That night, Orou couldn’t sleep. He didn’t want to cast the spell or even shape the spirit because Grizz was sleeping, so he practiced shaping his will into a wave. It was fairly easy, but Orou had to get the timing down so he had the most of amount of time to shape the spirit. Of course, he tried to collide two different spirits or simply shape the star himself, but for some reason, this task was way harder than making a string out of spirits, no matter what he did, he couldn’t succeed.

As he practiced the rest of his spells, he spent the most time learning how to control the blood serpent anew. One will was in control of moving the spirit, the other was in control of determining the timing of the attack and deciding on how it was going to attack. At first, his blood serpent collapsed several times but he got better and better at manipulating the wills, eventually surpassing his previous results. The attacks came faster and the movement overall was smoother, which would surely be a great boon when in combat.

Morning arrived and Orou was both examining the spirits for signs of weakening and Grizz for signs of waking. Coincidentally, the timing of the two was the exact same, the spirits started shaking and as Grizz stirred in his bed, Orou excitedly sent out a will wave. Wasting no time at all, he grabbed the spirit in front of him and imagined it shaping itself like a star. Almost like the spirit was made out of liquid, it rippled and slowly changed into what he thought of.

Orou looked at the greater spirit in panic as he wrapped his will around the star-shaped spirit. Recalling his other will, he used it to snap the box shut, preventing it from sending out another wave. The second he stopped his will wave, he immediately felt the star-shaped spirit resisting his efforts, doing its best to revert back into its original shape. For some reason, the spirit was exerting a lot more pressure compared to when it was being shaped into a string as if it was desperately avoiding its fate of being turned into a star.

Despite the spirits best efforts, Orou’s will held on strong. Tightly enveloping it on all sides, Orou commanded his other will to start constructing circle after circle around it, weaving complicated runes made out of spirits into the sides of the circles. Orou was doing his best to complete the spell as soon as he could because he felt that the will restraining the spirit was not going to hold on for that long. His mind was trembling from the pressure, but he was no stranger to pain, his mind held on strong as he completed the fifth circle.

As soon as he did so, the pressure from both of his wills disappeared. The circles and the runes within started spinning around the spirit at a slow rate, picking up in speed as time went on. The spirit shone with an increasingly bring light until eventually, it released a bright light. The spirit disappeared from view and as Orou looked around for where it might have gone and there it was, hovering in the middle of the circle just out of the corner of Orou’s eye.

The circle didn’t stop spinning, in fact, it spun around even faster until the runes became a blur. It spun so fast that it seemed to be shrinking in size, at least until Orou noticed that it had become half of its original size and it didn’t want to stop. Eventually, the circle shrunk down to match the size of his eye and floated right in front of his eyes, approaching closer and closer each second. Orou winced and he wanted to move away from whatever was approaching him, but he found himself locked in place by an invisible force surrounding him. Utilising his blood core to focus at one point on his body, he used all of his strength to try and move, but his efforts were for naught as he still couldn’t move.

Orou stared at the thing right in front of him. He wasn’t feeling terrified, but he had an unsettling feeling in his chest that he didn’t want this to reach him, however, no matter how hard he struggled to escape his binds, they held on strong, not budging in the slightest. His heart was racing, but there was nothing he could except watch.

The spinning circle touched his forehead and slowly but surely, merged with Orou. At first, all that he could feel was pain, but amidst the pain were traces of enlightenment. He struggled to ignore the pain and reach out for the few strands of understanding that were floating in front of him, but they seemed to be always out of his reach. He watched in despair as the strands floated away into the void beyond him, but as the void swallowed them, he seemed to have understood something, unsure of what it was himself.

The void that was in front of him was lifted and once more, he could see. The world in front of him was the same, but at the same time, it was fundamentally different. Everywhere he looked, the world was divided into two colors, white and black. The floor, the ceiling, the furniture and even Grizz were made entirely out of black strands, writhing and struggling to escape their boundaries. As he looked around, he saw that besides the black strands, there was a faint, black mist that was hanging around the room, sticking to the black strands and not letting go.

The mist seemed to be corroding the black strands in front of it, making it shiver as if in pain. The strands were retreating further and further, but they had no more room to run and they could only writhe around as the black mist dug deep into them. Looking at Grizz, he seemed to have something inside of him that was making the black strands slowly spin. As the black strands spun, they turned into the black mist that then went on to eat away at the rest of the black strands. The mist Grizz released wasn’t enough to fill the entire room and he wondered the rest of the mist was coming from. Then, he looked at himself in the mirror.

His entire body was filled with black strands, pressing up against his body, slowly expanding it outward and he could see himself slowly growing both bigger and taller. The place where his blood core was supposed to be was a huge mass of circling black strands. They were silently screaming in pain as they were crushed into the black mist by the circling thing inside of him. As he looked around himself, he saw a constantly rising black mist that was devouring everything around him. He could clearly see that where the mist was, the spot was very slowly blackening and becoming rotten, after weeks if not months, this place would be in shambles simply from this mist.

Grizz was moving around like everything was perfectly fine. How could he live without knowing that with each second, not knowing he was destroying the world around him? He bit onto the apple in front of him and the black strands from the apple were sucked his body, never to see the light of day again. Grizz tossed out a piece of a pig’s meat for Orou to see and even though he saw that it was full of black strands, Orou was very curious. He dragged it in front of the mirror and slowly bit into it before devouring it whole. The black strands within the meat were terribly afraid of him as he ate it, almost as if they knew their impending fate.

As the black strands joined the rest, he grew slightly more and within him, the thing started spinning even faster. Even though he ate the meat, he wanted to eat more, the black strands within him were disappearing at a visible rate and even if he didn’t want to continue eating, he had to survive.