To expel all that is impure was the most horrifying thing I experienced, even after a whole month of being beaten up and ten days of drowning myself, a weirdly colored liquid began seeping from my pores, tainting the water around me as it traveled downstream.

  I had reached the second stage of the body, and thus I fell unconscious once more.

  My choices were mostly the same, as last time, though three traits had opened up at the end of the list that weren’t there before.

  This time, my choice was easy, the mere option of the body refinement being easier was something that would probably save my life sooner or later, an edge I hoped to possibly advance past my current barriers.

  I did not choose to strengthen my body, for my biggest advantage was my arcane power and corrupted nature, with this training only existing to get my inherently frail body into a position where I wouldn’t die the moment I fought someone a bit stronger than me.

  My talent was chosen, so I could have an easier time advancing my body, the spells now straining against my body as my soul was rarely exercised anymore.

  Choice two fell on devourer purely because I am the curious type and didn’t know what a beings essence entailed.

  When I awoke, I was a waterlogged corpse standing up at the villages border, the sky black as I ran for a hunt.

  My speed was faster than before, space slightly distorting, so my path was a bit more efficient, while small branches that would have obstructed my path were withered away. Nothing would resist my charge, and when I finally saw an arcane signature that implied a nearby animal, my steps brought me close enough to witness.

  I was the stag whose back had been slaughtered by the sky titan, now with a few more deer at his side.

  Had I been even a bit more conscious, I could have held back my instincts, instead of jumping at one of its deer. I should have spared the beautiful beast, but I didn’t, and before the stag had reacted, my tongue was already inside and devouring the deer’s brain.

  It did not struggle, because its blood slowed when I asked it to, any and all sickness that had been inside it breaking out at once and weakening it while I drank deeply of its life force.

  As the horned titan turned around to witness what I had done, the others ran away, and he charged at me.

  I had an urge to obey and kneel before it, which probably would have resulted in my death had I not resisted and instead chosen the only option I deemed somewhat intelligent, running away.

  Running away was my method of sparing both of us some particularly bad wounds, and one the beast seemed content with.

  Once it had stopped chasing me, I began to inspect any changes that the essence might have done to me.

  The first thing I observed was meditating, but except for the blinding radiance of my bluish gray orb of a soul, only its size had increased slightly.

  Step two was a quick nap to look at its memories, though the ones present were exactly what I had expected, a life of grazing and some unnecessarily precise depictions of the stags actions, which made me glad I visualized my memories as books and not videos.

  Test three, and the one I feared the most, was to run a finger across my body and feel for any changes, which I quickly discovered.

  My legs were just a bit longer and slimmer than before, and my eyes seemed to be a little bigger.

  I had never been this happy about not having a trait while fighting a monster I would consider as a boss, though I knew it would be inevitable.

  While the mutations only made me hunger for peoples lives, this option would inevitably turn me into some fucked up chimera if I didn’t consume a human being every once in a while.

  From there, my path took me towards the village I now considered as home, suppressing my regrets by knowing it had made sure I live just a bit longer, a life lost to save a murderer for another day.

  When you walk through a dark forest for two hours, your own minds darkness tends to greet you on every corner, and as every life I had taken filtered through my mind, the last hopes of hundreds of mice, many an animal and thirty-two humans rested on my conscience, all of them dead because of my direct actions, and all of them fueled the arcane power that welled within me, moving branches out of my way or making my steps a bit surer when I didn’t focus. However I put it, I was the reason they were dead, and I would avenge us by destroying the titan I had unleashed and the defiled priest within.

  But that fight would be for me to fight only once I refined my mind and devised some spell to damage it with, for I was in a phase of training.

  Once I returned, the soft light of dawn filtered through the canopy, while my fellow students of the war pick had found joy in the simplicity of expanding the mine I dug as part of my training. Every day they brought more rocks, and as they offered me one of the pics they had made of stone, I found myself joining their backbreaking exercise.

  It was easy for me, the stone I planned to hit eroding slightly before my pickax even hit the hard rock, though that was not what I came down here for. What I came for was much more important.

  Having excavated a particularly big roc, I began drawing a ritual circle anyone building a dungeon had to learn in all my magical previous lives, be it miner or lich, for it enhanced the surrounding rock to be just a bit more stable.

  After giving a chisel to the miners and showing them the S they had to make every arms length they progressed through the tunnels, I knew them safe from the usually inevitable collapse of the first mine any civilization tries.