Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2011: A Curious Question

Ning frowned slightly at the mention of the war and was about to ask what had happened, but Crownus spoke before he could.

"There is no need to concern yourself with it yet. We can discuss it later."

Ning accepted that for the moment. If Crownus had been willing to continue studying him while the war unfolded across the galaxy, then whatever was happening had apparently not reached the point where either of them needed to intervene immediately. There was something else Ning wanted to know first anyway, especially since the changes to Crownus suggested that far more time had passed than he had realized.

"How long have we been here?" Ning asked.

"Approximately one hundred and thirty thousand years."

Ning looked at Crownus for a moment before turning his gaze across the barren landscape around them, almost as though the planet might offer some sign that such an absurd amount of time had passed.

"One hundred and thirty thousand years?" he asked.

"Yes."

"That’s... quite a while."

Even by Ning’s standards, it was not a trivial amount of time. He had expected Crownus to spend years studying him, perhaps even centuries if understanding the System proved especially difficult, but one hundred and thirty thousand years was far beyond anything he had anticipated. Crownus had apparently taken his opportunity to study Ning very seriously.

Ning stretched slightly out of habit, even though his body had no actual need for it, before looking back at Crownus.

"At least tell me you learned what you wanted."

"I did."

"Everything?" he asked with a curious gaze, though the manifested Will showed nothing on its goat-like face.

"Enough."

There was a certainty in Crownus’s answer that had not been there before the experiment began. Back then, he had understood individual things a System could accomplish and had managed to reproduce some of those effects through his own methods, but he had never understood the structure behind them. Now, after spending more than a hundred thousand years examining Ning directly, that uncertainty seemed to be gone.

Ning smiled slightly. "So you finally understand what a System is."

"Yes," Crownus said. "I hadn’t expected you yourself to be the System. I thought it had captured your Soul, but... you don’t have a Soul."

Ning smiled a little. "No, I don’t."

"Your Soul was destroyed in the creation of the System?" Crownus asked.

"My Soul was saved in the creation of the System," Ning answered.

Crownus thought for a bit before nodding along. "I suppose I understand what you mean."

"Do you think you can make one now? A System?"

The smoke making up Crownus’s body shifted gently beneath the floating goat’s head as he answered with complete confidence.

"I am ready."

After one hundred and thirty thousand years of studying Ning, Crownus was finally prepared to create a System.

Before they began, Crownus had one question left.

The smoky shape that now made up his body shifted slowly beneath the floating goat’s head as he looked at Ning. After one hundred and thirty thousand years of studying the System, there was very little about its structure that he did not understand, but one particular part had clearly continued bothering him.

"There is something I cannot reconcile," Crownus said. "How was your Soul damaged enough to become part of the System in the first place?"

Crownus had spent long enough examining him that it would have been stranger if he had never wondered about it. From his perspective, everything he had seen inside Ning suggested that something had gone horribly wrong with the Soul before the System ever became involved.

"It was already damaged," Ning said. "Far beyond the point where it could be repaired normally."

Crownus remained silent for a few moments, considering that answer.

"The System did not cause the damage?"

"No."

Crownus finally asked, "Then what if I chose a Soul in a similar condition?"

Ning immediately understood where the question was going.

"If a Soul was already damaged beyond repair," Crownus continued, "and would otherwise fail regardless of my involvement, could I use that Soul to accompany my System?"

Ning thought about the wording before shaking his head.

"You can’t make that judgment."

Crownus’s head tilted slightly. "Even if the damage is obvious?"

"Especially then. You don’t get to look at a damaged Soul and decide it no longer matters," Ning said. "Maybe it could recover somewhere else. Maybe there’s another process involved that neither of us understands yet. The point is that you don’t know."

Crownus listened quietly.

"If the Soul belongs to someone else, you don’t get to decide that it’s acceptable to use because you think they’re already doomed."

That was the important part.

It wasn’t that hard to find a Soul that was clearly far too weak to return to the reincarnation cycle. After all, there were places in the universe known as Soul Dumpsters, where the fabric between the Realm of Matter and the Realm of Souls was weak enough for extremely wounded Souls to come through.

If Crownus found such a place, then he could easily find a Soul that he could use. Though, at this point, it didn’t matter at all.

The Celestial Handshake they had already made reflected the same principle.

Crownus could learn, and he could experiment.

He could create Systems as complicated as he wished.

He simply could not do it by harming human Souls.

"I understand," Crownus said in the end.

Ning studied him briefly before nodding. "Good."

Crownus’s smoky body settled again. "Then I am ready to create the System."

There was a noticeable difference in the way he said it now.

"What should I do first?"

Ning looked around at the planet where they had spent the last hundred and thirty thousand years. There had been no notifications about him completing the requirements to unlock Nuclear Energy. He couldn’t tell how close he had gotten, though he should have been incredibly close.

"We’ll get to that," Ning said, turning back toward Crownus. "But first, I want to know more about this war."