Shadow Slave

With pretty much every muscle in his body sore, Sunny walked over to the girls and fell on the ground. After catching his breath, he looked at Cassia.

“Cassie? Do you feel better?”

Several seconds later, the blind girl slowly nodded.

‘That’s a relief.’

He shifted and hesitated for a bit. Cassia didn’t look too well. Her face was still very pale, with a distant, dazed expression on it. Her body at least was no longer trembling. Sunny wasn’t very good at talking to people, let alone placating them. He wasn’t sure what to say.

He cast a gaze at Nephis and sighed inwardly. Who knew that one day he would turn out to be the most sociable person for as far as the eye could see? What a joke…

“Can I have some water?”

Cassie turned to him and scowled, as though confused by the question. Then, she suddenly gasped and opened her eyes wide.

“Oh! Oh, sorry. Yes, of course…”

She summoned the limitless water bottle and offered it to Sunny. He took it with a grateful smile and greedily drank a few gulps before giving the bottle to Nephis. Eventually, it returned to Cassie.

“You drink some too.”

After she did, he awkwardly patted the blind girl on the shoulder.

“Everything seems to be fine now. Uh… did you dream of another vision? You can tell us. If you want.”

Cassie hesitated for a bit before saying:

“I… don’t know. Maybe it was just a nightmare.”

Sunny and Nephis exchanged glances. They both doubted that what Cassie saw was a simple nightmare. After all, people usually did not dream in the Dream Realm. The blind girl, meanwhile, continued:

“I don’t really remember. It’s all in fragments.”

Sunny carefully considered his words, not wanting to pressure Cassie too much.

“You can just tell us what you remember. Maybe we’ll be able to make sense of it together.”

Cassia sighed and tentatively nodded. After a long pause, she finally found the courage to speak:

“At first, I saw a… a boundless darkness locked behind seven seals. Something vast was churning in the darkness. I felt like if I directly saw it, I would lose my mind. As I watched, terrified, the seals broke one after another, until only one remained. And then that seal broke, too.”

She trembled a little.

“After that… I don’t know. It was as though my mind shattered into a thousand shards, each shard reflecting its own image. Most of them were dark and scary. Some I have already forgotten. The other…”

Cassie fell silent, remembering.

castle was suddenly consumed by fire, with rivers of blood flowing down its halls. I saw a corpse in a golden armor sitting on a throne; a woman with a bronze spear drowning in a tide of monsters;

looked up, her face full of

guarding seven locks. And at the top, a… a dying angel was being consumed by hungry

Her voice became quieter.

that what little remained of my sanity

sense of what Cassie had told them. Even if Nephis had an idea, she didn’t show it. Sunny, however, was totally lost. He couldn’t even begin to decipher the hidden meaning behind the vision… if it even was

showed her a human fortress and even the direction in which it was situated. This time, however, her dream was disjointed, full of weird symbolism and vague, uncertain images, much

Finally, he sighed.

just a nightmare. Your previous visions

shook her

back of his

seeing a random nightmare once in a while is a side

him, a faint relief

“You really think so?”

hesitated, trying to

It’s a

however, he

stay away from angels in the future.

finally ready

***

later, they were sitting on the western edge of the stone platform, looking at the scavengers below. Sunny’s shadow was busy scouting a path to the

always

Nephis and

seem to be almost done with the carcass.

three Sleepers to make any progress. It would be best to leave today and put

was a chance of not making it to safety in time.

frowned, seemingly thinking the

while,

spend another night near

offer his own opinion. However, a sudden commotion

of the disappearing sea, amidst mounds of broken coral, the carcass of the giant shark-like monster — the remaining half of it, to be precise — was almost stripped of meat. And between its white bones, something was shimmering

large, luminescent

Sunny’s eyes widened.

“Are those…”

two

Transcendent… two of them…

he was simultaneously filled with greed and fear. Greed because of how rare and precious transcendent soul shards were; fear because the giant shark turned to a be a corrupted devil,

entire city. Sunny belatedly realized