Ball of Nothing

Reforging Sylvia's Soul was a lot easier compared to reforging Hana's soul. Zero didn't have to tamper with Sylvia's soul to make it resilient enough for the responsibility of his 'thought'. Sylvia was already prepared for that immense pressure.

However, the tricky part was keeping Sylvia's soul from getting tainted by the heavy corruption in Baku's soul. Zero heavily underestimated the amount of corruption in Baku's soul when he removed the section and now, he stared at the mess he made.

"Wii, go to Half Moon Village and get me to bottles full of Trigression Falls' water."

The eggplant fairy complied and teleported away while Zero continued to cast purification and light magic on the soul fragments. He hadn't added the thoughts or chaos fragments to the soul elements because the corruption was doing too good of a job keeping the pieces together in the wrong way.

It was difficult to remove the sticky corruption. Allowing it to get near Sylvia's fragmented soul was like adding a drop of black dye to a cup of clear water and expecting it not to change colour. Zero didn't think that the corruption would want to get itself onto every single fragment it could find. He thought that the corruption would be eradicated by the power of Sylvia's soul. Unfortunately, he failed to take into consideration that Baku was a wandering god and Sylvia was simply a Great Sylph without much soul experience.

Purifying this corruption wasn't impossible, it would just take Zero a very long time to clean it out completely and restore the condition of the soul pieces with qi. If the corruption was anything like sins, Zero would've absorbed them into his inventory and converted them to energy for future uses. Unfortunately Lily informed him that there was no function in the Mind's Eye system to convert corruption that is an accumulation of negative thoughts into energy.

Zero looked at the two bottles of Trigression Falls water that Wii brought back and sighed. He hoped that steeping them in this qi-positive water would make the purification and restoration process easier.

He poured the water out into two different bowls with soul containment arrays. The contaminated pieces were thrown into the left bowl while the uncontaminated pieces were tossed into the right bowl that Zero purified at equal intervals with the aid of a talisman. The process was slow and painful but Zero had nobody to blame but himself. He should have thought about it before messing around with other people's souls.

The water in the left bowl turned murky after Zero's constant qi induction treatment to force the impurities to leave the soul fragments. He asked his assistants for a few more bottles of the same water while he tried to find a safe way to dispose of the corrupted qi water.

While waiting, Zero had an idea and an experiment he wanted to try out. He drained the corrupted qi water into another bowl that he placed several protective spells over and tossed in a single grain of chaos fragment. The reaction wasn't anything Zero was expecting. Instead of using the qi as an energy source to become active, the chaos fragment remained dormant even after all the corrupted qi water had been absorbed.

"What's going on?" Zero asked and decided to put it on hold when Lily appeared with two more bottles of water.

Throughout the purification process, Zero continued to toss corrupted qi water to that grain of chaos fragment and observed if there were any changes. The murkiness of the water became lighter after twenty washes and finally, Zero was starting to see the corruption fade. He spent close to thirty hours on this project without rest except for the occasional snack to stop his rumbling stomach. Zero abused all the magic and potions he had at his disposal to work on purifying the terrifying amount of corruption. It was finally paying off and more interestingly, the chaos fragment that absorbed all the corruption was starting to change.

Zero could see it, an aura of malice from this tiny grain of chaos fragment. The chaos fragment wasn't like the others that struck out and gave energy. It didn't matter if it was life energy, qi, mana or chaos energy, the regular reaction was to give something out. Something with the power of creation should have the ability to produce but this particular corrupted fragment does the opposite. it is incapable of producing anything but it was very good at absorbing anything. The more negative things Zero fed it, the hungrier it became.

"Lily, can you tell Zoe to prepare a barrel full of Trigresion water? I have a very thirsty experiment."

The flower fairy wasn't surprised but she had some concerns about carrying something that heavy all by herself. Zero raised a brow. Even though the lamp's time flow was slower than the one on earth, Zero was sure Bob should have rested enough by now.

"Get Bob to help you. Also, get Wii on standby, I'm moving to the next phase of the reforging once I finish purifying this last batch."

Once again, the mindscape assistants busied away. Mii was put in charge of Zero's side project to feed the thirsty chaos fragment and record how much qi it would require to quench its thirst while he added soul fragments and qi to the purified soul pieces.

There were no hiccups or room for failure with Zero in charge. Sylvia's soul reacted positively to Baku's purified soul fragments and Zero had no problems adding more soul fragments for reforging. In fact, spriggan Sylvia seemed to need more fragments to repair what her soul lacked to host Baku's fragments. Zero obliged and adjusted accordingly. The formula was very different from what he needed when reforging Hana's soul.

Wii, Mii and Lily took turns becoming Zero's assistants for the next few days as Zero patiently adjusted the reforging intensity. Sylvia's soul fragments had to reach a few more breakthroughs before it could become compatible with the vessel the Tree of Fertility created and it was an extremely slow process of inducing qi to accelerate Sylvia's soul growth.

While Zero worked on tampering the souls for reforging, Mii concluded that the strange chaos fragment needed about three barrels of Trigression Water to become neutral again. Zero did the Math quickly and understood that it was about the same amount of corruption it was fed and wondered if there was any purpose behind doing such a thing. Then he shrugged it off. At the very least, disposing of the corruption was no longer a problem. The corruption couldn't be erased and had to be redistributed carefully for it to return to the cycle. However, Zero found a way to completely remove it from the equation at the price of destroying three barrelsful of qi water. It was an interesting discovery but one that didn' make much sense to Zero as he put the finishing touches to Spriggan Sylvia's soul.

Once the thought was added to the stabilised soul fragments, Spriggan Sylvia's soul was born and Zero wasted no time. He teleported back to the Purgatory and tied the reforged soul to its new vessel, coaxing it into the body.

Spriggan Sylvia wasn't choosy and took a liking to its vessel almost immediately. Zero and his mindscape assistants watched the birth of a new spriggan from the Tree of Fertility and Bob recorded it with Zero's i-communicator.

Spriggan Sylvia was adorable when she climbed out of her fruit-egg and rubbed her eyes sleepily. Like a proud mother, Baku swept the young spriggan up with her branches and rocked her to sleep. Zero smiled. It looks like the roles have been reversed now but at the very least, they were together.

"Mission accomplished," Zero announced and yawned.

Now that his job was over, Zero felt his physical limitations catching up to him. The doctor barely made it to the bed in his lamp before he was already snoring. Bob watched over his master and tucked him into bed properly, pulling the covers all the way before wishing Zero a good rest.