Ultimate Gacha System: Reborn As A Mob in My Favorite Game

Chapter 135: Testing Soul Configuration [II]

Mirela didn’t argue.

She stood up immediately, grabbing her staff and her tunic crate, backing away toward the massive stone staircase alongside Anya.

Klaus walked ten yards away from the fire, stepping out into the open shadowless expanse of the polished obsidian floor.

He stood with his feet planted shoulder-width apart, closing his eyes and turning his focus entirely inward.

’Ah... time to experiment.’ Klaus thought.

He didn’t look toward the frozen rows of human statues inside his inner domain.

’For some reason, I can’t get them to move again...’

He ignored the stored bandits, the rotting Winterland and other monsters as well as the armored Varhem guards he had butchered in the snow.

Instead, he reached deep into the center of his chest cavity, directing his awareness toward the volatile crackling anomaly he had absorbed back during his conquest of the ruined winter camp.

The Lightning Spirit.

It had never been a quiet prisoner.

Ever since he forcefully dragged it into his vessel, it had lived inside his ribs like a caged ball of pure static electricity and elemental rage.

It didn’t possess a human mind, but it possessed a violently possessive ego that constantly thumped against his core whenever he drew his sword.

It had saved his life during the initial clash with Ryoki, blasting against his internal walls to keep his heart beating when the necrotic decay tried to freeze his blood.

Right now, it was buzzing erratically in the dark, vibrating with energy.

’Come on out...’ Klaus commanded mentally, wrapping his newly acquired Soul King authority around the crackling sphere of plasma.

The spirit violently protested.

It sent a sharp jarring jolt of static electricity straight up his spine that made his jaw clench.

It didn’t want to be dragged through the narrow... confines of his soul for some reason.

’I said move...’ Klaus asserted, tightening his mental grip like an iron vice.

He invoked [Soul Configuration] and the reaction was instantaneous and violent.

A deafening crack of raw thunder detonated directly inside the ground floor of the Endless Tower.

The glowing white runes carved into the surrounding obsidian pillars flared blindingly bright, reacting to the sudden surge of atmospheric interference.

Sparks of volatile blue-white plasma began to literally arc off Klaus’s skin.

The small hairs on his arms stood completely on end.

A sharp smell of burning instantly overpowered the smell of the campfire, filling the entire room with the pressure of a small incoming thunderstorm.

"Master!" Mirela shouted over the rising hum, shielding her eyes with her forearm as static electricity began to make the fur on her goat ears twitch and stand up.

Klaus gritted his teeth, raising his right arm straight out in front of his chest.

His heavy biceps bulged, his veins glowing faintly through his skin with bright blue plasma as he forcefully dragged the struggling elemental anomaly out of his inner domain.

It wasn’t like drawing a sword... It felt like grabbing a live power line with bare hands and physically ripping it through his own sternum.

A blinding sphere of swirling chaotic blue-white lightning violently erupted from the open palm of his extended right hand.

The orb hovered there in the air an inch above his skin, cracking and spitting bolts of pure electrical energy that scorched blackened, smoking lines directly into the polished obsidian floor around his boots.

The heat radiating from the sphere made the air physically warp and waver, screaming with the sound of tearing metal.

If he let go of it right now, if he simply released his authority, the sphere would detonate like a localized plasma bomb, blowing the ground floor apart and collapsing the upper staircase.

Klaus didn’t let go.

He clamped down harder.

This was where the standard Soul King class ended, and where his new skill began...

Normally, a spirit was just a spectral projection... a ghost made of loose mana that dissipated the exact second the host stopped feeding it energy and it lost its own.

But [Soul Configuration] granted him the absolute authority to rewrite that architecture.

He didn’t just want a floating ball of lightning that he had to continuously pump dry to keep coherent...

He wanted something permanent.

’Form up...’ Klaus willed, pouring a huge amount of pure refined white divine mana directly out of his core and plunging it straight into the center of the crackling plasma orb.

He used his own energy like an anvil, violently hammering the chaotic swirling elemental matter inward.

He forced the loose screaming electricity to compress.

Klaus forced the raw lightning to bind together as he actively wrote physical laws onto a being of pure energy, giving it mass, giving it gravity, giving it skin and bone forged entirely from atmospheric pressure and concentrated mana.

The sphere of lightning violently resisted the compression, screeching with a high-pitched whining feedback that vibrated Klaus’s teeth.

The light grew so intense that the entire cavernous room went stark white with the shadows being eradicated from the tower.

Klaus didn’t blink.

His glowing silver eyes stared directly into the center of the miniature sun hovering over his hand.

Since the spirit had always projected a distinctly aggressive and vocal feminine intent inside his head whenever it complained about his decisions with buzzes, his subconscious naturally provided the foundational blueprint for the physical vessel he was forcing it into.

He didn’t build a massive hulking monster... He didn’t build a terrifying beast either.

Klaus compressed the chaotic energy into something tightly wound and capable of holding that much voltage without exploding.

The mana drain was staggering.

Klaus felt a massive chunk of his newly acquired divine reserves vanish in a single second, poured directly into the permanent physical materialization of the soul.

Then, the compression snapped shut.

POP!

The blinding room-filling glare of plasma vanished instantly, imploding inward with a rush of displaced air that tugged at Klaus’s shirt and blew Mirela’s hair back across her face.

The screaming screech of electricity was completely gone.

Klaus slowly lowered his arm, letting out a long hot breath between his teeth.

’Shit... if it’s this hard to do something like this then to create a human body will be hell.’

Floating in the air roughly three feet off the obsidian floor, hovering directly at Klaus’s eye level was a newly forged physical existence.

It was a girl.

Or rather, it was a physical, chibi-sized fairy girl barely a foot tall.

She possessed a body forged from pale skin that faintly glowed with an internal blue luminescence.

Her messy spiky hair was a bright shocking yellow-blonde that literally crackled with tiny, harmless arcs of static electricity whenever she shifted her head.

Protruding from her back were two pairs of intricate, razor-thin wings that didn’t have feathers or scales... they were forged entirely from condensed looping sheets of blue lightning around her.

She wore a simple sleeveless tunic forged from dark woven mana that mirrored the color of rain clouds, and her tiny bare feet dangled uselessly above the scorched stone floor.

Her eyes snapped open.

They were large glowing electric blue orbs completely devoid of pupils, practically sparking with consciousness.

She looked down at her own tiny hands.

She flexed her fingers, watching the knuckles bend. She looked down at her bare feet, swinging her legs slightly in the air and she even reached behind her back with her fingers brushing the static of her own lightning wings.

She had a body.

An actual anchored physical vessel that didn’t require Klaus to constantly hold a spell open just to keep her from dissolving into the ether...

For three seconds, silence hung over the ground floor of the Endless Tower.

Klaus stood there with his arms crossed over his broad chest, offering a curious half-smile as he evaluated his handiwork.

"Well?" Klaus asked with his deep voice breaking the quiet. "How does the new suit feel, Sparky?"

The chibi elemental slowly turned her head. Her glowing blue eyes locked dead onto Klaus’s face.

The curiosity in her expression vanished instantly.

Her tiny jaw clenched tight as her spiky blonde hair flared outward, standing up wildly as a visible aggressive spark of blue plasma jumped across her forehead.

She didn’t offer a deep formal bow of gratitude to her creator.

She didn’t drop to her knees to worship the Soul King who had just granted her life.

She launched herself directly at his face like a high-velocity artillery shell.

"YOU ABSOLUTE, UNMITIGATED, ARROGANT BASTARD!" she shrieked.

Her voice wasn’t a rumble of thunder anymore.

She had physical vocal cords now, and she used them to produce an incredibly loud high-pitched ringing scream that bounced off the obsidian pillars and made Anya wince.

Before Klaus could even raise a hand to ward her off, the tiny fairy closed the distance and landed directly on his forehead.

She anchored her tiny bare feet against his silver hairline, leaned over so her glowing blue eyes were inches from his nose, and began raining a rapid furious, entirely uncoordinated flurry of tiny punches directly against the top of his skull and the bridge of his nose.

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

Her little fists were hard, possessing the physical density of river stones, and every single time they struck his skin, they discharged a tiny stinging snap of static electricity that made Klaus’s eyelids twitch.

"Do you have any idea... any single microscopic idea... how mind-numbingly infuriating it is to be stuffed inside a dark chest cavity for so long?!" she screamed at the top of her lungs, pounding her fists furiously against his forehead with every word. "I am a high-tier elemental anomaly! I rode the blizzards of the Winterlands and a Princess dammit! I struck mountain peaks! And you... you filthy heavy-handed thug... you shoved me inside a dark, stuffy inner domain with a bunch of creepy silent stone statues!"

"Hey... quit hitting the nose, I just got that set straight today," Klaus grunted, not actually bothering to swat her off his head, simply letting the tiny elemental vent her accumulated temper against his reinforced skull.

"I won’t quit!" she yelled, stomping her tiny feet against his scalp so hard sparks flew out of his hair. "You treated me like a glorified pocket battery! Every time you got yourself cut to ribbons because your swordsmanship looks like a drunken lumberjack chopping firewood, who had to shock your stupid sluggish heart back into rhythm?! Me! Who had to blast at all of those monsters so you didn’t die?! ME!"

She stopped punching for a split second, grabbing two handfuls of his long silver hair and yanking backward with all her tiny physical strength, growling through her clenched teeth.

"I hate you! I hate your stupid, heavy boots! I hate your reckless, brainless survival tactics! And I really, really hate that you made my hair yellow!"

Across the room, Mirela lowered her staff slightly with her mouth opening and closing as she stared at the bizarre spectacle unfolding in front of her.

"Is... is that a spirit?" Mirela asked, turning toward Anya with a bewildered expression. "Why is it hitting him? Shouldn’t a spirit be completely subservient to the Master’s authority?"

"The [Soul Configuration] skill that Papa used reconstructs the physical architecture of the entity, but it does not artificially overwrite the foundational personality of the harvested soul unless the host explicitly applies a mental subjugation parameter during the forging process," Anya explained calmly, though her purple eyes tracked the tiny fairy with distinct disapproval. "Father clearly allowed the spirit’s core ego to transition intact. Given that elementals inherently possess chaotic volatile temperaments... this behavior is statistically predictable."

"She sounds like a spoiled brat," Mirela muttered in irritation as she watched the tiny fairy continue to yank on Klaus’s silver hair.

"Are you done throwing your tantrum?" Klaus asked dryly, reaching up with his right hand and effortlessly pinching the tiny fairy by the scruff of her dark woven tunic, peeling her off his forehead and holding her suspended in the air right in front of his face.

She dangled there in his grip with her spiky blonde hair messed up, her tiny wings buzzing rapidly as she kicked her bare feet aggressively toward his nose.

"Put me down, you oversized meatbag!" she snapped, crossing her tiny arms over her chest and glaring daggers at him.

"I just spent a massive chunk of divine mana pulling you out of the dark and giving you a permanent physical body that doesn’t need to feed on my mana to survive..." Klaus said, leveling a deadpan gaze at her. "The least you could do is stop trying to re-break my nose. If you really hate walking around in the waking world that much, I can always dissolve the configuration and put you back on shelf duty with the statues."

The tiny elemental stopped kicking her feet immediately.

She looked down at her physical hands again.

She squeezed her fingers into fists, feeling the solid weight of her own flesh and bone. She looked past Klaus’s broad shoulder, staring out toward the open double doors of the tower where the cold winter wind was blowing snow across the threshold.

She could feel the air currents on her skin.

She could smell the dust in the room.

It was real.

She wasn’t just a blind pulse of energy floating in the air anymore.

Her glowing blue eyes flickered slightly, losing a bit of their aggressive, angry glare.

She looked back at Klaus’s face.

She took in the clean, unscarred lines of his jaw, the long silver hair, and the piercing luminescent silver eyes that watched her with quiet amusement.

A sudden rush of dark blue color flushed across the pale skin of the fairy’s tiny cheeks.

She forcefully turned her head to the side, refusing to look him in the eyes with her spiky yellow hair falling forward as her tiny shoulders hunched up in an exaggerated defensive shrug.

"I didn’t say I wanted to go back inside the stupid chest," she muttered with her high-pitched voice dropping its screaming volume, turning into a sulky audible grumble.

"Sounded like you hated everything about it," Klaus teased, holding her up.

"I hate your reckless tactics!" she corrected loudly with her head snapping back around to glare at him, though her cheeks were burning brighter blue by the second.

She crossed her tiny arms even tighter over her chest, her little foot tapping the air impatiently.

"You... you walked into that arena against a centuries-old monster who literally wrote the rules on the soul, and you didn’t even have a backup plan! Do you have any idea how scary it was inside the vessel when your life force started dropping into single digits?!"