“I don’t like learning through manuals. Teach me the same way I taught you.”

“Just read it first, then I’ll teach you. It’ll be easier if you’ve already got an idea of how to use the skill before we start going through it.” Wasn’t it only natural to study the theory behind something before attempting to put it into practice?

She snatched the manual and looked down at its leather cover with disinterest. Not caring for his response, her hand was abruptly engulfed in a cloak of crimson energy and the book was burnt up by the volatile inner essence until nothing remained.

Giving his head a light shake, he raised his right hand and conjured an ethereal spear of a dark red hue.

“You know the inner essence circulation routes for the Crippling Blood Palm? It’s pretty similar for this skill, but instead of moving your energy in circles as it goes throughout your body, move them in a sort of rectangular pattern.”

Sersa closed her eyes and began to meditate.

Sensing the movement of energies around her, he said, “Okay, now activate the skill as if you’re about to use the Crippling Blood Palm.”

A loose mass of dark red energy exploded from her right hand as she held her arm out to the side in anticipation of the skill’s activation. A large pressure bore down on everything within a radius of two hundred metres as several trees were engulfed by the rampant inner essence as if illuminated by a dim flash of devious light, though much of the bark was torn from their trunks by the force of the expulsion.

“Whoa, whoa, stop it! Are you trying to broadcast our location or what?”

She cut off the supply of inner essence and both the energy and the pressure abruptly disappeared. “That was nothing like a spear.”

“Jesus, why did you put so much strength into it? It’s your first attempt, so of course it’s not going to happen perfectly.” Raising the energy that he’d summoned, he said, “See how mine is shaped like a rectangle? Your first goal should be to create something like this. What just happened tells me that you weren’t following the right inner essence circulation patterns. The routes are the same as the other skills you know, since this one is meant to manifest around your hands, but the rotations need to be perfect.”

“I did the rectangular approach just like you said.”

“Try again, but with smaller rectangles. And only use a little bit of energy.”

Essentially, she needed to rotate her energy in localized shapes while also circulating these rotating shapes throughout her body via her inner essence channels, similar to how a teacup ride at a theme park spun in circles while the platform atop which these spinning cups were fixed was also spun in circles.

Her second attempt was much better than the first, as she managed to create a coffin-shaped mass of energy about the same length as an adult man. It wasn’t until several hours later that she managed to successfully conjure a staff-like mass of energy, though she would still require many days of practice before she could create an actual spear with the proper composition of energy necessary to throw it let alone to give life to its paralyzing effects.

“I’ll have to admit, it’s much easier to learn than I thought it would be.” Quieter, she said, “I wonder why only the great elders are allowed to learn it?”

“Because it’s probably the strongest offensive martial skill the sect has.” He couldn’t help but wish that the chained woman had taught him more of the many skills that she doubtlessly knew, as she had claimed that the Life-Severing Spear was a very common and low-class technique in whatever world it was that she had come from.

While the Crippling Blood Palm, the Scarlet Serpent Strike and the Scarlet Serpent Summoning techniques were very powerful in their own rights, the Life-Severing Spear carried tremendous amounts of force condensed at its tip, making it so that he rarely needed to make use of its special effects due to the fact that the vast majority of the disciples that he victimized simply burst into mists of blood and tiny bits of gore whenever they were hit with the skill in question.

Sersa snickered to herself, glancing down at the black-on-silver robes that Jason had ripped off of the Bloodhand Sect’s uniforms down to the bloody hand stitched onto the left area of the breast. “Who would have thought that things would’ve turned out like this? Back when we first made our little agreement, I honestly thought that my days were numbered. You…where did you learn how to create master-slave contracts? I only need two hands to count the amount of people on the continent that can make them.”

“Really? It’s literally a leisurely breeze.”

“Who taught you arrayments? Surely your master is a grand figure.”

“I told you, I don’t have a master. What I’ve learned, it’s all a product of my own efforts.” Of my own suffering, he thought, pushing past traumas to the depths of his psyche.

With all of the knowledge that he’d forcibly attained from Actius and his sibling disciples after undergoing a botched soul meld with the five of them, he had hundreds of arrayments at his fingertips. The reason why he was so wary of Actius’s soul fragment despite the fact that he had definitively sealed it away within the depths of his subconscious was that the other party was an Arrayment Master with untold thousands of arrayments at his disposal. Actius had been the most prolific prodigy in his world’s history, someone so talented that he’d been able to almost instantaneously create any new arrayment that he conceptualized in his mind.

No matter how confident Jason was in the strength and efficiency of the seal that he’d placed on the Neoman’s soul, he couldn’t suppress the growing suspicion that Actius might have preserved his awareness in some subtle way. If this were indeed the case, then there existed a strong chance that the Arrayment Master was lying in wait until the day that Jason met up with Nolan once more, which would present him with the perfect opportunity to possess Jason’s body and kill his friend in order to acquire the archaic ring that he had sought after for millions of years.

“You space out a lot. Why’s that, I wonder?”

Pushing his anxieties from his mind, he returned his focus to Sersa. “Good question.” A break in the cloud cover allowed a bright swath of moonlight to illuminate the clearing, which was covered in a coating of bluegrass and the occasional patches of lavender. Something about the way the moon shone down on him at this moment prompted him to draw out a subconscious arrayment that saw dozens of transparent discs appear in the air above, all of which were quickly dispersed at calculated intervals where they caught and refracted the moonlight in an attractive manner. Shortly after, a large amount of rainbows lit up the clearing to create the image of an iridescent lily at the centre of the schematic.

Why did I…?

Realizing that his actions had been spurred on by impulses that he’d inherited from Actius during the soul meld, he abruptly dismissed the lightshow with an almost desperate wave of his arm. Nobody would ever understand, he thought, the feeling of acting on the impulses of another.

Sersa watched him with curious eyes, her light, sandy hair bunching up around her arms as she crossed them just below her breasts. “Where did that come from?”

“Who knows.”

He’d inherited more than just memories from the forbidden ritual that he’d been subjected to in that nightmarish independent space. Habits, likes, dislikes, fears, preferences—he’d realized over recent weeks that some of the Neomen’s idiosyncrasies were creeping up here and there and influencing his personal behavior. At this point he had full control over all of the memories that he’d inherited, but it had become disturbingly apparent that pieces of Actius and his martial siblings lived on within his soul. Based on the man’s memories, this meant that there was a very slim chance that these soul fragments could be reassembled into the incomplete souls of his fallen friends, which could recover to their full strengths given that they were provided with enough time and nourishment. Only, for that to happen Jason’s life would have to be laid on the line as it went against the natural order of things to separate an existing soul in the same way that it was dangerous to forcibly combine them.

In a less judgmental voice than he was used to hearing from her, Sersa glanced up at the now-dark area above their heads with a bit of regret. “I’ve never seen something like that. I’d been of the mind that arrayments only had practical purposes.”