Anima Sensitivity at forty-one was deeper into the Acolyte tier than it had been.
Beyond enhancing the layered signature reading of the essence around me, that would now operate at a higher resolution. I would feel more, at a greater distance, with greater specificity. It would also enhance my spell-casting abilities and increase the growth rate of my spells.
I would feel them deeper now than ever before, and I guessed that casting so many spells directly from my soul was one of the triggers that was quickly enhancing Anima Sensitivity.
Now, my Endurance at seventy-one was substantially deeper into Adept, and my skill growth was both astonishing and frightening.
Everything that my hollow self did in the last loop had strained every single muscle I had to the limit.
I was remembering the way my body moved. It was even better than the warriors and the rangers that I had seen.
My entire body had been utilized to the peak of its abilities, and my Endurance had grown as a result. My body could now take what the Adept-tier body was supposed to take, which was the foundation that let Mortal Shell at sixty-one do the architectural work it was now doing.
The two skills together produced the body that had fought headless, and my body, after digesting all the gains from the last loop, was now even more durable.
This sort of ridiculous body that I was developing shook me to the core, but knowing the sort of dangers that I had to face, somehow, it did not seem to be enough.
If I were to be fighting Adepts that had lived for more than a century as a sixteen-year-old mage, then a body like this would be what it took.
However, I still had new scars that even my insane growth could not handle, and my cracked Anima Depth was one of them.
I focused on the notation. 91% structural integrity. Fractures detected. Soul Weight exceeding Anima Depth. Partial healing across reset. Fractures persist.
Pushing deeper into this description showed me something that I feared: nine percent of my soul reservoir was permanently fractured, and it was all because of the enhancement I had acquired from the Ascendant Earth Gate Skill.
Soul Weight exceeding Anima Depth.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This was a result of too much of a good thing.
The reservoir in the body of an Acolyte was filled with Anima in a gaseous state, and I know that when my Anima Depth reached the level of an Adept, it would be converted to a liquid form.
This was another reason why Adepts were so powerful, and that was because the Anima they had was much more concentrated, and using a small part of it equaled many parts of an Acolyte’s Anima.
An Acolyte’s Anima Depth could not hold the Anima of an Adept, since a few drops of liquid Anima would tear the container to pieces.
What was happening to me here was more peculiar. I did not gain the liquid base of an Adept’s Anima as far as I could observe, it was still gaseous, but it contained properties that made it heavier than what my soul’s depth could hold.
This new Anima inside me was breaking the law of the soul as far as I could see.
Was this a higher variant of Anima? Could there be a higher variant of the soul, the stuff of creation itself?
The reset that usually restored most of the structural damage from the soul burns, and the damage to my body could not do anything to this, because the damage was persistent.
My Anima Depth was carrying a load that it was not designed for.
The Ascendant Earth Gate’s white-glowing region, which gave me the +5 Anima Depth boost, sat alongside the cracks in my depth, occupying perhaps five percent of the reservoir, and the cracks were occupying another nine.
The total reservoir was therefore approximately fourteen percent compromised, five percent boosted Anima of a quality I did not fully understand, nine percent fractured space that produced regenerated Anima, but at reduced structural integrity.
The implications were now clear in a way they had not been before.
Each maximum-commitment soul-burn would leave a permanent fracture. The reset healed most of what extreme soul-casting tore, but not all.
I could afford a finite number of such casts across the remainder of the loop, possibly ten, possibly fifteen, before the reservoir’s structural integrity dropped low enough to threaten its function entirely.
At zero percent integrity, the reservoir would no longer hold Anima at all, and at thresholds below that, the soul would presumably fail in ways I did not want to discover empirically.
The cost of the loop was now visible in my own soul. I was not paying with my body; the body reset cleanly each loop. I was paying with the reservoir that contained my Anima, and the reservoir was a finite resource.
I had a budget of soul-burns, and the budget was depleting.
I would need to be economical with future maximum-commitment casts.
But that was not treating the root of the issue, because I was not in a situation where I could afford not to go all out.
I had gained great power, but the cost was not something that my soul could bear.
My Soul Condition was Strained when previous loops had recovered to Stable when I woke up. This loop’s death and my new Anima were enough that Mortal Shell at sixty-one could not fully restore the soul’s resting state.
I was waking with the soul still under stress. The Strained notation would persist until the soul’s structural work could be completed across multiple loops of recovery, assuming I did not perform another maximum-commitment soul-burn that pushed the condition deeper before the recovery completed.
I would have to live within the Strained state for the immediate future. The condition would affect Anima regeneration, casting efficiency, and the body’s overall integration. Nothing catastrophic, but it was something I would feel.
I had great hopes that Mortal Shell would be able to heal my soul, but I had to give it time and not push as hard as I could.
Come to think of it, I did not just get higher-tier Anima, I had also gained Endurance. Was it possible that this attribute was different from before?