Chapter 357: Shadow Growth Log

After his shadow had consumed coagulants for over a week, Richard went to the academic affairs office and signed out a training room.

Bolting the iron door of the underground training room from the inside, he summoned his shadow from behind the veil into the material world.

The shadow was much more solid than it had been a week ago. The feedings hadn't been in vain.

Sending the shadow back behind the veil, he officially began testing the various possibilities of his naming buffs.

He turned the first name over in his mind for a long time before deciding.

"Sentinel."

Ether flowed from the Seat of the Sun, following the conduction pathways to land on the shadow.

The name meshed perfectly with the shadow's plasticity.

The shadow was inherently an observer on that side of the veil; the name "Sentinel" simply invoked that observational trait.

The change was immediate. The shadow's perception range expanded outward.

Richard closed his eyes, using the spiritual bridge to experience the shadow's "vision."

It could detect shifts in ether density much farther out on the shallows, even distinguishing the exact directions those fluctuations came from.

A ripple drifting from the southeast and a surge rolling in from the northwest were automatically tagged with different color temperatures in its perception.

This information was transmitted in real time straight to Richard's brain through his spirit.

It meant he could sit motionless in the material world while a self-patrolling owl kept watch for him on the shallows behind the veil.

After twelve minutes, the name began to fade.

Without using the pure ether from his Spiritual Capacity, his everyday ether could sustain it for just over ten minutes.

He recorded the data and canceled the name.

Richard pondered his second test name for quite a while.

"Shadow Guard." That was his final choice.

A guardian for the shadow, and simultaneously, a guard in the form of a shadow.

As the name fell upon it, the shadow's core oscillation frequency dropped to the lowest value Richard had ever seen.

Unlike the passive acceptance of external power during previous namings, the name "Shadow Guard" drew a reaction of near "approval" from the core.

Richard had the shadow try casting Stone Armor.

The armor spread nearly fifty percent faster than it did when unnamed, and the shell's thickness increased by roughly twenty percent.

Moon-Shift Spike. Silver Needles flicked from the shadow's fingertips. Without using a Fang Needle as a medium, the cluster of needles condensed from pure ether was significantly stronger than normal.

The transition between Stone Armor and Moon Nails was also much smoother, with the interval shrinking to the blink of an eye.

But all of this was still within Richard's expectations.

What truly made him sit up straight was something unexpected that emerged after the naming.

The shadow began to "lean toward him."

On an etheric level, being named "Shadow Guard" gave the shadow a faint instinctual drive.

It actively adjusted its position toward Richard, placing itself at the spot closest to its main body that could simultaneously cover the most approaches.

The name had implanted a new nature into it; it was consciously protecting him.

Just these two were far from enough. Richard had already prepared a whole string of names he wanted to test.

First was "Ferryman."

The shadow was inherently a product of his Signature ability, "Ferry." Naming it "Ferryman" was a near-perfect logical match.

The instant the ether pushed out, the name landed on the shadow with an extremely high resonance.

The shadow's outline barely changed, but the "boundary" between it and the veil grew thin.

Previously, when the shadow sank from the material world to the shallows behind the veil, there was a blurry transitional phase, like the moment a diver plunged beneath the surface.

Now, that transition was almost completely erased.

The speed at which the shadow sank was drastically faster, and its resurfacing speed was the same.

This form could be used in the future as an assassin to ambush enemies in the material world.

Richard jotted down the data and moved on to the next.

The next name made him even more curious.

"Curtain."

As the name took hold, the change was subtle.

The shadow neither thickened nor thinned; its edges simply began to blur.

Once named "Curtain," the boundary between his shadow and all the other cast shadows in the training room vanished.

Following the textures of light and dark, his shadow spread out in all directions, blending seamlessly into the shadows covering the floor.

If someone were to open the door right now, they would see nothing unusual about the shadows on the ground.

But in reality, this entire expanse of shadows had been infiltrated by his shadow—silent and omnipresent.

Richard felt the "touch" of this dark blanket through his spiritual threads.

The silhouette of every single object in the training room lay within his perception.

This is the shadow's true form, he thought.

The essence of a shadow was simply an absence of light.

But this name had its drawbacks too.

The moment "Curtain" spread out, the shadow lost all of its combat capabilities as an independent entity.

Right now, it was only suited for hiding and scouting, not for fighting.

But that was only for now. He felt that in the future, he might be able to slowly elevate "Curtain" into "Domain," "Kingdom," or "Realm."

When that time came, he might very well replicate the shadow kingdom of that Black Earth River Master, perhaps even surpassing it.

Richard noted this down and canceled "Curtain."

The shadow coalesced from the darkness across the floor back into a human shape and returned behind the veil.

"Anchor."

This name made the shadow extremely heavy.

It was nailed in place, refusing to budge no matter how many commands he sent it.

Not even the tidal fluctuations of the shallows behind the veil could move it.

It had become a steel piling driven deep into the bedrock, absurdly stable.

The effect was easy to understand. If he needed the shadow to firmly hold a specific spot without moving, naming it "Anchor" was enough.

But it couldn't do anything else.

An anchor couldn't walk. An anchor was just an anchor.

Richard pondered the use of having an anchor standing in some deep corner of the veil, unable to find a clear purpose for it yet.

He rapidly compared the effects of all the names in his mind.

The core rule was already very clear: the closer a name aligned with a specific aspect of the shadow's essence, the greater the buff.

Conversely, the farther the name drifted from that essence, the worse the effect. If it strayed too far, it wouldn't attach at all.

What was a shadow's essence?

Soundless, lightless, weightless, formless, and plastic.

Any names extending from these essential lines could take hold.

Anything straying too far beyond these lines would slip off.

For instance, he tried "Flame."

The instant he pushed the ether out, it rebounded, stinging his wrist with numbness.

A shadow was fundamentally opposed to concepts like "light," "heat," and "combustion."

Giving it a name contrary to its own attributes meant it didn't even qualify to attach.

Richard shook out his wrist.

The effects of "Ferryman" and "Messenger" partially overlapped;

"Nail" and "Shadow Guard" offered combat buffs in different directions, but they could substitute for each other;

"Curtain" was perfect for hiding but sacrificed mobility; "Anchor" was ideal for holding ground but lost all flexibility; "Flame" was completely incompatible.

Every name simply magnified one specific trait of the shadow, causing the rest to wither in response.

It couldn't simultaneously be a sentinel, an assassin, and a shield.

Unless... Richard's eyes lit up. He could attach two names.

He sat on the training room floor for a long time.

What if he named the shadow both "Sentinel" and "Shadow Guard" at the same time?

Give it the expanded perception of remote scouting along with the instinctual drive of close-quarters protection?

The structural feature of Indo-European languages was roots and affixes. He could absolutely combine them to generate a name with composite abilities.

The moment the idea surfaced, [Speculation: Inner Awakening] flashed a red light.

A name required an initial expenditure of ether to write, followed by a continuous drain every second to maintain.

Behind the veil, the shadow could absorb ambient ether.

But in the material world, could his ether reserves sustain the ongoing drain of two names simultaneously?

Even if he had enough, that didn't mean it would work well. Opening two faucets at once lowered the water pressure.

Maintaining two names at once would dilute the effectiveness of each.

As for the actual difficulty of pulling it off, that was another matter entirely.

He decided to try it.

The shadow stood right in the center of the training room.

Richard took a deep breath, settling his Tide-Shifting Breathing into its steadiest rhythm.

Then, he pushed out two streams of ether simultaneously.

"Sentry."

The two meanings followed their respective conduction pathways down onto the shadow.

There was no problem when the first one attached.

But the instant the second name brushed the shadow's surface right after, Richard's chest violently sank.

Two torrents of ether were ripped from the Seat of the Sun at once, violently scooping out a massive chunk of his Spiritual Capacity's reserves.

The shadow's outline shuddered violently. The two names were fighting each other.

"Sentinel" wanted to push the shadow's perception outward, making its edges thinner and sharper;

"Shadow Guard" wanted to pull the shadow's form inward, making its edges thicker and denser.

One sought to scatter, the other to gather. The two forces tore at the shadow's surface for less than two seconds.

Richard's Spiritual Capacity plummeted straight from twenty points down to three, and the edges of his vision began to darken.

He hastily dispersed both names.

The shadow stopped trembling, its outline stabilizing.

Richard leaned on his knees, gasping for quite a while. Cold sweat drenched his back.

That was close. If he had held on for two more seconds, his own ether and Spiritual Capacity would have been drained completely empty.

If his ether emptied, his Micro-circulation would break. He would need a long time to recover, and that was even with [Healing].

The composite naming had failed. There were two layers to the failure.

The first was ether consumption; stacked together, it vastly exceeded that of a single name.

The second was far more lethal: a conflict of directions.

"Sentinel" and "Shadow Guard"—on an etheric level, their operational directions were entirely opposed.

Richard leaned back against the wall for a long time, waiting for his ether to slowly recharge to a level where his heart no longer fluttered with panic.

As he recovered, he pondered: what if the directions of the two names were aligned?

Take "Messenger" and "Ferryman," for example. Their effects partially overlapped; fundamentally, they were doing the exact same thing: crossing borders.

If abilities with the same direction were stacked together, would they stop fighting?

In theory, it was entirely possible.

But his ether had been drained to the absolute bottom today. He was in no shape to attempt any more high-consumption tests.

Richard's train of thought extended further. If aligned composite naming worked, what lay one step beyond that?

Three aligned names? Four?

In the future, once he reached Minor Adept or even Major Adept, and expanded his Spiritual Capacity to fifty, a hundred, or more, his ether reserves might be abundant enough to sustain the operation of five or six names at once.

What if he found five or six names that were perfectly aligned in direction, compounding layer upon layer?

Stacking them onto the shadow one by one—like first giving a blade its edge, then tempering it, wrapping the hilt, and oiling the steel.

With every layer reinforcing the exact same direction, the effects could potentially amplify exponentially.

When he reached that point, what would his shadow become?

Richard closed his notebook.

Just like Shadow Inversion, the naming ability was only a seed when it fell into his hands.

What kind of tree that seed would grow into depended on how much water and fertilizer he gave it, and how many years he allowed it to grow.

Stowing his notebook, he sat in the training room for a while longer, waiting for his Micro-circulation to fully stabilize.