Chapter 789: A Guess on the Soul Transfer
Phyllis finally slowed down after eating for what Roland estimated was a significant fraction of a normal person’s daily caloric intake in a single sitting.
Passersby slowed to study the table. Three people — two of them slender young women who did not, by any visible measure, seem capable of the damage in front of them. The stacked boxes of hamburger wrappers, egg tart trays, and empty cups reached a height that would have been embarrassing in a larger party. The conclusions drawn by people glancing through the window settled, by the logic of proximity and gender, on Roland. He accepted this. He had made his peace with being thought a glutton.
He caught Zero’s eye across the table. “Wipe her face.”
The little girl took out a wet wipe without commentary and carefully removed the tear tracks and oil from Phyllis’s face. Whatever compassion Zero kept concealed under her general suspicion of adults had made an exception. This might have been the first person she had met whose circumstances were obviously bad enough that a KFC meal had moved them to open weeping.
Phyllis sat back. The last egg tart disappeared, and she exhaled — long, complete, the sound of someone laying down something they had carried for a very long time.
“Awfully delicious,” she said.
“Good.” Roland slid the ice cream cones across the table. “Before you eat those — the Dreamland. Before you entered it, was there anything unusual?”
Phyllis glanced at Zero.
Roland blinked. She understood.
“This was long ago,” she said. “Let me think. No — nothing unusual. I simply leaned against the wall and disconnected myself. It’s a way to restore strength without becoming fully unconscious. I stop controlling the body and release my awareness into the dark. Even in that state, I can sense nearby danger — not see it, not hear it, but something makes me aware of it. Celine calls it a subconscious connection. Only inside a soul container do we become truly insensible.”
Zero’s mouth tightened. “Who’s Celine?”
“A physician.” Roland gave her a flat look. “Adults talking. If you’re bored, the park’s right there. Watch people fly kites. Don’t go far.”
She took her ice cream cone and left with the pointed dignity of someone who has decided that departure is the better option.
Roland watched her through the window until she reached the park’s edge. Phyllis watched him watch her.
“Is it safe?”
“Yes. This is a safe era, and she’s not easy to deceive.” He turned back. “Go on.”
“Once I’m in deep sleep, there’s nothing — no light, no sound, nothing at all. Just drifting.” Phyllis paused, her gaze going somewhere interior. “But this time, in that darkness, I saw your residence here. Your apartment. Your rooms. When I realized where I was, I was — I can’t describe the astonishment. And then I saw you.”
Roland considered. “The only thing different about your sleep this time was where you slept.”
“Yes. Just that. I was in your castle.”
He watched the last ice cream cone vanish. Phyllis heaved a long, satisfied sigh.
Beams of light, he thought, and it arrived in his mind with the particular clarity of something that has been waiting to surface.
“You told me,” he said slowly, “that when I fall asleep, there’s a yellow-orange beam above me — as wide as the city wall.”
Phyllis looked up. “Yes.”
“And you carry a beam too.”
She understood before he finished. “You mean our beams overlapped?”
“Yes.” He pressed his hands flat on the table. “The castle is just stone — ordinary stone, no inherent power. Only the beams could open a passage here. But the overlap alone can’t be the full explanation, or Anna, or Nightingale, or any witch who’d ever slept within range of mine would have come through before now.” He paused. “You disconnected your consciousness. You cut the tether voluntarily. That’s what opened the door.”
It settled him somewhere below thought. And then something else came loose alongside it.
The Taquila witches used the word soul as a practical term — not a metaphor, not a philosophical conceit, but a thing that could be extracted and placed elsewhere. They had moved souls into God’s Punishment Warrior bodies and into the carriers left by the underground civilization. They did it routinely, as a matter of institutional survival. But no one, in all the conversations Roland had had about the process, had ever explained to him what a soul was. Not what it did, or where it went, or what medium carried it.
He had assumed it was pattern. Thought and memory as electrical arrangement. Something that generated in a living body and ceased to exist when that body ceased. He had attributed the soul core’s apparent contradiction of this to magic, which was the category he assigned to things he couldn’t currently explain.
But what if it wasn’t a contradiction?
What if the Bloody Moon was the medium? What if beams of light were the transmission passage, and a soul was simply a person’s pattern of thought and memory as stored in the Bloody Moon — accessible to the soul core because the soul core knew how to activate the connection? What if the soul didn’t cease when it left the body; it returned to where it had always been kept?
The thinning of the God’s Punishment Witches’ beams after the soul transfer made sense on that model: transmitting a pattern of cognition and memory required less bandwidth than transforming magic power into physical effect. His own beam was as wide as a city wall because this world — built from the entire architecture of his memory — required a proportionally larger passage to sustain.
When Phyllis had cut her consciousness loose inside the range of his beam, her pattern, stored in the Bloody Moon, had found the nearest available structure and flowed into it. This world. His dream.
Which meant this world was not only in his memory. It existed, in some sense, as part of the Bloody Moon itself — built through Zero’s Soul Battlefield into the divine domain of magic power.
He was about to speak when the window beside him shattered outward.
The restaurant next door. Screaming, then the structural sound of something failing fast, then the flood of bodies through every exit — shoppers, diners, bystanders, all moving away from whatever was inside. Phones already recording. The street emptying with practiced speed.
Phyllis looked through the window with mild interest, one hand pressed to her satisfied stomach. “Didn’t you say this age was quite safe?”
“Ahem.” Roland stood. “That was a general observation. Come on.”
He looked for Zero in the park. He couldn’t see her immediately, but the park was contained and she was not easy to fool. He looked at the chaos.
Fallen Evil. The name had been appearing in news reports all month. People awakening with the Force of Nature and failing to hold it — the power turning them into something that had no category in normal law. Garcia had mentioned it two months ago: erosion from an alien world. He had been meaning to ask her more about that, and had not gotten the chance.
“Do you see Zero?” Phyllis asked.
“She’ll be fine in the park.” He turned toward the broken window. “We handle this first.”
He thought of the first one — the burnt-face man, who had been specifically hunting martialists. Leaving this one to wander freely was not a viable option. He also thought of the warmth that had moved through him when the first cyclone dissolved in his hand.
He bent and picked up a piece of decorative stone from the base of a planter and crushed it. The powder sifted through his fingers.
Phyllis stared at him. “You’ve become an Awakened.”
“Only here.” He let the dust fall. “My ability doesn’t cross over.” He kept his voice steady, and did not entirely succeed in keeping what lay under it out of his expression.
Phyllis looked at him with something that was not quite admiration and not quite wonder. “You are not ordinary in either world.”
They went back into the KFC, found the staff corridor, located the passage connecting to the mall behind both buildings. The stampede had cleared it. Abandoned shopping, toppled displays, an ice cream cone completing its slow dissolution near the entrance to a shoe store.
Roland placed Phyllis in the corridor and asked her to extend her Blade Claws and release her Force of Nature into the air.
The back door of the McDonald’s came off its frame with a crack. A man emerged from the smoke at a run and went straight for Phyllis.
Newly awakened — Roland could read it in the cyclone, small and dim and barely under control. Nothing like the burnt-face man. The warm current in his body stirred only faintly in response.
They had planned to lead him into the KFC. He didn’t cooperate. He stretched his left arm toward Phyllis and opened his palm.
The air between them expanded like a struck drum, visible in concentric rings.
Roland had the angle to step clear. He didn’t. He moved behind Phyllis instead, placed himself at her back, and the explosion took them both through the soundproof panel wall. He caught her before she hit the counter, absorbing the impact with his back. They landed together in the dust.
He lay still for a moment. The numbness that arrived faded before it finished. Whatever was growing in him here, it included resilience.
Phyllis pulled herself upright. One claw had snapped; she had turned it into a shield in the fraction of a second before impact. Three tears in her shirt. “I was careless. It won’t happen again.”
The Fallen Evil followed through the gap, breathing hard, smiling with the specific expression of someone who has recently learned what they can do and finds it satisfying. He leveled his arm at Phyllis. “Time to die, martialist.”
He was looking at her face.
He was not looking at the floor.
The broken claw moved.
It came up fast and struck at his neck. The flash of it caught the fluorescent light. The man’s expression froze. His head met the tile before his body had finished falling, and his blood reached the base of the counter before either of them moved.
Phyllis raised her hand. The claw returned to her. With two precise movements she opened the man’s left arm and removed the Magic Vortex, which had already stopped spinning as it left its host — sitting stable in her palm, red and still, looking like a gem.
“A broken claw within ten steps still answers me.” She held the vortex toward Roland. “My enemies rarely expect it. They never escape the second strike.” She glanced at the vortex. “Is this the Force of Nature?”
“Yes.” He took it. The moment his skin made contact it started spinning again — red, then blue, then white — and then a beam shot from it toward the roof and thinned and disappeared, and the warmth that followed settled through him completely.
He felt, as he always did in this moment, entirely himself. It passed within seconds.
He looked around at the ruin they had made of the KFC kitchen and said: “We need to leave. Now.”