Armad had recently discovered how resourceful Musa the cook he unexpectedly met at the kitchen was.
Without any instructions or orders from Armad, the man had improvised a cunning plan that pleased Armad greatly.
The plan was to serve Armad a triple helping of food in the morning, four times in the afternoon, and three times at dinner. He had then told his fellow kitchen staff that the prince had discovered a group of vagrants in the city and needed to help them.
That he would be visiting them under disguise to feed them with the food already served to him.
Musa wanted his colleagues to believe that those unusual servings of meals were meant for the needy and not the prince himself.
Knowing how kind-hearted their leader was, the kitchen staff didn't doubt Musa for a minute.
They also saw when he entered the prince's chambers as he served the food. That served to quail any speculations on whether it was the prince who ate the food or not.
No one would dare protest to this even if they believed otherwise for Musa had already warned them of the consequences of doing so. Revealing this secret according to him would attract a heavy penalty by the prince.
So, they all zipped up their mouths shut. In any case, everything from the kitchen to the accompanying accessories and the staff were all under the control of the prince.
His wish was their order.
On his part, Armad didn't think the staff would make any trouble. If there was anyone to be cautious of by the prince, it was his solicitor - the judge.
The man could surely hear of the rumors as certainly as he would investigate. But if he happened upon the staff, they could only repeat to him what Musa told them.
That would silence him because he couldn't face the prince or interrogate him for it. For he knew best of all that Armad was philanthropic. His nightly outings under disguise were no news to him, for he usually did that to experience first-hand the needs of his subjects.
This perfect alibi initiated by the cook would undoubtedly ensure that Armad's newfound skill remained secret.
At last, he gave a nod to the System to go ahead with the job of converting the nutrients into pills.
Probably due to disbelief or lack of experience, Armad occasionally looked down at his stomach. He wanted to see if the size of it would increase, for now, satisfaction was out of the question.
He could still feel the pangs of hunger and occasionally wondered if the food he ate went to his stomach or not. But then his mouth and throat were witnesses to the food's destination.
It could be said that the System probably took it as soon as it reached his stomach. Or perhaps it broke down in his stomach only that he couldn't be satiated no matter the amount of food he consumed.
He left the dining room for his bedroom and during the moments taken by the System to create the pills, he went and took a shower.
When he was done, he changed into a jumper and meditated for some time.
Afterward, using his spiritual sense, he searched around the vicinity to see if there was anyone close by. There was none. Even the guards had been earlier excused by him. Though they were still around since they couldn't leave him unguarded they stayed at a distance from his rooms.
Satisfied with this finding, he entered the largest of his sitting rooms. It was spacious and decorated elegantly, but Armad raised his hand and pumped into his fist some cultivation. In the next minute, every piece of furniture and ornament vacated the room and floated to the adjacent ones.
Satisfied that there was nothing now that stood in his way, he lowered himself down with his legs folded beneath him.
Tonight was the time to put his Negrinki to the test.
The coldness of the earth seeped into his bones until he became one with it. Then he closed his eyes for a long time and when he was sure that all his thoughts were concentrated and aligned in one direction, he pulled out a hundred pol years from his core.
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Then he pulled out all the Negrinki from those pol years and placed them before him.
It stayed there hovering in the air in all its ring-like glory. Like any other Negrinki, this one also looked hazy but it had a red color.
As it hovered there before him, Armad watched and studied the smoky substance before eventually pulling out some more pol years.
It was five hundred pol years this time and as he did so, he extracted the Negrinki from it also.
He kept on studying it and then added more pol years, a thousand this time around.
By the time he was done, six thousand pol years had been extracted from his core.
By now, the Negrinki was as tall as a fully grown adult person and a full meter wide.
He marveled at it. This was the Negrinki he had produced from six thousand years of pol.
His mind was full of thought as he stretched his hand out to feel it.
The first thing that came to his mind was that he didn't have any Negrinki back in the Third Lower World.
Back home, he had only fifty-five pol years. If not for the memories of the prince whose body he now occupied, Armad wouldn't have had an inkling of what a Negrinki was.
But thanks to the memories stored up in the prince's brain which updated him on what a Negrinki was, how to use it, and what it looked like. This was how he found out that the prince had his own special Negrinki which he acquired when he attained core formation.
It was the norm even here in the First World that Negrinki could only be acquired when one reached a thousand pol years, making him a core formation cultivator.
He wondered then if his memory of controlling the Negrinki was the same as the real prince. Or would there be a difference since they weren't the same person?
He knew that all the other skills were his own and were extracted and modified by the System, but he wasn't sure about the Negrinki.
Since he didn't have it before, he wondered if he inherited that of the prince. Or would his own have looked like this if he had attained the core formation stage back home? Only Time could tell.
When his outstretched hand finally touched the Negrinki, he was suddenly pulled inside by a strong force.
In the next second, he disappeared from the room and found himself in a strange world.
It was a small place that wasn't more than the size of his sitting room.
It looked like any other land but where it ended looked like it was abruptly sawed away from the rest. Only a vast space existed there.
Cautiously, he treaded to the end and put out his hand to see what he would find there.
There was nothing and he didn't feel especially eager to jump in there and see what it held.
He instinctively knew that the space he stood on was the only place allocated to him by the Negrinki. At least at the moment.
He also knew that the late prince's Negrinki was different from this, but since he never had one until now, its mechanics were still a mystery to him.
Armad wondered again if he was responsible for this or if it was caused by the System. Or perhaps his Negrinki might have looked like this if he had attained core formation back home in the Third Lower World.
These were questions that couldn't be answered for there was no one he could ask since the prince was already dead.
But despite how they kept nagging at him, they weren't the most important things at the moment. The most important thing he should currently consider was, the best way to use the Negrinki.
With what could the Negrinki help him? And how would it help in his search for cultivation?
As if on cue, the System sent him a message.
[The Negrinki could only be of help to you in two ways on your current level of cultivation: It could serve as a vault for you to keep anything you want. It works in such a way that anything you keep can be easily extracted by you anytime you wish. But anything that wanders and falls inside the vacuum would be lost forever.
You can imprison men here and they wouldn't have the power to do anything as long as their cultivation is lower than yours.
And this world could assist you to fight your prisoners even those with higher cultivation than you.]
Seconds later, another message appeared :
[The second way of helping you is by boosting up all of your skills by 3 percent. It shall be activated whenever you launch defensive or offensive skills.
Moreover, it will weaken any attacks by the enemy irrespective of their cultivation by 3 percent.
But beware because there are cultivators whose one percent of strength alone can kill you. That said, you won't notice it even if their strength got weakened by this world because you would be dead by then. These are at the moment all the help that the Negrinki could render to you.]
Armad was okay with that. It sounded promising to him for as tiny as the Negrinki world seemed at the moment, it would hopefully grow bigger in the future.
The prospect of getting 3 percent strength (or weakness in the case of an enemy) was quite exhilarating.
It would probably increase up to a percentage of ten, then twenty or above as his cultivation increased.
A fact not mentioned by the system was if he could escape to the Negrinki world at need. He thought it was possible to escape there when faced with a mightier opponent and all doors were closed.
But his thoughts were disrupted by a new message from the System even before he finished.
[No, you cannot do that. A visit to the Negrinki world is only possible when you are at 100 percent of your cultivation strength. Your cultivation strength lessens to less than a hundred percent while you fight. This prevents your entry unless you are fully loaded. Also, you cannot take anyone there while fighting unless you are fully loaded with cultivation higher than your opponent.]
Way to go System, thanks for crushing my hopes. Armad muttered to himself.
Despite that, he refused to think of Negrinki as any less important.