“So let me get this straight.” She gave me a dubious look. “A 60 million year old crazy Ne overlord who likes to collect curious things locked you in a time-stasis and ran off with your main body?”

  I nodded.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Nothing.” I shrugged.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.” I nodded again. “There is nothing to do, nothing I bsp;do at the moment.”

  “Wasn’t your main body important?”

  “Not really,” I shrugged. “The only thing that’ll be bothersome to replicate will be the Soulbone skeleton, but that’s just going to need me to sit down aate for an afternoon.”

  “I see,” she said with a released eyebrow, obviously not quite believing that I’d let the matter rest just like that and she was right. That tin would get his due in time, but as ht now, I couldn’t do shit to him.

  “SO,” I cpped, turning around as our versation came to a close. “Oh very good, we have some aspiri subjects who only have the fairaces of corruption! Tell me young dy, how long have you been a cultist?”

  The skin and bones woman who only wore ss in the same colour as the cult’s banners stilled as I hopped up to her and pulled her to her feet with a touch of TK. She was unfortunately far thteo answer my question, so I just shrugged.

  “As, it seems I am not to know this,” I mused, twirling her around in the air and putting her into the middle of the hall. “Ah, I almost fot! I’m going to need some refreshments before doing this.”

  I left the woman hanging as I floated out of the hole. “ you monitor them so they don’t run off?”

  “Sure.” Selene shrugged.

  “Thanks!”

  I came to float over the opening and started eling bio-energy through my body. The energy rushed through me, slowly growing faster or slowing down until I reached a steady base in it. Then I gave it a vibration.

  The tones I knew were matched easily and the symphony of the crotalids resonated in my body. The crese about in a few seds and I only had a moment to realize that this might not have been one of my greatest ideas.

  A k of that densed biomass sphere I kept orbiting my soul appeared in realspace just as I wa to but with my body being the ter of what was basically a summoning ritual, it appeared in my body.

  I doubled over, my human senses protesting the head-sized objeserting itself between my guts.

  “I’m su idiot.” I wheezed as I pushed my tendrils to absorb the new biomass.

  The disturbing feeling abated quickly and with a sigh I sent out my replenished bio-energy to remake my body. In the blink of an eye, my human body morphed into my Psyker Form in all but the skeletal structure whiow had a stand in I made by mixing a bit of Tyranid boructure with the Eldar one.

  My mind cleared up and I could feel the ge in my emotions. Sympathy and natural humahy dimmed and gave way for the baseline Eldar emotional spectrum. Some might say that the space elves only felt more but there was a deep-seated sadism built into their very genes.

  That could be terproductive. I purged it and along with that went the sudden urge to make the tests to bee far more painful for my subjects than they o be. Pragmatism referable to unreasonable sadism, though I didn’t think it made me any less of an asshole for what I was about to do to them.

  I fell down, TK dampening my velocity and ying me down on the flently.

  “Alright,” I grinned. “Let’s see! First thing first; I promised some healing to you didn’t I?”

  The malnourished little girl gave me a look not unlike what Selene gave me retly, looking at me like I grew another head or something. I threw a g Selene, who, trary to her previous look, appeared relieved.

  Hmm, anyway.

  “Here ya go.” I poked her in the forehead and my twin energies rushed into her body.

  Before topping myself off, this amount of energy could have remade my human body from nothing but right now I barely noticed the loss of it. My internal ter showed a loss of about 0.0001% of my current energy reserves.

  The girl shivered and her mrabbed onto her shoulders, helpiand upright as I rebuilt her weak body to the best it could have been. She grew twenty timeters, her bones grew denser and her muscles swelled while fat gathered in all the right pces.

  Her skin tightened on her newly gained muscle mass and gained a slightly rosy tint even with the more dark colour that was the norm among the wastend dwellers.

  I looked her up and down. My soul energy settled into her body, reinvigorating ans and reinf her flickering vitality. She should be good now. Even if most of the sympathy I felt for her left me by noromise romise.

  “Looks good.” I o myself. “Want to make any ges? Since I am having a great day so far I am willing to give you a little somethira.”

  “ge?” The girl said absently, looking down at her new body in bewilderment.

  I nodded. “Hair colour, skin colour, do you want eyes that look like liquid gold or do you ointy ears?”

  “I uh,” she looked up at me with uainty. “ you make me strong?”

  “Strong is subjective.” I tilted my head. “How strong?”

  “I want to protey!”

  Her mother pulled her bato a tight hug. Where moments ago the girl barely reached her chest, she now stood at eye level with her mother so the se looked different.

  “You don’t o.” She whispered to her. “Please don’t ge my daughter.”

  “Ah well.” I shrugged. “This should help if you don’t want any touch-up.”

  Another flick ter, she had bio-energy c through her body and reinf it. She wouldn’t be giving any hard fights to Astartes with that, but it should make dealing with a small time cult effortless.

  “Off you go.” I flicked up a portal and waved them in. “Don’t poke at the big men, they bite.”

  “Thank you,” the mother bowed before ushering her daughter through the portal which hissed close behind them.

  “Why did you do that?” Selene asked, her face betraying nothing about her feelings.

  “Helping them?” I asked and received a nod. “Call it a whim, I lost barely anything from it and they kicked my barely existing sympathy int order for a bit.”

  Seeing the slight frown on her face I gave her a look. “There is a differeween feeling sympathy for you and for a regur person Selehough I feel this body is not quite the best vessel for sympathy.”

  “What’s up with it?” She let her gaze wash over me, lingering in pces.

  “It’s mostly Eldar.” I twirled around. “Didn’t I say that already? Hmm, I thought I did?”

  “Eldar?” She looked up at my face curiously, evaluating. “The face doesn’t really match.”

  “I don’t really like the whole androgynous facial structure they have going on.” I shrugged. “Would this help?”

  My ears morphed, growing longer and their tips ending in a point. They weren’t as long as regur Eldar ears but they were still twice as long from the ear al to the tip than they were before. I had to admit that they had a certain fantastical appeal to them. These ears go well with the whole supernatural beauty thing I am going for.

  “I think I’ll keep it.” I smiled, ears flopping down a bit as I did. “Oh, they move like that, hmm, nice.”

  I wiggled my ears up and down while Seleared at me going at it.

  “The cultists? You wao do experiments, right?” She asked with a fake cough, though I noticed her cheeks were slightly flushed.

  “Oh, do you ointy ears too?” I wiggled my eyebrows at her. “I give you some, I won’t eveo ge yeic tempte for it much.”

  “No!” She gave me a weak gre.

  “Your loss.” I shrugged. Then I turo the cultists and Bob who watched our bypy with varying degrees of astonishment. “Alright dies aleme’s get this thing started!”

  “Sorry for leaving you hanging like that.” A fliy wrist pulled the unfortunate first test subje front of me, the woman biting off a scream as I dragged her through the air.

  The skin on my forehead parted and my vertical third eye brimming with liquid white light opened up, staring down at the woman but seeing something very different from what my regur eyes showed. Though, just to be sure, I eled some soul energy into my right eye too to get a third perspective on her.

  Human souls were weird to me. Especially with the text I had to pare what I was seeing to. There were all the spiritualist mambo-jumbo ba Earth that I heard of for one and while I never quite embraced those world-views, my mother was a staunch believer in that everyone had a soul and an aura.

  I couldn’t help but grimace as I remembered her. We weren’t too close and even if we met; she was more like a bothersome bigger sister that was just around and came for a visit to bother me than an actual parent. Maternal obligations weren’t really her thing.

  Still, I had her spiritualist babble still swirling around in my head and as annoying as it was to admit it; it was right on more ats than it was not. Souls were real here and so were auras, those two things were facts to me by now and auras worked simirly to how I expected them.

  Souls were different. I’d have imagihem to be like an overid imprint on the body or something like how ghosts were depicted in children’s cartoons but souls were more plicated here, especially human ones.

  The only other thing I could pare them to was my soul. It floated about in the Immaterium and a thread ected it to my body.

  Humans didn’t have soul threads, aher did they have their souls entirely in the Immaterium. The human soul was iheir body, at the ter of their being and the tral foundation for their minds but at the same time it was an impri on the Immaterium.

  That was the fusing part. Human souls seemed to exist at two pces at once, in realspad in the .

  I narrowed my eyes, all three of them b into the cultist whose soul was already close to being snuffed out, it flickered violently as she stared at me wide eyed and then she went still.

  Just when I was about to mark this as the first failure and grab the subject I stopped. Her soul stabilised and the soul I sensed in her body shimmered out of existend melded together with the one in the .

  Then came the ravenous monsters. Right as the soul flickered into life again in the , a swarm of what I saw as bloodthirsty fishlike beings ripped it apart. Each monster bit at the rapidly dimming soul until there was nothi.

  That was the harsh fate of every single human that lived, to die and be ripped apart by demons. This woman for instance was especially unfortunate. She was a simple human with a weak soul so if no monsters ped down on her soul for only a few seds, her soul would have disied into pure energy and she wouldn’t have had to face oblivion in the most agonising ossible.

  ‘The Emperor protects.’ A dark smirk crossed my lips. There was nothing out there in that dangerous o that was willing to protesignifit little souls like these. The only ohe big golden God-Emperor of Mankind protected were those who were worth the effort to wrestle for them with the demonic quartet.

  That wasn’t what ied me though, I khat any unprotected soul would be ripped apart after death but what I wasn’t sure of was the ‘Why?’. Why were they only vulnerable after the physical body died?

  I absorbed the cultist’s corpse without giving it another look, only grimag inside as my soul energy obliterated the lingering -taint. Still feels like someone is vomiting into my whole body.

  A fliy wrist pulled the unfortunate subje front of me who screamed silently with his gaze transfixed by my third eye. Oh well, it wasn’t like I liked screamers anywhere outside of the bedroom.

  I slowly pushed a glob of soul energy into him and scouted around, finding his soul in short order. Humans were like an onion. The outermost yer was the body, then came the mindscape and at the ter of it all was the soul. Of course you couldn’t find the soul if you cut a human in half — I checked — but for ah some skill in telepathy, pierg through those yers was doable, if not effortless.

  My tiny thread of energy moved with great care, poking around someone’s mindscape and soul carelessly had the unfortunate side effect of either sending them into a seizure, shock or ht making them catatonic if the telepath used their powers more like a drill than a scalpel.

  Humans are fragile.

  Thankfully, gazing into my third eye didn’t have the textbook rea on the humans, which was instant raving madness or catatonic shock. He just stared into them like he just id his eyes on something so beautiful that his mind bnked out and he couldn’t make himself tear his gaze away from it. Works for me.

  I poke around his soul, my third eye watg the mirror image of said soul in the like a hawk for any ges. Whatever I did to the soul here, happeo the soul there.

  Now, the question was whether that was the same the other way around too. I suspected the answer was no, otherwise the monsters wouldn’t wait for a soul to die. Most of them didn’t exhibit enough forward thinking to just wait around so whewo souls merged they’d get a double-sized meal. They were mindless, ravenous monsters. These humans were far too powerless to attraything with even a sembnce of intelligence.

  Then I let a single droplet of soul energy suffuse his (real) soul and all hell broke loose around his immaterial soul.

  The monsters came, biting, chewing, nibbling and fighting amongst themselves but despite their best attempts, the human only shivered as if a frigid chill rushed down his spine.

  That is one hypothesis prove’s get started on the rest.

  A wide grin spread ay face.

  P3t1