The Ascetic stared up at Mathias and spoke in a broken and raspy tone, "What the fuck! Why! How fucking deranged are you! You know you died right! How. It's ridiculous." He said softly in anguish.
The Ascetic couldn't come to terms with the fact that Mathias Calypses had used the double body technique to replace himself. To him it seemed alien, strange and wrong. Mathias Calypses had died, this was an immutable fact.
For the Ascetic, doing such a thing was far beyond the realm of reason and sanity. One had to be insane beyond conception to even think about performing such an act. After all you don't live on, you are replaced.
It was for this reason that the Ascetic considered what Mathias did as completely incomprehensible. Although Mathias' himself views his actions as just another one of his uncountable tricks.
This was not the first time Mathias Calypses had died.
The Lone Mother decided to kill Mathias with the rest of his dimension and she did, hundreds of times. Not that Mathias Calypses remembers any of these deaths though. After all, every real clone that Mathias Calypses makes of himself is technically a new person based on him with memories up to a certain point.
He makes it this way to guard against attacks through his memories and to prevent his adversaries from using connections between Mathias and his clone to kill both Mathias and the real body double.
Now marks the 314th iteration of Mathias Calypses.
Mathias uses this technique as a form of technical immortality. Others, such as the Ascetic, may not see this technique as living but Mathias does. For him there is no difference between him and the real body double and from a scientific perspective that is an accurate statement.
From his soul core to his flesh, every enzyme to every organelle, is exactly the same without any deviations. Mathias has to make sure this is the case every time or eventually he believes that he would eventually end up like a game of telephone, distorted and misinterpreted beyond recognition.
Mathias only sees his clones as living on if they embody him. If Mathias cannot recognize the clone he forces himself to scrap it. Even so, Mathias understands that no two things can be completely identical.
There are times where even he looks at his memories and asks, "Would I have done the same as the past me?"
But ultimately, since Mathias Calypses has been a clone for most of his time as a sorcerer, he tends not to think about these things very often. It's just a part of life for him.
Mathias looked at the soul core in hand, channeling aether into his palm he cast a simple yet effective sorcery, "Astris Fulo"
A beam of starlight easily pierced the Ascetic's head and he died, just like that. No more tricks, no flashy complicated sorceries, just the most basic offensive sorcery a sorcerer can feasibly produce: A simple beam of light.
Without a soul core, a sorcerer cannot use aether, since they don't have aether. Normally when a soul core is removed, it's like taking someone's brain out of their skull. Mortals and Initiates would collapse instantly. Adepts, if it's an action they are extremely familiar with, the body becomes capable of doing it without the core, such as walking in a straight line.
When it comes to Ascetics, their body can move and think consciously without their soul. It is thought that the reason for this is because of an Ascetic soul's greater imprint on the body. Although this consciousness will continuously fade and wear off, completely growing still after 20 minutes.
Ascetics, if their soul core is stolen, can use this brief intelligence to steal back their soul core and reincorporate it into their bodies, saving themselves. If another wishes to save them, up to 10 minutes after the Ascetic loses consciousness, implanting the core would still save them.
Although, after 10 minutes this becomes impossible and their bodies would never be able to reincorporate it. You also can't reincorporate cores into mortals and initiates, once their core is ripped from them their bodies can never accept it again.
The case with Adepts is different, once a core is ripped you have 10 seconds of certified success to incorporate their core back into them, after that you can still try to incorporate their core within 5 minutes but that would rely on the situation and a set of invisible conditions. Beyond 5 minutes such a procedure becomes absolutely impossible.
If revival of the soul belonging to the soul core is still wished for, a sorcerer can construct a modified real body double of the person in question and give it the soul core instead of an artificial consciousness.
The prerequisite for this is that the soul in question wasn't struck with a sorcery that counters this type of resurrection and it hasn't been too long since death.
The length of time before the soul truly dies depends on the level of sorcery they possessed, for mortals it's half a day, for initiates it's a 3 days, for Adepts it's 2 and a half weeks and for Ascetics it's three years.
Mathias Calypses, who holding the Ascetic's core, smiled slightly. He was not planning on using the Ascetic's soul core to make him into a golem that fought for him. Although Mathias could have done that, if he was holding an Apostle's core instead he even might have done so.
Nor was he planning to make it into a domain artifact to fortify the area against the other Ascetics in the surrounding Hua forest.
Instead, he was planning on literally absorbing the core and using it to ascend to an Ascetic. This was only possible because Mathias Calypses had already accomplished all the prerequisites required for ascension. As mentioned before, to ascend to a higher level of sorcery a sorcerer needs to achieve both gradual and explosive progress.
Gradual progress is achieved by simply saturating the soul core with aether, the main issue sorcerers run into with this gradual progress is the sheer amount of aether required to achieve this gradual progress.
Explosive progress on the other hand, is gained by achieving a feat so great that the heavens itself deems you of a higher level than you are. If you add the ridiculous amount of aether required to the feat the soul undergoes automatic ascension.
Feats in this case can either be something completely surpassing the limits of your stage or a series of feats the reach the extreme upper limits of your stage. Mathias, despite that fact that he survived the cataclysm caused by a suspected Evangelist and killed an Ascetic as an Adept, didn't satisfy the condition of 'completely surpassing the limits of your stage'.
After the the death of the Ascetic he had sensed that his soul had completed the necessary feats required for ascension. He did not know how he sensed this.
The aether required for the ascension of Ascetic is the same as an Ascetic. Mathias Calypses was holding the core for an Ascetic. He slowly was draining the aether with Energia Furari. From the slow leeching of the mass amount of aether, Mathias had discerned that would probably take multiple days to fully accommodate the energy.
He also realized that with the Ascetic gone there was a real possibility of the other Ascetics in the Hua forest to come and raid this compound. Mathias considered fending them off impossible. At first he contemplated running away.
But he realized he couldn't do that while carrying this massive energy ball which would attract those cultivators.
Mathias wasn't confident in his ability to escape while carrying the Ascetic's soul. Astris sorcery may be the best at escaping out of all the schools but as an Adept against multiple Ascetics, that tidbit of trivia matters little.
So he instead opted to fool them for just a few days.
Calling up his clones from underneath the rock below, Mathias Calypses infused them with aether directly from the Ascetic's soul, intending to turn those illusory clones into a sort of key.
The reason why he had to use aether directly from the Ascetic's soul was because when sorcerers absorb aether into their soul they change its properties. This was part of the reason why draining the Ascetic's soul was taking so long.
But since the Ascetic was a Solaris sorcerer and Mathias was an Astris sorcerer it didn't take as long as it could have. This was due to the interconnected nature of the sun and stars.
If Mathias instead was draining the soul of an Astris sorcerer this doesn't mean that he's be able to accommodate all the energy instantly. He would still have to drain it slowly from the soul core and remove the aether's previous identity while instilling his soul's identity into the energy.
It was for this reason he had to give his illusory clone the aether before he ripped it of its original identity.