A Wizards Misadventures

~~Level Five~~

I noted a distant burning sensation as I fell to the ground but it was overshadowed by the deep pain. I tried to get up but found my flesh melting into the ground and my muscles uncontrollable. I was… burning? Collapsing? Something clicked in my mind. My runes! My energies were so utterly unbalanced and that was reflected in my runes. I was surging with power and my runes couldn't handle that. With them directly connected to my muscles and enhancing my body that meant they were destroying me from the inside out.

As I came to this conclusion I felt a jump in my chest and my vision went black before coming back blurred. The jump came again, weaker, and my vision darkened. A heart attack? I'd never had one of those before.

My vision blackened one last time, somehow deeper than before, and my vision faded but the pain remained. In the back of my mind I noted the loss of my body, likely physical death, and felt disappointment at my lack of foresight. I had a few ideas, though. I had learned a few breakthroughs in runes with Poledina. I also had a better life affinity and far more precise control. I could probably get through puberty without disrupting the delicate processes in it. Perhaps I could take traits from magical races now that I could travel worlds?

The pain wracked me and I waited patiently for it to cease. I didn't keep time well when I was so distracted by my internal changes.

My affinities were going haywire and mage sight was useless with all the affinity screwing up the environment. My energies were also in flux, making me trapped in my changing soul. So I looked at what I was gaining.

My aura and mana wove together, making an elaborate tapestry of some sort. But unlike the other times where they made one coherent whole they began to specialize. Thick concentrations of aura and mana collected at the edges of my soul, encapsulating it in a membrane. A dense seed of aura and a little trace of mana in the center was something I knew instinctively to be my core, where most of my aura and mana were.

I also had a few other 'organs' of varying use, each of which I knew like the back of my hand. One was like the golgi apparatus in a cell, except my soul organ connected my soul to my followers more strongly than before and it would probably connect to my elementals too. It might be able to help form more coherent and stronger messages of intent in my aura as a way of communication.

Another was dedicated to expelling intruders, a crude non-sentient mass of aura and void standing constantly at the ready. There was even a strange tentacle of some sort dedicated to fine manipulation beyond what I could do before as well as extending the reach of my soul if I wanted to directly interact with something from a distance. I could probably perform surgery on a grain of dust now or cast spells more efficient and complex than ever before, provided that I created them.

Finally was a sort of portal. Through it I felt my soul space but also the presence of my other affinities in sort of realms of their own. Only space had actual… space but the others had little seeds of compressed affinity and my soul in their own space. They weren't connected to me directly but linked to me. There was only one I could recognize. Void. I… had a connection to other planes of reality like the greater void? But they seemed so weak. Shouldn't they be infinite masses of power? And on closer look void seemed to be far less than infinite. I probably released more void than the void in this dimension just by existing.

Even through the pain of my soul growing, though it was waning now, I touched one of these dimensions and felt its… desires? It was sentient? It was so strange, almost like an extension of me but not separate, though it had its own desires, even if it only had one. To grow.