After going around in circles, Bella ultimately came back to the old idea of using a soul to bear the backlash.
What could she do?
In the end, she still did not use the method recorded in the Book of Cagliostro. She did not want to damage her own foundation for this. Then a wild idea struck her, and she quickly thought of another solution.
Bella returned to Los Angeles specifically to find Sadako. She wanted to learn how Sadako created videotapes and split off part of her own mind into them.
At its root, a mental imprint was a derivative of the soul. Bella believed that using remnants of her own mind to bear the backlash from spellcasting could work well enough to fool the underlying mechanism.
"Me? You want me to teach you magic?" Sadako asked in disbelief.
Bella nodded very seriously. "That technique you use to make videotapes is actually quite impressive. Could you explain the process to me in detail?"
Sadako stared blankly for two seconds. "All right. I mean... I don't really think it's anything that amazing..."
After studying for two days straight, Bella could not help marveling at the original Sadako. She had absolutely been a genius! Unfortunately, Sadako's talent had disappeared together with her evil counterpart. Otherwise, she might have reached the level of an Omega-level mutant.
The current Sadako could only repeat the process from memory. Why each step worked and what the underlying principles were, she could not explain, and Bella herself was not entirely sure how to convert an ability involving illusion, mental contamination, painful torment, and instant-death attacks into a psionic spell.
Sadako demonstrated it twice from memory. Bella went home and copied the procedure as best she could.
She dug a large hole in the living room, built a deep well inside it, put on a long black wig and a white nightgown, and repeatedly crawled out of the well and back into it.
"Hey! What are you doing? I told you to stay home and watch the kid, but this is a bit much, isn't it?" Natasha came home from work and was startled the moment she walked through the door by someone's new look.
Bella spoke in Japanese with a hoarse voice. "I'm doing an experiment..."
Natasha frowned deeply. What did that mean? Why was she speaking Japanese at home?
Bella waved a hand, meaning: Don't bother me. I'm busy making a videotape!
"Horse! Big horse!" Little Elsa sat astride Bella's back. She had spent the entire day riding along as Bella crawled out of the well, went back inside, and crawled out again. The little girl was so delighted that bubbles of snot were coming out of her nose.
Bella performed another full round on the spot. Something still felt a little off. She swept aside the hair covering her face, picked up the Coke beside her, and gulped down half the bottle.
"Again!" She crawled through another round.
"Let your dad keep playing. Come on, let's go eat and leave her alone!" Natasha pulled Little Elsa off Bella's back. It was obvious that the little girl was not very interested in dinner, but her mother was too formidable, so she did not dare resist.
Bella reproduced Sadako's procedure exactly. Her movements, tone of voice, and clothing were all identical. Even so, it still took her three days to produce her first videotape.
The tape was obviously not meant to spread a curse. Its purpose was similar to the soul shards fel warlocks used for spellcasting in games: it existed to bear backlash.
Bella made ten videotapes in one go, while Little Elsa happily got five straight days of horse rides.
Work and childcare, both handled at once...
Testing the effect in actual combat would be far too reckless, so Bella decided to find somewhere safe to try the tapes.
She entered her private storeroom. The moment the door opened, she frowned slightly at the stench inside despite the low-temperature equipment running continuously.
The floor was densely piled with vampire bones. Most vampires turned to ash after death, but a few powerful ones always left behind the hardest parts of their skeletons. The Brotherhood had collected all of those remains here.
Sternums, jawbones, skulls, leg bones—every kind of bone had been piled into a small mountain, more than a thousand pieces altogether.
Following the Darkhold's requirements, Bella drew an extraordinarily complicated magic circle. Then she held a videotape containing her mental imprint in her left hand and cast with her right.
She began chanting a long incantation. Psionic energy was drawn from her Mind Lake and applied to the many bones. This was one of the relatively less dark spells in the Darkhold: Ismail's Soul Torment. The spell connected with the residual consciousnesses inside the bones, reshaped them, and recombined them into a new life-form.
The remaining scraps of flesh were stripped away, impurities inside the bones were transformed, and magical power repeatedly washed through the skeletons. At last, more than a thousand crystalline white bones slowly floated into the air, spinning and dancing above the floor.
They constantly tried to join together, only to separate again when the fit was wrong. Bella manipulated her psionic energy like someone assembling a puzzle, slowly fitting the many bones together.
One skull took shape first, followed by the neck. Then came a second skull, the sternum, the spine, the arms, a third skull, a huge bone axe, and finally the last skull.
The bone guardian formed from the skulls of four vampire progenitors officially awakened!
They were no longer vampires. The residual consciousnesses inside the various bones had already merged under the earlier magic, giving rise to an entirely new consciousness. Bella took one word from each of the four vampire progenitors' names. "Lord Marrowgar. That's your new name!"
There had ultimately been too little bone material. Lord Marrowgar currently possessed only the upper half of a body, but he had four heads, six arms, and a huge axe that looked extraordinarily vicious.
Once the spell was complete, the videotape carrying the remnants of Bella's mind spontaneously ignited. Dark-brown flames burned from the inside out until the entire tape was reduced to ash.
Bella carefully inspected the residue left by the flames, then examined the bone guardian's condition.
She had no intention of adding this creature to the Vengeful Ghost Alliance. She was worried that the Darkhold might cause changes even she did not understand, so she ordered the bone lord to remain where he was. Without her command, he was not permitted to leave the storeroom.
After more than a month of intense practice and exhaustive preparation, the Brotherhood's young assassin Desmond Miles, who was away on assignment, sent news back from Peru in South America. He had infiltrated a region the local natives called Paititi, where Trinity soldiers were currently searching nearby for an ancient Mayan artifact, the Silver Box of Ix Chel.
Bella did not want the videotapes coming into contact with her dimensional space. The unusual flow of time inside it would distort the mental imprints she had left in the tapes. She packed them all into a backpack instead and traveled to Peru with the large pack on her back, looking every bit like a dusty backpacker when she met up with Desmond Miles.
They arrived at a small town with a population of fewer than a thousand. The locals called it Kuwaq Yaku, a tiny place that could not even be found on a map. Continuous mountains stretched to the west, east, and south of the town. Only the north had a road leading to the outside world.