Critical Alert: Class incompatibility found… Soul integrity failing… Soul collapse imminent…

"Seriously?!" Adam cried out angrily, the desperation easily heard in his voice. "What the hell does that mean?!"

His shout startled the Leputi guards. They looked very nervous, watching blood coming from Adam along with his labored breathing.

Adam looked at Cruxannith. She still wasn't intentionally moving, but he saw her muscles flinching and a pained look on her usually blank face.

"Damn! What should I do?"

Adam ignored the warrior Leputi that left to get the healer Leputi who resided in the base. He felt an inner clock ticking as pain filled his head and stomach. His own muscles began to twitch.

Without much time, Adam went through the lines on the message, figuring that order mattered.

"Class incompatibility, huh? There is only one class, which means one of a few things. The first possibility is that my pathetic excuse for a tunnel couldn't join the souls. Second, opening the boundary of the class areas causes the souls to break apart. That doesn't seem likely though. How else would future Adam have been able to merge Gregor's class into his own?

"Third, there is something about her class, either the shape, density, or level, that conflict with my own soul. Fourth, that I know frick'all about souls and I just royally screwed up!"

Adam tried to reason it out while gameshow music played in his mind along an imagined countdown to his soul collapsing. He had no idea what would happen when one's soul collapsed, but he guessed at best it was death. There was probably no way to recover from it, considering that he couldn't even fix the wounds Cruxannith had made during their fight.

Every possibility that Adam came up with either led him to more concerns and consequences that he wouldn't be able to handle. Adam's strong suit was not reasoning, but at this point no one outside of the Red Clan knew more about the soul than him.

"Damn it! If the class is what is causing the incompatibility, then I'll just have to get rid of it!"

Without being able to think of any other potential solution, Adam dived back into his soul. He moved to Cruxannith's, finding the end of the tube. While Cruxannith's class region hadn't shrunk, the amount of energy inside had decreased. It had been pushed through the tube and was now more spread out.

Adam had spent hours, days, and weeks, inspecting her class and the shape of her skills. While he didn't understand what the angles, protrusions, and blocks meant, he knew what her class and skills looked like.

What he saw inside now wasn't it. Everything was distorted, their shapes degrading as the energy was pulled away to fill the tube.

"That answers my question," Adam thought wryly. "I'm an idiot, not a genius."

Well, the distorted class was only causing problems, so now it would have to go. Adam had been looking forward to having soul class skills to compare to his inherited pseudo-skills, but there was no helping it now.

Adam forced the energy that was still in the class region and tube to stop moving. Then he infused it with his command.

"[Soul Shatter]!"

The class, skills, and stored energy inside it all sizzled. Everything within the region and tube broke apart. They didn't disintegrate, instead they just faded into energy. Much of that energy he used to try and solidify the tube.

It was exhausting work, and he could feel his body suffering from the effort. He could also feel the pain spreading through Cruxannith. It must be agony losing something that you had worked so hard for. The class didn't belong to Adam, and he could still feel the loss from it.

Switching his view to his body's eyes, he watched Cruxannith. As the energy broke apart and lost its purpose, Cruxannith's body also changed. Her limbs became thinner as her stat enhanced body lost the benefits the class provided. Adam couldn't see her status, but a level of intelligence that had remained in her eyes, even without being able to contain memories, dimmed. She seemed more like a child now than a comatose adult.

"I didn't even think of the stat loss associated," groaned Adam, concentrating to see through the blood that was seeping from his eyes.

Cruxannith looked sick. She looked weak and pathetic. However, while she looked like she was heading towards death, she wasn't there yet. Adam returned his focus to their souls.

His [Soul Shatter] continued to change the energy, and he kept fortifying the connections between their souls with it. A few times, the joined souls quaked, and in response his body shuddered and convulsed. At one point Adam had to return to vomit up his blood and gastric acid to prevent himself from choking on it.

"Yeah, not a genius," conceded Adam, though he never really considered himself one, so that statement didn't hurt to say.

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Critical Alert: Soul integrity compromised… Soul collapse accelerating…

"Give me a break!" choked Adam upon seeing the updated message.

Regardless of the dire nature, it was still an improvement. He had gotten rid of the part about class incompatibility. So, the next step was to solve the soul integrity issue.

The soul wounds caused in the fight with Cruxannith had never healed. Adam would consider that a soul integrity issue, but that didn't seem like the problem. All the class energy was still contained within the class region and the tube, so it hadn't drained out of the wounds. Neither were able to pump all the way into his own class regions, since the pressure of his filled soul was too much to add more.

That meant the issue was the tube he made. Or the shape. Maybe the fact that the tube wasn't wide enough to allow the skill energy to fully flow from Cruxannith's soul to his own. Could that prevent the two souls from syncing their class information?

"Drink this, your highness," Adam heard the midwife Leputi say next to his body.

Without pulling his focus from the souls, he opened his mouth and allowed whatever potion she had to flow inside. Then he felt healing energy channeled to his body. The convulsing slowed, though he continued to tremble.

"What is happening?" she asked.

"I'm trying to prevent my death," he answered coarsely, not understating the breakdown of both soul and body. "Do whatever you can for my body while I work on fixing the problem."

"I will give my life to protect you," she said.

"The only life in danger here is mine," he retorted before returning to trying to fix this.

How could he fix the path that he created? It was true that in terms of skill, the tube resembled something made with playdough by a toddler, rather than a well sculpted masterpiece. Or even solidly welded metal.

Adam knew the skills he had unlocked by heart, but in hopes of coming up with an idea, he once more looked at future Adam's status sheet skills.

Core Skills: Soul Shatter █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ Soul Shaping Memory Manipulation Soul Resonance Mental Fortitude █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ Soul Vision Emotional Manipulation Soul Lock █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █

"Wait! There's a new pseudo-skill," he gasped, doing a double take. "[Soul Shaping]. It must have unlocked from my manipulation of the energy to form the tunnel. Maybe it will be more effective than just holding the energy together."

Calling on the new pseudo-skill, Adam felt a more solid connection to the energy. Before, it was like he had just been putzing around in the mud to form the tunnel. Now he felt like he could make more complex shapes.

He used the skill to force the tube to become wider and denser. The class regions didn't have a set shape, taking up space to accommodate the class and skills. To match that, Adam reshaped the basic class region within Cruxannith, making it more like a bulbous vase. The tube, instead of being a hole cut in the boundary, connected to the opening of the vase, also becoming more bulbous.

Adam made the tube less rigid, so that it could expand to meet a variety of energy transmissions. Then he altered the shape of his own class region, smoothing it out so it resembled an uninflated balloon. If there was room in his soul, it would be able to expand to take in the energy, which would require a lot less space than an entire class or set of skills.

Once the shaping was done, Adam tried squeezing the region in Cruxannith's soul. He squeezed and released, creating a pumping motion to check if the energy could transfer between her soul and his. His own region was able to receive the energy, although it couldn't handle much before his soul's pressure pushed it back to Cruxannith's.

A natural separation of incoming and returning energy formed, not requiring him to craft separate paths to flow along. After Adam felt the energy transfer, a feeling of stability settled over him.

With a sigh of relief, Adam returned his focus to his body. The bleeding seemed to stop, and he no longer felt the need to vomit. He was a mess and both his and Cruxannith's bodies looked like death worn over, but they were no longer trembling.

"Thanks for the help," Adam whispered to the Leputi, while breathing a sigh of relief. He might not have gained anything from this attempt at clustering their souls, except for the new pseudo-skill, but he felt like he was out of the danger zone now.

"It fills me with gratitude that your highness is improving thanks to my help."

The female Leputi pulled out a cloth and wiped off the blood from Adam's face before rubbing her own cheek against his. He wasn't sure what it signified, but the soft fur felt comforting after this crazy ordeal.

Then a new notification window popped up in front of him.

"For the love of…!" he groaned as he read it.

Warning: Soul Collapse slowed. Energy deficiency reaching critical levels…

"Now I need more XP or soul energy," he complained, causing all the Leputi to quickly step away from him with scared expressions. "Not you guys! I wouldn't take it from you."

Adam sighed and went back into his soul. Immediately upon going in he felt that the energy wasn't as dense. Moving to Cruxannith's soul he also noticed that it didn't have must loose energy floating around either.

When he had begun this endeavor, her soul had a lot more energy. He had used a lot for the tube, but reinforcing it came from the energy created by her class. Now it felt barren. Where could the energy have gone?

He moved around in her soul, trying to find where it had gone. Oddly, it was more difficult to navigate their souls with less energy in this space. It felt like he couldn't get purchase to direct his image while inside. On top of that, he couldn't feel drafts, like with wind, or see the energy moving, so he just roamed while trying to find a clue.

Back at his body, Adam felt the Leputi wiping him down and trying to clean off the blood and sweat. With the help of one of the warriors, they had managed to remove Adam's shirt and pants, and a makeshift towel was being skill enhanced to get him clean. Adam assumed this was what she did for pregnant women and ignored the sensations to concentrate.

When Adam came upon the place where his soul was bonded to Cruxannith's, he noticed a difference. The opening no longer looked like a hole knocked in a wall between two houses. It was now more like a very short tunnel but inverted. Passing through didn't feel like moving from one location to another, they felt more unified, with the rebuilt class region tube wobbling between the two souls.

The inverted tunnel also had a pull into Adam's soul. It was a little lopsided. That made Adam hiss in concern. If the boundary between their souls had been opened further, smoothing the transmission of energy, then that probably meant the energy had been drawn into his own soul and out through the wounds he couldn't heal. The pressure from trying to force another structure into his soul must have hastened its escape.

There had been a lot going on in the last few minutes and Adam didn't realize that [Soul and Body Shaping] had been stopped at some point during the ordeal.

"If what I need is energy," said Adam with a malicious smirk, "then fortunately I have a few snacks sitting around."

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