Chapter 1204: True Void Sense!

Phei sighed and finally allowed his shoulders to relax.

There was one other thing he had deliberately refused to think about while throwing himself around the lounge like an enthusiastic dimensional idiot: his Intelligence, or more specifically, how much of his INT all those Void Steps had been consuming.

His Intelligence had long since stopped being merely a measure of whether he could solve difficult equations and represented far more than intelligence in the ordinary human sense, forming part of the mental and spiritual foundation behind several of his stranger abilities.

Whenever something demanded too much perception, comprehension or control, INT was usually one of the first places Phei expected to feel the cost.

Yet after all those consecutive Void Steps, his INT had not fallen at all.

Phei frowned and checked again just to make sure he had not overlooked something.

Not one point had disappeared, which earned a quiet, puzzled, "Huh," before he summoned the relevant information and stared at it until the answer became embarrassingly obvious.

Void Steps had not been drawing upon his Intelligence in the first place, and neither had Hollow Touch or Minimal Void Sense:

All three drew upon the same black-white essence of his Void-Ice.

They were not foreign powers bolted onto him and demanding separate energy sources; the three belonged beneath his Void and were fed by the same essence already living inside him.

As long as Phei possessed enough Void-Ice essence, he could theoretically continue using them.

That did not mean he could Void Step forever without consequence, because his Lv.1 perception still deteriorated after too many rapid movements, his understanding of spatial hollows became progressively less reliable, and greedily forcing another Step while his senses were blurred remained an excellent way of discovering whether a wall looked as expensive from the inside.

Still, the abilities themselves possessed no cooldown, consumed none of his INT and had no arbitrary number of daily uses.

Phei’s lips slowly curved. "So I really can keep going."

That was disgusting, and naturally, he approved.

Unfortunately, it also brought him directly back to the largest weakness he had discovered so far:

Minimal Void Sense.

Phei closed his eyes again and allowed the strange second perception to spread from him.

The lounge disappeared from ordinary sight, yet something much less complete replaced it.

Nearby spatial hollows became faint impressions against his awareness, tiny irregularities his normal senses could have stared directly through forever without noticing, while the places disturbed by his earlier Void Steps remained as vague fingerprints pressed into absence.

He pushed the sense outward until incomplete impressions of rooms, walls, corridors and an elevator shaft formed around him. He could also detect people; his women and family moving through distant sections of the floor, but none of it possessed anything close to the clarity of ordinary sight.

A Juliette standing behind several walls became little more than an occupied shape whose posture and finer details remained hopelessly vague, while someone like Sienna her presence became harder still to perceive, her existence fading into a blurred smudge against the surrounding world.

Pressure slowly gathered behind Phei’s forehead as he pushed harder.

Minimal Void Sense extended beyond the immediate lounge, brushing across concealed spaces, hidden channels built into the hotel’s structure, weak distortions where formations had been layered into walls and several traces left by movements that had somehow disturbed space.

Useful, definitely useful, but Phei wanted to know how useful it became against something that actually wished to remain hidden.

He deliberately searched for concealed presences.

Phei had no idea Consort was nearby, much less that she had been watching him disgrace himself throughout his training, but concealment was one of the first obvious weaknesses worth testing. He swept through the nearby space several times and found nothing suspicious enough to seize his attention.

Apparently, if the person hiding was sufficiently powerful, Minimal Void Sense remained every bit as ignorant as the rest of him; because when he tried to perceive Chaos’s shadows he knew were here with just his void perception, he could not see the most powerful of them that his Primordial Blood was confirming were there than his senses and void perception did.

Phei opened his eyes. "That’s the problem."

The ability would probably become a nightmare against ordinary people, hidden chambers, weaker concealments, erased things, spatial disturbances and unusual holes inside reality.

But against the monsters Phei actually needed to worry about, however, it was pathetic.

Someone sufficiently powerful could apparently stand close enough to admire his hairstyle while Minimal Void Sense proudly told him that everything nearby looked perfectly normal.

His gaze returned to the small number beside the ability.

Lv.1.

His irritation softened almost immediately.

The ability itself was not pathetic, the Level One simply was.

Minimal Void Sense already allowed him to notice things his eyes, his earlier perception and senses completely missed:

If he raised it high enough to drop the word Minimal, perhaps he could detect powerful beings suppressing themselves, perceive through concealment instead of merely feeling something vague behind it, know exactly what occupied the space around him without needing to turn his head, or perhaps even use the Void itself as another way of looking at the world.

That final possibility made Phei straighten.

"System."

[Yes, Host?]

"How much EXP does it cost to level these abilities?"

[Ding! Minimal Void Sense Lv.1 → Lv.2 would cost...]

"No." Phei waved one hand dismissively before the System could begin feeding him every miserable intermediate level. "Tell me what I have to pay to take these two abilities from where they are now directly into their next evolution."

The System remained silent briefly before two lines appeared.

[Minimal Void Sense → True Void Sense: 270,000 EXP.]

[Void Steps → True Void Steps: 350,000 EXP.]

Phei stared at the numbers, then slowly looked toward the total sitting farther down his Status:

[EXP: 720,000]

270,000 for the first evolution and another 350,000 for the second meant 620,000 EXP disappearing in one sitting, leaving him with precisely one hundred thousand.

Phei pressed his lips together. "So basically, I go back to being poor."

[...]

His grin returned almost immediately. "I love it."

Apparently spiritual poverty built character.

"Upgrade Minimal Void Sense first."

[Confirmation Required: Host wishes to spend 270,000 EXP to evolve Minimal Void Sense into True Void Sense. Y...]

"I believe I did not stutter. I accept."

The System paused, perhaps offended by the interruption, before the blue window flashed.

[Ding!]

[270,000 EXP deducted.]

[Congratulations, Host, on evolving...]

"HAAAAAAAHHHHH!"

Phei’s body snapped backward, both hands slamming against the couch beneath him as his awareness violently opened.

There was no pain at first because there was simply too much of everything for pain to receive individual attention. The lounge vanished from ordinary sight, not because Phei had suddenly gone blind, but because his eyes became so embarrassingly inadequate compared with what replaced them that sight itself felt almost primitive.

He perceived the couch in its entirety, from the fabric above to the frame hidden underneath and the minute unevenness where one internal support had been secured more tightly than another.

At the same time, he perceived the floor behind himself, the underside of the nearby table without turning his head, the thin dust hiding beneath one leg, the darkness underneath the furniture and the empty spaces running through the surrounding walls.

His awareness spread behind him, above him, beneath the floor and to either side simultaneously until the very idea of a blind spot suddenly seemed ridiculous. There was no meaningful front or back to this new perception because everything within it arrived together, complete and immediate.

Phei’s breathing caught.

His ordinary eyes had spent nineteen years arrogantly insisting that the direction his face pointed toward was where the world existed. True Void Sense considered that an adorable biological limitation.

The walls stopped behaving like walls, although Phei quickly understood that he had not suddenly developed some cheap transparent vision.

His awareness was simply no longer approaching physical objects from the same direction his eyes did. It slipped into the Void surrounding ordinary existence and reality as he knew it before his awareness was welcomed to the Void’s view of that reality and he looked back into reality from there, allowing him to perceive what existed beyond a wall from somewhere that wall was never standing in front of.

Rooms unfolded around Phei from impossible angles. Corridors stretched open, pipes buried within concrete became part of a complete understanding of the hotel’s structure, and electrical conduits, concealed maintenance passages, architecture formations hidden within the building and tiny unused spaces between walls all settled into his awareness without requiring him to turn toward any of them.

But the range began expanding.

It passed 50 meters almost instantly, continued through 100 and then 200 before Phei’s fingers tightened against the couch as his awareness crossed 300 meters and kept going.

The Void ahead of his perception offered no resistance.

If anything, darkness seemed to withdraw willingly whenever he pressed farther, spatial hollows clarifying as physical obstructions ceased mattering once his perception moved into the layer surrounding them.

By the time it crossed four hundred meters and pressed toward five hundred, the amount of information entering Phei’s awareness had become monstrous.