Chapter 433: Soul Points
Chapter 433: Soul Points
Souls moved everywhere. Souls of every kind, different shapes, different sizes, different glows. Bruce saw a tall, slim soul that looked human walking past the gate beside a shorter, broader one with the same horns as Kael.
He saw a soul that looked like a graceful four-legged creature, the size of a horse, with a long delicate neck and a body that shimmered faintly silver, walking calmly through the gate carrying a basket on its back.
He saw a soul that looked like a small reptile, a soul that looked like a winged bird, a soul that looked like a person but with skin that was scaled instead of smooth.
All of them, all of them, glowed. The whole city glowed, softly, in a hundred different colors of held soul-light. It was less a city of buildings and more a city of small suns walking around carrying things.
Behind Bruce, the others were stepping out of the carriage one by one.
Kael came down beside him and stopped. He said, simply: "Huh."
Theron came down after, and forgot to be tired. He stared with his mouth slightly open.
Iret and Halen stepped down together, and Iret’s hand found Halen’s and held it. The older man with the soft voice, the woman with the blade-hands, the two friends with the different fires, the others, all of them came out and stopped and stared.
Fifteen newly awakened souls, standing on real ground for the first time, looking at a place that was not the grey.
Bruce did not have words for what he felt. Relief was part of it. Wonder was part of it. There was also a small, sharp, careful awareness underneath the wonder, the awareness of a man who had been told too many times in his life that arriving in a beautiful place was not the same as arriving in a safe place. He took the city in, and he filed it, and he kept his guard where it had been.
Then.
The voice came inside his head.
It was not the Akashic Codex he knew. He realized that at once. The voice was familiar in kind, in the resonance and the way it arrived in his mind rather than his ears, but the flavor of it was different. Lower. Older.
With a slight cool edge the physical-realm Codex did not have. Bruce felt it speaking and felt, immediately, that this was one of the other two. One of the alter egos. The Codex of the Soul Realm.
Around him, all fifteen souls flinched at the same instant.
They had all heard it. The voice in their heads said:
[Congratulations on awakening,]
[Congratulations on arriving at the Soul City Xiltra.]
Bruce stood still, and looked up at the towers of Xiltra rising in the pale luminous sky, and the city before him made one small movement of welcome, a banner shifting in a wind he could not feel, and the new Chapter of his time in this realm began.
The fifteen of them stood at the gate, still half-dazed by the sight of the city, and the lead harvester turned its star-orb eyes on them one final time.
The skeleton had stepped down from the driver’s seat. It stood now in front of the group, robe falling in clean lines around its bone frame, hands folded inside its sleeves. The other harvesters waited on and around the carriage in patient silence. The bell at the front had stopped ringing some time ago.
The lead harvester spoke.
"Listen carefully," it said. "This is the only orientation you will receive from us. Once we leave, you will be on your own in the Soul City."
The voice was the same chilling resonance Bruce had heard before, but slightly slower now, the way a teacher’s voice slowed for a lesson that mattered. The fifteen of them gathered closer without being told to. Kael shifted his weight beside Bruce
Theron straightened up despite his bad arm. Iret and Halen drew nearer together. Even the older man with the soft voice, who had hardly spoken in the carriage, stood at the front of the group with his head tilted, attentive.
"To survive in the Soul City," the harvester said, "you must earn soul points."
It let that word settle.
"Soul points are the currency of this place. Everything you need, you will pay for in soul points. Food, of the kind you ate in the carriage, costs soul points. Shelter, a room, a house, anywhere safe to rest, costs soul points. Clothes, weapons, training, healing, transport. All of it. Soul points."
Bruce listened carefully. The harvester paused as if to give them time to take it in, and went on.
"Understand," it said, "that your soul has needs much like a body has needs. You can feel hunger, as you have already felt. You can feel exhaustion. You can be cold. You can be wounded, your soul can crack, as you have all just seen happen to yourselves. The Soul Realm is hostile to a soul that does not protect itself. The mist outside this city is the most obvious threat, but even within the city walls, your soul will deteriorate slowly without rest, without food, and without shelter."
It gestured slightly at the city gate behind it.
"Inside the walls, the air is filtered. The thick mist of the Mistlands does not reach here. The buildings hold soul-energy properly, and the wards built into the city keep the worst of the corrosion at bay. But the air inside is still soul energy, in a thinner form. A soul left out in the open street for too long will weaken. A soul without food will hunger. A soul without rest will fray. And a soul that hungers and frays for long enough will eventually crack, and then dissolve, the same as the hollows you fought outside."
A small, cold pause.
"Soul points keep you alive. Without them, you will not last a week here. With enough of them, you can do almost anything in this realm."
Several of the fifteen looked at each other. The younger awakened, Theron, the two friends with the different-colored fires, the nervous thin man, had the slightly stunned expression of people who had thought not dying in the mist was the hard part. They were beginning to understand it had only been the first hard part.
Bruce raised one hand slightly. Not to interrupt, but to mark a question.
"The food on the carriage," he said. "Earlier I asked why it had not dispersed back into mist. You said I would find out when we reached the city."
"You did ask." The star-orbs settled on him. "I will answer now."
Bruce waited.
"The flesh of soul beasts holds its shape after death because soul beasts are fresh souls."
The harvester said it as if explaining something obvious that nonetheless had to be said.
"A fresh soul," it went on, "is a soul that has never lived in any of the other realms. It has never had a body in the physical realm or a mind in the mind realm. It has no past life. It carries no memories, no attachments, no sins, no accumulated weight from a previous existence. It is pure in the literal sense, uncomplicated, undivided, made only of what the Soul Realm itself produces."
The harvester paused.
"The Soul Realm is kind to fresh souls. The mist does not corrode them. The soul energy of this realm does not work against them, because there is nothing in them to purify. The whole purpose of the mist’s corrosion is to strip away the layers a soul accumulates from its past lives, to wear away the memories and the sins and the small stains of having been someone, somewhere else, before, and to return that soul to a fresh, unburdened state, so it can be reborn cleanly into another realm. That is the cycle. That is why the mist eats older souls and leaves the Mistlands full of hollows."
Bruce thought of the older woman in the cluster, gone now to mist. He thought of the baker. He thought of every drifting empty thing he had passed.
"A fresh soul, on the other hand, has nothing for the mist to eat. The corrosion has no purchase. So a fresh soul lives longer in this realm, much longer. Some live for ages. They can grow, develop, take on forms and intelligences of their own. They become what you would call soul beasts, soul plants, soul creatures, the native life of this realm. They are this realm’s people, in the way you would understand the word, even though they were never people in another life."
"And when they’re killed." Bruce said.
"When they are killed, their soul-flesh holds its shape for a long time before it disperses, because the realm does not work against them the way it works against you. Their energy is native. The mist accepts them slowly, the way water accepts itself. It is why their flesh can be harvested, cooked, and eaten. It is also why their cores, the dense centers of their being, what gathers at their heart when they grow strong enough, can be eaten by you, to advance your own soul. Their pure energy can pass into you, and you can use it to grow stronger."
The harvester’s star-orb eyes held Bruce for a moment longer.