After that day he did not speak much to his friend, he only sat in the cell and kept on repeating the same exercise of gathering energy particles with his mind and pulling them onto his brain.

He did not care whether or not it was true anymore, he just did it to pass the time and during the past few days of practice he had become better at it.

He did not have to focus on it fully and could absorb energy passively now, he also knew how to tone it down to avoid saturating his brain in energy.

Time passed just a bit faster than usual these days, in the blink of an eye it had been two weeks, keeping track of time for such a short amount of time was easy. It was after a month that it began becoming hard since he had nothing in his cell, but that was besides the point because today he felt like something was going to be different.

At first only one section of his brain could soak in the energy he managed to muster, but surely that number soon changed and went to two...then three, and today he finally felt like he was going to be able to do it all at once, in no time.

"I wonder.... Will something cool happen when I complete the whole brain?" he muttered, curious but not one ounce of excitement could be seen on his face.

"No use thinking about it, let's do this." He sighed and quickly dissuaded his thoughts, readying his state of mind he fully focused on gathering the particles around him.

Particles naked to the human eye revolved all around the room, spiraling towards the male's head as if they were gently being nudged by the wind. Inside of his skull those particles slowly covered the surface area of his brain and slowly melted into it. Seconds felt like hours as the process was being completed, then it happened...

A sharp pain shook his nervous system, it felt like thousands of needles impaled his brain as his body went limp for a second.

The pain was so shocking that it forced him to stop thinking as his vision went dark, the only reason why he wasn't laying on the ground face first currently was his shackles.

"What the hell was that..." When his senses came back to him, he could only feel a deep-rooted fear that had just taken place within his mind.

"Oh... I'm bleeding...." As he stared at the floor, he noticed large beads of thick and smelly blood falling down, but what was more shocking to him was how clear his thoughts had become "Hah.... Hahahahaha! So, this must be it." With a determined gaze he then closed his eyes and tried to gather energy at his brain again. "Oh no... This is it. I did it, my brain has mutated, I managed to reach the first breakthrough!" Earlier he could barely even pull energy towards him, his mental was like a small wind nudging dust in one direction. "If before me gathering energy was like blowing wind into one direction, now it's like using a vacuum! This is great, just great!" His body could actually control particles that were up to a centimeter away from it, and up to two centimeters if it was close to his head.

But just as he was about to continue, he paused and pulled his body back up. "Oh? ...You want to sign a contract with me?" Confused, he stared at his shadow as he thought for a moment. "Well, I would but... As you can tell my hands are tired and I'm not capable of breaking out just yet." He sighed and replied dejectedly.

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"Wait that's right! I just lost blood, you can use that!" His eyes widened as he realized that he almost let a golden opportunity go away, if it was to get stronger everything would be worth it in the end. After hearing the reply from his 'friend' he moved his body around, soon his shadow was barely touching the small puddle of blood, and soon it all vanished, just like that.

It was quite an interesting process to watch, who thought that Darkie was possible of doing something like that "...That's-- MMPF!"

Before he could speak, he was silenced by another shocking phenomenon, soon after having his blood sucked up by the shadow, it actually came alive and poured upwards. Defying both common sense and physics, but it was a shadow so he doubted that that would be the last of his concerns, did shadows even work in accordance with the laws of physics?

"Wait, how can I still be thinking in a moment like this? ...Ah seems like this is also an effect of this so-called cultivation." He sighed as the foreign matter penetrated his mind and also coated his brain. Soon everything went back to normal, looking at his shadow it now looked at it had gained three new holes, two for the eyes and one for the mouth. "Actually...you know what, if I keep thinking about this, I'll actually go crazy." He did not bother trying to figure it out anymore, magic shadow did magic thing, nothing to make sense out of there.

"Hm..." Closing his eyes, he once again focused, this time on sensing his body, he could vaguely sense his shadow's presence now too as he did so which was quite novel to him.

"Intriguing.. Oh, you have a way to help me keep tab on my body's state you say? Hm...mhm alright got it. But it might take some time." Now with the ability to control the energy outside of his body too he could make any body parts absorb it, following this logic he began pulling the fine invisible particles towards his eyes. The process was actually smoother than before, in less than one day he had managed his second breakthrough, some blood at also gathered at the corner of his eyes. He cried for a while which was enough to chase it away. "Geez...this is going to take some getting used to." Sighing he glanced at his shadow. "This speed, it's thanks to you right?" He then asked, he could now see particles hovering around in small clusters but paid no mind to them.

The shadow only smiled, not responding. "I see...." Looking up and around he realized a few things, most of the energy was actually colorless. If he focused, he could see the particles all around him, if not he could vaguely tell where the most particles were, and if he wanted he could straight up turn it off. It was quite... useless to him, he thought.

"What part of seeing little lights will help me fight huh? You've scammed me Darkie!" He complained before crossing his arms, it was getting late and he was tired. Sighing he closed his eyes and hummed a tune, passively gathering energy to his brain out of habit...

"Not useless huh? " After a moment he flinched, doing as he had been told he focused his eyes on his body and then proceeded to channel some more energy to them, 'feeding' them. This process allowed their capabilities to sharpen even further at the cost of energy, and this change was only temporary as keeping it up for more than 5 seconds made his brain ache.

"Seems like my processing speed can also be boosted but this reduces my time to a mere two seconds..." Not wasting time, he looked down at his body before letting go of all the surrounding energies. "Annddd headache avoided hehehe.... So that's the state of my body huh... Is it me or have I become so strong that those drugs barely are acting on me anymore?" He spoke with a cocky grin; he'd even put his hands on his hips if he could right now.

"Wait what do you mean only partially..." Even though he had been joking a second ago he became serious, lowering his tone as he listened closely. "So, someone's planning to break us out of here huh.... To think that those guards would accept to lower the dosage for some bribe... This is. This...Eh." He could only sigh and sit back, he was speechless, but an opportunity stayed an opportunity. God would probably punish him if he let something so good pass by.

"So how long do we have to prepare for that?"

"Two months.... I'll take the challenge!" Grinning he gently closed his eyes and began guiding the energy particles surrounding him to mend into his nerves as he slowly drifted away into a well-earned sleep.