The forest was alive with the bustling movement of wildlife and the silent work of vegetation yielded a very peaceful environment. A small creek could be hear as water rushed down it into a lake. A small fire crackled as Posche snored on a hammock tied between two trees. A small pot full of a water like substance was steaming over the fire.

Yami stood in the middle of the field, gripping his left forearm and straining his muscles. The mark on his hand would occasionally flicker.

“This is different from trying to get the life force into the ink! Instead of a small port, you need a larger one, like a floodgate!”

Yami took a breath and relaxed his tense muscles. As he walked towards the pot of water, he started to relocate his life essence into his left bicep where he could access it in a moment. Grabbing a mug, Yami poured himself a dark liquid from the pot, which was almost as thick as syrup.

“Hey Mr. P, what exactly is this stuff?”

Posche talked with his eyes closed, as if he was never sleeping in the first place. “That is a nutritious drink that the ancient echoes had created to give small boosts of life essence, like an energy bar if you will. It’s called Jono.”

Yami began to slurp down the liquid. It left a foul aftertaste in his mouth, and clung to his throat as the residue of the liquid entered his stomach.

“Jesus! I was gonna ask why no one just drank this for their power, but then I tasted it!”

“Well, they don’t do that because if they were to solely rely on this for their power, their body would eventually build up a resistance to it, and reduce the effect until it no longer had any. If they attempted to increase the amount they drank, their body could effectively stop producing it’s own life essence, and expect to receive it all from Jono. They would lose their ability to wield it at all.”

With one last gulp, Yami set down his mug and cracked his neck.

“Well, let’s hope I don’t end up like that.”

Returning back to the middle of the field, Yami took a breath. Gripping his forearm once again, Yami sent his life essence in a giant wave, covering the mark. It became completely invisible. Excited, Yami ran over to Posche.

“Check it out! I did it!”

Posche opened his eyes and looked at Yami’s palm.

“Good job. Now keep it like that for 18 hours.”

Posche rolled back over and closed his eyes. Yami’s mark appeared on his hand.

“What the hell do you mean?!?! Why 18 hours?”

“Don’t get frustrated at me. Think about it. You need to hide your Sirushi Inochi throughout the entire day, right? So what is being able to hold it for one minute going to accomplish?”

Defeated by this remark, Yami lost his frustration.

“Ok. But where am I supposed to find the time to do this?”

Posche shrugged.

“Just act like you are going to watch TV all day or something and stay in your room. Go to a friends house. I don’t care.”

Unsatisfied with this answer, Yami walked towards the door.

“I’ll see what I can do. Thanks for all the help, Mr. P.”

Posche took the sarcasm in his voice with a grain of salt.

“You have to learn it on your own, there’s no book I can show you.”

Yami slammed the door behind him and disappeared from the meadow.

Yami lay on his bed, simply resting and listening to music on his phone through a pair of black earbuds.

“18 hours. Huh. Looks like it’s time to grind out a new anime.”

Yami switched the TV on and loaded a show. He sat on the edge of his bed and as he hit play, he turned his mark invisible.

“Let’s do this!”

“So that’s how it is… I guess I have no choice. I’ll help in any way I can, but to keep this clear, I am not helping for his sake, nor for yours. It’s just repayment for earlier.”

Posche nodded his head.

“Thank you. I know you never wanted to be involved again, but I feel that your skills will be needed once Yami becomes more equipped with his dormant talents.”

Posche walked away from the woman standing in darkness of a shadow.

“As the Jinsei no Hogo, it is inevitable he will find danger. Her healing prowess and medical background will be essential in Yami’s training.”

The time on Yami’s watch was 12:31 a.m., approximately 13 hours after he had started another attempt at maintaining the Transparency Technique. Bits of his mark flashed on his skin, until, with his entire arm falling to his side, the entire mark appeared once again on Yami’s hand. Panting, Yami wiped the set off of his forehead with his left arm.

“That was about 13 hours, and it wasn't completely transparent either! To make matters worse, this was my fourth attempt!”

Standing under the constant drizzle of the shower head, Yami closed his eyes. The sensation of stress seemed to wash away with the water and flow down the drain where it would never be seen again.

“Just like the water, my Sirushi Inochi must be washed away with my life essence.”

Pounding forced Posche to open his door.

“Ah, so you've come. Have you made any progress?”

Yami held his palm up so Posche could see it. It was transparent.

“I’ve held it like this for 23 hours. Is that long enough?”

Posche smirked.

“Why Yami, aren’t we the overachiever today. Come. We’ll start the next part of the training.”

Posche opened the door to the meadow. It was evident that it was early morning in the meadow as well due to the dew found on the grass and the sun’s rays began to warm the chilly atmosphere. Posche rolled up his sleeve and showed Yami where his Sirushi Inochi would be.

“As you already know, the Transparency Technique can be active subconsciously, and as a result require as little effort to control as breathing. This can be done one of two ways. One way is how you have accomplished this feat. You have had to apply a consistent amount of life essence to your Sirushi Inochi in order to keep the technique active, which is not only taxing on your body and life essence, but on your mind as well. You will not be able to concentrate on other tasks you may have at hand, and in turn, your ability to utilize other techniques would be very limited. So in order to counteract this, I will teach you the second way to maintain a Transparency Technique. Using our electricity analogy again, you power it from you soul, which we could say is the main battery, say for a car. Knowing this, we can attempt to make smaller pockets of this container, as if they were AA Batteries. This will make your soul be divided, however, and depending on how big your life partition, or “battery” is, that will be taken out of your soul, yet, they will still be connected. So when you recover life essence, it will fill up your partition as well. Keep in mind that you can still transfer life essence out of your partition to other parts if you so need it, and you can manually shut it down. Anyway, let’s cut the chit-chat.”

Posche walked over to his hammock and revealed a notebook and a pen. On it, he drew a diagram of sorts. A large circle labelled “Soul” covered the majority of the page.

“Here is what we are going to do. You have felt how much constant life essence it took to use Transparency all day, so what you must do is take that amount of energy and form a pocket with it somewhere in your body.”

Posche drew a section of the large circle and showed it moving to the right of it’s predecessor, independent of it.

“You must then hold that pocket of life essence in the area that you want it and your body will begin to develop an envelope around it, and that’s all.”

Yami cracked his knuckles.

“Alright! Here I go!”

As Yami grabbed his forearm, Posche held up his hand.

“Whoa there, I haven’t even told you how to do it!”

Yami let go of his arm, turning back towards Posche.

“So what’s up?”

Posche began.

“Well, you are going to literally tear your soul into smaller chunks. The pain of doing this will likely be intense, and seeing as how you will need to hold your life essence in one place, there is a high probability that you won’t be able to hold it in one place for as long as needed. When this happens, you will need to expend that energy that has built up in your body. The best way to do this, if it does happen, would be to use it through your Sirushi Inochi. However, since you can’t use it, the only option for you would be to expand it through your muscles like you have before.”

Yami smirked.

“You said IF it does. That means I can do it my first try!”

Posche grinned.

“Go get it, Yami!”

Yami grabbed his forearm and began to focus on his life essence.

“I’ve used up about a sixteenth of my overall supply of life essence. I’ll give it just a little bit over that.”

Yami began to focus his life essence into flowing into a pool in his arm. Stopping it just before it reached his Sirushi Inochi, Yami made an outer wall with his life essence and held i firm as more poured into it. Yami gave a grimace of pain.

“I see what Mr. P was talking about when he described the pain. I’m not even halfway there in terms of the amount of life essence, and after that I still have to let it form an envelope around it, and who knows how long that will take!”

Posche saw Yami’s arm began to react to the pain, which led to Yami start to sweat. Posche laid onto his hammock and began to read a book titled “Secrets of Toskophium.”

“If Yami is going to work this hard, maybe I’ll have to out-do him.”

Five minutes passed. Yami was now covered in sweat and gasping for air. He had successfully managed to get the needed amount of life essence gathered into an area in his forearm, but due to the pain, his focus was dwindling.

“I can feel it all. My arm is twitching so badly, my life essence is acting almost ass if it were sloshing around inside of me. At this rate, there’s no way it will be able to get enveloped by my body.”

That’s when Yami felt it. The life essence had begun to solidify. The first of it felt like a stone had been thrown into the pool that was his life essence. Yami smirked.

“I can do this!”

Yami felt a sharp pain in his arm that caused him to flinch. This sent his life essence splashing outside of his container. Worried, Yami attempted to relocate it back into the pool that he had formed. Before he could, however, he felt the part of the pool that was covered by the life essence that had spilled over begin to envelope itself like it had earlier.

“Maybe this’ll help!”

“Hey Mr. P, I’m done.”

Posche looked up from his book. Yami stood over him, drenched with sweat.

“Ah, so you’re giving up this easily? Oh well, you gave it your best sh- Your hand… Don’t tell me you did it.”

Yami’s mark was Transparent. He grinned.

“I did it!”

Posche was taken back.

“My god, he truly is a prodigy! It took me more than five attempts, and here he does it in one!”

“If I may ask,” Posche started, “how did you accomplish this feat?”

“I came up with my own way to speed it up. I had felt the life essence spill over top of another, and in doing so the pool began to harden, so I took a small amount and covered the rest of the pool! Pretty ingenious, right?”

Posche looked at Yami with bewilderment.

“‘Harden’? What do you mean?”

“Well, the pool became enveloped by something almost crystal-like. Is that not how this training was supposed to work out.”

Posche shook his head.

“It should have been a gel-like substance, not crystal. Does it not feel awkward in your arm?”

Yami moved his arm around.

“Nah, not really.”

Posche grinned and patted Yami’s back.

“Well, we’re all different! In any case, good work today. I think we should both get some rest.”

Yami waved his hand as he walked out the door. Posche opened the door after Yami had shut it, leading to a different room that was filled with books, like a personal library of sorts. Placing the book he had been reading earlier into a shelf, Posche walked into another aisle and scanned it, eventually pulling out a book titled “Jinsei no Hogo: A History and Culture.”

“There has to be more to this kid than what any past Jinsei no Hogo has had. There must be an underlying secret that is altering this kid. Crystals? A pattern that has changed? This is different from all of his predecessors.”

Flipping through the book at an astonishing speed, Posche found something that caught his eye. Flipping backwards a few pages revealed a chapter titled “Haisen: The Dark Angel.” Beginning to read the pages, Posche felt a buzz on his phone. He had received a text message.

“Thank christ he’ll help. Hopefully he can help shed some light on this situation, or at least give me some time to research some more on this kid. He exceeds anything I’ve ever seen. I almost fear for his health.”

Posche set the book down on a table near the door and walked out.

Yami arrived at his house, feeling more than ecstatic to not have to wear the old gloves anymore. Shutting his door behind him, he sat down onto the edge of his bed and disrobed, putting on looser garments, sweatpants and a T-Shirt. Falling down onto his back, Yami stared at his ceiling as he felt his eyelids begin to feel heavier. Closing them, Yami fell asleep.

Ass he awoke, he opened his eyes to the meadow where he trained with Posche. He was no longer in his home attire, and Posche was nowhere to be seen. Looking around, Yami called out for Posche, but to no avail. As Yami looked around, there was not even a door for him to exit through.

“Hey kid, where are you going? Come over here! There’s a party!”

Yami looked around.

“Who are you? How did you get here?”

“I am you. Now come, I am just over this way.”

Yami looked over towards the woods.

“Yes, just over here.”

Yami began to jog through the woods, and as he did so, a feeling of insecurity became stronger. Passing over creeks and fallen logs began to make Yami question not only where this voice was leading him, but also where all of the wildlife had disappeared to. As Yami turned a corner, he found a dark, musty cave, whose entrance was covered in moss and vines.

“Please, make yourself at home. It’s been so lonely all these years, I can only imagine how nice it must be to feel the sun’s rays. Do be careful though, I’m afraid I’ve been asleep too long to do any cleaning.”