Wish upon the Stars chapter 855

The next day, after making my scrolls, I met with Dirk, the humanized Bull. I had to admit, I was pretty excited. I’d met plenty of beasts, but none of them had taken human form. I’d been told that most animals had no interest in assuming a human shape on rank up, and it could only happen after D-rank. Theoretically, it could happen ANY time after D-rank, but when an animal spent its whole life ranking up into a higher level form of beast, it took a big mental shift for it to change its spots, so to speak.

I was excited to see a human for beast, which I guessed was an ancestor to things like racial traits. Lucky for us, Dirk didn’t seem to mind taking a meeting for Carmichael. They weren’t friends or anything, but Carmichael was famous in Silent Sorrow.

Callie came with me, but we left the others to their relaxation as we made our way to a conference room on the fifth floor. When we arrived, we knocked loudly, and after a minute, a muffled voice called “C’min!” I glanced at my wife, who shrugged, and I pushed the door open, Mornax ready just in case.

I was back in my mask and armor, of course, and I was the sturdier of the two of us. I didn’t expect trouble, but that was usually when it showed up, so better safe than sorry.

When we stepped inside, I was surprised to see that there was only one person at the table. Specifically, one very LARGE person with food piled high in front of him. The man was colossal, at least seven feet tall and carved from pure muscle. He had a healthy tan and brown eyes, and his hair was long and wild.

In front of him, the table was laden with dishes covered with every kind of food imaginable. Chicken, fish, fruit, vegetables, baked goods. It was a veritable buffet, and Dirk’s dinner plate sized hands were grabbing up a large chunk of food with every breath, stuffing it into his mouth as he swallowed, sometimes chopping through the bone in his haste to eat. He looked ravenously hungry, and his eyes barely twitched off the smorgasbord in front of him.

“Dirk?” I asked after a full minute of nonstop devouring. He froze, blinking at us. 

“Oh, right,” he said with a mouth full of turkey. “You. You want some?” He pushed a huge plate of honey baked ham toward us. 

I shook my head. “We’re good, we ate earlier. We can come back if you’re busy.”

He shook his head. “Nah, this is just my midday snack.” At our shocked look, he swallowed everything and laughed. “Yeah, people are usually pretty shocked. When a beast transforms into a human, it usually keeps some of its animalistic traits. I was a Heaven Swallowing Bull in D-rank, so when I transformed, I brought my tough hide, my strong legs, and my appetite.”

I sat down across from him, intrigued. “So, your appetite is kind of like one of the modifiers on a racial trait? Is it just hunger, or does it give you some ability?”

He hummed, pausing to think. “I mean, I heal pretty quick. And I always get extra hungry when I’m hurt. I dislocated my shoulder in a fight earlier, so my snack is a bit bigger than usual. Is that what you mean?”

It was. “Do you mind if I use an ability on you?” I asked. “Nothing TOO intrusive, just a detection power.”

I didn’t know Dirk well enough to inspect his soul. But I also didn’t necessarily NEED to. Dantalion was optimized for body investigation. While I could do soul checks, I needed permission and assistance. But bodies were much easier. Coincidentally, beasts integrated their stats into their bodies directly.

That thought made me pause. From what I knew, the soul and body merged at S-rank, with the Saga acting as a medium. Paths created a bridge between physical and spiritual, letting the soul merge with the flesh.

But animals integrated stats into their bodies and not their souls. Was that why they didn’t need a Path? Or did they have Paths we weren’t aware of? I’d never seen an S-rank beast, not had I HEARD of anything higher. I knew god beasts existed, but I’d never heard anyone talk about one directly.

Far from being a non sequitur, this line of thought was integral to how I created Callie’s racial trait. I triggered Dantalion after he agreed and sat there for the next twenty minutes while he ate, investigating what I found.

It was…fascinating. First was the stats. They did make up the body, not just metaphysically, but they were used to create a solid mass. In humans, the stats affect the soul, which spills over to alter the body, but in this case, they had been combined into something similar to a Skill construct, but more tangible. It took me a bit to recognize where I knew it from. Specifically, it reminded me of a Chronicle.

In fact, looking at it that way, the entire concept of a Chronicle and subsequently a Saga merging with the body might have been a method to try to mimic this effect. I wondered if early cultivation was based entirely off beasts. Not just racial traits, but all cultivation. Paths, Skills, Chronicles.

Studying Dirk, I learned a few things. First, I couldn’t create a physical construct body for Callie. I had no mechanism to do it. Chronicles were complicated soul bullshit, and while I’d MADE one, I had no clue how it worked.

Even if I’d been able to design a physical reformation like that, I wouldn’t know how to apply it. Racial traits were applied to the soul, and changed the body that way. It was a natural mechanism and the body did half the work. Second, because of the way the stats integrated with the flesh, Dirk’s body made more…sense. It was more grounded. Vitality where his heart and stomach were, Might where the muscles were, Perception in the eyes. It was more linear, more logical. This was what I would imagine a person looked like if they were made out of stats.

From what I could tell, even though racial traits mimicked this effect, the results were more irrational. The soul wasn’t a physical thing, so it didn’t obey physical rules. A racial trait body was different than a normal person, changed, but the mechanism of that change was kind of abstruse. It didn’t follow any specific rules.

Which meant I needed to be very careful with my design. The soul wasn’t as restricted in the changes it made, and the changes that DID apply weren’t always ones you could understand or guess at. I’d been having trouble decoding racial traits that I’d been studying, and this seemed to be the main reason. Some of the things they did, they SHOULDN’T do.

With Callie’s trait, I had a baseline. Angels of multiple types to use as a template, and Sammel to experiment with. If I stuck to that, I’d be safe enough.

But a lot of the theoretical changes and exciting new mechanics I’d been daydreaming about had to be scrapped. I wanted Callie to be strong, and she would be, but field testing that trait in the way I’d planned on doing would be way too dangerous. Anything could happen, and I had no intention of risking my wife.

It ALSO explained some things about racial traits I’d known but hadn’t understood. Ones that I needed to know. Namely, it explained why it wasn’t possible to make a racial trait out of a Skill that wasn’t the primary. The main Skill for job users or the ability for heroic cultivators. It was because that Skill was already connected to the soul and had a direct influence on the body through that. It was the same reason you couldn’t rank your main Skill up past your current rank. It was part of you.

Normally, this would mean that I was functionally incapable of making Callie a different species. We were waiting to merge the Path skill with the racial trait until she ranked up, making sure that it had been refined and perfected as best as possible before combining them, so it could suppress the Abyssal influence.

This would have meant waiting until she was at the peak of D-rank to apply the racial trait…under normal circumstances. But Callie had another option. Namely, she had another Skill connected to her soul, and one that I could directly influence. Master Paired Duelling.

If I used the bond as the anchor for her racial trait, not only would I be able to apply it early, I could also help her keep it stable. She could access Sammael through the bond to bolster it if her Path skill got overwhelming, and she could access the library and the staff and consistently refine and upgrade it like I did my forms, laying the foundation for the merge when she broke through to C-rank.

Callie had been silently watching as I worked through all this, but at my burst of enthusiasm her eyes lit up, and I put my arm around her, pulling her tight against me in a side hug. “Hey Dirk, I think I’m good. You need anything else?”

The bull Ascendant shrugged. “Not really,” he said, swallowing the last of his current mouthful. “You don’t need to like…talk a bunch? I kind of figured I’d have to talk a bunch. Humans talk way too much.”

I laughed, shaking my head. “We’re good. You can get back to your snack. We appreciate the help.”

“Whatever,” he said with a shrug, effectively dismissing us from his presence as he began actively ignoring us. I had to hide a smile as we left. He reminded me a bit of Callie when she was really in the zone digging through loot.

“So, what did you figure out?” my wife asked me as we left. 

I grinned. “Everything. That was the last piece that I needed to finish. Tonight I’m going to complete the final form of your racial trait, and we can finally apply it. The way I have it set up, it should act as a filter for the influence from your Path Skill, at least until it can evolve enough to directly counter it.”

Connecting it to the bond was genius, if I did say so myself. It would allow her to use the Ten Demons Tree to evolve it consistently without needing me to actively work on it. Which was good, because I was not even remotely confident now that I could properly make a racial trait from scratch.

The uncertainty and irregularity of the soul method of body modification meant any new things I tried could have almost any effect. The unpredictability made heavy experimentation completely untenable. I had some ideas for how to make sure the trait would still be powerful and counteract the Abyssal influence, but it would be based on energy construction, not on the actual design. That would be close to the boilerplate angel design.

Still, Callie looked so relieved it broke my heart. I knew from the bond how unsettled she was by the experience of knowing things out of nowhere. The Path was convenient for us right now, but it scared my wife, she was terrified it was changing her in ways recursion didn’t, and that she might never be able to change back.

It wasn’t, of course, I’d have noticed, but I was glad I could give her peace of mind. With that out of the way, we headed back to our rooms. THis time, we didn’t call anyone for the process. This was going to be just the two of us. The bond being part of this made it deeply personal. Still, I couldn’t wait. By this time tomorrow, Callie would officially be safe from the Abyss. At least for now.