The goblin had finished inscribing the required magic circle and was ready to begin the soul-severing ritual. This was one of those magic rituals that required both a circle and a chant. So he cleared his throat and prepared to speak, “Steel my soul and make it as sharp as a blade and grant me the strength to split my soul in twain.” He imagined a blade forming from his soul and targeting a small part of his soul. “Heed me and sever what cannot be severed.”

  He willed the blade to swing and felt an indescribable pain; it felt like he was bleeding vigorously but he couldn’t stop now. He guided the severed piece and pushed it into the purified soul of the intruder; the originally colorless soul gained a hint of deep purple. He then hastily took a purified animal soul and put it into where the soul had been cut. The bleeding sensation felt staunched but he still felt weak.

  But other than the weakness, he was feeling something else, a faint connection to a purified soul. “It will be a lot easier to do that now in the future.” Thoth finally stepped into the room.

  “I hope so…” Amand replied as he stood upright. He was reaching out to his newborn soul clone; it really did feel like an extension of himself. The goblin stood up and began moving towards the sentinel he had created. He then pushed the clone into the humanoid construct. The iron was flexing its fingers.

  Being two places at once was difficult at first, so much so that Armand just sat down and focused on controlling the Sentinel for now. The large figure made its way through the doorway and into the forge. It picked up the mithral smithing hammer and began to hammer the Hell-forged mithral. While it was still just as efficient as the goblin was at shaping the metal, as long as it had mana. It essentially had infinite stamina.

  Once he got into the rhythm of swinging the hammer, he could try moving his main body as well. He went over to his chair slowly and deliberately as he tried to accommodate the dual perceptions he had created. The best way to do so was through practice.

  “Controlling multiple bodies is a skill any good demon needs.” Thoth said with a smirk.

  “But, I am not a demon.” The goblin replied, a bead of sweat dripping down his brow as he strained to maintain a split focus. He was making a lot of progress, however.

  “You could also just leave it to its own devices.” Thoth suggested.

  “As in?” Asked Amand

  “It is another soul; you don’t need to puppet it all the time. It should be able to do this on its own without your direction.” The demon clarified.

  “It would have been easier to know that.” The goblin spat, a little tired of the demon’s games.

  “But then you wouldn’t have practiced splitting your attention.” Thoth said as if he had done nothing wrong. “Just command it to do what you asked and ignore the connection.”

  So the goblin tried it; he commanded the split soul to continue smithing and told it what part it should be making and left it to its own devices. Once he started ignoring that part, he could finally breathe a sigh of relief, being of one mind once more.

  He continued in his usual routine for a couple of months, till one day he was walking out of the bath and before him stood the Sentinal Clone wielding the Hammer. It took a swing at him and he in turn absolutely bodied it with a punch to its center and hastily pulled the squirming soul from its body.

  It had gained a tinge of color other than purple, something more fiery. He stormed down the hall and into the main room; Thoth was sitting in a chair by the fire, deeply engrossed in a book that seemed to be covered in human skin.

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  “Care to explain this?” Armand angrily inquired of the demon sitting so nonchalantly.

  “Oh, did something go wrong?” The demon replied with mock concern.

  “This thing just upped and attacked me!” The goblin said angrily, waving the soul around, which had finally placated a bit.

  “Did I tell you to ignore the soul for as long as you did?’ Thoth grinned as if this whole situation was planned and inevitable.

  “You didn’t tell me.” The goblin replied, clearly not enjoying Thoth’s teaching methodology. “You nearly brought harm to me. How did our contract not activate?”

  “I cannot stop you from harming yourself.” Thoth said as innocently as he could muster. When all he got was a searing glare in return, the demon finally relented, “You have to impose your will on it occasionally or the split soul will develop its own will and desire. Considering you put the poor thing to work 24 hours a day for several months, I too would have found the opportunity to kill you.”

  “So I need to check in on it and reassert control.” The goblin asked for confirmation.

  "Yes, yes, that is how it would be done," the demon said, trying to shoo him away. Armand considered the whole situation; even with a clone of him working day and night, he was only halfway to finishing one hell beast. He had successfully created hellforged mithril from thin air but it took almost his whole mana supply for a mere bar of the stuff.

  The answer was obvious: he needed more hands to work, but he only had one soul of human capacity. “Perhaps I can redeem myself.” The demon said jokingly, “The question on your mind has an obvious answer.”

  “Without a catch ideally…” Armand said as soon as the Thoth spoke.

  “Just make some more,” the demon said simply, looking at the dungeon core.

  “Make more?” That was an option? The goblin couldn’t help but think.

  “Indeed, all you need to do is combine lower-quality souls into larger ones.” The thought had crossed the goblin’s mind; he had millions of insect souls at this point, but they were just tiny specks hardly worthy of becoming soul clones. “Have you never considered why demons consume souls?”

  “I had not; I thought it was just a demony thing to do.” Armand replied quite bluntly.

  “I am shocked that you would think such a thing,” Thoth said in mock outrage. “Well, okay, souls, especially those with evil inclinations, are delicious; it is also because we use said souls to empower our own. We torture every bit of evil out of them for our magic and then consume the broken souls to enhance our own.”

  Armand shivered a little bit at the description of what happened to the souls of wrongdoers. “So you torture souls and then consume the souls once all the will is out of them.”

  “Indeed, you’re lucky since your dungeon does the purification process for you, although you are missing the satisfaction of breaking a person’s will.” Thoth said, “Just push the purified soul fragments together to have them merge; that works for your soul too, by the way.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “What?”

  “I have had my leg pulled enough times to know that there is a catch to all this so spit it out.” Armand knew Thoth rarely offered legitimate information, and if he did, it often had a hidden catch.

  “You’re no fun…” The demon chastised him, “Very well.” He moved his crossed legs down into a side-by-side arrangement. “You see, if you just consume souls willy-nilly, you will quickly lose yourself just because you are an amorphous blob of undirected soul energy ripe for the taking.”

  “So you’re saying, ‘Chew my food.” The goblin replied. The demon nodded in turn and went back to his book, clearly done with the conversation. Armand took the conversation to heart; he decided to begin with the great soul combination experiment.

  He moved to the dungeon core and focused his attention on the specks of small light within. He banged by moving two of the specks of light close to each other till they were touching. Upon doing so, the two trembled but inevitably merged into something of a slightly larger size.

  The goblin began to continue this as he began a series of combinations; the tiny specks of light soon became something more. They grew in size till they became close in size to an animal soul. This took about ten thousand insect souls. It then took about a thousand animal souls to make something equivalent to a humanoid soul. It didn’t take him too long to form the uncountable lights into about five humanoid souls; of course, he left a little bit to repair his soul and even a little extra to nourish his own. He clapped his hands together; time to get to work!