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> **AUTHOR'S FORMATTING NOTE — READ FIRST:**
> This chapter establishes the text conventions used throughout the novel. Please read before continuing.
>
> | Format | Meaning |
> |--------|---------|
> | *Italics* | Shinji's inner thoughts / internal monologue |
> | `＜＜Text in double angle brackets＞＞` | Voice of the World — system-level announcements inscribed directly onto the soul |
> | `[TEXT IN SQUARE BRACKETS]` | NEKROMANTEION — early binary/terminal phase. Clipped, datadense, no personality |
> | 「Text in corner quotation marks」| NEKROMANTEION — Butler phase. Refined, dry, first-person. Begins late in this chapter |
> | "Regular quotation marks" | Spoken dialogue |
> | **[Skill Name]** | Named skill being referenced or activated |
---
He stepped out of the cave and into the torchlight and performed the role of a man who had nearly died.
It wasn't difficult. The chest wound was eighty percent healed — **"Vessel Stabilization"** doing its quiet arithmetic with the borrowed magicules of twenty dead guards — but eighty percent left twenty, and twenty percent of a Direwolf claw through the ribs expressed itself in ways that required no performance at all. He let the wince happen. He let the arm the nearest soldier offered take some of his weight. He let his voice come out rough at the edges, which it was.
"Young Master Julius—"
"I'm standing," he said, in Julius's voice. "That's enough for now."
They helped him onto a horse. They gave him a cloak. They asked questions that he answered in the measured, exhausted register of a nineteen-year-old noble who had survived something he hadn't expected to survive, which was accurate in every particular except the nineteen-year-old part and the precise nature of the survival.
The search party formed up around him and they moved south through the Jura Forest, toward the Muller border fortress, toward whatever came next.
Shinji Satou, analyst, ghost, currently operating Julius von Muller's body on manual override, settled into the saddle and began doing what he always did when the immediate crisis had passed and there was time to think.
He made a list.
---
*Alright,* he thought, as the trees moved past and the torchlight made the forest into a corridor of amber and black. *I've been running on instinct and thirty-two years of Captain Vane's borrowed experience since I hit the clearing. That's going to stop. Start from the beginning. What do I actually have?*
He turned his attention inward — not toward the Julius body, which was running on the equivalent of autopilot while he maintained the surface performance, but toward the deeper architecture. The Ghost Core. The place behind Julius's eyes where Shinji Satou still existed in its entirety, tethered to this body by silver threads of magicule energy and **"System Stability"**'s careful partition.
He was still himself. That was the first thing to confirm, and the most important.
*Confirmed,* he thought, and then stopped, because something responded.
Not the Voice of the World — that had a specific quality to it, the sense of something inscribed rather than spoken, law rather than communication. This was different. Smaller. A single ping, like a system process completing and flagging its result.
`[DREADNAUGHT — Origin Template: Active. Ego integrity: 100%. Identity anchor: SHINJI SATOU. Confirmed.]`
He blinked with Julius's eyes.
*That was you,* he thought, directing it inward, toward the skill rather than toward the world. *You actually responded.*
`[Query detected. Clarification: DREADNAUGHT sub-skill Origin Template monitors ego integrity continuously. This is a standard process report. No response was initiated.]`
*That was a response.*
`[...]`
*There it is again.*
A pause — the particular quality of a computational system that has just noticed it is doing something it doesn't have a category for.
`[...Noted.]`
Shinji kept his face neutral for the benefit of the search party and felt, somewhere in the Ghost Core's equivalent of a chest, something that was not quite amusement but occupied a similar address.
*Good,* he thought. *We're going to be working together for a long time. We should establish communication protocols.*
`[NEKROMANTEION: Communication channel available. Utilising World Language substrate. Awaiting input.]`
*There you both are. Start with the basics.* He settled more firmly into the saddle, adjusted Julius's posture to the correct riding form — borrowed from the guards' memories, cross-referenced against Julius's own training — and began his inventory. *Run me through what I have. Everything. Category by category.*
---
### ◈ CATEGORY ONE: UNIQUE SKILLS
`[NEKROMANTEION: Unique Skill inventory initiating. Two registered. Proceeding.]`
`[Unique Skill 『NEKROMANTEION』— The Sovereign of Souls.]`
`[Function classification: Offense / Utility. Primary role: Soul acquisition and management.]`
*I know the name. I want to understand the mechanics. Walk me through each sub-skill as if I've never used them.*
`[Sub-skill "The Great Harvest":]`
`[Combines: Spirit Consumption + Soul Drain.]`
`[Function: Forcibly extracts magicules and soul particles from living or dead beings in range. Passive absorption from environment also possible at reduced efficiency. This sub-skill is the primary source of magicule income. Range limited to physical proximity or direct contact in early stage. No confirmed upper limit on capacity.]`
`[Current efficiency: 73%. Optimisation ongoing.]`
*What's the 27% inefficiency?*
`[Soul particle loss during harvest. Approximately 27% of extracted energy dissipates during the transfer process before it can be archived. This is a known limitation of the current skill tier. At Unique Skill level, waste is expected. Reduction likely with evolution.]`
*Good. Continue.*
`[Sub-skill "Omniscient Analysis":]`
`[Combines: Soul Analysis + Soul Sight.]`
`[Function A — Soul Sight: Perceives the magicule wavelength of all souls within detection range. Bypasses physical and magical concealment. A being hidden by invisibility spells, barriers, or illusion magic still registers as a wavelength signature. Cannot be blocked by any method below Unique Skill tier.]`
`[Function B — Soul Analysis: Upon consumption of a soul, extracts the complete informational content — memories, skills, habits, relationships, emotional patterns. Skill blueprints below Unique tier can be recreated from this data. Named beings with high willpower can resist Analysis from within Ethereal Storage. Resistance weakens over time.]`
`[Current detection range: 200 meters active, 400 meters passive.]`
`[Note: Detection range scales with magicule capacity. Current range will expand as evolution progresses.]`
*The 400-meter passive range — that means I'm always passively reading wavelengths even when I'm not focused on it?*
`[Correct. Soul Sight is continuous. You are always aware of every soul within passive range. This has implications for social environments. Suppression possible via deliberate attention management but not automatic.]`
*So if I'm in a room with twenty people I'm reading all twenty of them simultaneously.*
`[Confirmed. Processing load distributed to Parallel Thought. No performance impact in current conditions.]`
Shinji filed this. Useful. Also potentially overwhelming in high-density environments. Something to monitor.
`[Sub-skill "The Void Archive":]`
`[Combines: Ethereal Storage + Take Over.]`
`[Function A — Ethereal Storage: A sub-dimensional space within the Ghost Core. Stores consumed souls, raw magicules, and extracted skill data. Current capacity: 34% utilised — 20 guard souls plus extracted Direwolf cardiac energy. Souls stored here can be queried as data but retain structural integrity. High-willpower souls may resist query over extended periods.]`
`[Function B — Take Over: Upon successful possession, grants immediate access to the host's Intrinsic Skills and Extra Skills as if they were the user's own. Current active application: Julius von Muller's Intrinsic Skills [Aura Manipulation], [High-Speed Reaction], [Mental Clarity], [Memory Anchoring] are accessible.]`
`[Note: Take Over does not grant Unique Skills. If the host possessed a Unique Skill, it remains inaccessible.]`
*Julius didn't have any Unique Skills?*
`[Confirmed. Julius von Muller: no Unique Skills registered at time of possession. He was on a standard noble-knight development path. Unique Skill emergence probability at his prior trajectory: 12% over a lifetime.]`
*Alright. Continue.*
`[Sub-skill "Absolute Dominion":]`
`[Combines: Soul Seizure + Vessel Stabilization.]`
`[Function A — Soul Seizure: Forcibly ejects or suppresses the soul of a target whose Soul Protect has been weakened or eliminated. Applicable to: unconscious beings, beings in critical condition, beings whose magicule capacity has been depleted below critical threshold. Cannot be used on healthy, full-capacity targets.]`
`[Function B — Vessel Stabilization: Upon successful possession, integrates Ghost Core essence with the host's nervous system and magicule circuits. Prevents Soul Rejection — the biological process by which a living body expels foreign spiritual matter. Integration is seamless from the host body's perspective.]`
`[Current application: Julius body fully integrated. Soul Rejection probability: 0%.]`
*What happens if I try to leave the body before the 71-hour mark?*
`[Julius body reverts to biological autonomy — which it no longer has, as the cardiac muscle was severed. Result: immediate clinical death of the vessel. Ghost Core ejection would be successful but would require locating a new host within 72 hours or face dissolution. Not recommended.]`
*Noted. Last sub-skill.*
`[Sub-skill "The Alchemist":]`
`[Combines: Soul Consolidation + Parallel Thought.]`
`[Function A — Parallel Thought: Allows simultaneous management of multiple cognitive processes without performance reduction. Currently running: primary consciousness engagement with environment, secondary process managing Julius body biological simulation, tertiary process indexing Void Archive data. These operations occur simultaneously without conscious management.]`
`[Function B — Soul Consolidation: Two or more compatible skills archived in Void Archive can be synthesised into a new composite skill. Synthesis produces an Extra Skill at minimum. Skill data from different sources that share functional overlap will synthesise more efficiently.]`
`[Demonstrated application: [Sword Mastery x20 sources] + [Aura Manipulation] = [Blade of the Fallen]. Extra Skill. Synthesis efficiency: 91%.]`
`[Current synthesisable combinations in archive: 14 detected. Recommend review when stationary.]`
*Fourteen possible combinations. What's the most useful one I'm not looking at?*
`[Highest priority unexamined synthesis: [Detection x7 guard instances] + [Vigilance x4 guard instances] = projected Extra Skill [Sentinel Awareness]. Effect: passive threat-detection extending Soul Sight's passive range to include intention analysis. Currently you detect wavelengths. This synthesis would flag hostile intent before action is initiated.]`
`[Synthesis possible at current magicule capacity. Requires 2.3% of current reserves. Negligible cost.]`
*Do it.*
`[Initiating synthesis.]`
＜＜Confirmed. Skill Synthesis successful.
Extra Skill [Sentinel Awareness] — acquired.
Effect: Passive hostile-intent detection within Soul Sight radius.＞＞
A new thread opened in his awareness — subtle, automatic, the way peripheral vision was automatic. The seventeen men riding with him registered as seventeen soul-wavelengths, each with an attached intent-signature. Sixteen of them read as neutral-protective: they were guards, their job was the young master, their baseline state was vigilance directed outward. One of them — three horses back, Aldric — registered differently. Not hostile. Anxious. The specific anxiety of someone managing a situation rather than experiencing it.
*Oh that's useful,* Shinji thought.
`[Agreed.]`
He had the momentary impression of a system running a quiet self-evaluation.
---
`[Unique Skill 『DREADNAUGHT』— The Immutable Architect.]`
`[Function classification: Defense / Self-Preservation. Primary role: Identity maintenance and physical evolution management.]`
`[Sub-skill "The Origin Template":]`
`[Combines: Master Template + Auto-Calculation.]`
`[Function A — Master Template: Stores a complete read-only copy of the user's personality, values, and behavioural patterns as they existed at the moment of the skill's acquisition. If identity drift is detected — through trauma, soul consumption, possession corruption, or other causes — the template triggers a corrective response. This correction does not alter memories or experiences. It restores the foundational self that interprets those experiences.]`
`[Function B — Auto-Calculation: Real-time geometric and temporal calculation of optimal timing for Phase Shift — the transition between intangible Ghost form and physical vessel interaction. Calculates to microsecond precision. Factors: atmospheric magicule density, distance to target, opponent reaction speed, vessel's current structural integrity.]`
`[Current status: Both functions active and continuous.]`
*The Master Template — what exactly did it capture? What is the "read-only file"?*
`[Summary of archived Origin Template parameters:]`
`[Core identity: Satou Shinji. Male. Age 29 at death. Former junior analyst, Kuroda Maritime Logistics.]`
`[Primary cognitive style: Observational. Classifies situations before responding. High tolerance for uncertainty; low tolerance for ignorance.]`
`[Value hierarchy: 1. Competence. 2. Honesty (to self). 3. Equivalent exchange. 4. Survival. 5. Others.]`
`[Defining flaw: Inability to delegate without experiencing it as failure.]`
`[Defining habit: Cataloguing.]`
`[Anchoring value: Curiosity.]`
`[The Template does not govern actions. It governs the self that chooses actions. You may choose to do things the original Satou Shinji would not have chosen. The Template ensures you choose them as yourself, not as accumulated noise from consumed souls.]`
Shinji sat with that for a moment.
*That's a more precise description of me than I would have written.*
`[The Template was inscribed at the moment of maximum psychological clarity — the moment of death, when irrelevant concerns have been stripped away. It is, in some respects, a more accurate portrait of you than your own self-assessment.]`
*And if I start drifting? If the soul consumption starts pulling me toward someone else's patterns?*
`[The Template triggers a notification first. Then a corrective pulse. You will feel it as a moment of unexpected clarity — like stepping from a fog you didn't know you were in. If the drift is severe, the correction can be... uncomfortable. The system prioritises accuracy over comfort.]`
*Good,* he thought, and meant it.
`[Sub-skill "The Purification Filter":]`
`[Combines: Static Filter + Night Walker.]`
`[Function A — Static Filter: During soul consumption via The Great Harvest, automatically strips the following from incoming data: emotional charge, trauma imprint, personality signature, subjective experiential overlay. What remains is archived in The Eternal Library as objective data — memories without first-person weight, skills without the emotional history of their original owner.]`
`[Without this filter, consuming 20 guard souls would have been psychologically catastrophic. The "noise" — their fears, their deaths, their final moments — was converted to magicule energy rather than absorbed into your ego. You received their knowledge. You did not receive their suffering.]`
`[Function B — Night Walker: Grants perfect perceptual clarity in total darkness. This operates through Ghost Core's Magic Perception rather than the vessel's optical system. Even while in Julius's body, you have awareness of spatial environments in complete darkness without requiring light.]`
*Why am I not hearing any screaming?*
`[Static Filter. It is functioning correctly.]`
*The guards — Captain Vane. I have his memories. I know his daughter's name. I know the recipe for his wife's soup. I remember his first kill. But none of it feels like—*
`[Like yours. Correct. The Eternal Library places those memories in the third person. You can access them as data. You cannot experience them as events that happened to you. This is by design.]`
*What happens to the memories if I don't access them? Do they just stay in the Archive?*
`[They persist indefinitely. The Void Archive does not decay. Captain Vane's daughter will remain the age she was in his last memory for as long as you carry him. Time does not pass in the Archive.]`
He didn't examine how he felt about that. He filed it for later, the way he filed everything that required more processing than the immediate situation allowed.
`[Sub-skill "The Eternal Library":]`
`[Combines: The Vault + Autopilot.]`
`[Function A — The Vault: A dual-layer partition within the Void Archive. Layer One stores skill data as technical blueprints — reproducible without the original soul. Layer Two stores experiential memories as accessible archives. You can query either layer through directed attention or through NEKROMANTEION's analysis functions.]`
`[Function B — Autopilot: Converts stored magicule reserves into biological sustenance for the possessed vessel. Julius's body no longer requires food, water, or sleep. It requires magicules, which NEKROMANTEION provides from the reserve pool. Current daily consumption: approximately 0.8% of total capacity. At current reserves: sustainable indefinitely.]`
*So I never have to eat.*
`[The body does not require it for function. Social expectation requires that you appear to eat in the presence of others. Recommend performing eating. The Autopilot can manage the biological processing of consumed material without impacting vessel function.]`
*That's going to be strange.*
`[Most things about your current situation are strange. This one is manageable.]`
`[Sub-skill "The Core Weaver":]`
`[Combines: Amalgam — Vessel Synthesis.]`
`[Function: The Fusion Engine. Allows extraction of Body Cores or Magic Crystals from defeated monsters, demons, or high-tier beings. Extracted cores can be integrated into the current vessel — Julius body — via Core Slot: Alpha (currently EMPTY). Integration physically modifies the vessel: the integrated core's magicule capacity, physical attributes, and innate abilities are welded into the body's existing structure.]`
`[Example application: A Lizardman's Magic Crystal, integrated into the vessel, would grant the body scaled patches with superior impact resistance in those areas, plus the Lizardman's magicule capacity boost.]`
`[Example application: A Greater Demon's Heart Core would grant the vessel access to the demon's innate magic and massively expand magicule capacity ceiling.]`
`[Constraint: Core Slot Alpha holds ONE core at current tier. Additional slots unlock with Ghost Core evolution. Current status: EMPTY.]`
`[Recommendation: First core integration should be high-tier. Sub-optimal cores cannot be removed once integrated without vessel damage.]`
*What would be the ideal first core?*
`[Criteria: Maximum magicule capacity expansion, minimum physical visibility. A visually obvious integration — wings, scales across exposed skin — compromises the Julius cover. Recommend: a high-tier magic-attribute core from an internal-effect monster. Magicule boosters rather than physical trait donors.]`
`[Candidates available in Jura Forest at current era: Iron Golem (Magic Crystal, +40% magicule capacity, no physical change), Shadow Panther (Magic Crystal, grants Shadow Affinity, subtle), Forest Dragon — if one can be located and defeated, which is inadvisable at current rank.]`
*Noted. Not today.*
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End of chapter.