Wish upon the Stars chapter 856

When we got back to the room, Callie and I called everyone, letting them know not to disturb us, and then settled in to begin the real work. Deciding the best place to do said work was the library, we sat in the living room together, linked hands, closed our eyes, and then I pulled her through the bond into my inner world.

We arrived in the library without much fanfare. Callie blinked in shock as she looked at the Ten Demons Tome. Namely, at the giant ass spectral TREE that now floated above it. “Well…that's new.”

I forgot that she hadn’t been in here since the staff ranked up. “Yeah, that happened when the Ten Demons Tree hit B-rank. I have no idea why, but it seems to make using it way easier. That vapor shaking from the leaves is the stuff that Wisdom of Solomon runs on. So I can use it way more often.”

“So, let’s get started,” I said excitedly, clapping my hands. I pulled her to a table, where I dropped a dozen books. “So, these are the tomes for your racial trait. Or rather, they’re the tomes that recorded all the data I was able to dig up from the others. After what I learned from Dirk, I’m going to pull these two.” I snagged the Vampire and Heaven Murder Elf tome, and tossed them on a shelf. “These two are the angel tomes, and this one is Sammael.”

I picked up a fourth. “This one is Chelsea’s ability. This is where we’re going to get the secret sauce. I’m designing your ability specifically to offset the problems with your Path. Now Sammael is imbued with Enshrining Darkness, which is powerful, but it has some sort of connection to the Abyss. Which means it’s not optimal for your form.”

Flipping through the book, I grinned. “BUT, that doesn’t mean we can’t use it. Chelsea’s ability, or rather, her ABILITIES, allow her to balance the two different energy types she inherited from my grandparents.”

“One of these is Enshrining Darkness itself, and the other is the flame of purification.” I flipped through the angel books, studying the construction of the racial traits as best I could, and comparing them to the construct I used for Sammael. Based on my observations, Sammael…shouldn’t work. It was deeply flawed. My soul picked up the slack, self correcting the form, but it needed lots of work.

This was less of an issue than it might have been, though. I’d had a parallel down here researching for a while, and a large portion of that had been running Sammael through the Ten Demons Tree, experiencing it deeply and slowly evolving it, accumulating lots of data about the deeper mechanics and the mythology of the form.

I COULD have used the Wisdom of Solomon to iterate it to perfection, but I didn’t want it to be perfect yet. Room for improvement meant I could incorporate new elements.

And I did mean elements. As in, plural. “Alright, so here’s the plan. I want your feedback here, because this is your racial trait, and you’ll be stuck with it for the rest of your life. Probably. I can’t design a new species. I know WAY less than I thought I did, and the complexity is so far beyond me it isn’t funny. But that doesn’t mean I can't do anything useful. Angels have base elements, concepts that define them. The flames the girls use, Enshrining Darkness, and so on.

“What I want to do is use CHelsea’s ability interaction, specifically her Path, which bridges the gap, to create a dual element angelic trait.” I spun the book to show her. “Now, by balancing the two improperly, I can make room for you to integrate the Abyssal Path into your trait before you rank up.”

She hummed with interest. “Ok, but correct me if I’m wrong, wouldn’t that just make me imbalanced in the OTHER direction? That’s bad too, right?”

“Depends what we use,” I shrugged. “I’m planning to use Leviathan as a base. It’s a domain, not a form, but they’re still related. It should work. Leviathan has a soul strengthening method built INTO it, and Zagan’s purification and lifeforce enhancement aspects are nothing but positive. I’ll use Enshrining Darkness to offset, like Chelsea has. Because Leviathan is so heavily altered and upgraded, Enshrining Darkness should be substantially weaker.”

The Enshrining Darkness ability was divine. It was SCARY. But it was ultimately just a normal ability. It wasn’t a Domain, at least not the version I was using. It was Chelsea’s inherited version. Strong and laden with mythology, but still just a high tier power.

It should mix PERFECTLY with the Abyss when Callie was ready, and the power from Leviathan would balance the combination. Especially with Callie’s connection to my own soul. When we did this, we’d be upgrading the bond itself, so our connection would get even deeper. I was pretty sure Sammael might actually mutate due to the connection, though I wasn’t positive.

She studied the books, flipping around, reading the stories, and missing the underlying construction. The tomes weren’t really designed for the average joe to read. The stats that were used in their creation were sort of in two states, stat and construct, and it took a certain processing ability to sort through them. She could still read the stories they told though, and that gave her some basic idea of how things worked.

Finally, she nodded. “Alright. If you think you can do it. Can you integrate Chelsea’s Path into this? Between that, the Enshrining Darkness, and Leviathan, this seems…busy.”

“I have a LOT of juice to run the Wisdom of Solomon,” I shrugged. “I can afford to be ambitious. Since I can’t alter the template much, I need to make sure your energy is leagues beyond any other angel. Altering the conceptual makeup is the best I can do for you. This will give you the best possible starting point. Once you finish integrating the Abyss, you should be a top tier racial trait user. Maybe not BETHY, but who is?”

After I got her permission, I started my work. Closing my eyes, I reached out to the tree. This was my first time using the Wisdom of Solomon since my staff had ranked up. Rather than just treat it like a machine, I decided to lean into the tree theme. Symbolism and stories were important aspects of technique creation, and forms were very similar. I was going about this racial trait thing from my strong points, so I needed to go all out.

Luckily, I had a good idea how to proceed. First I grabbed all the books that I was planning to use and carried them to the pedestal. Lifting them up, I speared them through with the roots, letting them float in the air as the ethereal appendages of the illusory tree held them pinned in the air like a butterfly on a card.

Closing my eyes, I reached out through the tree, feeling the tomes at the ends of the roots. The staff, consciousness still pretty murky, was there in the background, eager to help, so I allowed it to assist as I pulled through the roots, drawing the water vapor floating around the leaves into the roots. The energy, that unquantifiable substance that allowed this mechanism (I suspected now that it was some form of mythology), soaked into the books, then was sucked out by the roots, drawing the latent information inside them up into the tree.

Having absorbed the information, the concepts began to mix, iterations coming forth, but instead of playing out in my head like a computer, fruits began to grow on the branches. Because of the connection between my soul and the tree, a glance at the fruit told me everything I needed to know about it.

One fruit was round and dark, and that one was just pure Enshrining Darkness, one had slight swirls of green, and that was clearly Zagan. The tree was concocting the fruits based on all of the elements. Not just the ones I wanted, it was starting with single aspects and then mixing them. The lowest level of the canopy held more simple single color fruits, but as it climbed they began to shift and mix, introducing strange patterns and unusual side effects.

It was dizzying. Even sticking to the main template, the changes I was making to the racial trait kept mutating it into strange variants. Three winged angels, tree angels, angels made of pure darkness. The more information it gathered though, the more perfected they became. Not just from the books but from previous instances, I was able to see the improvement as the fruits climbed the tree.

Sadly, that wasn’t all I could see. The vapor was draining away FAST. I’d had way more of it than the last time I’d used this ability, and I was already almost out. I focused on a few of the most promising fruits and urged the tree to concentrate in those directions, splitting off a series of parallels to help it sort through the data.

Finally, right before I ran out of vapor, the process finished. At the top of the tree, situated in the same place the fruit had been back when it had just been a sapling, sat a single lustrous fruit. It was round and shiny, with mixed swirls of black through its mostly green and gold surface, creating strange swirling patterns that made me dizzy to look at. Reaching up, I beckoned to the fruit and it plucked itself, falling in a parabolic arc to smack casually into my palm. As soon as it was picked, the other fruits withered and dissolved, leaving the tree empty, though looking a little wilted.

I held up the fruit to my wife triumphantly, passing it over so she could examine it. “Ok,” she said slowly. “So…is this the catalyst? Like is this a real fruit? Because you need a catalyst for a racial trait, don’t you?”

“Not for this one,” I said with a shake of my head. “Racial traits use catalysts to trigger changes in Skills through the connection to the body, changing the soul by the transitive property. It’s kind of wonky, because it works the OPPOSITE of the way the traits function in the first place, but it’s only a spark and it uses qualities and aspects of the soul to initiate the process. We’re skipping that for you, because I’m connected DIRECTLY to your soul. I can make changes to the bond directly through our connection.”

She frowned, looking concerned. “Does that mean the bond will go away? Will we lose it when it changes?”

“Nah, it’ll just be altered,” I pulled her in for a hug. “I’m going to use Sammael to anchor my end, so it’ll just turn into something new. Still a bond, but it’ll become a completely unique Skill that I’ll have, while your side of it will turn into your racial trait. It’s the only way I could think of to make this work without waiting until your rank up and integrating it into your main ability.”

Taking a deep breath, she nodded. “Alright, I get you. So…how do we do this? Do I need a book or something?”

I tossed the fruit at her, and she caught it clumsily, raising an eyebrow at me. “Nope. It’s a fruit. Just eat it. Make sure you’re ready though, it’s going to be a doozy, so don’t just bite-” sadly, I hadn’t talked fast enough. Following my instruction to just eat the fruit, my wife had reflexively bitten into it, her eyes widening as she heard the rest of my sentence, one turning pitch black and one flashing bright green, then they rolled up in her head.

Cursing, I opened my eyes in the real world and darted forward, catching her, then grimaced. “Ok, that was on me. I probably shouldn’t have paused for effect.” Her only response was a violent twitch. “Right, let’s get you on the couch.”