Threads of the Soul

Humming his usual video game tune, Seth was lost in his thoughts as he gorged himself on the veritable feast that was laid out before him. The meat of the dozens of dead creatures was being dutifully collected by the designated collectors to later be shared around the rest of their little community. Smaller corpses were simply placed inside borrowed bottomless bags, while larger corpses were brought to the edge of the wall and placed into a pile for later movement.

But it was not the meat Seth was after, that was for everyone after all and he still had plenty from his own hunting adventures dried up into jerky. No, it was those delicious little glowing morsels contained within that he was eager to devour. Those lovely, delectable souls. A phrase that absolutely in no way made him sound like a power hungry villain.

He had no idea if there were any soul stat evolvers in the group, from his discussions with Angel and the others, both in the hunting group and the collectors he was currently mingling with, Seth had discovered that soul stat users were exceedingly rare.

Not only was it an extremely difficult stat to raise naturally, although it could be much more easily diminished, the variety of abilities that soul stat users could manifest were extremely vast. According to Angel, it was the wild card. Not only were the abilities wildly unpredictable, they weren't always extremely useful. At least not immediately.

Take Seth himself, for example. His abilities depended entirely on other entities, his puppets. Without his puppets he was little more than an ordinary man, which is what he was currently posing himself as. It was honestly a miracle, or sheer dumb luck, that he managed to survive his first few encounters long enough to discover the effectiveness of his abilities.

Other soul stat users might not have been so lucky. It wasn't just the rarity of the manifestation, it was their survivability too. It was as if you pulled 100,000 cards and 50 of those were ultra rare cards, but then 48 of them were lost in a fire. Those remaining 2 would be considered beyond ultra rare.

Besides, even if there was by some chance another soul stat user in this library, it's not as if he could actually feed them the soul remnants and there was no guarantee that they could eat them themselves either. He himself could only collect them due to a unique quirk of his ability, since the threads were a metaphysical extension of his own soul, plus his eyes strange ability to see them. There was no way of knowing if someone else could do this and if they could... Well, finders keepers.

Since Seth was adamant about collecting as many soul remnants as he could, to take full advantage of the eternal and sacred law of finders keepers, he initially focused on the smaller corpses. Each one of those put away in a pouch was one less remnant in his belly and one less stat point.

He would gather up the smaller corpses and kindly deliver them to the one's with the pouches, expressing that he was happy to help. Leaving them none the wiser to the delicious stat points he was slurping up with every dead squirrel or depraved rat corpse. He even managed to snatch a few remnants from other people's small creature stash, right before they were placed into their bag. Angel's voice resounding in his mind, eagerly confirming every little morsel he devoured.

[Your Spiritual Score has increased.]

[Your Spiritual Score has increased.]

[Your Spiritual Score has increased.]

[Your Spiritual...

***

Seth licked his lips as he devoured yet another soul remnant, this time from a larger beast since all the smaller ones had been stashed away for a while. Even though he couldn't taste them, he felt like he could. Something about the process of slurping up a creatures soul energy and using it to fuel his own was just so satisfying, it reminded him of all those years spent grinding away at games for hours on end just to hear that little chime of a level up.

No matter the game or the sound or even the time spent, that chime of progress always made the little gremlins in his mind do happy little dances. It was positively addicting, not that such a thing would ever be done on purpose, right? No, of course not. It just felt good then and it felt good now.

Scanning his glowing silver eyes over the killing field once again, Seth checked for any more glittering morsels only to let out a remorseful sigh when he saw nothing but the endless muted colours that composed that vision. It had taken him just under 2 hours to devour every soul remnant that he could, as well as actually assist with the corpse collecting to maintain appearances.

[Name: Sephtis 'Seth' Quinn

Species: Gaian Human

Biological Score: 92 Elemental Score: 70

Spiritual Score: 198 Psychic Score: 50

Mutation - Puppeteers Thread, Spirit Animal

Requitals: Life Lantern, Ravens Raiment, Expeditious Ratreat, Grizzly Reminder, Kiss of Death

Bonds: Omelette]

'Damn, So close.'

Seth clicked his tongue as he reviewed his latest stats. From this lovely buffet he had gained a whopping 24 points towards his spiritual score, putting him just shy of his maximum. So tantalising close, but it just meant that two or maybe even one more corpse would be enough to push him over the edge.

Then he could finally see what happens, if anything, when someone maxes out their stats. 24 might not seem a lot compared to the feast that he had, but it was more than the higher tier Shelled Drake had given him, even if not by very much, and it came with much less threat of death to consume. Those two combined meant that he had taken nearly half of a normal persons max score just from these two events, perhaps if he didn't have an especially powerful soul that he would have maxed it out by now.

It was a shame though, just a few seconds earlier and he might have been able to do it. Oh well. If by the simple fact that power hungry worms like Sirius were maxed out, yet hadn't transcended to the next tier, it told Seth that there was something special that they needed to do to finally bridge that gap. What it was? He currently had no idea. Of course he could also someone who had maxed out already, like Astra, but their conditions might not be the same.

Plus, with his stats being so teasingly close, he felt like a child on Christmas eve staring at the presents underneath the tree. No matter how much he wanted to tear them open or take a sneak peak at the answers, he knew that it would be better discovered when the right time came along. Why spoil the surprise of a good discovery, after all?

Working alongside the unpowered people, or 'mortals' as some liked to call them, Seth had finally realised the true effect of his stat increases on his body. Fighting alongside others such as himself against colossal creatures or wrestling bears by himself, It was hard to tell. But now that he had a frame of reference, Seth truly understood just how powerful he had become.

Even with one arm and a noticeably skinny build, since he was still working on cultivating that mass, Seth was still evidentially stronger than the average person by a considerable margin, even when they had two hands.

People had always joked that they should have an average person at the Olympics so that they could see how truly impressive those athletes are. A joke that now made sense to Seth, because that's exactly how he felt. Like an Olympian surrounded by average joes.

With his physical stats nearly hitting their max Seth, as well as every other evolver, was reaching the pinnacle of human capabilities. Not just in one category, but in all of them.

They had the strength of gold medal weight lifters yet the flexibility of gymnasts, the sprinting speed of the worlds fastest with the stamina of triathlon experts. Even then they were not limited by the feats achievable solely through training, it was as if they were simply born with the most perfect genes in the world. Like the energy inside of them was reconstructing their body from the smallest muscle fibre to be as optimal as possible. The mental image of a particular star spangled super soldier was impossible to keep from Seth's nerdy mind.

However each person naturally had a direction their body wanted to lean in so they weren't all equal on every level. Each person had, at some biological and instinctual level, their own definition of peak, for instance Alexandra would always be stronger than Seth even with their stats being the same. Their builds may not mean much compared to normal people, but to each other they did.

The stone Amazonian was undeniably huge, possibly bordering on the realm of super human in terms of strength, whereas Seth himself, even when he bulked up a bit more, seemed to be on the more lean side. His body seemed to be pushing him in the direction of speed, dexterity and agility, no doubt compensating for his run and hide nature. But even this skinny arm build for dexterity could lift a car, if he so wished.

A soft smile spread across Seth's lips as he stepped through the clearly marked hole in the blatantly labelled wall and headed towards the library it protected. If this, the level of a super soldier, was what he could achieve as a tier 0, then he really couldn't wait for the next tier.