The notifications arrived in a cascade I had never seen before, as they were not coming one at a time, the way they normally did.
They came as a wave, as if the system was pushing through everything that had happened in the dream and the death.
I lay on the cot for a long moment with the notifications stacked across my vision, waiting to be read, and I read them slowly.
There was no rush this morning. Whatever I had become in the last subjective hour, the world outside my tent was running on its ordinary schedule, and the eruption was still nearly an hour away.
[Soul Condition: Stable]
That was the first thing.
The Strained condition that had survived the previous reset, the condition that had been my constant companion since the larger demon had broken my title, was gone.
The dream of home had done its work; something in my subconscious had healed me, but it had also given me a new nightmare, and that nightmare was knowledge.
"I had seen God."
I closed my eyes, and inside my eyelids was dark and ordinary. No demon and no voices from the damned pushing their way through my throat.
Opening my eyes, I looked at the canvas ceiling, and for a long moment, I lay still and let myself feel what it was to be clean again, because I had not been clean since the larger demon had pointed at me from across the camp.
I sighed in relief before I read the rest of the cascade.
[Demonology 31 → 39 (Acolyte) — Rare — Unregistered]
The skill was approaching the next significant threshold, and I could feel the shift in how it operated.
When I thought about the larger demon now, my mind reached for categories and structures rather than horror.
The wrongness and horror were still there, but underneath them was an analytical layer that had not been present before.
I knew things now that I had not known yesterday. I knew that the larger demon was a higher-tier creature than the chitin ones. I knew the ritual of the heart-offering had a structure.
I knew the demonic language had grammar, actual grammar, with rules I could feel even though I could not yet articulate them.
Intuition was telling me that if I pushed my Demonology a bit further, it would become "Registered" and by that time I would be able to know the names of the demons, and that would be a welcome next step.
The skill was building the framework, but I would still need to spend time understanding what it had given me.
[Anima Depth: 47 (Acolyte)]
Three ranks from where I had been. Approaching the upper end of the Acolyte tier. At fifty I would cross into the territory where Adept-level disciplines became technically accessible, even if my disciplines themselves were not yet at that rank.
The threshold for Adept was sixty, and I was rapidly approaching it, although skill growth slowed down after fifty, but each point of growth brought about massive changes.
[Concentration 37 → 39 (Acolyte)]
[Observation 35 → 37 (Acolyte)]
[Meditation 21 → 26 (Initiate)]
[Marksman 30 → 32 (Acolyte)]
[Endurance 26 → 31 (Acolyte)]
[First Aid 11 → 14 (Initiate)]
Endurance crossed into Acolyte, and I felt that one differently from the others.
Concentration and Observation had crossed earlier, and the body had registered the change subtly. Endurance crossing felt physical, a denseness in my limbs that had not been there yesterday, a settled weight in my chest, that told me that my body had been forced to absorb sustained stress and had emerged from the absorption stronger than it had entered.
Four Auxiliary Skills at Acolyte now. Concentration, Observation, Endurance, and Marksman.
The body that had walked into this expedition four days ago was not the body lying on this cot.
I read the last notification, and I did not expect what I saw.
[New Skill Acquired]
[Mortal Shell — 0 → 6 (Initiate)]
[Tier: Broken-Celestial]
I stopped reading and sat up on the cot, reading the line again.
Broken-Celestial.
The word that had appeared on the Demon Slayer title screen the first morning after the kill, the same branch of magic that had no entry in any Discipline taxonomy I had ever studied, that the Academy did not teach.
I had carried the word through the last loop without knowing what it meant; now the system had answered, and I held a Celestial skill, even if it seemed to be of a rather lower variety.
I did not know what that meant. The system had given me a tier name and a starting rank, and the implication that this was a category of power that existed above the ones I had encountered, and I did not have the framework to evaluate what I was holding.
I opened the description with hands that were not entirely steady.
[Mortal Shell — Broken-Celestial]
[Acquired by: surviving the dispossession of one’s own body by external force]
[Effects:]
— Resists external attempts to reshape the physical body
— Resists external attempts to assume control of will
— Strengthens the binding between soul and flesh
— Damage to the body becomes increasingly difficult to translate into damage to the soul as the skill grows
— Each rank progressively reinforces the body itself, hardening flesh, bone, and channel against external harm
— Each rank progressively reduces the cost the body pays for sustaining a strained soul
[Note:]
— The skill is not a shield. It is a deepening of the bond, and the bond strengthens both halves.
I read the description of this skill twice, then I read it a third time, and the meaning of it began to assemble.
The demon had tried to evict me from my own flesh. Everything that happened to me during that moment, from the decay in my hands, my bones that had become spears, the voice that had spoken demonic words through my mouth, and my arm that had ripped my heart from my chest and offered it.
None of those had been me. They had been my body operating under the control of something that had pushed me out of the operator’s seat.
The demon had been trying to take the vessel from the soul that inhabited it, and it had nearly succeeded.
What would have happened to me if I had not died before I gave my heart to it?
Would the loop be able to bring me from that?