Shadow Slave

'That would be really ironic if the voice was just a figment of my imagination, wouldn't it?'

The empty void around him didn't seem as empty anymore. Even if it was now full of potential danger, the danger was better than nothing.

…Anything was better than nothing. After four days spent in the endless silence of the dark abyss, Sunny realized just how terrible nothingness was. The human mind was simply not built to withstand it.

In any case, he wasted some time staring at the distant stars, and then got to thinking.

Now that his cores were once again full of essence, he had no tool left to measure time. After considering his options for a while, he summoned the Cruel Sight and activated the [Dark Mirror] enchantment.

Even though he had no enemies to fight in the Sky Below, simply keeping the enchantment active was going to drain his shadow essence. Sunny felt that he could keep it going for about two hours straight.

After his reserve of Essene became approximately half-empty, he dismissed the Cruel Sight and sat cross-legged in the center of the dead devil's lid.

Plummeting through the lightless void, Sunny inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. Then, he concentrated on the flow of essence through his body, feeling it permeate every fiber of his being.

Directing it into the coils of the Soul Serpent, he felt its flow accelerate and widen.

By using the Shadow, he was going to replenish all of the spent essence in about a day. That was going to be his clock from now on.

Sunny exhaled, directed the shadow essence into his left hand, and concentrated it in his thumb, then in his index finger…

Thanks to the Soul Serpent, his control of the essence was better than that of most Awakened. However, it was still rather crude. Sunny innately knew how to enhance his physical attributes by expending it, but wasn't really efficient with how he did it. To him, it was a matter of instinct — he just thought about making his hand stronger, and the essence flowed like a torrent to achieve the desired effect.

That was how all young Awakened used it.

True masters, however, were much more intricate in their control of essence. They could isolate every muscle, every nerve, every bone in their body and only enhance those parts of it that they needed to perform an action. Their expenditure of essence was more akin to a trickle than a torrent, but achieved the same result.

That's why between two Awakened with similar soul core capacity, one could be able to fight at his peak physical prowess for much longer.

…Now that Sunny had nothing else to do, he decided to really work on this aspect of mastery over his own body and soul. He had practiced essence control before, of course, but between the constant need to hunt down Nightmare Creatures and the fact that Soul Serpent served as an effective replacement for months of training, not as much as he could and should have.

Directing the flow of essence into his right hand, Sunny sighed and thought:

'Vacation is over.'

***

Two more days passed… or rather, two cycles of spending shadow essence with the help of the Cruel Sight and then waiting for it to regenerate, which Sunny had decided to count as days.

He spent that time meditating as he controlled the flow of the essence through his body, sleeping, and feeling hungry.

Now that Sunny was rationing his food, the feeling of hunger that he had forgotten ever since becoming infected by the Nightmare Spell returned. Even then, his supplies were on the verge of running out.

He only had enough for two meager meals left. After that, Sunny was either going to have to starve, or consider opening the treasure chest again and gnawing on the dead devil's raw meat.

Both possibilities seemed rather bleak.

What he was more concerned about, however, were the shimmering fake stars of the Sky Below.

Now, he was more or less sure that they were slowly growing larger. If not for the conversation with the voice of the void, he would have never noticed the subtle change. But after being alerted to their importance and spending a lot of time observing the stars, he had become convinced that the voice — whether it was one of the Lost, a Nightmare Creature pretending to be human, or simply a manifestation of his damaged psyche — had been right.

He was slowly drawing closer to the stars burning in the deepest reaches of the abyss.

If only the voice had told him why, exactly, the stars were dangerous…

Luckily, on the seventh day of his plummeting through the Sky Below, the voice returned.

Sunny was grimly eating his second to last piece of food and staring into the darkness, feeling his mind teetering on the verge of madness, when the voice resounded from the void again:

"...What a curious creature you are."

'Oh, thank god!'

Sunny choked on a piece of dried meat, took a sip of water from the Endless Spring to chase it down, and glanced at the empty expanse of the Sky Below with a dark expression.

"Where the hell have you been?!"

The voice remained silent for a bit, then answered apologetically:

"Talking like this is draining for me. I was recovering."

Sunny frowned, trying to glean some information about the nature of the owner of the pleasant voice from this statement, but then gave up. He had too few clues to guess.

"Well… if you are about to disappear for a few days again, at least tell me what's the deal with these stars first. Why are they so dangerous?"

The void hesitated:

"You don't know?"

Sunny blinked.

"Of course, I don't know! Why would I ask if I knew?"

When the void answered in a few moments, it sounded slightly surprised:

"Well. Those lights are not really stars. They are actually remnant conflagrations of the divine flame."

Sunny thought about what he just heard, then tilted his head to the side.

"Divine… flame? What? Why would divine flame burn in the depths of the Sky Below?"

The voice chuckled. Then, it said with a bit of amusement:

"How do you think the Sky Below came to be? A long time ago, this was a beautiful and prosperous land, you know."

The amusement drained from its voice, replaced with something much darker.

"But then, its prideful ruler provoked the wrath of the Lord of Light. The Lord… ah, you probably only know him as Sun God… brought down his heavenly flame upon the lands, shattering the earth and burying an unquenchable fire beneath it."

The void grew silent, and then sighed.

"Over the ages, that fire devoured everything — the earth, the land, even reality itself. All that is left is this empty abyss, and the remnant fragments of the divine flame still burning deep below. So, I am sorry to say this… but unless you know a way to survive the searing heat of the all-destroying heavenly fire, you will probably burn to death in a few weeks."