Leo leaned against the cavern wall as he returned the transmitter to his Soulscape. “He forgot to explain why I need this sealed form…”
“It sounded like he was in a hurry,” Nyx pointed out, still not moving from her position. “Besides, he said he will call you back soon. You can ask him then.”
“I guess.” He smiled wryly. “Looks like we got the break we wanted, just not in the way we expected. Naz’Tor is right, though—it could have been worse.”
The feline snorted. “I think I’m gonna pass on a break like this. We’re doing this to survive, not to relax.”
Leo threw his hands up in mock surrender. “And there you go, ruining my attempt at positivity again. See who is the pessimist now.”
Nyx rolled her eyes at him and laid her head down. “Whatever you say. Now, go figure out how to use that sealed form. I probably need to learn it too.”
“Then why does it look like you’re going to sleep?”
“Because I am,” she replied without even opening her eyes. “Just a short nap. You can teach me once I wake up.”
Leo’s shoulders sagged. “Fine. Who knows how long we will be here anyway. We might have to take turns sleeping.”
“Exactly. Have fun then, and wake me up in an hour or two.”
“Will do,” he muttered and summoned the System interface to check the time in the job menu. He nodded at the timer, but just as he was about to dismiss it, something caught his attention.
What in the hell? Leo frowned, scrolling through the overly long list of available jobs. Unlike back on Earth, there were barely any System tasks here. He had only found three so far despite going through almost a hundred listings.
Those are all user-made tasks. Holy shit.
Since he was a Hunter, they all ranged from simple extermination jobs to harvesting specific body parts from Voidlings. There were other categories, but the vast majority fell into those two. One thing he noticed, though, was that even if a job was created by someone on Sazim, it didn’t necessarily mean it could be completed on this planet. Quite a few of them required traveling to places he had never even heard of.
Out of pure curiosity, Leo selected a job that seemed doable—even for him. It sounded like a simple herb collection, so how hard could it be?
Collection: Ice Dawn Flower
I require at least twenty units of freshly harvested Ice Dawn Flower. It may be found deep inside the nest located in sector 34 of Sazim. My contact information is attached to the job if you want to discuss the details. Commissioned by: Elkar Won.
Rewards:
75000 Ether and two Rare-grade potions of your choosing
Do you wish to accept?
Never mind! Leo shouted internally, quickly closing the task. I thought they just wanted me to find some flowers around the area, not to go into a bloody nest… Yeah, I think I’m gonna stick to System-commissioned jobs for the time being.
Not that the System offered him anything that he could complete at his current power level. There were exactly four tasks available, and all of them, bar one, wanted him to kill a certain amount of Voidlings. The last one was even worse—it called for the total destruction of a certain nest located in sector 9, wherever that was.
Well, at least now I know for sure this place is way above my pay grade. Maybe if it was a low C- planet… He shook his head and dismissed those thoughts. He should start working on what was important.
Might as well.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Leo closed his eyes and covered his body and mind in Essence. Then, just as he had done many times before, he pulled all of that energy back into his soul.
“Back again,” he muttered, opening his eyes to the familiar dark scenery of his Soulscape. It hadn’t changed much since his last visit, but there definitely were quite a few more black sparks racing across the sky. “The darkness looks stronger too…”
It made him wonder how many other people could say that their Soulscape possessed the representation of four different elements. Or if that was even something to be proud of. After all, he didn’t have time to develop his affinities anyway, so what was the point of having so many of them here?
Soon, he promised himself, for what felt like a hundredth time. Soon.
As Leo walked through the shadowed plains, he spotted more and more Vetilim constructs sprouting from the ground. So maybe Ruination didn’t need his input to progress. Either that or the spread of Void matter meant that his body and soul were nearing the point of being overwhelmed by the powerful element.
Either way, he didn’t like it. Anything that he couldn’t control was a problem that only grew with time.
“Speaking of which…” Leo stopped right in front of a massive shadow cage—a cage that still housed his sleeping nephew. He came closer and peered through the bars.
Apex Night Stalker (Voidling) | LVL: 31
Only? I honestly expected you to be in mid-forties by now, he mused and passed right through the bars. The transformed child remained motionless, so he crouched next to him.
“It’s probably a bad time for you to wake up, kiddo, but you can’t sleep forever,” Leo whispered, placing a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Just wake up soon. I will take care of the rest.”
Yet, the child stayed still, his chest rising and falling slowly.
Leo sighed and stood up. “I will be back, kiddo. Take care.”
With that, he walked away, refusing to look back. Even after all this time, he still had no idea how to help Adam. Nyx’s idea about rituals and healing held some merit, but with her memories fragmented, she couldn’t teach him more than some basics. His nephew needed much more than that.
“All in due time. All in due time…”
Before long, he reached his item stash. He quickly rummaged through the pile and picked up a booklet that definitely hadn’t been there before. Opening it, he skimmed through its contents.
“Sounds simple enough,” he commented and, with a pull on his Essence, returned to the real world. The booklet also landed in his hand. “Let’s see again…”
The sealed form followed similar principles to entering a Soulscape, just with a few added steps. For one, instead of only covering his body and mind and then pulling everything into his soul, here he had to take all three pillars and somehow compress them.
The booklet, however, didn’t provide much detail on how to achieve that. Leo predicted that, much like when he first learned to access his Soulscape, he had to figure out this step on his own. Either that or Naz’Tor had played a bad joke on him and gave him incomplete information.
Nah, no way.
Still, the booklet didn’t leave him completely clueless. It might not have described the exact steps he had to follow, but it at least told him that the compressed power had to be attached to his soul. Not placed inside it, but next to it.
Leo was still kind of mind-boggled about how that was even possible. Even Install-type items lived inside the soul, and now he was supposed to somehow take a big chunk of his power and rip it out?
This will take a while.
----------------------------------------
By the time the two-hour mark had passed, Leo made almost no progress. Straight-up forcing his pillars to compress didn’t seem to work at all, and trying to use Devour as the base of the sealed form helped even less than it did with his Soulscape.
Time for a break then, he decided and nudged Nyx. “Wakey, wakey! Time for training, you lazy ass cat!”
The feline groaned, trying to shield her eyes with her paws. Leo snorted and grabbed her limbs before they could achieve anything.
“I think not!” He poked her again. “You told me to wake you up after two hours, so here we are. No more sleeping.”
Nyx’s eyes snapped open, already narrowed and glaring at him. “I’m up. I’m up,” she growled. “You couldn’t just wake me like a normal person, hmm? I hate you.”
“Someone’s grumpy.” Leo smirked. “Be glad I didn’t do this an hour ago.”
“Whatever…” She scowled. “How is it going with the sealed form?”
His face fell. “Bad. Nothing’s working the way I want.”
“Explain.”
He sighed. “Basically, it’s a skill that compresses each of your pillars and then stores that surplus of power next to your soul. According to the booklet, you can seal even up to ninety-nine percent of your strength and transform into some lesser form.”
He also recounted everything he learned from his own attempts—which pretty much amounted to nothing—and then told her what he was struggling with. Nyx listened to it all, humming in thought every once in a while.
“So that’s how it is…” she muttered. “Give me a moment.”
What?