Guiltythree
Neph’s sheet for anyone wondering if they missed anything: Name: Nephis. True Name: Changing Star. Rank: Dreamer. Class: Demon. Soul Cores: [3/7]. Soul Fragments: [2749/3000]. Memories: [Dream Blade], [Starlight Legion Armor], [Dawn Shard], [Dark Wing], [Nameless Sun], [Entwine], and a few other utility memories. Echoes: — Attributes: [Dreamspawn], [Nephilim], [Flame of Divinity], [The Fire]. Aspect: [Light Bringer]. Aspect Rank: Divine. Aspect Ability: [Soul Flame]. Innate Ability: [Halfbreed]. Flaw: [Pristine Soul].
This seems like a good place to put my rant. Sunny's powers are f**king b*llsh*t compared to everyone else's. 1. His aspect is a f**king flaw by itself, forcing him to follow the orders of someone else. 2. His aspect is "divine" but his rate of growth is like 1% compared to nephis. 3. His ability to turn things into Shadows has way too high of a cost, literally slowing his progression even further. 4. Not even his additional shadow is good. Who cares if he can empower up to 7 things? So can Nephis, we've seen how she can empower 2 things when she was at the monster stage. The only potential difference is that maybe Sunny can empower 1 thing 7 times, while Nephis can't. Not that it would matter, since his flaw, sorry aspect, forces him to obey her. Not to mention by the time Sunny gets 4 shadows, Nephis will almost certainly have 6 or 7 cores of her own. 5. Being a slave provides no benefits to him. He doesn't gain any additional powers or boosts, all he gets to see is Nephis's aspect and abilities, which she'd probably have told him about anyway. So, Sunny's powers are worth maybe 20% of Nephis's, with a slower growth rate, and the condition that he lives forever with essentially 2 flaws. Nothing about that screams "divine". Now onto the b*llsh*t part of the story: 1. Sunny is now enslaved, because somehow Cassie's powers let her see his true name? 2. Almost certainly nothing will happen to Cassie, despite her deserving it, because the audience, and probably author, have a hard on for her. 3. Sunny and Nephis's relationship going into the future will be completely 1 sided, boring, and annoying. He can never refuse her, so there will never be any unique or interesting interactions between them again. He can't even argue with her, because she can just tell him to shut up and agree with her, and he will. 4. I don't care if Nephis is gone for a while now, and Sunny's free. That's temporary. She will come back, and Sunny will be enslaved. He won't try to scheme against her, because she can force the truth out of him. He can't side with the Legacies and get them strong enough to fight her, because the story's clearly trending in the direction of both Sunny and Nephis fighting the Spell, which the Legacies support. I literally can't see anyway following Sunny as the protagonist is going to be interesting. Unless he somehow gains the ability to evolve his Aspect past slave, and free himself, he's just a f**king pawn. I'll keep reading because I'm invested, but I'm highly disappointed.
Nephi has 2749 shards at 3 cores. That means she collected a grand total of 5749 soul shards since creating a new soul core reduces your shards back to 0 and the required souls shards seem to increase by 1000 for each new core. Killing other fellow awakend seem to be inanely profitable if u compare it to Sunny's measly 1000 total collected soul shards. The way the author told the story, it looks like Sunny and Nephi were the only ones to create new soul cores at reaching their maximum soul shards capacity. My theory is that reaching max soul shards is only one of the requirements. Another one could be having a true name, since that is something both only nephi and sunny have in common. Maybe you can evolve your soul core only to the Maximum of your apsects rarity as an additional requirement.