The doctor finally got up when Harlan began his third round of push ups.

Mortified that he had overslept long enough for his patient to fully recover and eat his overnight snack.

A guard under an invisibility spell had already reported him to the princess however, along with a message saying Harlan was awake.

Eventually Harlan was told by the now uncloaked guard that the princess wanted him to have breakfast in her room again. And he was to be guided to her immediately.

“You may stay, I wish to speak with you about a promotion once I am done with breakfast.”

She actually had a second and third guard in the room with Harlan, none of them tried to assassinate him in his sleep which was mostly what she wanted to know, but this one had given her timely reports on his actions so she decided she should have a personal guard finally.

She had one as a child, but she didn’t think one was necessary once she was strong on her own, even this one was really meant to guard Harlan and run around for them.

“So, Harlan, did you sleep well? And did you learn anything useful beyond your first near success?”

“I think we should take a break every hour to let me eat, taking souls out and then mapping them all then putting them back inside is much much more work than I realized. Also you need to stop me, I’ve been around those enchanters too long, I stopped thinking about my health and let myself get so weak for no good reason. And most importantly… Did you send out a letter?”

“Of course, it shall take roughly 2 days to reach your family, our deal holds and you did very well yesterday other than all the gore.”

“Thank you.” Harlan was nearly in tears as he ate. At least they would finally know, and he felt a new fire burst from his soul, he needed to do better, to make himself worth too much to the kingdom for them to keep him trapped for the rest of his days.

Once they were done it was to the dungeon again, with their new personal guard tagging along, Hostin Eslend was his name, he was actually relatively new to the castle, his father a minor noble who got him the job.

As was normal with those who had their work through connections rather than a long service in the army he lacked a strong stomach for what he was seeing.

A boy a third of his age breaking rabbit necks and then stuffing all kinds of souls into the bodies, most often ending up with a pile of gore on the ground that he had to sweep into a larger pile so it could be disposed of at the end of the day.

But what unsettled him the most was how the boy spoke of it.

Darn, another failure, maybe an adjustment here? And then speaking happily with the 4th Princess as if nothing had happened.

When 2nd breakfast came for Harlan he was still relatively clean, the bodies often burst a few seconds later due to a change in method, which gave him time to use a windshield amulet Rosewell gave him.

Hostin was silent, stock still watching the boy eat as if the room wasn’t colored red.

Eventually Harlan requested to walk in the menagerie for a time, he wanted to look at slip ants, even in the undead he succeeded with they just attacked everything around them, while the Fomorian undead were apparently able to follow orders.

Fresh air did wonders for Hostin, though he was still thinking of how he could get out of being their guard as soon as he could.

Harlan simply tried to touch the souls of the ants without doing anything else to test reactions.

He noticed how the queen was clearly the strongest mind and could send out orders to the rest of the group. And that unlike what he had read of the mind links used by other animals, a soul link order from a stronger being could not be ignored.

He began mapping out how they connected and what the signals looked like.

Cynthia had been done with the other plants and animals and started chatting with Rosewell.

Meanwhile Harlan was quite literally fighting for his soul.

He linked into the overmind after a time and the queen was very very angry about it, he had no idea how to fight soul to soul but the sheer difference in power between them allowed him to win.

The queen was dead and now he was the new overmind, his mind was flooded with questions from the ants, where to place food, how many babies should be allowed to grow and many many more simple things that the queen just commanded the ants to do by instinct, he had no idea how to be an ant queen, but they wanted orders since their previous ones had stopped.

“Cynthia, Rosewell. We have an issue. How hard is it to get another queen slip ant?”

“Well, they aren’t common but once a queen dies the swarm goes berserk and fights until one of them starts to change into a queen. Do you want one for research?” Cynthia was clearly the person he should be talking with about this.

“I kinda… linked into their oversoul and killed the queen, the colony now wants me to tell them what to do, it's… it's hard to think with so many small voices.”

Cynthia started burning ants with precise bursts of heat until they were cut down to roughly half their population.

“Now that you should be spending less time with their requests, you could try to disconnect, they will enter their frenzy and a new queen will be born. But… this is a very interesting opportunity, have you tried to order them yet?”

“I… I’ll try.” Harlan started trying to order them around, had he not spent so much time watching the queen give orders beforehand it would’ve been impossible to do. But eventually he had them all form rank in a perfect square.

“Wow, that is interesting.” he had no idea when she had gotten a pencil and a journal. But she was furiously scribbling.

“Can you make them enter different shapes? How about asking them to coat my hand?”

He had them move into a triangle, then a circle which was shockingly hard compared to the square.

Making them all move unto her hand without a special shape was actually easier.

“Turn them intangible next.” she stopped asking, he wondered if everyone with power had something they were obsessive about researching.

He hadn’t understood the queen’s command to make them slip into things, it was sent in a bunch of little bursts.

The first group ant fell into the ground and just… kept going until they were outside of the oversoul range.

He explained it to Cynthia who just told him to try more.

It took more tries than he would’ve liked and the ant population was further cut by another half but he got them to go back into their tunnels under the ground.

Then he dropped control and let them find their new queen among them.

2 hours had passed already with him acting as a queen, unlike with the rabbit undead which was large singular mana costs. This was dozens of very very small costs constantly. It was still hours away from their lunch so he asked for 3rd breakfast.

The cooks were already seeing the trend and had one of them constantly ready to quickly prepare food multiple times a day.

When he was done he revealed his findings to Rosewell and Cynthia who tagged along.

“I would need to see them in action, but I am absolutely sure the undead made by trained Fomoirans are in an oversoul of some kind.”

“Not possible, we encounter undead who are alone all the time, unless they can maintain an oversoul across vast distances that isn’t the answer.”

“Wait… I need a doctor who can work on soul damage, a doctor who can regrow organs, and mana gems the size of a rabbit heart.”

“Oh now this is exciting, is he normally like this?” Cynthia was… odd, she didn’t react like a person normally would when talking about these things, she was just happy to be involved in any magic research it seemed.

Eventually they returned to the dungeon with Hostin carrying a bag full of non-imbued mana gems.

The doctors were fidgety, but at least didn’t look quite so green when they saw the gore pit they had dug for the rabbits.

“Alright, now let me explain my idea, I think they ARE in an overmind, and it doesn’t cover a long distance at all, now, I need a knife please. I am going to be taking a small fragment from the very very center of my soul, this shouldn’t cause damage but that is what you are for, and you are for when I move that part of my soul into a mana gem and place it inside of the rabbit where its heart was, I need it to be anchored so it doesn’t bounce around inside.”

Now the doctors were getting green, they didn’t really know what they were getting into,

“Well you are right in that it shouldn’t cause any damage I am going to remind you to be very careful with this, that soul may in theory become an exact copy of you at this moment, and it may react violently knowing its a copy to be used up.” the soul doctor, a woman in her early 40s, with bright white hair.

had explained some other minor things like loss of some short term memory.

“I will be able to anchor the gem inside its body without issue, it’s more common than you might think.”

The organ doctor was a man in his mid 30s, also with bright white hair, apparently both were singly aligned to light magic, which was a significant boon towards their abilities.

It took 30 minutes for Harlan to finally work up the courage to triple check that he would be fine.

The soul doctor was also constantly watching over his soul.

“I’m going to extract the marble now.” It took another 10 minutes to very carefully carve it out into a perfect circle.

Then he placed it in the gem, he felt somewhat hollow inside, a piece was absolutely missing and he knew it.

Once it had taken root and was fed enough mana to grow to fully saturate its crystalline structure he cut open a rabbit after performing his now all too routine neck snap then heal, he placed the new crystal heart as he called it in his head into the body.

Then the soul which he grew with a piece of mimic soul but both having all of their emotions and memories removed, he placed it inside.

The rabbit stood up, looked at him, and it then began to dance. Harlan had the thought that it should do that if the soul in the crystal really had grown into a version of him.

In 30 minutes the rabbit burst, a new record by nearly 3 times.

He tried the process again, this time with just placing the original rabbit soul into the body but with its long term memory cut out.

The rabbit didn’t act like him, it took 30 minutes to finally start moving again.

Then he tried to connect to the soul inside the gem, to give it orders, it lashed out, it wasn’t quite a human soul and the gem's size kept it from having too much mana.

Hostin blocked the fireball it launched while Rosewell completely obliterated it with gale force winds.

The gem twisted and sounded like screams as it scraped itself trying to assume a human form.

It finally detonated, the 3 rabbits closest were completely gone, it wasn’t an explosion like they had expected, it seemed to just devour everything around it.

Harlan didn’t even understand what went wrong, surely he hadn’t changed in the time between experiments enough to make it snap.

He decided that those experiments would need more time.

It once again became trial and error like his first day.

He was relentless, nearly 2000 rabbits perished in those 2 weeks.

Rosewell had to pull him away many times, he was so close, and yet so far.

He became obsessed with what went wrong on the second experiment.

Eventually everyone in the castle had heard the rumors, dozens of rabbits being delivered to the dungeon, and buckets of gore being removed.

The Fomorian boy growing more and more agitated the longer he stayed.

It got so bad that Rosewell knew something needed to be done.

He was brought back to the facility.

Relly and Zella and Reet were waiting, an important mission ahead of them.

Get Harlan to calm down and actually rest his mind.