Chapter 172: Chapter 172
With six of the seven troublesome little Apostles temporarily taken away, Marshall felt no sense of loss whatsoever.
If anything, he felt lighter.
Of the six who had left, some were lazy, some were insane, and some were obsessed with things he would rather not deal with.
Having them out of Cake Tower for a while meant fewer arguments, fewer complaints, and considerably less chaos around the house.
As far as Marshall was concerned, Gluttony was the only one he really needed nearby.
She was the smartest of the Seven Sins Apostles, the creation Marshall was most satisfied with, and by far the one most suited to working beside him.
Her performance exceeded that of ordinary Gugas in practically every category, which made her capable of serving as a genuine laboratory assistant rather than simply another experimental life-form.
With Gluttony helping him, Marshall could run several research projects in parallel instead of personally supervising every calculation, magical array, sample, and experimental record. His efficiency rose almost immediately.
Artificial life had another enormous advantage as laboratory staff.
Apostles didn’t need to eat.
They didn’t need to sleep.
They didn’t need baths, bathroom breaks, or ordinary biological maintenance.
As long as they could absorb sufficient negative emotional energy, they could remain active indefinitely.
If not for the unfortunate possibility of their personalities becoming increasingly strange, they would have been the perfect employees.
Gluttony, fortunately, came very close.
Her particular expression of "gluttony" wasn’t an endless appetite for ordinary food.
It manifested as an insatiable desire for knowledge and the emotional energy that allowed her to become stronger.
The more she learned and the more power she accumulated, the more satisfied she became.
That made her almost ideal for Marshall.
The problem was that the personality of an artificial life-form wasn’t something he could completely design in advance.
Marshall could determine its abilities, foundational instincts, loyalty, behavioral restrictions, and many of the concepts used in the construction process, but once the mimetic soul truly stabilized and began functioning independently, a degree of randomness inevitably entered the resulting personality.
That was why the other Apostles had developed so many peculiarities.
Marshall doubted he could simply reproduce Gluttony and expect to receive another equally perfect assistant.
Even if he copied every page of the Book of Gluttony and constructed a second body from exactly the same specifications, the mimetic soul that emerged might develop in an entirely different direction.
He could just as easily end up creating an actual glutton who spent every waking moment demanding food.
Mass-producing Apostles was even less realistic.
Leaving aside the cost of materials, constructing one was far more complicated than writing a few sentences in a magical book.
Marshall’s Apostles had been inspired by the manufacturing principles behind the Books of Zeref, which meant their construction differed fundamentally from that of ordinary Gugas.
And the greatest difference lay in one deceptively simple question.
Where did an Apostle’s mimetic soul actually come from?
Marshall had eventually found a very straightforward way to describe the answer.
A Horcrux.
Not literally, of course.
The Apostles were closer to a version of a Horcrux without the horrific drawbacks.
Instead of splitting a soul, the process copied one.
And whose soul was being copied?
There was hardly any need to ask.
Marshall’s.
Every Apostle could therefore be considered a lower-specification version of Marshall himself.
The body might resemble Erza, Mira, Cana, Levy, Juvia, Wendy, or Lucy, but the underlying soul-pattern was derived from Marshall.
Each Apostle carried some magnified fragment of his own nature, and even their emerging personalities were formed by taking certain aspects of Marshall’s character and exaggerating them through the corresponding sin.
In that sense, despite looking exactly like the girls, the Apostles were actually much more like Marshall than like their supposed originals.
The more the girls learned about their miniature counterparts, the more they were indirectly learning about him.
The saying that a creation resembled its creator had rarely been so literal.
The same principle could be observed elsewhere.
Zeref’s demons reflected aspects of Zeref.
The Celestial Spirits of the Celestial Spirit World likewise carried traces of whatever principles and personalities had shaped their origins.
By studying a sufficiently advanced creation, one could often infer a surprising amount about its creator.
There was, however, one detail Marshall had conveniently neglected to tell the girls.
Because every Apostle’s soul was copied from his own, Marshall could use Soul Magic to establish an extraordinarily deep connection with them.
With only a small amount of magical preparation, he could project his consciousness directly into an Apostle’s body and temporarily operate through it.
In other words, Marshall could "descend" into any of them whenever he wanted.
The effect resembled a divine possession ritual, so Marshall had given the technique an appropriately dramatic name:
[God Descent.]
That was another reason he had been so unconcerned when the girls asked to take their Apostles home.
He could always check on them personally if necessary.
Besides, Marshall privately considered the whole situation an amusing compatibility test.
It was almost like letting everyone experience married life in advance.
Not that he was thinking anything weird.
Obviously.
If the girls could tolerate the exaggerated, sin-distorted personalities of the Apostles, then surely living with the considerably easier-to-handle Marshall himself would be effortless.
At least, that was the theory.
Judging from the reports coming back to him, however, most of the Apostles were not proving especially popular.
More surprisingly, the person whose compatibility seemed highest with her Apostle was actually Wendy.
Marshall found this revelation profoundly moving.
’Wendy is the kind of woman who could become my mom!’
’Amazing!’
’Being looked after by Wendy for the rest of my life sounds incredible!’
Marshall luxuriated in that fantasy for several seconds before realizing his thoughts had drifted somewhere completely irrelevant.
’Ahem.’
’Back to research.’
Phoebe, despite also being an Apostle-like artificial life-form, belonged to a fundamentally different branch from the Seven Sins.
Light Magic was one of Marshall’s strongest magic, so naturally he had always wanted to create an Apostle capable of expressing it properly.
The Seven Sins were still relatively weak at the moment, but Marshall had no doubt that he could continue upgrading them over time.
If they eventually reached the level he envisioned, they could become his eyes and ears across the entire world.
He could send them to different countries, continents, ruins, organizations, and battlefields while receiving information through their shared connection.
Marshall rubbed his hands together with a distinctly villainous chuckle.
"Hehehe..."
At that point, perhaps becoming the God of a new world someday wasn’t entirely impossible.
Unfortunately, Light Magic had terrible compatibility with negative emotional energy—Curse Power.
In fact, the incompatibility was even worse than Sky Magic’s, which Marshall found difficult to explain.
After several failed experiments, he abandoned the inefficient idea of forcing Light Magic into the Seven Sins framework and instead allowed Phoebe to develop as an independent branch.
That separation eventually gave Marshall another idea.
He could turn Phoebe and the Seven Sins into two experimental control groups.
Two different artificial-life systems.
Two different developmental paths.
And two different branches of Slayer Magic.
God Slayer Magic and Devil Slayer Magic.
...
The idea began with a casual conversation Marshall once had with Ultear.
At some point, she mentioned that Grimoire Heart had a Mage named Zancrow who could use the legendary Lost Magic known as God Slayer Magic.
Marshall’s immediate reaction was disbelief.
Someone that impressive existed and nobody had told him?
Naturally, he began asking questions.
After digging into the matter, however, Marshall discovered that Zancrow didn’t actually practice what the ancient texts described as True God Slayer Magic.
What he possessed was a later reconstruction.
A modified system created by later generations after studying Dragon Slayer Magic.
There was an important distinction between the two.
Ancient documents recorded that the original God Slayer Magic predated Dragon Slayer Magic itself.
Its origins stretched so far back that even reliable historical references were scarce, making it one of the truly ancient Slayer-type Lost Magics.
Then, roughly four hundred years ago, some absurd genius created Dragon Slayer Magic.
Slayer Magic returned to the world.
Naturally, other researchers became interested.
Someone studied the newly developed Dragon Slayer system, compared it with surviving records of ancient God Slayer Magic, and attempted to reverse-engineer a cultivation method that would theoretically allow a human to reproduce the legendary art.
In other words, somebody had taken Dragon Slayer Magic and created a second-generation theoretical version of God Slayer Magic.
Unfortunately, nobody at the time managed to successfully practice it.
Eventually, the magical world dismissed the method as little more than an interesting hypothesis—something that looked plausible on paper but couldn’t actually be achieved by a real Mage.
The research itself survived.
Marshall could even find the original article among the ancient documents available through his information network.
And apparently everyone had been wrong about it being impossible.
Because Zancrow had actually succeeded.
The moment Marshall learned that, his excitement skyrocketed.
A cultivation method that depended on extremely unusual aptitude?
Why hadn’t anyone said so earlier?
That was practically an invitation addressed personally to him.
Marshall immediately dug the old research paper out of the ancient archives and began studying its reconstructed God Slayer Magic.
After enough reading, experimentation, and magical analysis—
something clicked.
[Modified God Slayer Magic LV0 acquired.]
Marshall understood.
More precisely, he finally understood what the entire family of Slayer Magic actually represented.
Dragon Slayer Magic.
God Slayer Magic.
And, theoretically, Devil Slayer Magic.
They weren’t merely unusually powerful elemental systems.
They were high-level magical frameworks designed to create a direct path toward something Marshall mentally classified as the Level Five rank—magic that touched the fundamental source of a concept.
Marshall already possessed Dragon Slayer Magic, so after reading the reconstructed God Slayer method, the intentions of the original researcher became remarkably clear.
At their foundation, Slayer-type Magics were systems designed to interact directly with an element’s source concept.
The user stored a particular conceptual "seed" inside the body, then used that seed as the core of an internal Heteromorphic Magic system capable of digesting and assimilating compatible external conceptual elements.
Suppose there were two Mages.
One practiced Fire Dragon Slayer Magic.
The other practiced Fire God Slayer Magic.
Both manipulated fire.
Both could devour external fire and convert it into their own power.
But the foundational energy driving their internal Heteromorphic Magic was different.
One relied on Dragon Power.
The other relied on God Power.
That was the true distinction.
Under the original theoretical framework, successfully cultivating a Slayer Magic required more than simply possessing affinity with a particular element.
A Fire Dragon Slayer needed fire as the elemental foundation, but also required a Dragon Seed.
Likewise, a true Fire God Slayer would require both the fire element and some equivalent God Seed.
Without that conceptual seed, the system lacked the central structure needed to transform an ordinary elemental Mage into a genuine Slayer.
That requirement explained why the ancient art had been virtually impossible to reproduce.
Except someone later modified it.
The reconstructed version of God Slayer Magic did not strictly require a genuine God Seed.
Instead, the newer version demanded something else entirely.
And that something was...
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