Chapter 7: Traits and Terror

“Yes!” Mr. Adamas had a big grin on his face as he moved forward, picked up Shaar, and threw the boy into the air before catching him. “My son is a little monster!”

And Shaar, in a rare showing, was giggling loudly as his father threw him up twice more.

“Okay.” My father, still with a big grin on his face, clapped his hands together. “We get it. We get it.

“But the important thing is that his elemental affinities are a good match for the soul beast his mother prepared for him, so we don’t have to go out looking for another one.”

Dad turned to look at me and then to Shaar again. “Are the two of you ready to start on the path of soul beast adepts, to bond with your first beasts and gain fantastic abilities?”

“Yes.” I looked up at my father with big excited eyes.

“Yes.” After his dad put him down, Shaar ignored the orb he’d been fascinated by and also looked up at my father.

“Alright then.” Dad summoned out the two eggs he and Mr. Alvaro had received from our mother’s families from the minor time-slowed spatial dimension contained in the ring he was wearing on his right hand’s middle finger and held them out to the two of us. “Here you go.”

I took the green, blue, and white jade-like egg, about the size of an adult’s fist, into my two little hands and looked at with wonder, and, at the same time, Shaar took the thumb-sized black egg and seemed to start comparing it with mine, seeing as his eyes kept traveling between the two.

“Now, just like you’ve learned, you need to merge your new soul beast eggs with your souls.” Dad continued smiling down at us. “But, without access to the ability to control your qi, mana, or psyforce, how can you do so?” He held up a hand toward Shaar as Shaar was about to speak. “And, Shaar, we are all aware you know the answer, so let Kyla speak instead.”

“Blood bonding, direct ingestion, and qi guidance.” Unlike with a lot of the random facts Shaar enjoyed, I had at least done my research on binding a soul beast as I, like all children, wanted the magical powers I saw every adult enjoying. “Blood bonding is done by dripping a bit of an adept’s blood on an egg, forming a connection between the adept’s life and that of the soul beast inside. And, if the affinities of both the adept and the soul beast match up well, the soul beast egg has a high chance of merging into the adept’s soul.

“Direct ingestion is directly swallowing the egg, something only possible for smaller soul beast eggs, and it has the same limitations as blood bonding, but with a slightly higher success rate. Though the adept does risk dying if the egg doesn’t bond.

“Finally, what I’m positive we’ll actually be using, qi guidance. This is the process of an adept that can control qi guiding the innate qi of a child into their first soul beast egg, creating a bond without any blood loss or risk of choking.”

“Correct.” My father reached out and placed his right hand on Shaar’s right wrist and his left on mine. “So, let’s start the process.”

Then he did something neither Shaar or I at the time could feel and small pieces of our lifeforces flowed from our hands into the eggs we were holding.

Both eggs then glowed slightly, and the next thing we knew they were gone, merged into our souls in a process we were too weak at the time to truly feel.

“Now, we wait for a few minutes.”

Like my father’s words indicated, nothing happened at first. But then my body started to feel weird, tingly all over. And I could suddenly feel my heart beating faster, sense my liver clearing out the minor amount of toxins in the food I’d had for breakfast, and even perceive the electrical impulses between all the nerve cells in my body.

The clarity of my vision increased ever so slightly. The feel of the clothes I was wearing grew a tiny bit more acute. And my sense of balance improved, to the point I felt distinctly more steady on my feet.

My body was changing, starting on the process of being reforged, and at the beginning it felt awesome.

But then things began to go wrong.

Shaar’s fat reserves started to noticeably shrink rapidly, and his muscles began to atrophy, pain seemingly wracking his body as he began to scream. And then my body started to change for the worse as well.

My fat began to move, transitioning more toward my hips and chest. My bones began to change, my pelvis especially growing wider. And my hair began to grow longer.

When looking at the scene using Lord Aeon’s Past Sight skill from the future, I wanted to break something, but, at the time, I was in too much pain to really realize what was happening.

“Adam, take Kyla to the garden. Make sure no one else enters, and then get her lots of food. I’ll do everything I can for Shaar.” My father acted immediately, giving out orders to Mr. Alvaro even as he picked up Shaar, who was still screaming, and created a portal to what looked like the inside of the library.

Then, in my memories, everything was a blur.

Watching our fathers’ actions through the Past Sight skill, however, I could see how Shaar’s father worriedly followed my dad’s instructions, moving me to the palace’s large gardens and then leaving me under a large tree in the center of a small open field as I passed into unconsciousness from the pain. Then he hurriedly got the three gardeners working in the garden at the time to leave, closed off entry to the area using a spell formation built into the garden’s walls, and left to get one of the palace cooks to prepare me a small feast, which he then brought back and set up picnic style under the tree.

Unable to really do anything else, he then sat down, held his knees up to his chin, and began to cry.

My father, meanwhile, brought Shaar to the basement of the library, poured a good half of his own qi, mana, and psyforce into him, and then opened another portal into the quarters of the palace’s resident doctor. “Doctor Auris, I need your holy blood vine over here! And I need it now!”

An old-looking man with long blood-red hair and golden eyes hobbled out of the bedroom, pulling up his pants and not wearing a shirt or shoes, with an annoyed look on his face. But then he saw Shaar through the portal, and he moved as fast as his old body was able through the opening into the library, where he then summoned out a blood-red vine the size of a large snake.

The tip of the vine, about as thin as one of my fingers, stuck into Shaar through his abdomen under Shaar’s shirt and began to grow inside him, a holy light emanating out from the sections inside Shaar’s body, and the atrophying of Shaar’s muscles noticeably slowed.

“Get the kitchen to send over about 200 kilograms worth of food,” the doctor ordered my father, completely disregarding the normal courtesy he would show his king as the situation was urgent. “Then explain to me exactly what we are dealing with.”

***

A few hours later, I woke to find Mr. Adamas standing underneath the tree next to me, looking up at the south of the Eastern Continent up in the sky above us. And, when he looked down in response to me moving, his eyes were puffy and he looked far worse than I’d ever seen him before, which scared me.

“How are you feeling, little one?”

“I’m a bit scared.”

Adam Adamas smiled slightly, seemingly trying to put on a brave face, as he squatted down in front of me. “Understandable. You just went through a pretty scary experience.”

“What happened to me?”

“You awoke to your first trait.” Mr. Adamas reached down and wiped away a couple tears from my eyes. “And it’s not one your father or I would prefer for you.”

Traits were special abilities an adept would awaken to every time they bonded with a new soul beast. And what trait was awakened would depend on the affinities and natural inclinations of the adept, along with the species and affinities of the soul beast.

Common traits included things like increased affinity for a given element, the ability to empower a certain subcategory of skills of one’s soul beasts, and the talent to strengthen a certain family of soul beasts using less resources.

Most traits weren’t too ridiculously powerful, but they generally defined the strengths of an adept, and thus what future soul beasts they would bond with. And some, like Shaar’s first trait, were far better than others.

My first trait, however, was more of a curse. Due to the nature of the soul beast my mother’s side of my family had chosen for me, a particularly talented temptation tulip, my trait, when combined with a powerful skill the temptation tulip granted me even before hatching, worked to make my body physically transform to take on the ideal beauty standards of everyone and anyone around me. And, while it was technically powerful, it wasn’t much of a benefit, especially when, at the age of six, it started to transform my body to become sexually appealing to adults.

“Why isn’t Dad here?”

The worry and fear in my voice was apparent, and Mr. Adamas reached down to give me a hug in response, his expression showing genuine care and nothing else, even as my face and body had transformed to make me look like a smaller version of several prominent women from his life combined together, my own mother and Shaar’s included.

“Two main reasons, little one.

“First, given the nature of your trait, if you’re around more than one person, your body would keep transforming so long as anyone moved, which would hurt until you advance some more in your cultivation and your body adapts.

“Second, Shaar is in a really bad condition right now, and your dad is doing everything he can to save my son’s life.”

“Oh.” Looking back, I could see the gears moving in my little mind even as more tears started to flow from my eyes. “So, you need comfort as much as I do, and dad figured we could help each other while he’s busy.”

My little hands reached out and hugged the large man, patting him gently on the back, and I can remember what I was feeling.

I was scared of what was going to come with my new trait. I was terrified for Shaar’s wellbeing. And, at the same time, what my father had been trying to teach me earlier in the day really started to click in my mind.

Having friends you could trust was really important.

Mr. Adamas was my father’s friend, and so my father could trust him with taking care of me at what was to then the worst point of my life. And Shaar was my friend, so I was going to murder everyone involved with tricking him into bonding with a soul beast seemingly purposefully designed to kill him.

First, though, I would make sure his dad could stay functional to help take care of him.