After reviewing my skills, I closed my status and decided to continue my hunt of monsters.
'Now that my hunt to gain all worthwhile skills is complete, I should continue to explore and level up. I should probably also search for the boss while I'm at it.'
After giving it a bit more thought I decided to summon my clone to increase my exploration and leveling speed.
Soon after black smoke manifested in front of me before dispersing revealing a copy of myself with an annoyed face.
"Took you long enough! I thought you would summon me after you entered the dungeon, but instead I was just waiting like an innocent maiden who just got abandoned by a bast**d!"
"Oh, sorry," I said a bit embarrassed, but then a thought occurred to me. "But what do you mean you were waiting? Were you not unsummoned?" I asked confused.
"Oh right, I didn't tell you, did I? I can explain it to you if you truly want me to." He said arrogantly. "First you need to know what it means to be a true clone. Now a true clone as you would expect is well, a true clone. It possesses a mind of its own, or you could say a soul. As you would expect it isn't easy to create a soul, so you need something of equal value, or you need enough power and mana to brute force the process. The only way you could create a soul since you are so weak is to sacrifice a part of yours or te-"
"Wait but isn't that dangerous!?" I asked concerned.
After I asked this, they seemed even more annoyed than before, and after a few seconds they answered me. "First, please don't interrupt me again. Second, to answer your question it is. As I was trying to say before, the only way you could create a soul was to sacrifice ten percent of yours. This happened during the process of your advancement and under normal circumstances I would guess it would have taken around a year for your soul to fully recover."
"Really? Then I guess it was good that I managed to gain soul regeneration before."
"Your right, it was good that you managed to gain soul regeneration especially for one specific reason."
"What is it?" I asked a bit impatiently.
"I did ask you not to interrupt me, but I will allow it this time." He said pridefully. "Anyway, the main reason that it is especially good is soul damage. Well, you see a soul can only take a certain amount of damage before it will become crippled, or to be exact if your soul is damaged more than 80% than your soul would be crippled. Now take a guess what would happen if you were to advance two more times in short succession knowing the fact that it takes 10% of your soul to create a true clone."
After a quick second I realized what they were trying to communicate. "You mean my soul would become crippled!? That's good to know, but I have to ask what this has to do with me asking about you waiting while you were unsummoned."
After asking this they seemed a bit embarrassed with a faint blush on their cheeks.
"Of course, I remember." They said not wanting to admit how they got sidetracked. "Since you really want to know we need to go back a bit. As I mentioned true clones are made of parts of your soul, making true clone's subordinate souls. This means our souls are connected which allows for quite a few things. First is the stuff you already know about like experience and power sharing. Second is that I have innate knowledge on souls as a created soul which is why I know all of this. And the third and final benefit is that when I'm not summoned, I can enter your soul scape allowing me to not only view things through your eyes and see your memories, but I can also create a lucid dream-like space."
"Oh, so that's what you meant. You were waiting inside of my soul scape."
"Yeah, that's what I just said. You're not the brightest are you."
"NO! I am smart." I said embarrassed. "I got the third highest grade in the school, and my intelligence stat is extremely high."
"Don't lie to yourself. Intelligence has nothing to do with IQ. Intelligence can only increase memory, thinking speed, and total mana pool. Just because an idiot can think faster it doesn't make them a genius, it only increases the number of idiotic thoughts they make per second."
"Anyway," I said trying to divert the topic. "We should probably go back to the reason I summoned you. I wanted to ask you to go around exploring the environment and hunting any monster you see."
"It's a bit tedious, but fine I guess."
After saying that they then turned around and started to walk away, but a thought occurred to me.
"Before you go you should use transformation."
Hearing this they were confused and gave me a look telling me to go on and explain.
"Well," I said trying to explain. "As you know, you have your own personality so I figured that you should probably have your own appearance and name, so you aren't confused as me."
"I guess that makes sense, and I have been meaning to do something about my appearance. Afterall why would I want to look exactly like you when were so different."
"All right, then transform and tell me what you want your name to be so I know what to call you."
After hearing this they started to transform. The first thing to change was their height increasing from 160cm to 180cm. After that their appearance started to become more refined with their face becoming more handsome. The final thing that started to change was the color and length of their hair, tails, and eyes.
Their hair shortened going from lower chest length to only shoulder length as the color of their hair started to change. The color went from black to a deep red and fading to a bright red at the ends with the same change happening to their tails. Once that was done their eyes changed from amber to orange completing their transformation.
"I'm done." They said. "As for my name, you can call me Diablo."
'It's quite edgy but it somehow fits them.'
"Alright," I said with a smile. "Then let's split up Diablo. Let me know if you encounter anything of note."
"Alright, I'll let you know if I encounter the boss or anything else."
After that we both went in two different directions and started to continue exploring and hunting.
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