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Chapter 538: Growing Darkness

I stood atop Trials’ island, closing my eyes and focusing. I could feel the shadows stretching out, further and further. Connecting with every dark corner of the world and integrating it all together. This must be how Thelsa felt the first time that she created the shadow of Fyor, the feeling of something expanding deep within you.

This wasn’t just a normal saint energy, that much I was certain of now. As I felt the shadow world growing larger, I had a guess at the true nature of this ability. The world’s shadow was an attempt to mirror the power of the Keeper himself, but on the opposite side of the spectrum.

With the world’s shadow, it was possible to train people who had any classes that the user themselves possessed, and those people had the potential to train to a higher level than the user. As opposed to my situation, there is quite the contrast.

Of course, it shouldn’t just be limited to classes. If you think about it, the world’s shadow was something which existed in multiple world types. At no point in its market entry did it say that it required the game system to function. Therefore, classes couldn’t be the true standard that it used to give power.

Instead, it should be something like… understanding? Personal experiences? One of those two should be the real foundation for how the world’s shadow created its entities. By using those experiences or understandings as a foundation, it builds a personality, a living creature that is able to expand on that foundation.

However, while it is able to incorporate its own understanding to improve its ability, it is unable to learn anything entirely new. That was why Thelsa had to reach perfection first, before any of her shadows could. She had no true understanding of the concept, or firsthand experiences with it.

Similarly, if I were to create a god with the world’s shadow, they would only be able to use a domain that I myself had access to. Anything else would be considered new, and couldn’t be programmed into the shadow. I wasn’t able to simply create half-gods on the verge of ascension and mass-produce deities with new domains because of this restriction.

You have created the Shadow of Earth.

I gave a small smile as I saw that message, knowing that the process had been finished successfully. Although it took longer than when Thelsa performed the same action, that could also have been because she had the system’s assistance. Still, I remembered the disorientation she suffered from when she had performed the process. That could have been a side-effect of how she did it, or because she was not used to having such a large internal world.

On the other hand, I did it more slowly due to my inexperience, but I also already had the world of my inner sky. Thanks to these things, I didn’t feel such disorientation when I finished creating my shadow. And, if the name of this energy was more carefully thought-out than that of the Ki of Beginning, this should be the true core of the energy itself.

“I’ll be going, then.” I spoke out loud to the dungeon I had borrowed, before shifting my location back towards the citadel. Now that I had finished my main objective, the rest could be done from the comfort of my mortal home.

“Welcome back, my Keeper.” Tsubaki spoke calmly as I returned, not even flinching at the way I appeared next to her. “I trust everything went as you expected?”

“Thank you. As for that… we’ll see soon enough.” As I said that, I walked over to my throne. While I had created the shadow of a world due to the energy itself possessing a form of will, that wasn’t going to help me as much with the process of creating a living shadow. For that, I did have an idea of what to do, but I would need to test it to be sure.

Once I had sat down, I split part of my concentration off to create a divine clone, and sent it into the world of shadows. Inside, as I had seen in Thelsa’s own shadow world, light and dark were inverted. Because the citadel’s throne room was primarily lit with natural lighting, this caused a scene where darkness poured in through the windows in an attempt to scatter away the light.

“Now… it should be something like this, right?” I muttered through my avatar, focusing. If my guess was correct, the creation of a shadow person was, in essence, simply the creation of an avatar through the world’s shadow. As such, that was exactly what I tried to do.

Shadows warped within the inverted world, seeping along the ground to pool in front of me. While I was in the process of creating the avatar, I did my best to separate my mind from it. In a way, this was similar to the process that I created Clover Kyr. However, in his situation, I was isolating two different partitions of my mind. In contrast, I was now attempting to completely remove my mind from this avatar.

Given what I had observed from Thelsa, I felt that this would be the correct choice. In order to allow the shadow to develop from only a portion of my knowledge, I had to first create an empty vessel. At least, that was my reasoning behind it.

Soon, the shadow rose up to create a vaguely humanoid shape in front of me, its features too blurred to make out. From everything I could discern, this was a finished avatar. However, it felt… empty due to the lack of a will.

Closing my eyes, I focused my thoughts, controlling my soul to form threads from three different ‘classes’ of my power. These were the mage, monk, and ninja classes, and I began to feed these threads into the avatar in front of me.

To my surprise… the avatar did not accept these threads. At least, not in the way I expected it to. Instead, it dissolved the moment that the threads touched it, returning to a pool of darkness. However, I was able to feel something different within it as opposed to the original darkness. There was now something growing inside of it.

I see… the process isn’t to form an avatar and feed it the experiences that I want to use as a foundation. It’s to first feed the experiences into the world’s shadow, and then allow it to create the avatar on its own. The fact that things were being performed backwards here surprised me, but there was nothing I could particularly do about it.

While the first shadow was ‘incubating’, I created four more pools of darkness. For each of these, I focused on giving them only a single class. For the first one, the class was enchanter. For the second, it was druid.

For the third shadow, I decided to do a little test. When I use my Keeper levels, my soul is shifted to allow all classes to ‘fit’ in it. I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to create a shadow from a class that I did not have myself, and only existed in my Keeper power. As such, I used the bard class.

And finally, for the fourth shadow, I was performing another test. Rather than pulling a class from my soul, I retrieved a thread from my soul and filtered out all of the ‘class data’ from it. What was left was only a pure thread of spiritual energy with my divinity mixed in. This was my attempt to manufacture a god. If it worked, I could later try it with the different domains I had access to.

Once I was done with that, I had a total of five pools of shadows sitting before me. Each of them had the feeling of something growing inside of them, though I did not know how long the process would take for them to grow. Should I consult with Thelsa about this?

When that thought occurred to me, I simply shook my head. Thelsa was already going through a rough time. It was her identity as the Shadow Saint that helped her move past her grief. If I were to appear and suggest that anyone could potentially form this energy, it would send her spiralling back into her despair.

If I decided that I really did need a tutor for this energy, it would be better for me to purchase the guide for it from the market. That guide was likely to be far more comprehensive than anything that Thelsa could teach me anyways, and would help me to eventually create a legacy for shadow saints, if I decided to one day spread them.

At that thought, I began wondering… what would happen if two people created a shadow of the same world? Would their shadow worlds be independent of each other, or would they merge together? That was something I would need to consider in the future, if more people with this power emerged.

Within a mage’s laboratory at the heart of the elven kingdom, mana and spiritual energy could be seen flowing through the air like glistening streams. Below, numerous formations had been laid out to guide the energies, while multiple magic items served as foci for the ritual.

One was a staff made of silver, runic patterns etched into it. Another was a wooden wand with a bloodied tip. Then there was a sword with a shining topaz embedded in its hilt. Each of these items seemed to serve some specific purpose, whether it was to guide or condense the airborne energies.

“Yes, yes.” A female elf spoke up just outside the boundary of the ritual, excitement clear on her features. She was one of the foremost researchers when it came to combining energy. She had clearly understood the fundamental properties of each of the basic types, and was able to understand how they would respond when placed together under specific circumstances.

This was her newest theory, a new mix of mana and spiritual energy that she had formulated. In order to get the process just right, she had to spend months creating the precise formulas. Then she had to find the proper enchantments that would resonate with the energy to create the best result, and calculate their placement within the ritual.

If this worked, she could predict the ability of the new energy based on the research she had done. It would be capable of transferring enchantments from one item to another, while bypassing the natural limits of the enchanted items. This was because the enchantment could be stored in the energy itself, and simply use the item as a conduit for the power, thus reducing the burden that the item had to face.

She knew that the ritual was reaching its final stages, able to see how the energies were beginning to merge within the air. Every time the streams of light passed through one of the enchanted items, their splendor became brighter, absorbing a portion of the enchantment in order to further refine its own properties.

These strands then merged together at the center of the ritual chamber, drawn towards a glass sphere that she had set as the final focus point. Her eyes went wide with glee as the energies began to seep into the glass, before her expression shook.

The energy within the air trembled faintly, barely enough for her to even notice. Yet, that small tremble was enough that it disrupted the fusion process. The researcher barely had the time to run for the door, slamming it behind her before she felt the foundation of the building shaking from the energy explosion. Her wards managed to dampen the effects as much as possible, but it was impossible to full cover up such a large eruption.

Thankfully, such things were not entirely uncommon for her, so she lived in a rather secluded area outside of town. Monsters were often drawn in by her experiments, but the local beasts were easily dealt with by her wards.

“What could have gone wrong?” She muttered to herself, opening the door after the explosion had finished its damage. She was no stranger to failure, yet this time the process had been going so smoothly! The energy was at the final stage of condensation, and the fusion would have been completed in just a few more moments!

Shaking her head, she moved to one of the side rooms, where she had a series of monitoring devices set up. As she was used to her experiments failing, she had these devices installed so that she could always determine the exact cause of the failure and correct her mistakes before attempting the experiment again.

“Nothing on the ki spectrum…” She muttered, looking at the first device. This was the most common cause of failure, with either her own ki becoming excited from watching or a nearby monster being killed and causing their own ki to erupt.

However, when she turned to look at the next screen, she blinked in confusion. “A… natural energy fluctuation? And, there are traces of foreign mana and spiritual energy sweeping through the lab as well.”

Natural energy was the easiest thing in the world to keep at bay with her wards, so there shouldn’t have been any chance for it to disrupt her experiment. Not unless an elementalist had personally arrived to disturb her. However, there was no trace of that. “Maybe a higher order of energy? If it had natural energy as a component, it might have been picked up…”

However, she did not know of any order of energy higher than the ‘perfect self’ that contained natural energy, and her wards were even capable of keeping the residual energy of that type at bay. This made her both uncertain and excited at the same time. Unfortunately, she didn’t have enough data to discern the full composition of this residual energy.

As she shook her head, she moved to her ritual chamber, where she noticed the shattered shards of glass on the floor. In one of those shards, there was a faint swirling mist of silver and yellow light. Her smile bloomed once more as she realized that a piece of the energy had managed to condense before the disruption occurred.

It might be just a small shard, but it was enough to get started.