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Ettol snapped control back. “Ah. Sorry. Just another joke that didn’t land. I didn’t mean anything bad by it.”

‘Heh. You do love those, don’t you? When will you learn that you’re not a comedian?’

“I’ve still got time to improve, don’t I?”

‘I never should have let you attend that experimental comedy festival ten years ago. This is never going to end now, is it?’

It was actually more like twenty years ago, but Ettol wasn’t about to correct him. He merely returned a smile as he silently reassessed the reaper’s condition.

No obvious cracks in the lamina of the soul. No leakage. Good. But what about the inner structure?

That was more difficult to examine without alerting the reaper, but Ettol had been growing more powerful. Perhaps it was okay to push a little harder this time. And if he was ever going to repair the reaper fully, this would need to become trivial for him.

The reaper was talking again, but Ettol was hardly listening.

He knew what he was looking for, at least. The filament. The thin, unreal wire on which hung the nucleus--or the mind, in other words--of a reaper’s soul.

The problem was that the filament was so small and evasive. Unlike the filament of a light bulb, for example, this one could move and even hide when it sensed an observer. They always seemed to dislike being noticed, and it was the main reason why many reapers became abruptly nervous in the presence of people such as himself.

And unfortunately, today was still not an exception.

‘You’re doing it again,’ said Nerovoy. ‘Stop that.’

Naturally, unlike the average reaper, this one had plenty of experience dealing with him and so already knew precisely where this “inexplicable anxiety” was coming from.

“Sorry,” said Ettol, easing back from his psychic plunge. For a moment, he considering trying to explain, in the hope that the reaper might understand that he was only trying to perform what was akin to a medical examination on him. But he decided against it. Down that road lay too many impossible questions.

And questions from his mortal loved ones were often how things started to go awry. With the benefit of hindsight, looking back on all his incarnations, that was typically where things began to spiral out of control.

More than anything, he didn’t want that to happen again. Not this time.