At first, they weren’t sure how they were meant to navigate between their two bodies, though they guessed that the most obvious solution would involve fiddling with their cord – assuming that they still had one. Searching for the connection in its usual spot on their chest, they soon found something that made them gasp in shock.

  ‘It feels so much wider than before!’

  Granted, describing their link in physical terms had never been a simple task. It was impossible to put an exact number on its diameter or cross-section, because the cord didn’t exist in the physical plane. In fact, it didn’t even pass through the much fuzzier soul plane that tended to greatly distort time and space.

  Instead, it seemed to exist inside a third, even more esoteric dimension – one exclusive to Percy, his clones and his familiar. Whether the Clone bloodline had created this private realm or merely allowed them to tap into it, they didn’t know. Either way, it was the reason they could communicate and send mana across vast distances – provided that they could keep the connection open from that far away.

  In theory, they could have tried to gauge the width of their cords indirectly, by estimating the amount of mana that they allowed through, but even that had always been quite challenging. After all, mana could be compressed countless times in its unmanifested state. A Red and a demigod both stored their entire reserves inside a tiny orb in their sternum, yet mages at the higher grades could easily expand their mana enough to conjure enormous boulders or fill entire lakes with water.

  After obtaining the Sorcerer’s Eye and upgrading their Secret Art to Refined, they had technically gained the ability to perceive the cords directly but, again, what their eyes had shown them about the cords’ dimensions had never been that trustworthy. As a result, they’d only used the information to better orient themselves, and pinpoint the direction and distance to their clones – not the transmission process itself.

  Consequently, the best that Percy and Micky had ever been able to do had been to compare one type of cord to another. The original connection was the one they used most commonly, since it was the least expensive to maintain. Everything beyond that required either an additional clone or a lot of effort.

  The empowered cords granted by Soul Resonance allowed them to transmit more mana and from farther away, but activating and maintaining them was a hassle. Then, there was the two-way connection Percy and Micky had relied on over the past couple of years, after upgrading their Secret Art to Soul Harmony.

  It had doubled the cord’s capacity and even allowed them to keep it open passively, by twisting two of the empowered connections together and creating a permanent loop of soul mana between them, though that had come at the cost of permanently occupying a second cord.

  That said, they currently had access to a connection that appeared to eclipse even that. It was probably best described as a vast tunnel, rather than a cord. More importantly, it felt like they could push more than just mana or information through it.

  ‘Come to think of it, isn’t our soul already stretching inside?’

  That had never happened before. As intimate as Percy and Micky’s connection had been, their souls had always been separate. Right now, that was no longer the case. They had clearly fused completely, their joint existence now spanning both bodies.

  ‘If that’s the case, why is only the crow awake?’ they wondered. This was especially glaring, considering that they shouldn’t have lost the Insomnia trait.

  Playing around some more, they soon realized that they could shift their soul better than most living beings could. This was something that they hadn’t been able to do in their original bodies – this was closer to how the clones tended to interact with their hosts.

  In addition to this increased flexibility, the crow body felt rather cramped – almost like a disproportional fraction of their soul had folded up inside it. Another chunk was resting inside the cord, suspended in the strange dimension, with only the tiniest wisp lingering in their human vessel.

  ‘It’s probably a good thing that there’s some of it left, otherwise one of our bodies might have died in its sleep,’ they realized, swallowing hard.

  If they had to describe this situation to somebody, they’d use the analogy of a person resting on a king-sized bed by themselves. There was simply too much room, and they’d accidentally rolled too far toward one side without noticing, creating this imbalance. So… what if they tried to return to the middle?

  Figuring out how to do that wasn’t very difficult.

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  They already had plenty of experience of doing similar things with their clones. Leaning into the connection, they felt their soul practically fall inside a deep well, soon reaching a much larger vessel and expanding freely on the other side. They had to stop themselves before they rolled too far in the other direction. The whole process felt natural – just a function built into their new existence by default.

  If there was one thing they didn’t appreciate, it was how painful it was to move their soul across the cord. This had nothing to do with their transformation itself, but rather the injuries they’d accumulated during the battle. Many spots felt stiff and riddled with cracks – almost frostbitten, if souls could even experience that. The internal friction worsened their wounds, causing them to wince and grit their beak.

  Evidently, the state that they had entered while fighting Deimos had greatly strained their soul and bodies. It didn’t look like they would be able to do that very often, and recovering afterwards wasn’t trivial either.

  Even so, they persisted, until more senses fed into their mind: the hard, uneven ground pressing against the human’s back, a second set of soft breaths that was oddly in sync with the first one, and three new limbs that they could move around. Sitting up with difficulty, they opened their eyes, scanning the room until their gaze landed on the tiny crow standing on the ground next to them.

  ‘How bizarre…’

  They could see themselves through two pairs of eyes. One saw the grey bird, its icy body now small enough to fit on their head, the other seeing a giant human towering over them like a tall tree. The man’s clothes were in tatters, his dark, unkempt hair falling messily over his shoulders as he scratched his bushy beard in contemplation.

  They were both of them!

  Obviously, Percy and Micky had shared senses many times before, so this wasn’t entirely new. Still, it was quite different from their previous experiences. It felt less like two people borrowing each other’s eyes, and more like a single individual rubbing his hands together, feeling each limb through the other.

  In some ways, this wasn’t as comfortable as what they had felt during the fight. Their incarnation as the cloaked figure had felt more right – closer to how they were meant to be. Sadly, their current grades appeared to limit how long they could stay fully fused. Either that, or it was simply something that no living being was capable of maintaining forever.

  The good news was that they knew how to merge into that form again if they wanted to, but it was obviously better to save that as a trump card. At the very least, they had to mend their injuries before they even considered going all out again. Besides, having two bodies came with its own advantages, so they didn’t feel like complaining.

  Regardless, the spell they had registered during the battle clearly hadn’t ended. It had merely gone dormant, the Symphony of a Dead Winter still faintly echoing in the deepest recesses of their soul, patiently building up towards its next crescendo…

  ‘I guess this is who we are now. Can we even be considered a beast or a sapient anymore?’ they couldn’t help but wonder.

  A case could certainly be made against that. There probably wasn’t even a name for the type of entity they had become. Their souls hadn’t merely merged – they had also grown in the process, evolving into something new. Something that their physical vessels struggled to contain by themselves. A lot of their soul would inevitably continue to exist inside the ethereal cord. Perhaps, that was their true self, and their bodies were little more than a pair of gloves now – the ethereal entity’s only means of interacting with the real world.

  Was it the crow’s beast affinity that had turned them into this? Perhaps recovering so many memories – too many memories to fit in a single head – had played a role, as well as the colossal amount of mana they’d absorbed through their boosting arts to facilitate the transformation.

  They sighed. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter.

  Paying more attention to their bodies, they soon noticed something else. ‘Well, it looks like our cores and mutations are still constrained to their original bodies for the most part.’

  The human’s eyes now glowed in a dull grey colour, sporting slit pupils like before. In addition to their regular sight, they could perceive the crow’s much lower temperature compared to its surroundings in the form of a dark silhouette in a slightly brighter background. A smaller grey silhouette flowed inside it. This amorphous flame clearly pertained to their soul, or at least the part they had left inside the bird.

  A Green and Yellow orb shone in the crow’s sternum and abdomen respectively, the corresponding mana channels branching out to the rest of its body like before. The Yellow ones were a little difficult to spot, however, since the whole structure was now made out of mana of the same grade. Finally, a thick, ink-like substance permeated the bird, indicating the willpower coursing through the mana.

  The bird’s vision was a lot less detailed than the human’s. It couldn’t register temperature or willpower at all. It could spot the grey silhouette flowing inside “Percy” through its passive Soul Vision, but it wasn’t as defined. As for the human’s cores, “Micky” had to manually tap into his Mana Sense to locate them.

  ‘I guess we’ll have to fix our missing arm the good old way too,’ they thought, their human lips curling into a frown as their avian eyes lingered on the stump.

  The crystalline appendages that they had forged during the fight clearly hadn’t survived their separation. It wasn’t that strange, considering that they’d been fuelled by a mutation that the human body no longer had access to.

  Getting up, they stretched their remaining limbs with both bodies, noticing how easily they could control them simultaneously. At least, their mind appeared to have kept up with the transformation, meaning that it wouldn’t take them very long to adjust to their new reality.

  They hadn’t missed the pyramid still slowly crumbling inside the human’s head, of course, and there was also the Starry Queen that they had to deal with, but they wanted a few more questions answered before worrying about any of that.

  Turning to their trusty Status, they braced themselves for what was certainly bound to be quite the overhaul…

  Book 1 on at no extra cost, grab a copy for your shelf, or listen to the audiobook on .