Chapter 355: Feeding the Shadow

After class, Richard returned to his dorm, fishing his keys from his pocket to unlock the door.

He sat down at his desk, reached into the bottom of the drawer, and pulled out the cowhide bag.

Untying it, he revealed his entire current stock of ether condensates.

His grandfather's quota for this quarter: two medium-concentration, sharply angular grayish-white crystals, individually wrapped in cotton cloth.

The three pieces Baldwin had brought back from Franc: also medium concentration, carrying a faint, indescribable bitterness from the battlefield.

The quality was fine, but the foundation was rougher than his grandfather's. Holding them, he felt like something was still festering inside, not yet fully dissipated.

One medium-concentration piece was allocated from the refugee camp field mission.

This one was the smallest and lightest in color, wrapped in the Branch Office's standard brown wax paper with a numbered tag stuck to it.

The Flanders Marsh condensate—he hadn't had time to deal with this bottle yet.

Sitting on the desk, it looked like a test tube filled with swamp water. Even the glass walls bore damp streaks seeping from within.

He had also received a few pieces from the Black Trench mission.

The rest consisted of a few low-concentration fragments he had gathered piecemeal.

There were four or five pieces of varying sizes. The largest was the size of a thumbnail, and the smallest was barely larger than a nail clipping.

With everything laid out on the desk, Richard ran the numbers in his head.

Nurturing the Sphinx Lamp required a very small amount daily; its metamorphosis relied on craftsmanship and time.

The condensate acted as a catalyst, but the lamp's appetite was quite limited. Everything else was surplus.

Ether condensates would slowly dissipate over time.

Low-concentration fragments degraded the fastest. Left unused for a while, they would vanish into thin air, leaving nothing behind.

Taking them to the next Theogony Salon gathering to trade was an option, but that wasn't until mid-December. There was still a while to go.

Furthermore, trading condensates at the salon was highly unstable. When supply exceeded demand, almost no one wanted them.

The safest route was having his aunt use the Academy System's recycling channels, which maintained fixed purchasing avenues for clean condensates.

However, the recycling price was always kept very low.

Richard pinched a few fragments thoughtfully, then placed them back down.

He packed away the items on his desk one by one, preparing to do his final set of breathing method training for the day.

As Tide-Shifting Breathing engaged, he slowly sank into its wave-like rhythm.

The inhale stretched into a long slope, ether swelling upward.

The exhale contracted into a short wave, ether receding.

After several complete cycles, his breathing steadied to the point where he couldn't even hear it himself.

Next, it was time to inspect his shadow's daily training.

He summoned the shadow from behind the veil into the material world.

Richard had it practice armoring itself.

The shadow extended its right arm. Ether spread outward from its core along the extremely fine Micro-circulation, condensing a thin shell over its forearm.

The shell was considerably thicker than before, and its shape was much more regular.

Richard nodded in satisfaction, preparing to have the shadow switch to Moon Nail practice.

In the gap between those thoughts, his hand subconsciously moved to tidy up the desk.

The shadow moved.

Before Richard could shift the fragments in his hand toward the hidden compartment, the shadow's silhouette tilted slightly toward his hand.

His hand froze.

When Richard swept his Inspiration over it, he saw something he had never seen before.

The core inside the shadow—synthesized from two wisps of spirit—was vibrating at an extremely faint frequency.

The frequency was so low that if he hadn't happened to spread his Inspiration densely enough, he wouldn't have noticed it at all.

The vibration was directed toward the condensate in his hand.

Richard set the fragment back on the desk and took a step back.

Using Silent Observation, he spread out a layer of Still Water and examined the shadow again from head to toe.

The shadow stood motionless before the desk. Its armor had dissipated, its right arm hanging by its side.

But from the edges of its black mist, several extremely fine tentacles extended.

They all pointed in the same direction, aiming straight at that low-concentration fragment.

Speculation: Inner Awakening began to do its work at this moment.

Had the shadow ever shown this kind of reaction before? No.

Before the spirit was injected, the shadow was just a puppet he led by a string. It would never exhibit active inclinations toward external objects.

After the spirit injection and the fusion of the two spirits, the core gained the ability to operate independently.

The shadow had become capable of multitasking, possessing its own Micro-circulation and breathing rhythm.

And for a living thing with a metabolism... hunger was only a matter of time.

Richard wasn't in a hurry to hand the condensate over.

He placed his hands behind his back and stood in the empty space between the desk and the bed, watching the shadow's reaction.

The shadow's tentacles drifted in the air for about ten seconds. After failing to touch the target, they began to slowly retract.

"You're hungry," Richard said, raising an eyebrow.

Of course, the shadow couldn't understand him.

Once the tentacles retracted, the core's faint vibration dropped, shifting from hunger back to standby.

Richard thought of the Sphinx Lamp's metamorphosis process.

The lamp's transformation relied on craftsmanship; the condensate was just a catalyst.

The lamp needed to be fed a little condensate every so often to catalyze the process, but overfeeding was useless—its appetite was finite.

The shadow was a product of the lamp, an extension of his Signature ability, Ferrying Shadow.

If the condensate was a catalyst for the lamp... then what was it for the shadow?

He picked up that smallest low-concentration fragment from the desk again.

This time, he placed it on the desk about half an arm's length away from the shadow, then retreated to his chair and sat down.

The shadow sensed the target moving closer.

The tentacles extended once more, reaching further than before.

Several incredibly thin black threads attached themselves to the condensate's surface.

Richard stared intently using Spirit Vision.

The condensate was absorbed thread by thread by the shadow's tentacles.

Its method of absorption was entirely different from Richard's own process of converting supernatural item ether through his panel.

When he absorbed supernatural item ether, it was an extraction—pulling ether from the vessel to convert it into Available Points on his panel.

What the shadow was doing looked much more like digestion.

Following the condensate's inherent structure, it gnawed away the outer shell layer by layer, swallowing it along with everything else into its body, leaving absolutely nothing behind.

Ten minutes later, Richard gauged the size of the condensate. It had shrunk by about a third.

The shadow's tentacles stopped; it wouldn't eat anymore.

Richard probed inside the shadow with his Inspiration.

The change was subtle, but he could see it: the shadow's overall solidity had improved by a notch.

"Why is this exactly like raising a kid?" Richard felt an inexplicable sense of déjà vu.

Crouching by the desk, watching the shadow stand obediently in place to digest after its first meal, he felt something he couldn't quite put into words.

Back in Briston, Evelyn once had a pet turtle that she kept for two months.

The turtle ate cabbage leaves. Every time it finished eating, it would pull its neck in and sit completely still, looking indistinguishable from a piece of intricately patterned rock on the windowsill.

Evelyn's expression as she crouched by the windowsill watching the turtle digest was pretty much the same as his right now.

Over the next few days, Richard tested the other qualities of condensates one by one as a comparison.

He repeated the experiment with the low-concentration fragments several times.

The shadow spent twenty minutes digesting the first piece, and its silhouette thickened another notch.

The second piece took about the same amount of time, but the magnitude of improvement clearly shrank.

When it came to the third piece, the shadow's tentacles hesitated for a long time upon touching the surface before attaching to it, eating off and on for half an hour.

In the end, it stopped after eating less than a quarter of it. It pushed the rest away and fully retracted its tentacles.

Diminishing returns. By the third piece, it was nearly full.

Low-concentration fragments were as easy to digest as porridge, but they didn't build much of a foundation.

Richard jotted the data down in a notebook, then switched to the medium-concentration condensates.

He chose the cleanest one, given by his grandfather.

When he unwrapped the cotton cloth and set the crystal on the desk, the shadow's reaction was considerably stronger than with the fragments.

The digestion process was much slower.

While the shadow consumed the medium-concentration condensate, Richard could feel the pressure on its core rising.

Its silhouette exhibited slight fluctuations; the edges were no longer smooth, occasionally jutting out into small spikes before snapping back.

Richard watched from the side, clutching his Pocket Watch to time the process.

It took a full hour for the shadow to consume just half of the medium-concentration condensate.

The rate of growth was several times that of the low-concentration pieces, but the core's vibration frequency took about ten minutes to slowly drop back to its standby level.

During those ten minutes, the shadow could do absolutely nothing. It was like someone who had just gorged at a buffet, leaning against a wall and struggling to even breathe.

Richard drew a horizontal line in his notebook and wrote "Digestion Cycle" underneath it.

Low-concentration fragments required almost no recovery period; the shadow could move immediately after eating.

If he forced a second medium-concentration piece on it right after the first... Richard didn't try. He was afraid he might genuinely overfeed the shadow to death.

The third type: the Flanders Marsh condensate.

Richard unscrewed the cap of the glass bottle and placed it on the desk half an arm's length from the shadow.

The shadow's tentacles extended, probing toward the mouth of the bottle.

The moment the first tentacle touched the space above the bottle, it violently snapped back.

It was repulsed by the layer of death energy coating the ether.

"Needs purifying first." Richard screwed the cap back on.

Much like when he dealt with the Correspondence Curse on the Bronze Mirror, this stuff had to be washed clean before it could be used.

The Sacred Ibis Bronze Paperweight and the Bronze Scales would come in handy here.

He could use that "one mark, one weigh" purification process to strip away the death energy. Once it was peeled clean, the high-quality ether underneath would be exposed.

However, purification took time. He roughly estimated that it would require three or four rounds of cleansing before it reached a level the shadow could tolerate.

The fourth type. He shifted his gaze to the small vial sitting at the corner of the desk.

The Ether Condensate given by Prometheus. He had never used it.

The shadow reacted violently the moment he picked up the vial.

Its tentacles practically shot out.

Seven or eight black threads reached for the vial simultaneously, the foremost one latching onto his wrist and slipping between his fingers to press against the glass.

Richard hurriedly shoved the vial back into the hidden compartment and blocked the drawer with his body.

The shadow's tentacles clung stubbornly to his cuff. It took several seconds before they reluctantly retracted, one by one.

The sheer intensity of that craving sent a chill down the back of Richard's neck.

Ether Condensate was a potent medium; for human ether circulation, it was the equivalent of adrenaline.

For the shadow, it was like pumping high-purity aviation fuel into the gas tank of a civilian sedan.

Could it run? Yes.

But how far? Until the engine blew its cylinders.

He decisively crossed the condensate off the shadow's menu.

It couldn't touch the stuff at this stage, at least not until the shadow's core endurance grew enough to handle that level of intensity.

It was the same logic as raising a child: infants could only drink milk.

At a pace of two to three low-concentration pieces a week, and no more than two medium-concentration pieces a month, his current inventory would last a little over four months.

His grandfather's next quarterly quota would arrive in January. Combined with his field mission payouts and appraisal income, he could easily keep this going.

The shadow stood before the desk, its core vibration frequency having fully returned to standby.

"Go back to your training," Richard said, giving it a shove.

The shadow sank down reluctantly, gliding across the floor before vanishing to the other side of the veil.

Richard finished clearing his desk, sorted and wrapped the unused condensates, and tucked them back into the hidden compartment.

Charlotte had sent him a letter recently.

It contained only two lines, written in a hurried scrawl with long, dragging strokes.

"The editor-in-chief is asking if you're still writing.

The deadline for the new issue is January 15th. If you have a new draft, just mail it directly to the editorial office."

Half a line was tacked onto the bottom.

"P.S.: The Poor Relief Committee has replaced its personnel. No one brings up that last piece anymore."

Richard set the note aside.

Over half a year ago in Briston, when that essay was published, the Star Card's toll had already begun to manifest.

He had indeed been remembered.

Because of his grandfather and Professor Mortimer's connections, the way he was remembered was through the Poor Relief Committee rotating out a batch of its staff.

The newcomers flipped through the old archives and reclassified the embarrassing cases his words had laid bare, filing them away under "Appropriately Handled."

And then, no one spoke of it again.

Burns still died.

Mrs. Rosalind was still doing laundry for others.

By December, the chimneys of the poor households at the east end of Slag Alley still belched choking coal smoke as whole families huddled around half a coal briquette to survive the winter.

The article was written. He got famous. And then what?

Richard leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs under the desk.

The rain outside continued to fall.

He thought of the refugee camp. He had done his part, yet those two hundred and sixty-one people had already been marked for death in advance.

Pulling his gaze back from the window, Richard let it rest on Charlotte's letter.

His last essay had satirized the system.

But what good was satire?

Once the satirizing was done, the system remained the system. They just swapped someone else in behind the exact same desk to do the exact same things.

His mother had taught him: "Just write the story, and let the story speak for itself. Don't make appeals; don't suggest reforms."

She was right. But she had never taught him where the listeners should go after the story ended.

His last piece let people know just how rotten this world was.

So what if they knew?

Knowing that Burns would cough himself to death by the stove didn't change the fact that those who didn't know what to do still didn't know what to do.

He picked up his pen and drew a horizontal line across the top of a blank page in his notebook.

Below the line, he wrote a single word: "Living."

Then he set the pen down again.

During their last phone call, Evelyn had mentioned that Mrs. Weir's daughter had never celebrated a single birthday before getting married because the flour for a birthday cake was too expensive.

Evelyn's voice had been muffled when she said it.

"When I open my shop in the future, if she ever comes to buy anything, I'll give her a discount."

His sister had quickly changed the subject after saying that, moving on to talk about the orange cat that stole almond crisps.

But Richard remembered it.

What Evelyn wanted to do was very small.

To give a discount to a girl who had never had a birthday cake.

Yet it was precisely this kind of thing that his writing ought to accomplish.

He didn't need to tell people how dark the storm clouds in the sky were. Anyone who looked up could see that.

He should be telling the people standing in the rain that there was a piece of roof three steps to their left.

It might not be a large roof, and it might not block much rain, but at least you wouldn't be standing out in the open, waiting to die.