Raymond realized that he was far smaller and as such a more vulnerable target by the worm like corruptions once again. He willed himself into a direction planning on absorbing as many souls as he could find to empower himself. His newfound speed allowed him much greater freedom in his hunting grounds. And now with abilities empowered as they were he felt more confident than ever. Finally he was making real progress towards helping his future host. And soon his speed took him towards a new soul, one that was far and away the oddest soul that had been found, it was pure gray, there were no marks and it made the area around it feel cold even to a bodiless soul form.

His movements became sluggish in response to the sudden exposure to temperature. feeling something was wrong with the soul, but also knew that absorbing it would allow him to gain a more than potent ability. With conflicting interests he was forced to slowly withdraw from the area of cold the odd little gray soul was emitting. Even after getting away from the now labeled ‘cold one’ he was still moving at a sluggish pace and unable to feel as confident as he’d felt before nevertheless he continued his search for more powerful abilities. Soon he would be ready to take on anyone who stood..Floated? In his way.

‘What could that thing be? And why was it so powerful? Nothing in my memories share many if any similarities, it had to have been something amazingly powerful and something that would inevitably lead to the development of a greater number of even more powerful abilities.’ Thinking of how much stronger he could become his mind drifted from that to a more pressing matter that being the effectiveness of absorbing abilities and using soul power to bring them closer to their original strength. having been able to see the pattern written on the proverbial wall, when he first absorbed an ability it would be at most only 25% as effective as what it had been before. And after using the stray soul energy in the void he was able to bring them closer to 30% effectiveness. But the sheer cost of doing that for the few abilities he had caused him to be sucked dry of all energy he had absorbed and then some. As seen by his loss in size, but that meant he did have a limit to the amount of talents he could absorb for his future host. Knowing this, all while hoping it not to be the case, Taking stock of the current talents plundered. The first one was an ability to understand shapes and the qualities they had, before he’d absorbed the talent he had a basic understanding of non complex shapes but now he could tell that a triangle would result in a very highly structurally stable shape, and a sphere or even a dome would evenly spread any forces applied to it, making for very useful construction ideas. He had been able to absorb two more talents as well,

The second was a talent for charming words. having memories of dozens of lives but going over them after gaining a talent for understanding people or even animals to a lesser extent he could tell that having this made most if not all situations more beneficial for his hosts. He’d be able to get better jobs, earn higher wages without having to sell his life to feeding some capitalistic greed machine. He could talk to people and feel safe in knowing that they weren’t laughing at him behind his back, any number of these would be invaluable to a host but combined? Truly a masterpiece. And finally his third prize had been something he hadn't seen since he found that he could absorb passions, when he first absorbed it he was terrified it would be extinguished but it had survived and grown from the newfound surplus of soul energy. He couldn’t tell what sort of thing it would do, but still knowing this was something more valuable than he could even imagine. And it would make any of his hosts more than capable of greatness. Almost made him wish he had a body so he could slap himself in the face.

After taking stock of his collection. A key realization had made itself known in the souls here, souls with talents came with almost no memories but the souls that did have memories didn’t so far have talents. And almost like a shovel to the back of the head it struck him, they all had talents and things to make them special but something had taken them, something had used it for fuel… Just now the pieces of a puzzle making themselves were known, allowing him to know why there were so few souls with talent, let alone souls with multiple! The corruption was taking these things that made souls unique and making them uninhabitable by any form of intelligence or any form of will to fight them off! They were making a self sustaining loop where the souls with special talents were prioritized and then slowly destroyed and turned into trojan horses. He stopped thinking for a moment and realized that most if not all the souls he would be facing were damaged and maybe not even savable, at least to the current him, and with that he was off and going at a blistering speed trying to make use of every single one of these poor souls that were being doomed by the corruption. And now a purpose was made clear to him, it was to stop these horrid creatures from ever doing this to more souls. And he would die once again or succeed in his mission.

The blistering speed was lapsed in moments of calm where he would absorb larger remains of souls, and the brief flashes of these memories spurred him further into a frenzy; he was like a rabid animal, homing towards souls and absorbing them before they could drift closer to the wells.

A thing he was becoming more familiar with was the layout of the void, even if it had no physical landmarks after having been inside it for so long he’d been more than able to start noticing that there were almost rings inside the void, starting with the furthest ring, the one he was at currently, there were few souls with any talents here, they had just come from being in they mortal plane having been victimized by the corruption. The second ring only just barely ventured inside of there he found a well before a dark shape in the void had forced to make himself scarce, they seemingly moved at random inside their rings never staying in the same location for long. There were very few memories of what these wells meant but out of the dozens of sets of memories he could tell that for some reason these wells led to seemingly normal worlds very similar to the ones of his original life. But they never had anything too mystical at most. There were a few items in each world that stood out, in one world people seemingly took energy from the sun but it only made them super healthy and by no means allowed them to do any sort of unnatural feats. Or in another people were required to take yearly marches into the cold where the strongest would survive and somehow gain powers of animals, heightened senses and a more beastial instinct. But they never were able to breed super monsters or anything their senses oh so legendary in their world was about twice as efficient as a normal baseline human. And the beastial instincts? Well when everyone treats you like some kind of monster that can’t be told no, one must assume that you would at some point decide that it just didn’t apply to you hence a self fulfilling prophecy.

The point being that if looking for an easy solution to his issues he could lay low for a few years and go to a relatively normal one where he could build strength without having to worry about being surrounded by corruption. But it would hamper his desire to aim for higher tiered worlds where he could gain so much power that he’d be able to squash the corruption within a single host’s lifetime. flying through the expanse of the void traveling all while making great work as a cleaner and fulfilling his goal of removing huge amounts of damaged souls who would only serve as catalysts for the corruption to make use of. In the short amount of time he’d been blazing a trail through the void, the few dozen sets of memories had grown well into the hundreds and it no longer took moments to glance over them all, but instead seemingly what in a timeless place as this felt like hours. And he was only able to view the highlights of these memories. Not seeing every sweetheart romance or tragic backstabbing from a friend, only moments of extreme importance were able to be viewed in any sort of haste. This made his will, lazy and almost lethargic to obey his wishes, like the ‘cold one’ he had seen in the past, but now it was rather obvious that it was due to himself rather than being in the presence of some sort of higher tiered talent or somethingorother. He felt that even if he had no new talents or anything to improve by attempting to condense himself, it was the only way to ensure his safety where he’d never know when an attack from the corruptions would happen. And there were times that they happened. They happened quite often in fact.

He had normally only seen it happen from very far off distances but the few times he’d been jammed in the middle of one of those mosh pits of angry teeth made him wonder how he was able to survive when he was so weak before. As he went through the process of kneading his energy into something more usable his mind drifted off towards the first time this had happened, it was at least thirty or so souls ago that he’d found himself there.

At first there seemingly was only a single yellow soul perfectly unaware of what was going on around it, as many souls here tend to be, he’d approached it and did the usual song and dance of reaching out and feeling for a conscious inside and expected to feel nothing, instead he found his mental tether being pulled tight with no room for resisting was pulled almost on top of the soul. There the soul split into a new type of corruption, one that played a weak and tasty soul free for the taking, only to pull their victims into iron like jaws. Thankfully he had not been as bloated as he currently was or else he’d have been long gone, at the sight of something so groutesq he had been startled into almost allowing the thing to clamp its jaws onto him but had just enough time to shift his mental tether from an oblong smooth thing, into a cylinder with a consistency of sandpaper, allowing damage to the internals of the thing bad enough that it made its best attempt at pretending to not have been just moments ago trying to eat him but rather once again a poor weak soul… The fact that this most likely worked on souls made himself almost feel dumb himself, but as a sensible soul he wrapped his entire being around the monster and began squeezing the being as hard as he could. At first nothing had happened but soon the sensation of being crushed allowed him to know that he’d broken the thing into larger fragments than he’d liked but he didn’t have the strength to crush them more. So he let them fall into the void disappearing into fine particles.

He had almost completed the set up for a new attempt at using his energy, seeing as it was so difficult to move he felt it best that he not add any more to his plate. And so he followed his own advice and focused on using what he had at his disposal he used his talent for shapes to make his will into different shapes growing increasingly more complex in an attempt to force his control over his energy to improve. Each time his energy was too slow to react he would have to start the practice all over again, this proved to show little results for increasing his energy manipulation but he somehow felt that the percentage of the talent had increased by a small amount. And like this a long time was spent stationary, other than the ever increasing size of his pancake like form. Seeing as he had spent such an seemingly abnormally long time playing with what amounted to shapes for children, growing tired of doing so for any longer, was a vast understatement. Even at a glance the size of his “net” had grown meaning he would be able to capture more soul energy to fuel his development. And maybe hopefully he would gain some more complex shapes if the talent in question was feeling oh so kind.

Once he felt as if he was going to rip if he expanded any further he forced himself to stay like this for as long as he could, like a person stretching after getting out of bed. hoping to be able to gather at least some amounts of energy while not having to sacrifice his time but he had little hope of doing that so instead focused on getting as much as possible in the here and now. And as he kept his shape he pulled more and more energy into himself slowly expanding not out like previously but in all directions at once, he willed himself to ignore any pain and instead focused on holding his maximum size as long as possible at the largest he would be around the size of a large Suv. And he felt like he had eaten one too. And so with much and in fact more effort slowly started to push inwards putting tremendous strain on his entire being… He kept pushing, and pushing, until he felt as if his energy was trying to rip holes in his form to make room, when this happened he was forced to use his talent and will a shield to form around himself to help both keep his energy in and to push his form into a more compressed shape than ever before. And yet soon enough his shield was being damaged, dozens of micro cracks had formed making the whole thing unstable, pushing himself and his talent he willed a second shield around the first one and slowly started letting the new one absorb into the old one.

He was so tired, his desire to continue doing this, to cause so much pain to himself was tested time and time again, yet he didn’t stop he still kept his memories of his original host close to his metaphorical chest, to keep his reason for surviving all this pain close, to give his resistance more strength. And slowly like tectonic plates moving, slow steady never halting for anything, well that last but was false he had been forced to relocate twice now by wells opening near his location trying to draw his attention from his task towards getting a new host being able to feel that connection, imagining it almost caused his carefully balanced act to fall apart but he was able to save it in the nick of time, he forced himself to ignore the calls towards the newest well opening and instead marshaled his efforts towards in the final push. As his entire being was moments away from being a single point the size of a human fist his vision went black. In a way similar to when sleep overtakes you at your weakest. He didn’t know it but this was going to be a long nap for himself.

``Grabbing for some type of air to fill my lungs, my memories came rushing back. I wasn’t Raymond, I was a soul trying to bring some sort of order to this chaotic place. There was no air, he nor anything else here had lungs or bodies in any meaningful sense and the darkness was not a new found version of sleep paralysis, no it was always dark or rather there was never any color to start with other than the souls who one could see if they were trying hard enough, and most importantly of all.’ Thoughts processed faster than ever with the memories of all those souls condensed down into much more potent forms his mind had been able to clear up space and suddenly found there to be very little he couldn’t think up as of now in just moments. He knew that was going to disappear once he started to clutter his mind again but one had little choice in the matter of absorbing memories or not hence there was nothing to do but make plans to work around this limitation. ‘My talents have improved greatly, if my memory serves correctly they would have been around 32% of the original's potency and were now sitting at a comfortable 39% potency.’ The threshold to 40 seemingly too vast to overcome with the amount of energy he had available He knew that it would most likely be the last time he got any more potency in these talents for some time, and made as much peace as he could with such thoughts.

Forcing himself outside his own mind attempting to locate some form of souls to gather. And soon like riding a bike he was hunting once again this time though he gained nothing, not even memories from the first ring, he knew the reason but had been forced to at least make an attempt at gaining something from these small and weak target who he knew couldn’t fight back, including the jaw trap corruptions who now couldn’t even budge him when they pulled his tether as a matter of pride he’d been able to reel the things back towards him like sort of grim fisher.

Now stood a choice before him, he could try and get inside the second ring, only now at his level could he tell there was some sort of veil surrounding it stopping the weaker souls from seeing inside, he barely met the qualifications for learning that information, and he was trying to avoid thinking about how he felt his entire being open up and produce some sort of information as soon as he looked towards the veil, although now he knew how souls learned the basic principles of this place, evidently they were pre hardwired to gain the information when it was required. Coming back to his choice he almost wanted to thank himself for making a decent distraction for himself but found that he couldn’t, his own desire for duty putting a halt to that plan before it even drew breath. Only just now with all he’d gone through was strong enough to even know there was something inside there that even this place decided to protect the lower tier souls from, the thought alone making his nonexistent stomach turn in place. He only had two paths, the first would be to drop down a well in his current tier and use that to gain some sort of power from it, or he could make a break for a well in the second tier ring, he had no illusions now about being able to actually survive there, the corruption had long since gotten more aggressive agents in that area, able to survive off the higher tiered souls there. But if he was fast enough he could get to a well and leapfrog his development skipping having to take host after host in an attempt to eke out even the smallest edge to survive in that surely damned place.

He would have rushed in head first before his forced sleep, but now after fully gaining the full worth of each of the hundreds of memories inside himself he was far and away a different being than when he first came here. Now he knew that there was only one real way forwards and that being the slow path with many risks yet unexplored by lesser souls. Letting himself be pulled towards a well, he knew not where it would lead but was aware it would be the next phase of his plan.

---prologue fin

Chapter 1

I quickly found an issue with my “very well thought out plan.” I had no choice who my host was nor did I have any ways to communicate with her at all.

My current host was a girl, she hadn’t been given a name when she was born, seemingly due to the high infant mortality rate of this place. The reason I thought this to be the case is from how the adults acted when one of the four kids inside the room died due to any number of reasons they simply plucked the thing up and carried it off without a single worry about being seen as a horrid barbarian for being so callus towards a baby, of any species now that I thought about it. Lots of races seem to enjoy placing baby animals on some sort of pedestal of cuteness. I had nothing else to do but to impart my whole effort into seeing this child grow and flourish, no matter what was happening she would grow.

I spent the first few days of this cycle watching as the child grew more and more brazen grasping around even though they couldn’t see and such acts that are important to developing as a healthy baby. She never cried though, and I do have vivid memories of babies enjoying the activity or at least enjoying others suffering from said activity. Another development in these three days was that there was only one other child remaining inside the room, and I’d long noticed that the adults hadn’t fed any of the children since I’d been here since the start of this young child's life. I could feel how hungry she was, and that alone would have caused kids to scream even adults if the circumstance was right but a baby under a few months old? Something was wrong here and I didn’t know whether to abandon this cycle or to stick it out to the bitter end.

As he was having an internal debate with himself a small baby was looking up at her guardian angel, she had been able to see it protecting her from the scary shapes, when they took the others like her, now there was only one other like her and yet the guardian stayed. She would trust it as long as she could, as long as she could see her guardian angel she would have hope.

“Ah who am I kidding, look at the little bundle of cuteness, maybe other people had the right idea with enjoying baby animals, and if they all were as quiet and well behaved as this one? I could see himself getting really comfy with living like this.” he said quietly to avoid being hard even though that was highly unlikely.

The other baby lasted two days before it started crying. As soon as it had started to wail a man walked in, his stride sure and his face grim, he had a long beard tied into knots, he had a shaved head. A large frame was covered in fur clothing easily able to cover his arms and hands if he put them to his side. And now looking at his side he had a sword inside a sheath belted to his pants. The man loomed over the children trying to learn who had been crying. Even if I knew I couldn’t do anything I stood in front of the girl. I wanted to protect her and that's what mattered to me, the man was unable to see me. He looked at the girl and his grim face lost its hardness for a moment. He then scooped the last child up with practiced ease and gutted him like a macabre sacrifice. He knelt down and used the blood of that poor child who was still squirming in his death throws, trying to cling to life. The barbaric man, his fingers dripping with blood pressed his thumbs onto the girl's still bald head, and spoke in barely a whisper, he still heard it. Even if the girl didn’t understand, he had just heard his host's name after all “Gunnr”, and he would remember that name for as long as he continued his mission, even if said host was too young to understand.

The little Gunnr had been carried off outside the room, and for once, much like his host, he was able to see the outside world. He saw a vast land with sparse trees, in the very far distance he could see a port from the great viewing spot the hill they were located on provided. The man continued carrying the girl away from the house, and following along, the sight of many houses that some of his memories named longhouses filled his vision. And oddly each house followed a trend, either with a man of similar attire sitting outside the home looking as though he was prepared for anything or a man would be watching a child with a very similar red mark on their head. Not all the people were tending to the clearly ritualistic sacrifice of children, some were pulling carts of goods, giving a wide berth to each of the men even going out of their way to avoid crossing them or their sight line. Women were chatting to other women or teaching children both boys and girls how to sew with bone needles. Needles of the sights he continued following the pair. They traveled for six minutes or less from what was assumed to be the method of time keeping in this world. They finally stopped at a longhouse right alongside the river and with its back facing what could have been the densest forest in the area.

The man put little Gunnr onto a large animal hide, acting as a rug. She didn’t move around either from exhaustion from not having enough sleep or from some sense of self preservation I wouldn't know but her eyes seemed to be looking for something, Raymond stopped looking at the girl and passed through the walls of the building and sat next to the child. He hoped that his presence would calm her and possibly increase her chances at survival, he hoped to see her reach her absolute limit of potential one day.

Pov Change-The Large Man.

(Character’s thoughts other than the host and Raymond, will be in italics)

My plans to start practicing my sword were interrupted by one of the nameless crying, begging for its weakness to be destroyed before it ever had to face the cruel outside world. And as my father did for his children I shall do for my own. I stood and with the same motion as turning around I entered the testing hall, I had the rest of the month before I had to give up on both nameless and try again, as soon as my steps crossed the threshold I aimed my desire to kill at the two children, one final test to see if they could stand by their metal. A boy and a girl, the boy had already failed, his wails seemed seeped in self loathing for his own weakness, I would understand I would feel the same way if I were to be such a failure. But the girl showed promise, she hadn’t even flinched when the door slammed into the wall, her form perfectly tense yet relaxed. A natural warrior just as I had been at her age, but her eyes.. They shined with such a desire to see what I could do, daring me,tempting me to let out my true self. My face whose long practiced shape was forced to stare blankly at my daughter I knew just was her name would be. The failure was dead before he hit the ground and again no flinching, just pure contempt for me and a desire no, a need to see me dead, it would serve her well in life. Taking the blood of the failure I named my true child “Gunnr” in as soft a voice as I could just as my father had done for me. She would learn her name in time, be that as a mighty warrior whose tales ring in halles across the land and sea, or as another disappointment. Only time would tell.

Picking up my daughter I walked at a slow and purpose filled pace, ignoring my fellow warriors, some still having to complete the culling of their runts. I made quick work of the walk to my home, I would have to care for my daughter with food and clothes. With that in mind I grabbed my hunting bow and moved towards the forest. I would get food and hide for the child and allow them to have clothes large enough to cover them during the winter. I was hoping that the child would be able to hunt by her fourth or fifth winter as I had when I was younger.

The man made his way into the forest, he was a newly minted father even if he’d been a father in the literal sense more than once, this was his first child, out of all the failures he’d had previously, his stride was interrupted and the man seemed to relax, his eyes closed, his breathing became deep… The man's head turned towards his left there he saw as a faint speck in the distance deer fur, stuck to a tree. And like a ghost the man made his way towards the tree, never stepping on so much as a leaf. The distance of 900 paces was quickly closed and the man stood before the tree. And without so much as a grunt of effort the man was climbing the tree like his armor and bow weighed nothing to him. The 6’5 man scaled the tree and made his perch amongst the higher branches of the tree. He didn’t stay there long, as he heard the sound he was looking for almost as soon as he’d reached the top layers of branches. The sound of hoofs. The man smiled thinking of all the food he would bring to his daughter. ‘His daughter wouldn’t go hungry while she was under his roof. That much he could be sure of.’ And so the man hopped off the tree and began moving towards the herd of deer who was about to be a few members shorter.

---fin