He was finally set free, it was not easy. Inero-ie bowed slightly. He would have rejected this gift if he had been given the choice, still, whether he desired it or not did not change the value of what he had received. After a while, he straightened his body and walked away. He Melded with both ice and darkness. Now that he was without the protection of his armor suit, the moment he stopped the Melding would also be the moment he would die, frozen instantly as the intense cold would rush in, freezing, devouring, the small spark of life that burned within him.
Threads, thousands of them, each hundreds of meters long were spread in all directions giving him a level of cognition incomparable to the physical senses. In every way. While his eyes failed even to make out the finger in this lightless world, Threads allowed him to sense everything with perfect clarity for hundreds of meters around him. While his ears were made useless due to the harsh winds that were a constant, Threads allowed him to sense each and every collusion between uncountable, small, shrapnels of ice that were constantly colliding with one another.
Every minute detail, whether it be the cracks on the sharp rocks to the sharp edges of countless flying ice shrapnels, everything was clear. There was another advantage to the Threads, he could control what he sensed so he made the world appear bleak, colorless so that his heart would remain dead, so that he would not be swayed away from his desire. What he could not filter out, though, was the incredible wonders hidden within even the most minute of things. Things that could not be sensed by the physical senses available to humans. One time these had made his heart flutter, at one time these had almost made him want to live again. Now, he had grown accustomed to them too.
Wandering without any purpose, he found himself inside a canyon where his attention was captured completely. A crystal of ice. He approached the crystal, a single slow step at a time. With each step that brought him nearer, he could feel the cold intensifying. It mattered not because he was mesmerized by what he found inside the crystal, the swirling Qi the ice crystal. The way Qi moved within the lattice structure fascinated him. The tips of his finger drew nearer the surface of the crystal, almost touching it.
"Stop," suddenly a voice resounded inside his head, breaking him from the stupor. Startled, he retracted, realizing that his fingers had almost touched the crystal. Despite having maintained the Melding, he could imagine the intense coldness would have invaded his body. If he had touched the crystal just now, the cold inside it would have found a path to travel into his body, freezing him.
Awoke and alert, Inero-ie quickly isolated the malicious content inside his mental space, destroying them, and only then did he focus his attention on the voice that had saved him. Although it was a mental transmission, he could identify the sender despite it being cycles since he had heard from him.
"Thank you," Inero-ie uttered. There was no one in the vicinity, and even if there was, the furious winds would make sure none could hear what he had said. Still, he had uttered with confidence that that man would clearly hear it.
"Come, I have a job for you."
"Yes," Inero-ie uttered and right at that moment, his threads sensed something closing in. He dived into the icy walls of the canyon until he was deep enough. He stopped once he was sure he would not be detected, stopping and focusing on reducing the amount of Qi spent on Melding.
Soon the monsters appeared. It was a centipede, body slim but with a trunk consisting of thousands of subsections. Its approach was quiet. Maintaining distance from the crystal, it began looking around, searching, but without success. Inero-ie remained there, meditating while he waited for the centipede to move away.
Though he could move, the canyon walls were massive and would require an amount of Qi that he did not want to waste. He had refined cores that could be used to refill his core but each refined core was expensive even by his standards not to mention he had limited quantity.
It took a few days before he considered it safe to come out of the canyon's icy walls. Once out, he jumped, waiting until he started feeling the pull of gravity and manipulated the ice, pulling it out, grabbing it. His feet smashed into the rocky wall, then below his feet grew a platform. He prepared himself, then jumped, destroying the platform below him.
"Guidance, please," Inero-ie asked as he pulled himself up.
"Go north," soon came the reply and he started walking without hesitation.
The first time he had stumbled upon that place was by chance, he had been injured, his body almost fully frozen. It had taken him all his effort to stop his heart and brain from being frozen.
Slowly, as he covered the distance, walking while hiding whenever he sensed the presence of monsters in the vicinity, the instructions he got became more and more detailed.
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Just before he had breathed his last breath, he had been whisked away. It had been so sudden, so skillful that he had not understood what had even happened. But one thing he had noticed immediately, the cold had lost its power. From then on, it had been a struggle to push out the cold that had frozen most of his body.
The Nutrition biscuit cracked under the assault of his teeth. It was dry, without even a hint of moisture and without an iota of taste. Then he threw a pill into his mouth, it was small but inside his mouth, it unraveled into water that slowly mixed with the crushed biscuit. While he ate, a few hundred Threads were focused on a small spike protruding up from the ground, on the structure of the spike before him.
Soon he finished eating and resumed the journey.
***
In front, he could sense a castle so massive that despite now having thousands upon thousands of Threads, he still could not sense it all at once. It had been created by twisting and morphing a mountain of ice. His steps took him before what he thought was the gate and the next thing he knew, he was inside. The freezing cold no longer existed so he undid the Melding and he could feel his body warm up to the comfortable temperature of this castle.
He was inside a corridor, and just like he remembered, the walls on both sides were filled with books. The air was filled with their smell, the smell of tens of thousands of books that existed just in this corridor. With each step the memories of the past tried harder and harder to come forward, the memories of time he had spent with these books most of which had been outside his understanding. What he had been able to comprehend, however, had been instrumental in what he was now.
It had allowed him to crystallize the cycles he had spent observing the Specters and use it to refine the design of the Threads and optimize the Qi-location. It had allowed him to make his suicidal technique, A Way Through, even more powerful. It had, most important of all, allowed taught him how to perform Melding, among many other things.
This place had, in a way, allowed him to live and he resented it for that. If he had not been brought inside back then, he would have died. If he had not learned from the knowledge this place provided, he would have died. Here he was though, just a living corpse once again moving through these silent halls.
"Your emotions are out of control," he heard a remark.
He checked the body, his face still set in the blank mask that had become second nature, his body posture not giving any hint of instability. Qi, he then realized was the problem and quickly reasserted his control over it. 'Still not cleaned, it seems.'
His body bent a little, giving a slight bow in respect while he retracted all of his Threads and opened his eyes. It was all out of respect. It was due to the man in front of him that he could keep his promise to this day. Even if he hated that.
"You haven't changed at all. I thought you would. When will you stop being stubborn," the voice continued.
Inero-ie stood still not knowing how to respond. He was certainly stubborn, and an even greater idiot. He was an idiot who was walking a needlessly difficult path when he could have lived a far easy life. But, he had never cared for living.
"I have a task for you," said the man wearing clothing as unfamiliar as this castle he resided in.
"Task?" Inero-ie asked and then his gaze followed the finger of a man who seemed to be there but not at the same time. The walls that were there a moment ago disappeared and he bowed slightly to the last person he had expected to see in this place.
"She is special even in the lineage sired by my student so I could not allow her to be taken away. I was going to send her back but now that you are here, it will be a good opportunity for her. Teach her along the journey."
"Before we leave, do I have permission to browse some books?" Though he felt uncomfortable uttering such long sentences, he had to if he wanted to increase the chances of survival when he appeared Shedding.
'Ha! Survival!' Sometimes it was difficult to grasp the line between struggling because of the promise and struggling because he genuinely wanted to live. Still, he had decided long ago and it was not going to change now.
"Cile, child, do you have any objections?"
Princess shook her head, not even lifting her head up from the tower of books gathered around her.
“Your employer looks happy with this so go browse what you need.”
"Thank you," Inero-ie expressed his gratitude with another bow and then accessed the system that managed millions of books present in this place. First, he started with the book related to the Laws, wanting to gain a deeper understanding of the questions that had come into his mind in the cycle he had been stuck with the white snake.
***
Once he had finished the doubts and questions he had regarding the cultivation of the Law, he shifted his attention to the other matter–Shedding. Now that he had gained a foundational understanding of the Law, he could finally make an attempt to Shed.
Shedding was leaving the old body for a newer and better body. Lesser potential for higher, greater potential. It was the process of a caterpillar shedding its cocoon to become a butterfly. Where one could only crawl before, and even then slowly, after leaving the cocoon that was the old body, the potential of the body would change as drastically as a caterpillar gaining the ability to fly.
To make this drastic change possible, the Qi that had been accumulated, the Path that had been walked down, and the Laws that had been understood, were the main ingredients responsible for such a dramatic change.