The Soul species really isn’t something I understand. I mean, how could I? 

Varuna is literally made of water. He is nothing but water and a soul somehow living in it. Almost like water itself gained a will and formed a soul to carry out said will. And because the entire power of an ocean all combined into one soul, Varuna is massively powerful.

And now there is another one. This, as I called it, Soul of the Mantle, might not be anything like that. I just liked the name for a magma soul. 

It wasn’t as powerful as Varuna, thank god, so it might be a relatively newborn Soul compared to Varuna, but the Soul still matches the power of an SS-rank monster.

And if my guess is correct and this is a relatively newborn Soul, it might just be testing what it can do. Varuna was seen as both a god and a monster, and thus was eventually frozen and trapped. And sure he caused destruction to some of the coastline villages, but that is what the ocean sometimes does. Storms, tidal waves, what have you. Any of those can wash away towns or even cities. Thus so can the Soul of the Ocean.

But what about magma? It can erupt and burn away entire regions. The ashes can kill even more people. Luckily it hadn’t come to that, at least not yet, and this young Soul had just heated up the area. 

But now. Now it didn’t seem happy with us. The lava that made its body gathered and formed into a golem-like shape, but it clearly took inspiration from the two of us, as well as the people living in the surrounding areas. You could definitely notice some of those inspirations, like the scale-like pieces of hardened lava that formed on the Soul’s ‘skin’. Well, the surface of its lava body. It also had a body most proportional to a lamia, probably because Lamia have the Thermal Fluctuation Resistance skill so they can take the heat better than most creatures. So if the Soul was observing people with the heat, it would have taken more from lamias than other species, as they have been the most active in the heatwave.

As for its features, they took after Alice and I. The magma hair was styled very similarly to mine and the facial features took a lot after Alice.

“Brian?” Alice said. “... do we fight this thing?”

“Not yet. If it doesn’t attack, we don’t have to.” I told her.

As we kept flying, Alice changed her outfit to a Fire immune magical girl outfit and I also took out my armored jacket as it has amazing fire resistance. I then asked Alice to try to keep the starting forest fire at bay. She could do that with Fire Magic, using a Flame Control spell.

The Soul saw Alice putting out the fires its presence was starting, and that caused it to recoil back a bit. Maybe it didn’t understand the harm it can cause?

I decided to assume so, as the Soul wasn’t aggressive. It was more curious and scared.

So I tried another Soul Magic spell. Soul Connection. It is actually the spell the Factory VR pods use to move the user’s soul into my soul realm, or whatever the Factory is. 

But you can do so much more with it. From exchange of information to transferring souls, it can do a lot. But it is also easily resisted and broken, even by someone with no knowledge of Soul Magic.

I still decided to try it and managed to form a connection with the Soul of the Mantle. I pushed through both images and ideas of how it was harming the people here with the heat, and while I also pushed for the idea that I forgave it, I tried to get it to stop.

The Soul seemed to flinch with every image, every idea I pushed to it. And through our connection, I could feel it weeping because its existence was causing people harm.

As it did, it kept shrinking down, the lava making its body falling to the ground. But the damage it caused to the already badly burned ground just made the Soul weep even more, so I did my best to collect all the lava into Storage before it could hit the ground.

It shrunk until it was no more than a meter tall, and just kept crying. Apparently I accidentally thought it that people cry when they are sad, as it was now crying tears of lava.

I turned to Alice, asking her with my eyes what she wanted to do. Again, this is technically her mission, even if I kind of took over for a bit.

Alice quickly moved to comfort the crying Soul, while I used the Soul Connection to teach it how to understand speech, hopefully also teaching it how to speak. Though admittedly it will have to talk with magic as making vocal cords will be way more difficult than that.

Admittedly I’m not good at speaking with magic. I’ve learned a bit about it, but not all that much. I was still able to get enough through that the mental weeps I had been hearing became actual sounds that Alice could hear.

Eventually the Soul stopped and tried to speak, but that was still beyond its skills. So instead, it tried to convey to us that it wanted us to deal with it, like we would with any monster. Apparently it had learned of monsters and what people do to them, and now it considered itself one.

And no, Souls like this aren’t monsters. They don’t have monster cores. They are actually closer to dragons than monsters, since both are extremely powerful races that don’t need the System to protect them from miasma.

Luckily Alice was able to calm down the crying Soul. Thank god she actually has full on fire immunity in one of her magical girl outfits or this could have been bad. 

But now that we had dealt with the source of the heatwave, we had to actually figure out what to do with it. Well, we had an obvious choice, so we just decided to bring it to HomeBase where it could figure out its place in the world. 

We also named the soul. Alice asked me for a name, so I ran through a few names of fire and volcano gods I remembered. Agni and Vulcan were suggested, but the Soul didn’t like them, but she seemed to enjoy Pele, so that ended up being its name. I also decided that she would be female, as between the name and her facial features that resemble Alice, she was more feminine than masculine. That way I don’t have to call her it.

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After that I teleported Alice and Pele back to HomeBase. After that I returned to where Lua was and told her that the heatwave had been dealt with.

The people had already noticed it, as after Pele withdrew all the fire mana she had spread around, the temperature had cooled down. It will still likely take a few days for everything to go back to normal, but at least it was no longer scorching hot.

When asked what caused the heatwave I brought out a large magma crystal. It is like the sea crystals Wilma received as a birthday present from Cailie and Varuna, but instead of Water attributed, it was Fire attributed with just a bit of Earth attribute as well.

One had actually formed in the lava pool Pele had been living in, so I collected it after I sent Alice and Pele to HomeBase. I decided that I could blame some of the heatwave on the crystal so that Pele wouldn’t get more flack. I don’t want people actually trying to kill her.

When asked how a crystal could cause a heatwave, I explained what magic crystals like these actually are and how they form. In this case, I used the lava pool Pele formed as the reason. A new volcano could have formed in the area, but instead a magic crystal began forming in it. But because of a crack in the crystal, a lot of the fire mana that should be used to form the crystal instead leaked into the air, and that caused the heatwave. Is what I told the locals. 

They believed it as they had no reason not to. Just being near the magma crystal was dangerous and actually touching it can easily burn you. So over a long time it could have believably raised the temperature of a large area.

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Lua and I kept teleporting between the area and HomeBase for the next few days, just to deal with any injuries that were still a thing, and helping the local fields with more copies of Rain of Mercy.

I also had reported to the Crystalline family, but unlike the locals, I told them the truth about what happened. As well as the lie I told the people.

I explained that I had taken Pele under my protection and I was ready to threaten them that no harm would come to her unless they wanted me to cut them off and shut off their network and their access to the Factory.

Luckily it didn’t come to that as they understood my viewpoint and simply thanked me for taking care of the issue.

They also offered me a noble rank in the Empire as a reward, which I actually accepted, but put it on hold until I could find out if it would cause any problems with the Kingdoms. I don’t want to step out of line. … okay, I don’t care that much but still. I don’t want the Kingdoms to go to war with the Empire over me.

And don’t say people wouldn’t do that. I’m a literal goldmine of everything. People would go to war over much less. The problem would be me stopping the war and likely cutting off both sides.

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On HomeBase, Pele was quickly learning more things about the world. She apparently hadn’t seen as many things with her scouting fire mana as I assumed, but luckily we have the best teachers and controlling her heat was simple. 

By the way, Pele took to living on floor 43 of the HomeBase dungeon. It is the volcano floor for those who didn’t remember, and it was perfect for her. She couldn’t really damage anything there. Well she could, but it is already a volcanic floor, so anything she would break can be easily fixed. Unless she somehow breaks the entire dungeon and I doubt she can do that.

She also learned of Varuna, someone very much like her. Sure Varuna was water while Pele is magma, but they are close enough.

And the two of them actually share an interesting fact. They both have the same weakness. The cold. Pele can no longer control magma after it hardens and Varuna can’t control ice. 

Pele actually deals with it better as she can re-melt hardened magma, so in a way that is an advantage to her, but she needs to keep her body much warmer than Varuna. He just has to keep himself from freezing.

But still, seeing that she wasn’t the only one of her kind made Pele really happy, even if the two Souls aren’t exactly the same.

She had also finalized the form she usually took. It looked like a lamia, but one made of magma. And as I said earlier, she had similar hair to mine, so quite short but straight, and facial features taken from Alice. I suppose you could call her our first child, even if we didn’t give birth to her.