The undecided

Entry one :

Today I have had the greatest revelation of my life. Greater than when I single handedly revolutionized mankind understanding of magic.

I was invited to watch the discovery of a colleague of mine. While exploring an abandonned planet, he found a broken soul. Nothing special really. Until he had the idea to date it.

That soul was older than our galaxy. Not just the planet, the entire galaxy. That means this soul predates everything we know of our universe.

This soul is older than what we thought was the oldest being to ever live. More importantly it comes from a time before The Dark.

I, along with other scientists of great renown, were invited to further study the soul and discuss the implications of its discovery.

How disappointing. I watched those I thought to be the greatest mind in the universe, my equals, pitfully ignorant of the greatest discovery of our time. Nay, the greatest to ever be made.

They endlessly talked about what we could learn of the time before The Dark. They were blinded, by an idyllic past that was forever gone.

Instead, I saw the future, one where The Dark no longer exists.

Don they realise what this means?

A soul survived The Dark. Not even the greatest of mage could. Not the Gods, not the Elders, not the Dragons. But a simple broken soul could. It survived The Dark and billions of year until we found it.

That only means one thing. The soul is immortal.

Not just that particular soul. All of them. Mine, those of my short sighted colleagues or that of a spider I just killed.

They are all immortal and immune to the influence of The Dark. They may lose strenght and break but they never disappear completely.

I just need to learn how to fix them.

And then I will have an immortal army. I will be invincible. It is only a matter of time until I rule the galaxy, until I rid the world of the scourge that is The Dark.

And then I will be admired, worshipped by all as a God!

Entry two :

My growing ambition aside. This will not be easy. Like when I first studied magic, I am in a situation where I have no prior knowledge of the subject.

Not only that but I must also act in secret. Experimentation regarding the soul have always been taboo and I doubt my current strenght and reputation can protect me.

The first step I must accomplish is to find knowledge on the subject. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, prior study have already been made, I only need to acquire them.

I have had my eyes on a small group of semi-humans. They have, throught genetical experimentation and inbreeding managed to change their way of using magic from internal energy to soul energy. Their method is considered illegal by the central government.

So if I subdue them I can kill two birds with one stone, I can steal their knowledge and improve my reputation.

The second step is to find test subjects and a large amount of souls.

Subduing the tribe will temporarily fix those problems but it won last. I need more, a lot more.

Finding test subjects will be the easiest. If I play this well, I may even obtain willing test subjects. I can wait.

But finding a large amount of souls will be hard. I can just commit a genocide.

Or can I?

No I can .

There might not be many mage on my level or people stronger than me. But the few who are would not let me do it. And they would notice if an entire planet disappeared. Especially the Druids.

No I need a source of souls that is both clean. In the sense that it does not require me to kill anyone. And that is unclaimed. Most of them are currently controlled by one of the Elder.

I don stand a chance against them.

I do have a plan. However, it is risky. I would have to engineer a way for two elder to attack each other. Then even if none of them dies. They would fall into a slumber that could last millions of years to recover and I would gain access to their well of souls.

The plan has to be perfect before I make an attempt. I can risk my life. It is too precious.

Entry three :

It has been five years since I last wrote and I have been very successful since.

In order, I easily subdued the tribe and began to learn all they knew about souls.

Once again proving my genius, in the short span of five years, I have already surpassed what they took generations to accomplish. I also modified the way they found to cast spell with soul energy so that it no longer requires you to be a semi-human of their tribe.

This was simply done as a test to prove I could do it while conserving my humanity. But if it proves bothersome, I would have no problem discarding it.

I have also gained unrestricted access to several well of souls. Throught several proxy, unknowingly acting in concert, I have been able to start a war among the Elders.

Once the fight was over, I simply volunteered to watch over their resting place, ie, the wells.

I have selected the biggest one as my base of operations. That well is located in orbit around an isolated planet, the only one of a solar system on the edge of the galaxy.

There, no one will interrupt my research.

I also made progree on acquiring test subjects to practice on living soul. I found a species of tree that can produce fruit containing all manner of biological matter, the kind usually found in animals.

I also decided to use clones as my subjects. I will grow them using those fruits.

Clones are perfect for my experiments. Their identical DNA will allow me to truly research the soul and make abstraction of their body. Furthermore, since I will use clones of myself, I will be the most familiar with their body. This will simplify many matters like figuring out what kind of energy vessels they have.

They will also have an innate sense of loyalty towards me. And if they don , well I can always make a new clone.

Entry four :

I have run into a problem. On the positive side, the production line for my clones is fully functionnal.

I even added the possibility of modifying some of their genes. Just in case, it might come in handy. Since my goal is to create immortal soldiers, it would be arrogant of me to simply assume that my DNA would make the perfect container for any souls.

I need to both check if any soul is perfectly matched to one unique body and if there is a most optimised option.

The production line creates and grows the clone until they are thirteen, the time where the energy vessels finish forming in the body.

But this is where my problem occured.

Whenever I try to integrate a soul, no matter how well conserved, the clones body always rejects it. I believe it is because the clone has its own remnant soul but if I destroy it preemptively, the energy vessels don grow.

If I wait too much, they just become vegetables.

In both cases, I have no need for cripples.

Furthermore, the effect is worsened when the soul is in a worse state. And my wells almost exclusively produce old ans broken souls.

And I lack the expertise to fix them. Or rather lacked.

That is where I was when I met my savior. Luna.

She is a soul being. At first, I thought she was here to take revenge for that tribe I captured. I remember them worshipping such beings and thought my comuppance had come.

How wrong I was.

She was interested in my research. She asked me to help with a problem of hers and she would not only teach me about souls but also guide my research.

Thanks to her, I could now repair even the most damaged soul. I could take a soul, break it into tiny pieces, age it a million year, and plunge it into The Dark, recover the smallest of fragment, repair it, insert it into a new body and the being would not even know it had died.

Not only that but her insight into the way I could continue my research was invaluable.

She proposed that each soul had, like the energy vessels of the body, a unique set of markings that oriented it towards certain ability and attribute. If I could identify these marks, by exposing the body to that ability or attribute while I insert the soul, I could recharge it and, potentially, ensure that after resurrection, the soldier still had the same level.

I wasn there yet. But with each day, I get closer to my goal.

But obtaining that help wasn free. Luna requested something of me. As soon as my research advances enough, she needs me to create a child for her.

She isn human. her species is that of a soul being. That is a rough translation. The actual name of the species is untranslatable.

These beings don have body. The way they reproduce is throught a form of parasiting. They cut off a small part of their soul and inject it into a living being. Then as that being gets older, they either adapt and evolve into the same species, losing their body in the process or they die a slow and agonizing death.

That process is both long and has a very low success rate. On a planet with billions of inhabitants, maybe only one would be able to survive the process. But it is very unlikely that they would be the one actually selected.

Lunas species may live for billions of years but they very rarely reproduce and so their number remains almost constant, slowly declining.

She wants me to identify what are the factors that can garantee the success of the injection. And to at least make one for her.

Basically she wants me to make her a kid.

It won be easy. But I can refuse now when her help was so useful.