He raised both of his hands, holding them hovering just inches above the unconscious wolf’s body.
’It’s time...’
Klaus took a deep breath, flooding his arms with an immense volume of pure white Soul Mana.
The air around the carriage grew incredibly heavy with the atmospheric pressure warping under the strain of a god actively defying the laws of nature.
VWOOM!
The glowing white mana poured from his fingertips, completely engulfing the wolf’s body in a blinding cocoon of light.
Klaus didn’t just cast a generic transformation spell.
He had to actively rip apart the wolf’s spiritual blueprint and forcefully restructure it into the exact shape and density of the giant mountain bear currently pulling the carriage.
It was agonizing unsettling work.
’Being able to change souls... is very...’
What was the word? Wrong? Disgusting? There were so many ways to describe how the feeling of changing souls but if Klaus were to simply describe this process.
’Exhilarating.’
That was the word... he felt exhilarated to be able to change the soul of this monster.
He forced the soul’s skeletal framework to expand.
The exact microsecond the spiritual bones lengthened, the physical biology was violently dragged along with it to match the new container.
CRUNCH! SNAP! SQUELCH!
The sounds erupting from the cocoon of light were absolutely horrifying.
The wolf’s physical bones shattered, elongated, and re-fused with sickening, wet crunches.
The flesh bubbled like hot wax, the muscle fibers tearing and multiplying at an impossible cancerous rate to match the newly enforced soul capacity.
The white fur thickened, the skull warping and widening into a blunt snout.
The sheer physical mass of the creature doubled, then tripled in a matter of seconds.
The heavy iron grating of the rear runner loudly creaked and groaned under the sudden massive influx of weight.
Klaus gritted his teeth with sweat breaking out across his forehead.
This wasn’t easy though.
The mental calculation required to simultaneously expand millions of individual cellular pathways without letting the body explode was staggering.
"Almost..." Klaus grunted, his arms trembling slightly from the output. "Hold together..."
With a final surge of energy, Klaus locked the new spiritual blueprint into place as the blinding white light faded, dissolving into the freezing wind.
Lying on the iron runner was no longer a dire wolf.
It was a perfectly rendered flawless replica of a giant mountain bear.
Valeria gasped with her tiny hands flying to her mouth.
"By the heavens... you did it. You actually overwrote the laws of biology."
Klaus let out a heavy breath, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow. "Yeah. It’s incredibly draining, but the physical vessel will always adapt to the shape of the—"
Klaus stopped talking.
His glowing silver eyes narrowed sharply.
Something was wrong.
The massive bear lying on the iron grating didn’t take a breath.
The chest wasn’t rising.
The rhythmic thud of the heart that Klaus had been monitoring through his spiritual connection had completely, abruptly stopped.
A sudden sound, like a pane of fragile glass shattering into a million microscopic pieces, echoed directly inside Klaus’s mind.
TCHING!
The newly forged expanded soul inside the bear violently splintered.
Without the anchoring stability of Klaus’s active manipulation holding it together, the structural integrity of the overwritten soul completely collapsed.
The soul didn’t just leave the body... It experienced a true absolute Soul Death as it was dispelled entirely from existence, reduced to nothingness.
The exact second the soul died, the biological vessel lost its anchor to reality.
The massive mountain bear didn’t rot.
It simply turned entirely to gray ash, collapsing into a pile of dust that was instantly blown away by the howling Winterlands wind, leaving the iron runner completely empty.
"No," Valeria whispered, her red eyes wide with shock. "What happened? You built it perfectly."
Klaus didn’t look angry.
He looked concentrated instead, Klaus stared at the empty space on the runner, his mind rapidly replaying the exact sequence of the agonizing transformation, running the mathematics.
"I was too focused on expanding the physical container," Klaus muttered. "The wolf was alive while its soul was being deconstructed as I stretched the spiritual matrix to fit the biology of a bear, but I didn’t fortify the consciousness to handle the trauma of the expansion."
Klaus ran a hand through his head.
"The mind couldn’t comprehend the sudden influx of mass. It panicked, destabilized, and shattered the soul from the inside out."
He looked at his calloused hands, clenching them into tight fists.
"If I’m going to overwrite a living soul," Klaus deduced coldly. "I have to sedate the core consciousness completely, isolate it from the physical pain receptors, and artificially fortify the structural integrity of the soul wall before I alter the flesh."
He looked back out into the dark, freezing snowpack.
"Going to need another subject," Klaus announced.
He didn’t wait.
He shot another liquid-glass tendril of white Soul Mana directly through the barrier. It whipped through the blizzard, latching onto a second stalking dire wolf hiding in the shadows of the tree line.
Klaus brutally yanked the beast through the dome, dragging it up onto the iron runner with a heavy sound.
THUD!
He instantly flooded its chest with concussive pressure, knocking it completely unconscious.
"Let’s try something harder," Klaus told Valeria, his silver eyes glowing with a terrifying determination. "Something that requires total structural overhaul. We’re making a human."
Valeria hovered closer, watching in silent, mesmerized awe as Klaus went back to work.
He raised his hands over the unconscious wolf.
This time, he didn’t immediately force the bones to break. He pushed his Soul Mana deep into the creature’s core, wrapping the fragile spark of its consciousness in an impenetrable fortified shell of divine gravity.
He completely isolated the mind, ensuring that absolutely no sensory feedback from the physical transformation would reach it.
Once the soul was anchored and protected, Klaus began the brutal, agonizing process of biological reconstruction.
VWOOM!
The blinding white light engulfed the wolf once more.
This was infinitely more complex than making a bear.
A bear was just a larger quadruped.
Turning a canine into a bipedal primate required a complete, foundational rewrite of the skeletal system, the muscular alignment, and the internal organs.
SNAP! CRUNCH! SQUELCH!
The sounds were sickening.
The wolf’s spine violently snapped and straightened, fusing into a human lumbar column.
The front legs shattered, the joints reversing and elongating into arms, the paws splitting and melting into long pale fingers.
The thick white fur rapidly receded, sinking back into the bubbling flesh as it smoothed out into pale human skin.
Klaus’s jaw locked tight, the veins in his neck bulging against the sheer, monumental strain of the magical output.
He was sweating profusely with his divine core burning like a supernova to sustain the unnatural evolution.
Because of the immense pressure, his focus slipped for a fraction of a microsecond and the light faded.
Lying on the freezing iron grating was a completely naked, incredibly tall human male.
The limbs were perfectly proportioned, the skin was smooth, and the chest was rising and falling with a steady human heartbeat.
The soul hadn’t shattered and the biological anchor was stable but as Klaus wiped the sweat from his eyes, he noticed the flaw.
Because his focus had slipped during the final stage of cranial reconstruction, the human’s head was grotesquely deformed.
The jaw was elongated and crooked, the cheekbones were asymmetrical, and the skull sloped backward at a sharp unnatural angle.
It looked like a horrific melted wax sculpture of a face.
"The cranium is malformed," Valeria noted quietly, hovering over the unconscious man.
"I lost the grip on the facial side for a millisecond," Klaus grunted, his chest heaving as he stared down at his creation. "The brain is intact, but the aesthetic structure is ruined. Still... it’s alive. The soul held."
He looked down at the naked man’s groin. There, resting against the pale thighs, was a completely standard set of human male genitals.
Klaus frowned, a look of disgust crossing his face.
"Nope. Not looking at that," Klaus muttered.
He raised two fingers, pointing them directly at the man’s groin as he didn’t use a knife.
He just tapped into the soul, specifically targeting the spiritual blueprint that dictated the reproductive organs, and effortlessly deleted that line of code from existence.
The flesh immediately reacted to the missing soul data.
The penis and testicles simply melted away, the pale skin smoothing over seamlessly, leaving the area completely flat, featureless, and genderless like a mannequin.
Valeria stared at the smooth flesh with her tiny jaw literally dropping open.
She looked up at Klaus, her red eyes wide with a mixture of terror and profound reverence.
"The power of the Soul King is absolute," Valeria whispered, her ethereal voice trembling. "You didn’t just alter it... you erased its biological function with a thought."
"This isn’t the main thing I’m concerned about," Klaus said, his voice dropping into a heavy, dark register.
He looked down at his own hands, clenching and unclenching his fists.
The raw potential of his class was fully opening up before his eyes... He wasn’t just a flesh-crafter.
He was a god of spiritual matter.
"If I can turn a monster into a bear, and a wolf into a living human..." Klaus murmured, his silver eyes locking onto the unconscious faceless man on the grating. "What happens if I remove biology entirely from the equation? Can I force a living, breathing soul into an inanimate mechanical structure? What would a weapon that possessed a living soul actually look like?"
Valeria hovered backward, sensing the dangerous shift in his intent.
"My King... transmuting flesh into metal... the energetic equivalent required for absolute molecular conversion is astronomical. You could tear your own core apart."
She doubted that but she wanted to know how serious her King was about it.
"I have to know," Klaus said and he didn’t hesitate.
Klaus stepped forward, placing both of his large calloused hands directly against the bare, heaving chest of the deformed human.
Klaus closed his eyes and unleashed everything.
KRA-BOOM!
The eruption of Soul Mana wasn’t just a glow this time... it was a violent shockwave that violently rattled the oak carriage a bit.
The white light was so incredibly dense that it eclipsed the darkness of the Winterlands entirely.
Klaus demanded the flesh to harden into cold unyielding iron. He forced the bones to hollow out into reinforced steel barrels.
He commanded the pulsing living soul to compress, to flatten, and to weave itself into a highly conductive spiritual circuit.
The strain was unimaginable.
Klaus felt his mind physically going blank, the edges of his vision turning a dark static-filled black.
The volume of mana rushing out of his divine core felt like it was shredding his reconstructed veins.
Every single instinct screamed at him to stop, to let go before his brain hemorrhaged.
He refused. He pushed harder, grinding his teeth together so hard they cracked.
’The hell... form already.’
With a sickening sound, the biological matter entirely collapsed in on itself.
The light violently imploded, vanishing instantly.
Klaus staggered backward with his boots slipping on the iron runner.
He hit the heavy oak door of the carriage hard, his broad chest heaving as he desperately gasped for air.
A sudden sharp pain ripped through his chest, and he violently coughed up a thick wad of dark, steaming blood, splattering the freezing snow beneath the grating.
"My King!" Valeria cried out.
The chibi Crimson Sharpshooter flew over to him in a panic.
She hovered directly in front of his face, reaching out with her tiny, etherea hands to gently, desperately pat his sweaty forehead and silver hair, trying to offer whatever comfort a ghost could give.
"I’m fine," Klaus grunted hoarsely, wiping the blood from his chin with the back of his hand.
He took a slow, deep breath, his divine core instantly rushing to repair the torn vessels in his throat. "It’s done."
He pushed himself off the door, looking down at the iron grating.
The faceless, deformed naked man was completely gone as there was no blood, no ash and no remaining flesh.
Lying on the cold metal was a flawless black sniper rifle.
It was a masterpiece of lethal engineering.
The metal was a dark matte obsidian, devoid of biological imperfections. The barrel was long and thick, designed to handle extreme velocity but what made it truly terrifying was the intricate, glowing white circuit carved deeply into the side of the receiver.
The circuit was pulsing. It possessed a slow thud that perfectly mimicked a human heartbeat.
It wasn’t just a gun... It was a living breathing weapon, powered entirely by the trapped, compressed soul of the wolf he had overwritten.
Klaus leaned down, wrapping his large hand around the heavy black grip.
As his skin made contact with the metal, the white circuit flared brightly, recognizing its master.
The weapon felt incredibly warm to the touch, vibrating slightly with eager intent.
’So it’s living...’
Klaus lifted the massive rifle, resting the heavy stock against his shoulder. He looked down the scope, aiming the barrel out into the dark, howling expanse of the Winterlands.
He turned his head slightly with a smile spreading across his face as he looked at the tiny Crimson Sharpshooter hovering beside him.
"Time to test it out, huh?" Klaus said.