It took me nearly an hour to remove the 'leech'. I was more than powerful enough to do it, I could feel it, but without a proper technique, or even good control over my soulforce...

I had made many, many mistakes. I tried drowning the thing with my soulforce; didn't work, it just surrounded and encapsuled the leech without being able to crack its shell.

I tried grabbing it with soulforce and pulling; didn't work, the leech had a hell of a good grip on the victim's soul, and I would tear their soul asunder before tearing the leech away.

Eventually, I stumbled upon a winning method. I wedged in small tendrils of my soulforce inbetween the leech and the soul, slowly but surely separating them. The leech had six long 'legs' rooted deep into the girl's soul, and when the main body had been separated, I gently pulled them out one by one. It wasn't easy, and it required an incredibly precise control over both my mana and soulforce, but I eventually managed. The girl's soul was left with six slightly leaking 'puncture wounds', but I knew full well those would heal in a few days.

From there, I went case to case, sending batches of people inside Flora and removing their slave marks once they were out, as a kind of 'reward'. While I did this, I found out that only a maximum of five people could enter Flora at any given time, and that I didn't count towards that number. Curious stuff.

As I got more experienced in removing 'leeches', the time I took per each one dropped exponentially, with the last one only taking me three minutes. I felt like it wasn't only from experience though, but also the fact that such a strenuous exercise had somehow improved the control I had over my soul and soulforce. I still needed to encase it within my mana to prevent it from dissipating, but now I felt like I should be able to find a way to get around that.

I was improving. I had already known this for a while, but somehow the numerical value of my Soul Power didn't exactly correlate with my soul's actual power. The best way I could explain it was by comparing the soul to a human body.

In that analogy, the Soul Power Stat would be like the size of the body. Yes, being bigger made one much stronger by default (if you didn't factor in gravity), but it wasn't everything. Again, using the same analogy, for these past 2000 years my soul had been a 200-meter-tall giant, but an extremely lanky one. A skeletally thin one, riddled with slowly healing scars from my many skirmishes with dragons.

Now that I had been using it repeatedly, it was moderately toned, but still not really muscular. That meant that it could still get a lot stronger.

But what had I improved in by undoing these same marks wasn't the 'muscle' of my soul, but its fine control. If before the body. could only swing it's arms around randomly, now it could do so much more dexterously and it could even move its fingers independently. Again, still a long way until it got as good at controlling its body as it is able to.

"Excuse me, sir..."

I was woken up from my ponderings by an innocent, hesitant voice. I turned towards it, and I saw an impeccably beautiful girl, almost like she was shining, even behind all the wounds and dirtiness. Somehow, she smelled of camomille, and her voice was soothing and pleasing to the ear. I was puzzled for a moment, but then understanding flashed through my magitech eyes, and I cast [Grand Appraisal] on her.

'Indeed, she has unreasonably high Charm.'

She wasn't all that high-leveled, not yet in her 40s, but she had almost 300 Charm, most likely due to her rare class, [Seductress]. I had no clue about what the requirements for that were, but what I was more curious about was why she had even been captured with the two skills she had. One was, as the name of her class suggested, was [Seduction], and it-

"Hey... could you please take me with you? I won't be able to survive here in the middle of nowhere... I will get eaten by beasts, or... by men..."

She was teary at the end, barely squeezing the words out, but I knew it was just a play. A very elaborate one, in fact, using both of her Class Skills, [Acting], which was at a whopping level 7, and [Seduction], which was level 4. I could feel the strange, alluring energy flowing out from her words, but I wasn't at all affected by it.

'Ha! I have no hormones in this body! I'm invulnerable to your advances, you vile, vile woman!'

What I didn't know at the time was that, ever since The Wipe, as some called the day where The System appeared, hormones and other such things had been removed entirely, and instead, desires happened solely within the soul. Of course, that meant I would not be affected by such things. Falling back to my earlier metaphor, it would be like injecting an aphrodisiac that would turn normal people crazy to a 200-meter-tall giant. By the time it even spread out throughout its system, it would already be so diluted there would be no effect.

I could have acted like I fell for her trick, but I despised acting weak. Instead, I just let out a small pulse of [Soul Detection].

Indeed, she was that slave with the dark gray soul. Not as dark as any of the slavers, but it was well past the point of neutral gray.

'Well, maybe life forced her to do some evil deeds to survive... should I let her go with the other refugees or just deal with her now? Sheight cause them trouble...'

When the girl saw me hesitate, she most likely misunderstood, and seemed to be getting ready to cast her Skill on me again. I stopped her with my hand.

"I'll let you leave with the rest of the slaves because I'm not a fan of mindless killing, but do not dare use your Skills on others so selfishly again. I'm going to advise them to be on guard against you, too. That said, you should try to be a better person from now on. I don't know what you've gone through or done to survive until now, but it's never too late to repent. Here,"

I dropped some coins in her hands, of about 500 kayds in value, then also gave some to the rest of the ex-slaves, along with advising them to be wary of the [Seductress]. I was a bit miffed, since the money I'd given them amounted to about half of my funds, but I didn't really have a lot of uses for money anyways.

It would be cool to make a dramatic exit now, but I still had to charge Flora up to get her ready to go. I bade the the ex-slaves goodbye and entered her portal, telling them to use the carriages that belonged to the slavers as transportation to the nearest city if they wanted to.

Then, I walked inside Flora.

'So, is the second floor built?' I asked her.

'Umm, it warns me here that I'll be asleep for a while if I make it, so I decided to wait until you came back...'

'Good call. Does it say anything about consuming resources?

'No... It will improve my maximum DP, but it doesn't say anything about cost...'

'Good. Then I'll charge you up to full, then put you in portable form, and only then you'll start the upgrade. If it doesn't let you, we'll wait until we find a safe spot and do it there, alright?'

'Yup!'

And so we did. I used the time where my mana was regenerating to practice control of my soulforce, trying to make the tendrils that exited my body last for more than a few seconds. After a while, I managed to figured out how to condense more soulforce at the edges of the tendrils, slowing down their decay by quite a lot.

It was like a crude copy of my own soul membrane which, being at the peak of perfection, was pretty good reference material.

By the time Flora's DP was full, my soulforce could last about 30 seconds without disintegrating. It sounded like a pitifully snall time, and it was, but it was pretty much a tenfold increase in comparison to before.

And, luckily, Flora was able to proceed with the second floor upgrade without issues, even when I'm her compressed form. So, I lost my talking partner for the remainder of my journey towards Mount Hearth.

After a few days, I reached the foot of the mountain, and I belatedly realized... the place was a volcano. I don't know why I had taken so long to notice, but all the dots were there. I just hadn't connected them 'till now. Starting from it's freaking name, Mount Hearth, to smaller details like how the mining city sprawling beneath it was famous for its unnaturally hard purple obsidian. It was probably a material enhanced by mana, but it was still a volcanic rock at heart. The city also sold many types of gems which, if I remembered correctly only, formed under extreme heat or pressure.

Anyway, for me, this meant I would be diving straight into the innards of a volcano, even if it was a dormant one.

I didn't like this development.

Gritting my nonexistent teeth, I searched around the foot of the volcano, looking for any cave entrances, and only found one after hours of searching.

Inside, the humble cave diverged into an intricate and complex cave system, one I got lost in several times. But, as I made my way deeper into the caves, uncaring about the total lack of oxygen and the rough and jagged surfaces, one thought popped into my mind.

'Hot.'