Unlife II

Nox truly thought he had the whole Lichdom Ritual figured out and only needed to work out a few kinks but he was dead wrong and had hit a big snag.

He had plenty of experience in soul extraction, creating several spells that could drain the literal essence of one's soul out and, it certain situation, tear it from his vessel entirely.

With all of this experience backing him, Nox believed he merely needed to draw on the principles of the soul that he had already grasped with said spells and develop one with a more gentle and refined approach to relieving a body of its soul.

Dreams were pretty, however, reality was harsh.

After destroying a bunch of poor souls from poor sods that ended up in his lab as test subjects, Nox was hit with the reality that what he thought to be a relatively easy part.

Originally, he though the concoction meant to kill him would be the most difficult as it was not simply a method to end him but also an important component of the transformation.

He however, swiftly changed his mind when his Unbind Soul proved to be a nightmare to perfect. Although he got closer and closer to the perfection he desired with every failure, he was always missing the target by a an increasingly smaller margin that diminished more and more slowly.

On the upside, he had gathered considerable amounts of Excelia since there was not point in wasting ruined souls.

And so, when he inevitably failed in one of his experiments, he would just devour the soul into his Philosopher's Stone.

Nox surmised that the transformation would require massive amounts of energy that his dying body and the phylactery would provide but as he had no idea how much was exactly necessary, he decided to accumulate as much as possible just to play it safe.

Back to the issue of the Unbind Soul spell development was that Nox either fell short or overshot his target.

What this meant was that the spell was either too weak to actually unbind the soul and bring it out of the physical vessel or too strong and violent, forcefully ripping it out while causing irreparable damage.

Well, Nox's Panacea might had been enough to stabilize and eventually heal such injuries, especially considering how close he was getting to the sweet spot, but as this was just a part of a much greater transformation, Nox worried that sustaining such an injury would stop him from completing it, or worse, kill him when he tried.

The main difficulty in this endeavour was the souls were very much attached to their physical vessels until these perished which made them very hard to extract without either killing the target or damaging the soul.

Unfortunately for Nox, he had deduced that the unbinding of the soul from its fleshy vessel before its death was an absolute necessity.

He discovered this in his quest to achieve resurrection. Nox knew that it was possible, his own panacea was capable of doing so and Fels even had magic for it, magic Nox was very interested in learning but had yet to figure out how to do so.

Despite this, there were strict limitations, the only time Fels succeeded in resurrecting someone was when Wiene died in the series and Nox's Panacea needed to be administered within a very short time after the actual death.

At first, Nox believed this was due to the soul leaving the body after death as Freya had claimed in the LN she would follow Bell's soul into Heaven should he die but after he gained a much greater understanding of the soul, even if many of its mysteries still eluded him, he realized he was only partially correct.

While the soul did indeed leave after a short time, there was a change in it that began occurring right after death, a change Nox had yet to fully understand.

If resurrection came before the change was completed, it was fully reversed as the target came back to life but if allowed to fully take place, the target became impossible to bring back to life.

Nox was only drawing upon other sources of media for his ideas of Lichdom but if DanMachi was real, what stopped all those other worlds from being real as well?

As such, he deduced that this change was the reason Unbinding was required to be done before the ritual death of one's physical body as it would somehow prevent said change from taking place.

While Nox struggled within his time accelerated lab, time tricled by outside, even if at a slower pace.

The Loki Familia, thanks to Nox's existence had their expedition sooner that in canon and rather than being done in by the Virga and being forced to retreat, they had pushed through and fought the Demi Spirit Titan Alm who thanks to Nox's unbalancing of the world became far far stronger.

It was as if the world itself was trying to adjust to his disruptive presence . . . Or maybe his repeated violations of the Dungeon and its supposed rules were what cause that disaster and thus it was of his own making.

Whatever the case, unlike Bell, Bella did not end up facing a savage Minotaur, was quite a bit stronger than she was in the original but did not get the rude awakening to the cruel reality of their world and her weakness which she probably needed.

Still, other trials still remained for the heroes of DanMachi as other events of the plot drew closer and closer.

In the end, Nox who had the intention of running some interference was reminded by a magical alarm he had set up that he needed to get his ass out of the lab.

Despite not being pleased at the fact that he would need to leave his happy days of research and experimentation, he figured he could use a break and some fools to vent his stress on so out he went, ready to have some fun.

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P.a.t.r.e.o.n is officially up!

The link is: https://www.p.a.t.r.e.o.n.com/lusoba  without the extra dots of course.

You'll get to read up to FOUR weeks ahead, a full month, but I'll still post here.

There's also my other novels Kage of Kages and FATE of DxD, do check them out!

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