CH875

“Do I really need to do this?” Mora asked as he sat at the table, staring down the plate of food in front of him as his face twisted. “It just looks so weird.”

“Mora, if you’re going to be using a body, that means keeping it alive,” Ben told him. “It’s a big responsibility, if you’re going to do this then you need to take care of it.”

“Ben, you’re making it sound like taking care of a pet,” Thera sighed.

“I mean, it’s not entirely different. Besides, just give it a bite, I can already tell you think it smells good.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” The boy told him while Ben laughed.

“Maybe you don’t yet but you’re currently undergoing a biological response to the food in front of you that all of us fleshies refer to as drooling. Just put a little in your mouth, chew it, and swallow. If you really, really hate the experience then there’s always the option of getting out of there and using your mana to direct it to eat but if you’re trying to go for the full mortal experience then this really is a defining part you can’t skip. Trust me, even if it feels weird at first, you’ll learn to love it.”

“Mmh, okay,” He finally gave in, lifting his fork and with a doubtful look put it in his mouth, his entire expression changing for it as Ben grinned back.

“Good?”

“I don’t know. I think so?”

He kept eating despite saying that. Even if mentally he wasn’t sure, experiencing senses his true form wasn’t capable of, he was currently linked to the body he wore and it at least was certain of the quality it had received, craving more the instant it got its first taste and letting the other two watch as the boy devoured his first meal, smiling happily as they did.

“Another issue with having a body is going to be keeping it clean though,” Thera said as she gently wiped the boy’s face with a napkin when he was done. “I guess there’s going to be a lot of little things to practice but you’ll slowly get used to them, although now… What are we going to do about today?”

Her eyes turned back to Ben when she asked, uncertainty about how to handle such a turn of events as the plans she thought she had were instantly warped. Should she go to work with the boy like she had been doing that entire time? There were no obvious problems with it but it was easy to imagine something popping up too that might need to be dealt with and even if she was perfectly equipped to handle any issue that a mortal body might have, trying to deal with it in a busy hospital with people dying all around them would only add another layer of stress.

“Why not stay with me today then?” Ben asked. “The biggest issues I can imagine are going to be getting Mora used to his new senses and he’ll have to deal with plenty in the shop that’ll be worse than anything at home but hopefully not as potentially nauseating as whatever you might find in a hospital. Plus, I’ll be around to help out too.”

“Mmh, they do know I’ll occasionally miss days if an emergency pops up and I’m willing to say this qualifies,” Thera muttered. “And I am basically a volunteer anyway, it’s not like I’m marked as a member of staff anywhere and there have been less and less injuries recently as other healers improve, but… Mmh, maybe I’ll take a half day. If I show up in the afternoon, they can deal with it.”

“That’s the spirit! Okay Mora, looks like you guys are with me today so come on, let’s go have some fun.”

---

Standing in front of the boy, touching his chest and with a pout on her face, Delair’s initial excitement at the surprising change couldn’t help but deflate when she’d realized an inescapable fact of it.

“So I can’t stick my arm through you anymore?”

“Why do you enjoy that so much anyway?” Mora asked back, his own confusion plain, with no experience controlling his face to keep his every emotion as anything less than obvious. “It’s not that exciting.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” She said, shaking her head but not elaborating further, only looking disappointed until Mora broke down and removed one of his spiritual arms from his new flesh and let it pass through her, bringing a laugh back to the girl’s face while Ben and Thera watched from the side.

“...Well, if they’re happy then it’s fine,” Thera said, understanding no more than Mora why the young girl enjoyed his intangibleness so. “But do you think this is going to be okay?”

“Soft maybe. It’s not like he’s actually fully become the soul of a body, if something bad enough happens to it, it shouldn’t kill him but I can imagine the potential pain being decently traumatic, even if he were to go back to just living like a great spirit.”

“Ugh, I have so many new concerns,” She complained before pausing a moment, looking at Ben from the side. “And what do you think about this?”

“It’s interesting. Honestly, I’d go so far as to say super interesting. I wonder if all of the regular soul spirits could do this too? For that matter, I wonder if the life and death spirits can? It seems like Nox is less acting like the soul of the corpse he uses than he is puppeting it. How do you think any of them would react to getting to experience a mortal life in any way or think with a mortal brain? If that really is happening of course, hard to judge when Mora doesn’t let me read his mind but maybe I’ll ask him permission to peek later.”

“...Yeah, I should have known you’d be way too interested in this,” She sighed. “But that wasn’t entirely what I was talking about. He used us to make a body, do you not have any particular feelings about that?”

“What, like he was trying to more firmly become our child?” He asked, being rewarded with the sight of Thera freezing at the bluntness before answering.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I mean, it doesn’t really matter to me. It probably would have been better to talk to us about it first but if he was looking for attention, well, it’s cute.”

“Cute?”

“Sure, he’s still a bit clumsy at expressing himself but he’s trying, of course it’s cute. And if he is more firmly trying to cement himself as our kid, or at the very least a part of our family, well, I care about him and you care about him and we aren’t planning on abandoning him any time soon, right?”

“Right, I just… I don’t know.”

“Ha, I know you don’t want any but part of that comes from the lifespan issue, right? Well, we’ve gone and adopted one that’s going to even outlive you. Does that help make you a bit more comfortable with all of this?”

“It’s not that, I’ve already committed to looking after him for as long as he needs it, my mother made sure of that when you were dealing with Bloom but… If we were to have a kid in, you know, a slightly more normal way than how Mora just did that, do you think they’d look like that?”

“Ah, so the issue is that Mora doing this has made you more conscious of kids in general, gotcha.”

“Didn’t need you to just spell it out for me.”

“Ha, but that’s also very cute,” He said with a wink, getting lightly elbowed in return. “But as for how they’d look? I mean, yeah, I guess that’s probably pretty close unless Mora specifically tried to over or under-express specific traits when he made it. He’s actually really interesting to look at, the eyes obviously come from you, they’re just presenting his soul affinity instead of your earth but it’s pretty obvious that a few of the other traits he’s presenting are coming from your succubus half instead of me. If we did have kids, it would be neat to see where the earth affinity stays strong. Would it always be eyes? Windows to the soul and all that as they say but I could see hair too. Ha, I wonder if Mora had been presenting his nature there if he would have been bald? Skin would have been a bad one too, probably, seeing as how if it presented through his soul affinity, that might have meant a transparent view to his muscles beneath but then, maybe both are already being presented there in some way I’m just not noticing? We don’t know how your body works either, do we? But Mora said that your biology was useful for making him a vessel, you’re both probably flooded with mana in ways a more typical mortal wouldn’t be.”

“And now you sound more like a biologist than anything else. So this really hasn’t made you feel weirdly conscious at all?”

“No, sorry. I mean, sure it was a surprise but I don’t think this would even make my top ten since coming to this world.”

“You’re right, if I wanted to compare feelings then I’d need to do it with someone with an actually normal life,” She sighed. “Aunty will be good to talk to when she finds out. Thank the gods there’s one other normal person in our household.”

“Okay, not only am I offended for multiple reasons but you don’t get to count yourself as a normal member of the household either, miss first half spirit, succubus and spirit princess, contender for two different skills, and holder of nearly a million points of mana.”

“I’m not a princess to the succubi.”

“And that was literally the only point you could refute.”

“Okay, fine, fine. Aunty Sonya is the only normal one that lives with the rest of us freaks and weirdos but it’s still a matter of scale. If she’s a one and you’re a ten then me and Mora are both fours, tops.”

“Why exactly am I sixty percent weirder than you?”

Thera laughed. “Oh, not sixty percent. This isn’t a straight scale, it’s exponential.”

“I’m literally just a little guy.”

“You’re not little and I don’t even have the time or energy to list off everything about you the way you just did about me so let’s just leave it at the fact that you somehow have two third-tier skills and are aiming for more and I’ll let you figure out the rest yourself with that crazy brain of yours, which you can no longer deny by the way. You can’t have a third-tier mind skill and pretend your mind is still sane.”

“I can pretend all sorts of things.”

“Ha, you know, they say crazy people don’t stop to wonder if they’re crazy.”

“Alright, I can see I’m going to be slandered for a bit today so hold that thought for just a moment.”

In all of his experiments on Quox, he’d found more than a few useful aspects of his new skills with one that could be applied to his student and using it as an excuse to put a pause to that conversation, directed the rest of himself to examining Delair as he started, wanting to be certain she’d be okay.

While even the chances of giving her a headache felt low, he was about to try something he hadn’t before with her and wanted to be prepared for any potential reactions, either to put a stop to what he was doing instantly if it came to it or else even going so far as to clip the information he was going to provide from her using mind break so, lightly touching her mind with his own, he started giving her knowledge.

It was something he’d done before throughout her lessons and with numerous other people as well but what he was now doing was on another scale entirely. The knowledge skill he used to hold was perfect for making her and anyone else memorize the information he could provide but from all of the people he’d connected to across all walks of life, he’d found he could now transmit far deeper levels of experience and while her physical body worked he did exactly that, giving her not just all of the information he held on crafting but subtler details too, apply what he knew in a way that would fit her own body as he transmitted information on how she should move and how it should feel, being rewarded with a surprise of his own as he heard the notification going off in her head saying she’d gained her fourth level to the skill, making him re-examine his plans for the day.

Well, that could be interesting.