" he muttered, narrowing his eyes at the projection.
It was like staring at one of those old anatomy posters, only this one was floating in the air and still looked alive. He could see everything, the organs, the veins, even the millions of tiny muscle strands packed under the skin. But that wasn't all.
Streams of light ran through the Iron Bess's body, all converging toward a small, spherical object in its chest, pulsing with faint golden energy. Each pulse grew weaker, slower. Surrounding it, like a haze, was a cloud of Brown particles suspended evenly throughout the projection.
"What is that?"
Vael reached out, carefully poking at the Brown cloud, and was shocked to find he could interact with it—pulling it out of the projection with his hand.
[You have received: Earth Affinity (3%). [Do you wish to consume it or store it?]
Eyes wide in disbelief, Vael nodded instinctively in his mind.
Consume it.
[You have consumed Earth Affinity (3%)]
[Your Vessel has unlocked Earth Affinity.]
[Countdown until assimilation- 12 hours.]
[Your status is being updated]
--
Affinities=
Water – 23%
Earth – 3%[12 hours]
--
Looking at the screen displaying Earth affinity caused Vael to nearly jump out of his skin, a wide grin spreading across his face.
He could do that?
One had to understand that in all the countless worlds discovered across the Grand Weave, although there were some ways to gain new elemental affinities, they were all incredibly rare and were sold at no less than several hundreds of million credits.
He, on the other hand, had just gained a new affinity from a dead beast, he had bought with a mere two hundred credits.
What did this even mean? Could he collect every elemental affinity in the known universe and stack them all in his body? And if he found more creatures with, say, earth affinity, could he boost the ones he already had?
All of a sudden, thousands of possibilities began racing through his mind, but he forced himself to stop as something else on the projection had caught his attention.
Out of the corner of his eye, hidden deep within the center of Iron Bess's body, he spotted a faint wisp of something flickering, like a flame, growing dimmer with each passing second.
Perhaps it was his new Domain, but he felt certain he already knew what that thing was.
A soul.
It made sense that the soul looked like it was fading. It had already been about an hour since the Iron Bess was killed.
Could he touch it?
Taking a deep breath, he reached into the projection and gently poked the wisp before plucking it out, a chill running through his body as he did so.
This…what could he even do with this?
He hadn't received a prompt from the screen, no message indicating he could consume it.
Suddenly his gaze shifted to the second Iron Bess still lying dead in the cage.
Could he?
Without wasting any time, he pulled the second Iron Bess out of the cage and similarly extracted its soul.
--
[Two lingering souls have been detected.]
[Do you wish to initiate fusion?]
[Y/N]
--
Without hesitation, Vael nodded eagerly, pulling the two wisps, merging them into each other.
What happened next was completely beyond his expectations.
The two souls flared violently, fighting one another as if struggling for dominance. At the same time, the dead bodies on the table began to convulse, their muscle and flesh tearing free from their corpses like streams of liquid and flying toward each other, merging, shifting, and shaping itself around the soul fragment.
Vael watched, stunned, as his mind received constant prompts asking how he wanted to sculpt the body, but he ignored all of them, eager to see what would happen if he didn't interfere.
The process was brutal. The flesh curled and fused into something entirely new, eventually encasing itself in a thick cocoon of blood.
For hours, he watched with bated breaths as nothing happened.
Then, a mental link clicked into place within his mind. The cocoon cracked open, revealing a reptile-like creature coated in viscera. But this one was different.
Its body easily twice the size of a normal Iron Bess.
Vael watched with bated breaths as the 'thing' raised its head, staring deep into Vael's eyes, and taking a weak step forward, before collapsing onto the table.
"What?"
Confused, Vael quickly summoned its projection.
Inside, the wisps of soul now combined into one were fading away, extinguishing into nothingness.
Was it because the souls had already been a lot weaker when he had taken them out?
Vael exhaled, shoulders slumping as the creature went limp, but as he stared at the half-born chimera twitching on the table, he couldn't help it as his lips curved and widened into a huge grin.
He threw his head back and laughed.
"Hah… oh, this is insane."
He wasn't even sure what he'd made; was it some sort of chimera, or something entirely else.
But that connection he had felt. It was impossible to describe but…
"This…" He gently picked up the chimera's corpse in his two hands. "This is going to change everything."