The soul was gone, deliberately shattered by me, after Elric's attempt to fight beyond his limit had brought his soul to the brink of ruin.
The reservoir that had held his Anima since the day his depth first stirred was rubble. The Anima that had filled it was already evacuated into the new channels. What remained where his soul had been was an absence, and the absence had a number.
[Effective Operating Capacity: 0]
Zero.
A normal mage at zero is a corpse. The soul is the engine; remove it, and the body is meat that has not yet been told to stop.
But this body had the Hollow Space behind it, the deeper seat the welded state had carved, and so the body did not stop. It lay curled in the ash, and it did not die, because the thing that kept it alive was no longer the soul.
I began to push Creation-Anima into the vacancy.
