Ch 181 – Soul in a Bottle
This was a miracle.
Catching himself before he fell flat on his face after vaulting over the basin's edge, Deacon sprinted across the cracked platform toward the half-skull with shadow-flame eyes lying there looking confused and disoriented but undeniably alive.
"Ah—! By the fucking gods, man— my fucking eyes!" Bonehead complained loudly as an entirely nude Deacon suddenly appeared towering directly above him, filling Bonehead's entire field of vision. "Some warning would be nice before you assault me with your dick and balls!"
Deacon's face contorted as he struggled to choose between laughing or sobbing, the conflicting emotions warring inside him because Bonehead was alive and complaining and sounding exactly like he normally did, which meant this was real and not some dying hallucination his brain had conjured up in his final moments.
Reaching down for the half-skull with trembling hands that he couldn't seem to keep steady, Deacon carefully picked up what was left of his friend and brought the bone up toward his face, completely ignoring the stream of promises and threats from Bonehead about all the ways he was going to beat Deacon's ass later for manhandling him like this without permission.
"Thank you for still being alive," Deacon choked out with shaky hands that were gripping the skull maybe a bit too tightly, his voice cracking on the last word as tears started rolling down his cheeks again despite the fact that he'd thought he'd cried himself dry already.
Staring up at Deacon's face with his shadow-flame eyes flickering in confusion, Bonehead couldn't help but look bewildered by the intensity of emotion radiating off his friend before his gaze shifted to scan what he could see of their surroundings from his limited vantage point.
“What do you—?” Bonehead began, but the question died in his metaphorical throat as his eyes locked onto Jass’s corpse lying motionless a dozen meters away. In an instant, memories surged to the front of his mind like a dam breaking — the platform, the antlions, the desperate fight. He remembered Jass dying as he frantically tried to force a potion into her mouth, failing mere milliseconds before the bottle would have shattered. As his own body crumbled into bone dust, he saw Jass’s life force finally leave her, and then everything went black.
"Ah... that wasn't some nightmare I had, was it?" Bonehead said solemnly after a bit of time had passed and he'd recalled everything that had happened just before everything went blank for him, his usual sarcastic tone completely absent and replaced with something hollow. "...I should have known better, given how undead can't sleep, so of course it couldn't have been a nightmare."
"…So, what do we do now?" Bonehead asked Deacon after watching his friend dry his own tears with the back of his wrist, the practical question cutting through the emotion of the moment because someone had to start thinking about next steps even if neither of them wanted to.
"I have to bring them to their families to get them proper burials," Deacon answered quietly, turning his gaze away from Bonehead and toward where both Jass and Sam's bodies lay, before suddenly remembering what the Djinn had said about not all of them being dead and whipping his body around to see that she was kneeling beside Esmerelda's corpse doing something he couldn't quite make out from this distance.
Feeling as though his throat was being squeezed by an invisible hand, Deacon slowly and numbly made his way toward the Djinn, his feet moving almost on autopilot as hope and dread warred inside him in equal measure.
Was he entitled to one more miracle, he asked himself as his feet picked up speed almost against his will and he eventually found himself standing over the Djinn's shoulder with Bonehead still clutched in his hand, watching as the glass bottle she held was being filled with some sort of gold and green swirling liquid that was being drawn out of Esmerelda's body—no, not liquid, it was more like gas or mist by the way it moved within the bottle and flowed up from Esmerelda’s lips.
"What are you doing?" Deacon asked the Djinn warily, giving a cursory glance at the golden chains that were constricting her body but didn't seem to be causing her any discomfort.
"Saving your friend," the Djinn answered plainly without looking up from her work, her hands steady as she continued the delicate process of extracting whatever was coming out of Esmerelda's corpse. "She should by all rights be dead, given how long it's been since her heart stopped, but… her bloodline runs strong within her."
"What the hell does that mean?" Bonehead asked from his position in Deacon's hand, his shadow-flame eyes fixed on the swirling contents of the bottle. “And who the hell are you?”
"The Floor Guardian of Floor Ten, and to answer your first question; it means that your friend here's soul has yet to perish despite the connection between her body and soul having been severed when she died," the Djinn answered as she slowly moved the now-filled bottle—green and gold gases swirling together inside it like a miniature storm—away from Esmerelda's blue-tinged lips and sealed it shut with the cork.
“A what?” Bonehead muttered to himself before voicing his confusion. “The fuck’s a Floor Guardian?”
"Normally in death, once that tether between your body and soul snaps and your soul is left exposed to the world with no protections, it gets crushed and destroyed almost instantly, typically within the same moment your physical body dies unless you have some very specific protections enchanted onto your soul beforehand." The Djinn answered, ignoring Bonehead’s newly voiced question.
She paused to make sure the cork was properly sealed before continuing. "Even with those protections, at most your soul could last mere moments longer after your death before it unravels completely — hence why I'm claiming your little friend here's bloodline must run incredibly strong within her, not only due to their willingness to be around her despite her being a human, but also for them to continually sacrifice their own existences to protect her soul from dissolution, delaying its true death through their own destruction."
The Djinn held the bottle up to examine it in the dim light filtering down from above. "Without my interference, and given the number of spirits killing themselves to prolong the life of her soul, she probably would have ultimately perished just under an hour after her physical death — truly her soul must be quite beloved by the spirits for them to be so willing to sacrifice their own existences to keep her alive just a bit longer."
"Why?" Bonehead asked simply, the question encompassing everything he didn't understand about what he was hearing.
"I do not know," the Djinn admitted with a shrug. "Bloodlines are tricky things and often quite impossible to figure out what a person's bloodline actually is and what effects or defects it could provide unless you see it directly written on their Status Page or they tell you themselves, which is just as improbable given how personal that information tends to be."
“But, I can readily admit, she has a powerful one,” the Djinn said with a tone tinged with something that neither Bonehead nor Deacon could pinpoint, but neither of them liked it.
"...So that thing in your hand is Esmerelda's soul?" Deacon spoke up, his voice barely above a whisper as he stared at the swirling green and gold mist contained within the glass, wanting to push the focus away from Esmerelda’s supposed powerful bloodline.
"Correct," the Djinn answered before continuing without being prompted, apparently anticipating the next questions they would ask. "And to answer what you're about to ask next— no, I am not stealing her soul, and her original container, her body, is far too damaged and ruined to contain her soul any longer given the massive trauma it sustained, so she needs to have a new container to hold it, thus this Soul Bottle which cost me a hefty sum in Karma Points given its ability to safely contain a soul without degradation." She gave Deacon a pointed look, even though her face was still mostly veiled.
"Which, by the way, you are incredibly lucky was even available within the Karma Shop at this exact moment, because if it hadn't been, I would have had no way to fulfill my end of our bargain.”
"But how would that be better than being dead if she can only live trapped inside a bottle?" Bonehead asked, his tone growing more agitated as the implications of what the Djinn was saying started to sink in. "Can she speak? Think? Sing? Eat? Do the things she loved to do before this all happened?"
"In the bottle?" the Djinn asked rhetorically, her tone making it clear she thought the question was absurd. "No, of course not — a soul trapped in stasis can't do anything except exist, but I am fulfilling my end of the deal by healing your friends that were still alive but on the verge of death, which is exactly what I said I would do."
Deacon's mouth went dry as he stammered, trying to find his words, his mind racing to figure out what options they had and coming up frustratingly short. "I—But—"
Shaking his head to clear the fog of confusion and panic, Deacon took a few minutes to gather his thoughts and force himself to approach this logically instead of emotionally, and eventually he managed to achieve some sort of mental groundedness that let him speak coherently.
"So, she can't go back to her old body because it's too destroyed, and healing potions are useless after a certain point," Deacon said slowly, working through the problem out loud. "So she needs to have a body — a container, something just as good as her old body or like that bottle to contain her soul with no rejection for her to be able to actually live again, correct?"
"That is correct," the Djinn confirmed as she slowly rose from where she'd been kneeling beside Esmerelda's corpse, turning around to tower over both Deacon and Bonehead while letting the Soul Bottle containing Esmerelda's soul float above her open palm like it weighed nothing.
"A perfect container that would match her one-for-one would be a sibling — they share enough of the same DNA that rejection wouldn't be an issue," Bonehead muttered to himself, though his words were easily audible to everyone present.
"But Esmerelda's never mentioned anything about siblings, nor about a father, so he’s either dead or out of the picture...and that's not even considering that doing something like that would kill the soul of whoever's body we took, and she would never forgive us if we did something that fucked up."
Fuck... what else could we do? Deacon thought to himself as he fell silent along with Bonehead, both of them lost in their own thoughts while feeling the weight on their shoulders growing heavier and heavier with every passing second.
They were so absorbed in trying to solve this impossible problem that neither of them noticed when the Djinn waved her hand and caused form-fitting dark linen cloth to materialize out of thin air and wrap around Deacon's body to clothe him, seeing as how his old armor had completely melted away in the golden pool he'd bathed in and left him naked.
His Spatial Sling Bag suddenly appeared floating in front of him as well, pulled from wherever it had ended up during the chaos, and the Djinn made no attempt to open it or search through its contents because the bag was protected with security enchantments that would destroy everything inside if she tried to forcibly access it, not to mention that actively and intentionally interfering with an inhabitant of the Tower's possessions would only further strengthen the punishment she was currently enduring from the System and the full effects of her true punishment for when she returned back to her Floor Seat.
Deacon suddenly whipped Bonehead's skull around to look directly at him, an idea forming in his mind that was probably insane but might be the only option they had.
"Do you think with rituals and your alchemy, we could create a body for her soul to inhabit?" Deacon asked intensely, his eyes burning with desperate hope. "Like, actually build one from scratch that wouldn't reject her soul?"
"I... maybe, I don't know, can alchemy even—" Bonehead muttered to himself, looking lost in thought as he tried to recall everything he'd ever learned about soul-binding and body creation rituals, trailing off before his shadow-flame eyes suddenly hardened with determination as he met Deacon's gaze.
"No, you know what — even if it's the last thing I ever do, I will create a body for her, I don't care how long it takes or what I have to sacrifice to make it happen."
"We will," Deacon nodded with absolute resolution in his voice.
"Well, I hate to break up this touching moment you're all having," the Djinn said, her tone carrying a hint of amusement as she interrupted their determination with cold practicality. "But I cannot linger here any longer after interfering as much as I already have — the System's punishment is only going to get worse the longer I remain in direct contact with you."
"So, here you go," the Djinn continued as the Soul Bottle containing Esmerelda's soul suddenly sprouted a delicate silver chain that attached itself to the rim of Deacon's new linen pants, and simultaneously three translucent dice strung together on another silver chain appeared floating above her raised palm before drifting forward to hover in front of Deacon for him to take, while at the exact same moment Jass, Sam, and Esmerelda's corpses all teleported to lie at his feet in a neat row.
"What about—?" Deacon started to ask as he reflexively caught the three dice before they could fall, but before he could finish forming his question, everything around him suddenly shifted and warped in a way that made his stomach lurch.
Both he and Bonehead no longer found themselves within the blood-soaked underground chamber of Solomon's Hidden Temple but instead were standing back outside on the raised platform where the massive archway leading into the temple was located, with the corpses of Jass, Sam, and Esmerelda arranged at his feet exactly as they had been a moment ago.
"I will contact you when I want your end of the bargain to be fulfilled," Deacon suddenly heard the Djinn's voice whisper faintly into his ear despite her being nowhere in sight.