The trip back was far less eventful. The further he got from the Void, the more the metaphorical darkness receded, to the point that he imagined he could see the effects of his supposed blessing from Void, [Void Walker], in how it was affecting his surrounding soul.

  It was obvious that the actual Void wasn’t stored in his soul, that it should just be another of his memories, but his experiences were telling him something else. Perhaps by getting a blessing, it changed the effects those memories had, truly tainting his soul by storing a very real section of the Void inside it.

  The question now was: what to do with this little sliver of Void?

  The Achievement stated that he’d gain access to the Void affinity easier, but he’d still gained no such thing, seeming to hint towards how he was just flat out incompatible with it. He didn’t know what qualities the Void affinity was looking for, but it didn’t seem he had them in the same way his anger aligned with Wrath or his intentions aligned with Kindness. Hell, even his introversion tended to align with Soul.

  Nonetheless, he now knew he had a real, tangible piece of Void inside him, for all that did for the future. He would find a way to draw strength from it at some point, but right now, he focused on his current issue of tying his Identity to his Body.

  Now that he was going the right way, there wasn’t much interesting change. Everything became brighter, and he started to encounter more recent memories. It seemed that his soul was something of a Russian nesting doll, with each experience encapsulating all the previous, and his most surface layer being the current moment.

  It was on the surface of his Soul where he finally found a change in how Connection interacted with him- though not immediately reaching the end.

  As his vision popped above the surface of his soul, he saw that Connection still did not end quite yet.

  The current memory this line of Connection sat upon was something akin to the sensation of touch on his chest. In other words, the present sensation of touch, as he’d finally reached the current moment, and it was still changing in time with his body.

  He continued to follow Connection as it snaked around the surface of his soul, occasionally dipping in and out of memories but never straying far from the current moment until, eventually...

  He was right back where he started.

  The same feeling of touch in the same point on his chest, he realized that he’d somehow made a full loop. Looking around for the path he’d come from, he could see none, so he did it again, this time being more aware of the location on his soul.

  No matter how hard he tried though, he could not perceive where Connection overlapped with itself. It seemed to never end at all, as there was no one place to simply untie it, and he got the feeling that he’d never succeed if he didn’t change his goal.

  The Skill was Conceptual in nature, so it was probably doing some Leviathan-bullshit to only partially exist and become some sort of non-euclidean shape that overlapped in some place without ever touching its end, but honestly he didn’t need to understand it to take advantage.

  Instead of attempting to untie Connection, he simply had to change where it was tying. Right now, it linked up only to his memories and sensations, probably because those were the parts of him that Iora broke. What he needed instead was for it to link up to a more esoteric part, his Identity.

  If he couldn’t untie the entire structure, then it would remain a loop. He could just use that loop as a… lasso? He could lasso his soul. The thought made him laugh but he got back into it.

  Pulling up Solidity, he knew it would be integral to what he was doing. While it might be possible for him to do an independent evolution of Solidity, allowing the Skill to accomplish his goal of becoming a spirit-human hybrid, he did still want to be a Reaper, so he wanted to work that into the construct.

  He didn’t want to take too long though, feeling exposed without Alorans help in hiding him, so he quickly checked how much time he’d taken in studying his soul, finding he had no reason to be worried since it’d hardly passed the five-minute mark.

  In his soul, he could move as fast as he could think and boy could he think fast.

  A bit more secured, Dei tried working out exactly what he was going to do by first focusing on Solidity.

  It was hard to see the structure of it normally, but since he’d pulled up a massive portion of his Identity, he spotted it now. It was very similar to Connection in that it formed strings of sorts that would interweave between his Identity and the rest of his soul, but it wasn’t exactly holding anything together. His Identity could easily pull away from it, and he watched as the strings of Solidity would release if he moved his spiritual body at all, retracting into his soul and hiding away.

  When he followed where they went, he could see they did more than just stop at a level just below the surface of his Soul, they continued on to somewhere else.

  Now following these, he was only partially surprised to see that they didn’t take a path through his memories. Rather, they went to the part dictating his instincts and body. All the physical aspects of himself if his higher brain functions were completely removed from the equation.

  ‘Fuck I’m glad I have [Soulspeak], if I didn’t have an instinctual understanding of my soul I’d be so screwed right now.’

  Nevertheless, it was important to see. Everything was clean and running well right now, but Dei could understand that a strain would be placed on himself if his body said “You are twenty years old” but his mind said “you are one year old,” and it was here that the issue resided.

  For how tough the Fortitude affinity was though, Solidity was a very fragile Skill. It was intentionally malleable so Dei could still Project and his body could still grow faster than his mind, that way it wouldn’t stand in the way of natural human processes.

  Fortitude was a human affinity, and it wanted to ensure he stayed as human as possible, but that was now a flaw in the Skill he’d need to fix by making it more Leviathan-based.

  Seeing that, he knew what he needed to do- he had to run the sutures of Connection along Solidity, braiding their purpose together. Connection was a much more rigid shape, so it would be a permanent change unless he redid all of this again.

  Something told him that wouldn’t be a good idea though. As it was, both Solidity and his soul were more malleable than usual. It took him a moment to realize, but they were more easily changed because Solidity and his Class were at their evolutions, in other words his Skill and soul were in flux.

  Dei started to doubt if he’d have been able to do what he was about to if he’d leveled up even a single time, because that would lock in the changes his Class made to him.

  Although… The Skills from it did already merge with his other Skills, so it was clearly tied deeply into him anyway. If he tried changing his Class, would it be possible? Would the System disassemble his Skills to retrieve the ones he’d taken from it?

  A shiver went down his spine at the thought, he wouldn’t even try.

  Point being, now was the time when such a change to his soul structure would work best, and it was time to get started.

  He had no real way of doing this other than by feel, but the first thing he did was search for the nearest form of Connect. When he did though, he ran into something of a problem- Connection would have to dive deeply into his soul, so he couldn’t just use the surface structure.

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  No, he had to find a deeper part, and run that along Solidity until it was at the surface. Really, there was only one option for that.

  The point where Connection dived deeper into his soul would have to be moved, and he already knew this would be at best deeply uncomfortable.

  Finding that same sensation on his chest, Dei gently took hold of it, and nudged it to the side, towards his Identity.

  Immediately, his physical body opened its eyes and vomited on the ground, misaligning his projection. Not that he blamed it, as even that small act felt like there were worms tangled throughout his entire body, and every single one twitched at the same time.

  Spiritual Dei sighed. “This is gonna hurt you a whole heck of a lot more than it’s gonna hurt me.”

  “Aauughh just get on with it. No matter my spasming, it doesn’t seem harmful. Don’t stop til the end.”

  Spiritual Dei grimaced. He’d have to experience the sensation when they remerged their minds. Still, they didn’t seem to need to be aligned until right at the end, when his Projection would have to rejoin his body for the last bit.

  Not wasting any more time, he was as gentle and quick as he could be, but there was simply nothing to ease the burden. His physical body almost immediately collapsed to the ground, away from the puddle he’d made earlier and spasming violently.

  The Projection kept a close watch on the main soul, watching as his memories were only partially hindered and moved around harmlessly to follow with [Connection], which he was pretty sure would cause issues later for him to fix. What he really watched for wasn’t the memories themselves, but the cracks between, watching them also move along with [Connection].

  ‘Okay that’s REALLY gonna cause some issues later’ he thought, which made him stop.

  While he couldn’t tell, there was no doubt a Leviathan was watching. If he tried to brute force the issue, he’d probably be struck down. ‘I gotta be smart about this.’

  Moving it back to the original position, much to his body’s displeasure, Dei went deeper into his soul. He tried and failed to dive deeper into the pink cracks, finding that it repelled him in much the same way as the Void had before.

  Instead, he went to the Connection tying it all together and began the long, tedious process of pulling it free from his memories.

  The soul was a very fluid thing, and it took on a more gelatinous consistency now. When he pulled the connection out of it, the soul was easily pushed back into place, molded perfectly into where it needed to go.

  The first time he tried, he felt the sweat dripping down his face as he waited for the entire structure to collapse as his soul unraveled, killing him, but luckily that didn’t seem to be the case.

  Aloran was right, his soul was more than healed, at least for these purposes. He couldn’t be sure about deeper down, but his success on the surface gave him confidence.

  Piece by piece he went, pulling more and more of the sutures through the squishy walls of his Soul and leaving them to hang freely in whatever metaphorical open space existed between his memories.

  He tried to make it a quick process for the sake of his body and, for the most part, succeeded. Right now his body functioned at normal thinking speed, while his was more than twenty times that. It hardly had a chance to process what was happening before most of it was done, and by then he could simply shoot through the rest.

  He gave himself a significant amount of slack, because he really did not know how much he’d need. First he started deeper in his soul, working his way up to the surface before disconnecting the surface parts as well. At the same time, he memorized the pattern took when wrapping itself around his soul and making sure to not forget it.

  Once he had enough slack, he carefully dragged the structure over to the part dictating his instinct, and ran into another problem.

  It was fat. Compared to Solidity, Connection was a mass of bulk with little focus on elegance. That didn’t make much sense to him, as Connection was supposedly a much more sophisticated Skill, but he was left guessing if that was simply how large it had to be.

  The thought made him panic. If he couldn’t shrink it down, he’d be shit out of luck because there was no way he could braid the two Skills together right now. He had to try.

  With a force of will, he tried compressing Connection down and, surprisingly, it came to him easily. Instantly, the glow of Connection began to shine multiple times brighter than it was before, and he felt a sense of accomplishment.

  Not from himself, but from the Connection Skill itself.

  ‘Is this thing alive? Or is it a window into the Leviathan? Doesn’t matter, I’m on the right track. Don’t know why it was so thick, but that’s something to ask Aloran when I don't feel like I’m on a timed cooking show with my soul as the dish.’

  Even though he easily felt himself push it to be smaller, he went further than that, focusing everything he could on making it as dense as possible. Only when he could do no more did Dei move down the Skill, wanting it to be as sturdy and dense as possible.

  Luckily, this part seemed to be a much easier time for his body, as it couldn’t feel it at all. Something else that concerned him though was how the glow along his skin disappeared, but it would probably come back once he rejoined the Skill to his soul.

  Once he’d moved along the entire length, getting something much finer than what he had before, Dei realized it was time for him to rejoin with his body and start the final process of merging himself together.

  Before that though, he really wanted to get this right, so he went about moving down Connection once more, increasing its density and making it a much finer structure. The Skill seemed to like it when he did that, so he’d make it all better if he could. Once more moving down the path to the Void, Dei was faced with what he had to do to improve the rest of it, if he couldn’t even go down.

  Without finding a solution, Dei instead made the Connection Skill slowly grow thicker as it approached the Void, letting it take on the initial thickness by the time it shot out into the darkness.

  Sighing from the mental exhaustion he already faced, Dei moved back to the original purpose he came here for by moving back up and out of his own soul. When he was back in his projection body, he finally gave a heads up to his physical self.

  “I’m rejoining now. Ready for the final step? Any insights or thoughts on things I’m missing?” He asked, knowing well that they were literally identical.

  “Ugh, no. You’re good. I never want to do this again,” Physical Dei said.

  “Well if this works, it won't even be possible, because we’re going to be mer-”

  “Yea yea yea chatterbox, just hurry up.”

  Spiritual Dei scrunched his face but did as told, rejoining with his body.

  He had to grit his teeth as he remembered how he made the process of remerging painful, in exchange for growing the strength of his soul any time he did so.

  When that was over, he tried to not dwell on the uncomfortable memories his body had about him rummaging through his own soul and quickly sat back up to lean against the wall, hoping to keep at least a little bit of comfort for the next part.

  Gently bringing his sight back to the loose parts of Connection, he guided it back to Solidity once more, this time significantly easier since it was not pulling at his soul with each movement.

  ‘Not much anyway…’ he thought, still feeling a gentle discomfort because of how it was pushing a few memories out of the way and pulling some of his deeper ones ever so slightly.

  When he was in the right position, he started the process. Bringing Connection together with the Solidify Skill, he started on intertwining the two.

  Starting with the base of Solidity, Dei ran Connection through that part of his soul, was about to move up the Skill when he ran into something of a problem.

  He intended to braid the two together, but for that he’d need only three strings. Solidity had like, fifty or sixty.

  Sighing, he set Connection down, then went about braiding then re-braiding the parts of Solidity together, until he had exactly two lines, the ends of each held in place by the parts of his souls they were tied to on each end.

  Next, he brought up Connection once more. Though he’d shrunk it down a lot, it was still rather thick for a single line of Solidity, which worked out well because they were now of equal thickness with the changes he’d made to both Skills.

  He could already feel that Solidity had evolved in some way with how much he’d changed it, but he ignored that for now. It was still at level one hundred. Even if it was evolved, he could change it until that evolution was locked in by him getting the Skill to level one hundred and one.

  Finally, finally setting about to finish his original purpose, Dei began the process of braiding Connection with Solidity, going about carefully to ensure he didn’t miss a single loop.

  As he reached the end of Solidity, he threaded the newly changed Skill through his Identity, feeling a pressure behind his eyes as he did so. Pushing it out the other side and breaching the surface of his soul, where the extra length of Connection still sat, floating in the Presence surrounding his main soul.

  Dei sighed. The process was done, and he felt his mind explode with notifications, but he resisted the temptation to open them quite yet. He couldn’t just leave all this Connection floating around, so he went through the arduous process of recreating the entire pattern it originally sat in, slightly changed only because it breached the surface of his soul in a different location now.

  Meticulously, he recopied every bump, dive, angle, and slope in the Skill until at long last, he was done.

  Breathing deeply, he held it there for a moment and opened the very first notification.

  [Race Altered: Gem Dweller Human has been altered into Gem Dweller Union]

  "We Unionizing"