The dungeon contacted me before I managed to contact him, saying that his lesson plans were completed and he was ready to teach me. I could just feel the tension leaving my body when I heard that.

His first lesson was on the basics, and it was a lot more interesting than I thought it was going to be. Though that is partially because I already knew quite a bit thanks to Fate and was able to make connections between what he was saying and what I already knew.

I already knew that the soul consists of an outer ‘shell’ and an inner ‘core’, what I didn’t know was that the outer shell does a lot more than just act as a form of protection for the core. The inner portions of the shell are cannibalized to form the structures in the core and the shell itself empowers the person that the soul belongs to in pretty much every way, though not quite as much as some of the structures in the core do. That is why people feel weak after exhausting the shell of their soul through things like seeding other souls, or learning.

Yeah, I already knew that memories were stored in the soul, but I was not aware that there was a dedicated structure in the outer core of the soul to store memories. And this structure is expanded upon as you learn new things and form new memories, which means that if you learn too much too quickly you can exhaust the shell of your soul. It is rather fragile structure by default, though I imagine that there are ways to fix that if you are skilled enough with the soul.

I also learned why it is relatively rare for people to be reincarnated with previous memories. The shell of your soul is ripped away rather quickly during the process, as every part of reincarnation is rather traumatic. If your entire shell is ripped away then it starts to destroy the part of your soul dedicated to memories.

I also learned a lot of minutia about the structure of the soul, like which structures do what and how they interact. There is a surprising amount there, aside from the memory storage most of the structures inside are rather small.

He also told me to focus heavily on the exercises the other dungeon taught me, and even taught me how to do them better. Apparently the benefit there is twofold, the most obvious being to make me better at using my own soul. The less obvious benefit is that the soul is very similar to a muscle, and working it out like this will improve it. Something about purifying it and letting it flow better, I’m not entirely sure what he meant by that but I have a decent idea.

The dungeon was impressed by how quickly I was learning things, saying that I had gone through a day and a half worth of lesson plans within the course of one day’s worth of teaching. Saying he might need to readjust his schedule if things kept up like this.

And then at around lunchtime, the lesson stopped, with him saying that he can’t afford to teach me all day as he has other stuff to take care of. And so I was left with half a day to work on other stuff, so I decided to take his advice and focused entirely on the soul exercises.

It’s not really all that different from what I do when I refine plants, it’s basically the same repetitive series of motions over and over again. Only with this, there doesn’t really seem to be an end goal beyond endless improvement. Which is totally fine, as long as I am improving I am satisfied, it’s only when I stop improving that I get frustrated and anxious.

During my three or so hours of near-total concentration, I noticed a couple things. The first is that the shell of my soul was actually shrinking. After observing for a little bit I didn’t notice any of it being tied up into any of the structures in my core, well, a little, but not nearly enough to account for what was going on. I did notice some of it being cast off and turning into ambient mana, but again, not nearly enough to be relevant. It was just disappearing slowly. It didn’t seem to be doing any damage, and the shell of my soul is a lot thicker than the vast majority of people’s. Plus I can recover from any damage to it pretty quickly. So overall it wasn’t that big of a deal, but it is something I am going to have to ask about.

It’s also telling that almost nothing that he taught me had anything to do with connections, which means that it’s probably a bit more esoteric. It is entirely likely that I learned more about that because I simply knew more about it as I had to learn quite a bit about connections with the soul in order to confirm that I was not dying when my monster parts were being stripped away. I had more there to base any further inspirations on, which I have noticed is a factor in the type of information Fate gives me.

On the other hand, it is also plausible that I got that information because it will somehow be relevant to me preserving my mind. Of course, it could just be that it was pointing me in the right direction so I would know where to look on my own. I really have no idea, but I think the best plan on my part would be to operate under the assumption that learning as much about the soul as possible will help me preserve my mind better than anything else I could do right now.

It’s entirely speculative, but based on the fact that no major negative event has happened so far I would say that whatever is going to happen is going to take a while to actually make itself clear. With how much Fate I gained it’s probably some incredibly powerful creature like the one who let me get access to Fate in the first place subtly working against me. Of course, it could just be that a volcano is in the process of opening up beneath my feet and that at any given moment I could die in a blaze of molten rock. Again, I have no idea. I’m honestly not sure which one I would prefer at this point.

Other than that I spent my downtime with Azrezel. He was exhausted today so we mostly just cuddled.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.