Chapter 18

It was night.

In the small room in the Laiken family cabin, Zairen sat on his bed, cross-legged.

An eerie aura permeated through the air, and moonlight shone in through the window, casting wildly distorting shadows all around the room.

In the past week, Zairen had been tirelessly training the Silent Shadow art, which had already reached a basic level of proficiency. One of the passive effects of the art was to improve agility, stealth, and precision. Although Zairen still had not used any shadow art abilities, he was now significantly stronger than he was before.

However, today was special.

In the Silent Shadow art, there were three core abilities, each exponentially more difficult to master than the previous. Each ability required the the user to have a profound understanding of the laws of darkness and shadows.

Today, Zairen felt that he had trained sufficiently enough to start using to a basic degree the Silent Shadow art’s first core ability: shadow walking.

Shadow walking was the most basic and fundamental ability in the Silent Shadow art. It allowed the user to temporarily travel distances through shadows. Because of this, it was an extremely practical and powerful ability at the same time.

In his previous life, Zairen had used shadow walking extremely frequently, and thus already understood many of its profound mysteries.

Zairen stopped meditating and opened his eyes.

‘I hope I have enough spirit energy to shadow walk…’ he thought to himself.

He slowly stepped off his bed and stood in one of the room’s many shadows. Poising there silently for a few moments, he prepared himself.

He then closed his eyes and clasped his hands together, slowly concentrating his mind. As he felt spirit energy surging up throughout his body, he intensely visualized himself becoming one with the shadows.

In response to his thoughts, the shadows surrounding him suddenly seemed to start boiling, frantically spazzing around. The eerie aura in the room also started to fluctuate.

Suddenly...

“Phew.” Zairen breathed a sigh of relief. “Success.”

He was standing in the cabin’s hallway, standing outside his small bedroom’s door. Somehow, he had transported himself nearly five meters away away from his original position.

Breathing somewhat heavily, Zairen walked back to his room and opened the door. He smiled lightly as he walked in, and closed the door behind him.

‘The speed is quick as usual.’ Zairen thought to himself. ‘Travelling along the shadows in the room, I arrived at my destination in only half a second.’

He walked over to his bed and sat down. After taking a deep breath, he gauged his remaining spirit energy.

‘I just spent about a fourth of my total spirit energy… looks like I only possess enough to shadow walk for two seconds.’

Zairen sighed lightly. However, he wasn’t disappointed. After all, he was only seven years old! He would have years to build up his spirit energy and ability proficiency in the future.

He took a deep breath. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he brought out the Shadow Dragon Sword from his consciousness.

It was clearly a very practiced movement, obviously done many times before.

After inputting his remaining spirit energy into the ring, Zairen exhaustedly put the sword away and went to bed.

-----------------

As soon as he woke the next day, Zairen decided that it was finally time to pay another visit to the mysterious woman in the grey ring’s interdimensional space.

After successfully shadow walking the previous day, he felt that he was finally strong enough to make official diagnosis for the woman in the grey ring’s interdimensional space - only by being there physically could he properly identify whatever the woman was afflicted with. That would entail directly dealing with the pressure the woman’s body let out!

Although he was fearful that something could easily go wrong due to some mishap, Zairen had finally been able to shadow walk, and as such, had greatly increased his strength, so he felt that he could tackle the problem with much less difficulty.

Zairen wanted to try to start treating the woman in the space as soon a possible. Although the woman had resisted the poison for almost a hundred years, there was no saying how much longer she could do that!

He also now possessed at least the rudimentary equipment required to do some minimal treatment work, so it was a better time than any to get started.

Zairen sat cross-legged on his bed, and focused his mind. Today, he would attempt to physically enter the interdimensional space in his ring. Although that sounded absurd, it was clearly possible, and to treat the woman, he absolutely needed to do it. As a doctor, it would be hard to inspect or treat the woman’s body comprehensively without physically being there.

He took a deep breath. Knowing that it was possible to physically enter the space, he didn't hesitate.

With one movement, he sent in a layer of his spirit energy to trigger the interdimensional ring to suck in an item, but instead of sending in an item, he offered himself!

PHOOSH! The next moment, his body disappeared. Zairen had been sucked into the ring!