(I have a feeling the monthly votes haven't been very strong this month... so let me ask for them again. Comrades, if you still have unused votes, send them my way. It's not like you can invest them in real estate anyway, right...)
Angel City was still incredibly empty. Walking across those grand cloud bridges and open-air plazas felt like touring ruins. Aurelia walked beside Sandora and me, and she brought up the manpower shortage she was facing.
"Only standard apostles can handle complex, delicate tasks, but there are too few of them, and construction progress has been severely affected. We've already created a large number of Elemental Creatures to assist with construction, but mass-produced Elemental Creatures can't handle work as delicate and demanding of adaptability as calibrating magic-energy nodes. Now, every commander skilled at creating magic-energy lifeforms is extracting their own souls to create smarter, more useful Split Bodies... Sixteen commanders have already been sent away for recovery after suffering serious mental breakdowns due to excessively frequent soul-splitting."
Aurelia described the various problems they currently faced in an exceptionally calm tone. The more I listened, the more cold sweat seemed to gather on my forehead. The situation in Heavenly City was bad enough, but more importantly, this was how the big shots of the Mystic System worked—as Bellavella had said, Mystic System apostles were exceptionally skilled at controlling their inner selves. Manipulating their own souls was as ordinary to them as eating and drinking. Before this, I had honestly never heard of anyone cutting their own soul into seventeen or eighteen pieces to cultivate separately—were they earthworms?
Ahem. That thought was far too disrespectful. Stop, stop.
Since we were talking about splitting souls, perhaps I should explain it a little. Extracting fragments from one's soul did not literally mean