My Living Shadow System Devours To Make Me Stronger

The cry of an infant stirred Damon from the haze.

He lifted his head slowly and found himself staring at rough bark inches from his face. No, not bark. A canopy. A vast tree towered above him, its branches stretching hundreds of meters into the sky, its leaves spreading wide and casting a cool, heavy shade across the forest floor.

Something tugged at his cheek.

At first, he thought it was an insect. Then he felt the faint pressure of tiny gums pressing against his skin. It was not painful. Barely noticeable, in fact. There was only a faint scent, warm and milky, as the small mouth gummed his face with surprising determination.

Damon did not move. He only stared ahead, frozen in confusion.

A red blur suddenly swept into his vision and scooped the creature away.

He blinked and pushed himself upright.

A baby, no older than a year, was cradled in the arms of a scarlet squirrel. Off to the side, beneath the massive trunk of the tree, a black raven was aggressively milking a struggling minotaur.

The raven smacked the giant beast every time it tried to resist, while the squirrel firmly guided the baby’s mouth toward the minotaur’s udder.

Damon stared, his expression blank with disbelief.

By the time the milking was done, the baby had stopped crying. The squirrel and raven began rocking it gently, completely absorbed in their task, unaware that Damon was now sitting up and watching them.

“Wh… what the hell is going on here.”

They froze.

The squirrel, clearly Scar, turned first while still rocking the child. The raven, who had been fanning the baby with its wings, was Croft. Both of them slowly turned their heads toward Damon.

Their eyes widened.

Hope flooded their faces as though they had just seen salvation itself.

Before Damon could say another word, they rushed toward him. Scar reached him first and promptly dumped the baby into Damon’s arms.

Damon reflexively caught her.

She was wrapped in soft fabric he immediately recognized. It was material from the system. From his shadow storage.

He glanced down and noticed his shadow had been coiled protectively around the child the entire time.

It was a baby girl.

She was painfully adorable.

“Is this…” Damon began.

“Squeal squeal squeal.”

What followed was the most vicious insult Damon had ever heard in squirrel language. He was fairly certain he had just been called a scumbag and a deadbeat in at least seven different ways using only variations of squeals.

Scar was furious.

Croft joined in.

“Caw caw.”

Damon did not understand the words, but the emotion was unmistakable.

They were venting.

About the things they had endured. The sleepless nights. The stress. The bullying. The sheer suffering of taking care of this child while Damon was unconscious.

Damon looked down at the baby in his arms, then glanced toward the base of the tree.

There, scattered across the ground, were fragments of a shattered capsule and shards of glass.

Pieces of the Womb of Healing.

Which meant…

“Hmm. This thing is my daughter…”

Even as he said it, the words felt unreal. Absurd.

The baby’s tiny hand wrapped tightly around his finger with shocking strength, trembling with effort as she held on.

Damon blinked.

Then he noticed it.

His mouth slowly fell open.

The baby was already in the First Class Advancement.

“Ho… how is that possible…”

Damon drew in a slow breath.

Ashcroft’s voice echoed in his mind.

“Hmmm. How interesting. I have never seen talent like this. Even I cannot compare.”

“A prodigy,” Damon muttered.

But her talent was the least of his concerns.

He was still trying to process the fact that he had a daughter at all.

She looked nothing like him.

Golden hair. Golden eyes.

His genes had not even attempted to fight back. She looked as though she had been kissed by the sun itself. The only thing she seemed to inherit from her mother was the texture of her hair.

Damon slowly raised his gaze to Scar and Croft, who were still angrily ranting and gesturing, clearly complaining about the unfairness of life and the hardship of parenthood while accusing him of being a negligent father.

He sighed, then frowned.

“How long have I been asleep?”

He paused.

“And more importantly… where did you two get a minotaur.”

Damon was soon subjected to an epic tale of danger, love, enmity, pain, and reluctant parenthood.

Apparently, three years had passed.

Scar and Croft had followed him after Wendy was killed by Morticai. When Damon fell into the spatial rift caused by the fractured space, the two of them had leapt in after him without hesitation.

That was how they ended up here.

It took them time to find him. When they finally did, his shadow was behaving strangely. They later discovered why. Damon had used his blood and Wendy’s blood with the Womb of Healing to create a child.

After one year, the child was ready to be born.

But Damon was still unconscious.

With help from his shadow, they pulled the capsule out of his shadow space. The problem was that the baby did not come out. Neither Scar nor Croft had any idea how to open the thing without harming what was inside, so they left it alone.

For another year.

Until the capsule cracked open on its own like an egg.

And just like that, the two animals found themselves staring at a newborn baby with absolutely no idea what to do.

They had hoped Damon would wake up.

He did not.

So they did the only thing they could. They put aside their constant bickering and worked together to keep the child alive, guided loosely by Damon’s shadow, which seemed to know a little about raising children.

First, they forced the shadow to hand over fabrics, blankets, and duvets from Damon’s storage.

Then they kidnapped a female minotaur.

And milked her.

Damon glanced at the minotaur, which still stood nearby with a permanent expression of fear and despair carved into its face.

“Well. That explains the minotaur.”

They had wanted to carry Damon and leave this place, but they were afraid the baby would not survive the journey.

Scar was the only one with anything resembling hands, so the squirrel handled the carrying, rocking, cleaning, and feeding.

Croft handled guarding the baby, finding food, and dealing with anything that came too close.

They had, in every sense of the word, been her parents.

It was easy to overlook, but both of them were in the Fourth Class Advancement. Creatures of terrifying power reduced to exhausted caretakers.

Damon looked down at the baby in his arms and felt strangely disconnected from the world.

To them, three years had passed.

To him, it had been an entire decade inside Mugu’s life. He had lived it. Felt it. Loved it. His heart and mind had changed from that experience. And when he returned, all he had carried back with him was despair.

The knowledge of the Unknown God.

The weight of it.

When he woke, his heart had been like an endless night.

But now, as he looked at the golden-haired child in his arms, it felt as though a single ray of sunlight had pierced that darkness.

As though despair was something that could be overcome.

He gently touched her nose.

She let out a soft, delighted sound and opened her mouth as if trying to bite his finger.

Damon smiled.

“I thought you would be dead when I came back. I had already accepted it. But it seems you are quite the fighter, aren’t you, little sunshine.”

“Shuh gah hah.”

Her tiny hands grabbed at his finger again.

“You are like the sun… right. The sun. Ranar.”

Something warm and fragile stirred in his chest. His divine spark pulsed faintly with a soft light.

“Ranar means sun. It was the name of someone who loved me dearly. The name of someone I loved. You are my sun.”

He lowered his forehead gently to hers.

“My Ranar.”

Ranar had been his mother’s name.

And though this child looked nothing like him, she looked eerily like his mother. The same golden features. The same warmth. The only difference was that she was small enough to fit in his arms.

He hoped she would grow up to be just as beautiful.

For the first time, the seed of depravity inside Damon weakened, while his divine spark grew stronger.

Time seemed to slow.

The world faded until it felt like only the two of them existed.

In this world, everyone wanted to be needed by someone.

Mugu had wanted to be needed by Abellona. When she did not need him, he fell from grace and became a demon who sought the end of all things so that his pain would end as well.

Damon did not know if Ashcroft’s fall had been the same.

But he understood Mugu.

His entire life, his reason for living, had been to save his sister. He had wanted to be needed by her.

“Ranar Grey. Do you like it?”

“Dahh ahh hah gugghh.”

She responded with happy, meaningless sounds, but Damon could not take his eyes off her.

He had fallen completely in love.

Off to the side, Scar and Croft watched him with flat, unimpressed expressions.

They had suffered. They had cleaned her, fed her, protected her, endured sleepless nights and constant stress.

And this man had woken up, held her for five minutes, and named her.

They looked at Ranar.

She looked happy.

They glanced at each other.

If their master wanted to steal the credit, they would allow it.

As long as she kept smiling.

“The Unknown God says We are forced to exist. Existence is suffering. End everything” Damon muttered to himself

’Then why does this feel worth protecting?