"I will be back... I will always be back."

The darkness of death did not argue with my convictions, and it simply waited, patient as the grave, and somewhere in the distance, I could hear the loop begin its slow turn.

It sounded like an engine the size of a continent, which was a strange thought, but I had barely anything to describe what I was hearing as Elric returned, as well as the weight.

I knew that my body had changed, but there was something that caught my attention. There was a new weight inside my body that I could not trace at first, almost as if some of my organs had been transformed into metal, and their weight was tearing my insides apart.

I opened my eyes inside my tent, and the memories of the last loop entered my consciousness slowly, as if they were being filtered.

My hand went forward and snatched the floating silver orb by my head, but the strength behind my grip was so unexpectedly great that I crushed the orb in my fist.

"Up, up, laaazzzyyy......"

The voice of Mel cracked and faded away, but all my thoughts were on my memories and all the crazy things that had happened to me at the end of the loop.

Too much had happened in the last loop, and to keep me from freezing in place for too long, I suppressed memories of the horned demons and the way that I died, to free my mind to think about my immediate situation.

This method was effective, but I had no doubt I was messing up my sanity in some ungodly manner, and I could not think about that now.

’Accumulate scars until you can no longer be hurt by them,’ I thought to myself.

One of the most visible progresses I made during my last loop was finally stepping past the first Earth Gate, acquiring a new Epic Skill, Ascendant Earth Gate.

This was the strangest skill that I had ever acquired because it did not give me any active abilities; it simply gave me attributes in some of my skills.

At first, this skill almost seemed incredibly useless for an Epic Grade skill, since it was just giving me growth in skills and attributes that I could grind by myself through a few more loops.

This skill seems to have helped me skip through a lot of time to reach the Adept level, but that was not always a good thing, especially for a mage, as every growth I would have made to push me to a higher Anima Depth would mean the refinement of my spells and enhancing my overall power.

I did not want to get stronger in this manner, since it would dilute my combat ability in the long run.

Perhaps, this skill would be great for anyone else, but for me, it was actually not that important; I recalled that there was a growth tag attached to this skill, so it could still surprise me in the future.

I had burned the entirety of my soul, and I should have been dead, but my body kept fighting, to the extent that it seemed that a new consciousness that was me, and yet not me, took over.

What did I know about the soul, and what took over me at the end?

I did not have enough answers, but I knew that I should start with what I know, and what drew my attention the most was the difference I could sense inside me.

Something had changed in me, and this change was so fundamental that it felt alien to my consciousness.

I reached inward, through my seven channels that had been rebuilt and reinforced across thirteen deaths, and travelled through my body, past the woven architecture of Mortal Shell, then pushed past the reservoir of my Anima Depth.

Another surprise awaited me as I looked at my Anima Depth, and the reservoir was different; about five percent of my soul was glowing with a faint white light.

Hmm, perhaps the attributes given by the Ascendant Earth Gate skill were not so simple after all.

At this point, I should be touching the deepest layer of my being. I mean, there could not be anything deeper than my soul, right?

Well, it turned out I was wrong; there was something else deeper than my Anima Depth, and I saw a hollow place dwelling deep inside of me.

It resembled a small room filled with darkness, and somehow, I knew that this darkness was not the darkness that came from the absence of light; no, this darkness had weight behind it, and if I shone light inside this room, the darkness would just swallow it all.

I did not have this hollow inside me in the last loop, and I think I knew why this thing was now inside of me.

The number of demons I had killed in my last loop had filled me with so much warmth that it kept fueling me even when my soul was gone, and this act had unlocked something deeper in me than my soul.

I sat up slowly, and the hollow place moved with me. Not painfully. Not even noticeably, except that I could feel it there, a second center of gravity inside my chest, like there was a second set of strings that could pull my limbs if the first set were ever cut.

A body could not move without the soul, which was the essence of life. Without a soul, a body was nothing but a pile of meat. This was the truth that I knew my whole life, but this hollow place inside me threw all of this knowledge into the trash and spat on it.

It was telling me that even without my soul, there was another source of power within me that was nearly opposite to what I know about life, and it did not seem to care that I was seeing something that was impossible.

I remembered my body fighting without a head. My corpse, held together by nothing but Mortal Shell and the last command encoded into every fiber, had punched the horned demon in the throat.

It had kept fighting long after the soul that should have animated it had been scattered across the darkness.

I had thought that was Mortal Shell alone, but Mortal Shell deepened the bond between soul and flesh. It made the body harder to break and harder to remove the soul from. It did not, as far as I knew, make the body capable of independent action after the soul had departed.

That was something new. I called up my status screen with a thought, and the notifications arrived in a flood that made my breath catch in my chest.