Chapter 147: Bonding [7]
"Me?" Soren furrowed his brows in deep confusion, his finger pointing slightly at his own chest.
Elenaria kept her eyes on the panicked assistant. "Alright. You may leave. We will head down shortly."
The researcher nodded frantically, offering a hurried bow before scrambling out of the room, the heavy metallic door sliding shut behind him.
Once the door clicked into place, Elenaria turned toward the President. "Sir, what should we do?"
Soren watched them closely. For the first time since he had met President Marron, the older man looked genuinely conflicted. A tense, heavy quiet settled over them, making Soren realize that whatever was kept in Sector Seven had to be incredibly dangerous to disrupt Marron’s usual composure.
Marron rubbed his temples, letting out a slow breath to clear his expression. "Let’s continue what we were talking about earlier. We will handle Sector Seven later."
"Alright," Elenaria agreed, though her voice remained guarded. She turned back to face Soren, her eyes narrowing as she shifted her focus back to his core. "Mr. Soren, have you contracted with a magic beast before?"
Soren shook his head without hesitation. "No, never."
"Then, were you in close contact with a magic beast for a prolonged period of time?"
"No," Soren said, racking his brain to be sure. "I encountered them in the past, but I was unawakened back then, and those beasts were already bonded to other tamers."
Elenaria stepped a bit closer, looking for any missing detail. "Are you absolutely certain? Please, try to remember anything, no matter how trivial it might seem to you."
"Well, that’s really all of it," Soren said, digging through his memories of his earlier life. Then, a small detail surfaced. "Right... I raised a cat for a few years before awakening, but it was just an ordinary domestic cat."
Hearing this, Elenaria let out a quiet sigh, her shoulders dropping slightly. "How can you be so sure it was ordinary? You were unawakened back then, so you wouldn’t have been able to perceive its mana. How could you accurately tell the difference?"
Soren fell silent, awkwardly scratching his cheek as he thought about how to explain it. "Well... magic beasts can heal their injuries themselves using mana, right? And pretty easily too. But with her, whenever she got into a scrap, I had to physically take her to the local vet and use normal medicine on her wounds. It would take days or weeks for her to heal up, just like any normal animal."
"I see." Elenaria nodded slowly, falling into deep thought.
She walked a few paces away, her eyes fixed on the floor as she connected the pieces. A moment later, she looked back up, her gaze locked onto Soren with a sudden sharpness.
"It seems highly likely that the cat was not an ordinary animal, Mr. Soren," She explained calmly. "Even if it started as a normal beast, animals can undergo spontaneous mana mutations over time. It is entirely possible it evolved later on, and subsequently formed a subconscious bond with you."
Soren blinked, completely caught off guard. "A subconscious bond?"
"Yes. Since you spent so much time together and clearly shared a deep emotional connection, the contract could have formed naturally, without either of you even realizing it happened."
"So... you mean the problem is related to that?" Soren asked, his stomach twisting.
Elenaria nodded. "If I had to guess, that latent bond has already occupied your primary bonding slot. Because you were unawakened at the time, your soul space was still underdeveloped. The sudden presence of a contract might have permanently limited the growth of that slot, locking it in place and rendering you unable to accept any external entities."
She paused, crossing her arms as she offered another hypothesis. "Moreover, it could be a matter of absolute spiritual jealousy. Certain feline anomalies possess an incredibly possessive soul signature. If your previous companion marked your soul space before it fully matured, its residual mana might be actively hunting down and crushing any new contracts you try to establish, viewing them as hostile invaders."
"...I see." Soren nodded.
"Alternatively," Elenaria continued after a brief moment of reflection, "your unawakened soul space was highly malleable back then. Spending years in constant contact with a single creature might have permanently attuned your nascent pathways to its specific frequency. Now that you are awakened, your soul space could simply be hardwired to reject any signature that isn’t an exact match to that cat."
Soren and Marron nodded slowly, processing the weight of her hypotheses. The explanation made a strange sort of sense, giving a bizarre framework to the empty sensation Soren felt whenever a new bond tried to settle.
Elenaria watched his expression closely before asking her next question. "What happened to this cat, Mr. Soren? Is she... still alive?"
A wave of melancholy washed over Soren’s face, his eyes dropping slightly as the sudden reminder of the past tugged at him. "Actually, she disappeared about a year and a half ago. I searched the entire area for months, but I was completely unable to find her."
Elenaria tapped her chin, a final, more complex theory taking shape in her mind.
"Her disappearance introduces another possibility," She murmured. "When a magic beast with a deep emotional attachment faces danger or undergoes a sudden, forced mutation, a bonded partner’s soul can sometimes experience an instinctive alignment with it across any distance. Your subconscious might have desperately reached out through that emotional bridge, involuntarily pulling a fragment of her soul into your dormant soul space to preserve it."
Soren looked up, listening intently.
"If that is the case, your core isn’t rejecting these contracts out of hostility," Elenaria explained. "It is simply expending all its capacity to preserve that fragment, leaving no room for anything else."
"Y-you mean... she might be dead?" Soren asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
While a part of him had already anticipated such an outcome over the last year and a half, he still didn’t truly believe it. He would much rather believe she had simply run away, found a new family, or was just living her life somewhere out of reach. Hearing the theory stated so clinically made reality feel uncomfortably heavy.
"It is just a possibility," Elenaria said, shaking her head gently to ease his sudden distress. "We cannot draw any definitive conclusions based on theories alone. However, there is one definitive way to check whether any of this is true."
Soren looked up, his chest tightening. "H-how?"
Elenaria paused, exchanging a brief, meaningful look with President Marron, who silently gave a firm nod of approval. She turned her focus completely back to Soren, her voice steady.
"We have to go to Sector Seven."
"Sector Seven?" Soren asked, the ominous tone making his chest tighten. "Just what is in there?"
"...Something very dangerous," President Marron replied. A cold glint passed through his eyes, his demeanor shifting instantly from a worried observer back to a formidable leader.
"However, it might be the key to solving your problem," Elenaria added, her expression turning dead serious. "And... the President is right. It is highly dangerous to meet that one, especially for you right now, given your situation. Are you absolutely sure you want to take this risk?"
Soren didn’t hesitate. He thought about the little kitsune and the lingering phantom memory of the companion he might have lost. "I am."
"Alright," Elenaria nodded, her tone leaving no room for argument. "But you are to stay as close to me as possible and not to make a single movement without my explicit command."
"Understood."
"Good, then follow me."
