The Oracle Paths

Crunch and Lord Phenix blinked stupidly, glaring at him with a disdainful expression like,

'What the fucking shit are you on, bro? It literally has the word Will in it...'

Jake and the other Myrtharian Nerds weren't stupid and already had their own idea of what it was, but an expert like Vexa could save them a lot of time. All they had to do was listen to him.

Seeing that no one was cocky enough to contradict him, the cube man lost his fervor and enlightened them in a dull voice,

"Don't misunderstand. True Will has nothing to do with your own will, but it reflects who you are, what you do, or rather what your soul believes you are or do. You have all acquired one or two Soul Classes during this Ordeal. So you have experienced the side effects of these classes for yourselves. Some of these side effects on your personality may be so intense that they may even feel worse than those of Corruption. A Soul Class like Serial Killer would literally turn you into a psychopath with an irrepressible urge to methodically kill people who fit your criteria. A Soul Class like Loner or Hermit would literally make you anti-social.

"Fortunately, the Soul Classes suggested by these Prophetic Steles are based on your predispositions or past achievements. Yet despite this, whatever choice you made significantly affected your personality in one way or another. But in essence, it is much the same as your True Will. What you have to remember is that a Will that doesn't come from you and affects you, can still be willed.

"A Soul Class is simply your whole soul being rewired to think and act in a certain way. Each of your thoughts and intentions is basically Soul Power and when your Soul reaches a certain... volume or density let's say, you will begin to affect the reality around you. Rather than talking about Spirit Body level, which varies greatly in meaning between species and bloodlines, I prefer to talk about Soul Strength/Spirit Body Strength as well as Soul Power/Spirit Energy."

Jake frowned. This was getting confusing. For some strange reason the Oracle Status had never shown his Soul stats in this way, though he always chose the most clear and readable display model for himself. From their skeptical faces, his friends thought the same.

"It seems that no one took the time to teach you these basics. You guys had it tough..." Prysm quipped to the side, leaning against a wall with her arms crossed.

"Well, that's currently the norm in most factions." Vexa shrugged. "They would have been informed of all of this before their Fifth Ordeal anyway, if they ever chose to participate."

Turning his attention back to Jake and his comrades, the cube man summarized,

"Let's start with the basics. The Soul is to the Spirit Body what the brain is to the body. So far, nothing fancy. But the Soul can either dissociate itself from the Spirit Body and command it as the brain does through our nerves, or it can merge with it, which means a fusion of consciousness. In this state Soul=Spirit Body.

"Soul Power is the extremely pure Spirit Energy produced by your Soul when you think and with which you control your Spirit Body. In the example of the brain and nerves, it would be the electrical impulse controlling the Spirit Body. If your Soul Strength is high, your Soul Power will be stronger and more abundant and by extension so will your Spirit Body control. This does not grow like the Spirit Body through cultivation, but by simply living, experiencing things. When I was born, my Soul Strength was almost identical to yours, but because my cognitive faculties were immensely superior, I accumulated in just a few days as much memory and knowledge as an ordinary human would in a lifetime. From then on, my Soul Strength was much stronger, simply because it is bigger, denser, richer.

"A simple rule in the Mirror Universe that will never deceive you is that an aged Evolver is a dangerous Evolver. He may be weak, but his Soul is definitively strong. And I must stress, Soul Strength and personality are two fundamentally different things. Just because you are a tough guy who can withstand any kind of torture does not mean that your Soul Strength is high. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this discussion today."

Jake surprisingly understood what he meant. When his Intelligence stat was that of an ordinary human, he would forget things, his memories would degrade over time, and his senses were not as sharp.

Even if he tried hard to learn and increase the number of new experiences, there was a threshold of intellectual maturity that a human could not surpass. With age one could even speak of mental decline. This meant that the Earthmen had an average Soul Strength on a species scale that they could hardly surpass.

Nowadays, he could outperform in one day a Nobel Prize winner in mathematics if he felt like it and this knowledge would be crystallized in his memory forever. It was part of him, which meant that his overall Soul Strength had indeed grown permanently.

Having a powerful brain was the prerequisite for making this miracle happen in species without Souls at birth like on Earth. But if the Aether density was not sufficient, the Soul would still fail to take shape.

"Now that you know what Soul Strength and Soul Power are, you know that there is no way to hasten their growth except by staying alive and building up your mental stats to gain experience faster. A less noble shortcut is to devour, assimilate other souls and memories, but that has dreadful side effects..." Vexa ended the first chapter of his lecture on a somewhat depressing note. " However, your Soul Strength, but also your Bloodline, directly influences the ability and limit of growth of your Spirit Body.

"So let's talk about Spirit Body Strength and Spirit Energy. Why Spirit Body Strength, rather than Spirit Body level? Because quantity often matters more than quality. A being the size of Aurae, even with a Spirit Body lvl 1 and an inferior bloodline would have billions of times more Spirit Energy than you. Because its Spirit Body is huge, fragile and lacking in density, a lvl 30 Spirit Body could easily damage it with Spiritual Attacks. On the other hand, as weak as a lvl1 Aurae might be, if he decides to focus all his Spirit Body Strength on you, you are dead. Of course, it would need great mental stats and Soul Strength to handle such a mass of Spirit Energy, but even if its control is crude it will have no difficulty annihilating you.

" In short, a lvl 1 Aurae baby would have a Spirit Body Strength and therefore an amount of Spirit Energy at its disposal much higher than you. I digress, but this rule also works with Aether. Aurae's body contains more Aether than you can imagine. The simplest Aether Spell cast by it, even if the local Aether density was 10, can destroy Quanoth. Life is unfair, get over it."

Jake and the others grew glum upon hearing this. Life was indeed unfair. Earthlings like them had to fight for every tiny power-up while some other species were born at the top of the Mirror Universe food chain.

In the end, they were like ants fighting for crumbs while dreaming of supplanting the sun. Maybe they were wasting their time.

"What about True Will in all this, meow?" Crunch yawned.

"Tsk, I'm getting to that." Vexa clicked his tongue with annoyance. "True Will is focused Soul Power. Do you remember what Soul Power is? The energy of your thoughts and intentions. With that you can control your Spirit Energy, but not your thoughts and certainly not Soul Power. Because to control a thought, you need another thought, so Soul Power to control Soul Power. On your planet, in psychology you would refer to this as consciousness and unconsciousness.

"Most of your Soul Power acts upstream. You never realize that it exists. The Soul Power contained in your thoughts is pathetic compared to the incredible amount of Soul Power contained in your Soul. A thought lasts only an instant. It can never equal decades of memories and emotions.

"True Will is when your unconscious and conscious Soul Power are on the same page. In simple terms, what you think and desire at a given moment corresponds to past memories, experiences, emotions and values that your Soul has integrated in the past. Automatically, this gives you access to much more Soul Power than a simple thought would allow and this energy is also much purer, much harder to tamper with.

A Soul Class works in a similar way, but much broader and less specific. Digestor Corruption works on all levels, directly impacting the Aether making up your Soul Power."

Vexa stopped there. At this point, he knew that a demonstration was better than a long speech. He walked over to the mural console and pressed a few buttons. A block of gum pink metal about his height, and quite spongy, appeared in the center of the training chamber.

"This is Gumdolite, a metal with an infinite coefficient of elasticity." Prysm explained to them, laughing softly. "It's very rare and you can' t find it in a natural state, not even in System 0. It's an illusion created for training purposes."

Jake nodded. It was like his Purgatory Dream, only better.

"You heard Prysm. Vexa said. "Who says infinitely elastic means it can't be cut, only deformed. I'm a swordsman so let's check it out."

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