Shadow Slave

Sunny woke up from the oppressive feeling that drowned the whole world. The sunset was drawing near, and with it, the abyssal shadow of the Crimson Spire had once again fallen on the cursed city.

The distant spire could be seen from anywhere in these somber ruins, looming over the Forgotten Shore like an eternal dark omen. It was cyclopean and unimaginably high, with its roots growing from the endless sea of crimson coral and its peak lost somewhere beyond the veil of grey clouds.

In these past few months, Sunny had gotten accustomed to its presence and learned to not pay it any attention. Thinking about the Spire was a sure road to madness.

After all, somewhere inside that inconceivable structure lay their only hope of ever returning home.

And hope was a poison.

Yawning, Sunny stood up and stretched his arms. His good mood, which he had momentarily lost for some strange reason, was already returning.

Now that he had some time to put the events of the previous night into perspective, he understood even more clearly how amazing his luck had been recently. The acquisition of the Stone Saint and her following transformation into a Shadow were nothing short of miraculous.

His life was about to change for the better!

However, Sunny had to think things through thoroughly. He was in uncharted waters in regards to how to cultivate his pet monster.

The initial excitement he felt after realizing that the Shadow Saint was capable of consuming Memories to collect shadow fragments was gone. In its place, there now was a series of uncomfortable questions.

Sunny had spent somewhere around six months on the Forgotten Shore. In all this time, he had only been able to collect three Memories that were suitable to be fed to the Shadow, giving her mere six shadow fragments.

full years to see his labor bear fruit and find out what exactly was going to happen once the Stone Saint had accumulated all two

years. The King of the Castle himself had only been here for eight, and only lived that

would grow dramatically once the deadly stone knight was added into the equation,

iron chest that stored his painstakingly accumulated fortune of

incredibly rich man. His fortune could buy him a lot of things in the castle, from comparatively simple to increasingly rare and hard

that could be easily bought in that pit of despair he didn't

Memories. Powerful Memories with

could get the same amount of fragments from the most useless of Memories,

the future, he would be able to cultivate the Shadow at double the speed, too — half of the materials coming from the Memories he would be acquiring from slaying monsters, the other from the Memories he would be buying with the soul shards the monsters had left behind. That would potentially reduce the overall timeframe to

big problem

shards, he would inevitably draw a lot of attention. Dealing with random daredevils who would try to rob him, while not pleasant, was not a big problem. But if Gunlaug himself were to become interested in his exploits…

sort of planning

seemed to be blind and deaf to the truth,

frowned and turned away

But first, I'll have to check if consuming Memories is the

to know if the Stone Saint could absorb shadow fragments by slaying

***

the forsaken city. Able to become one with the shadows, he had a certain advantage over anyone else who would dare to explore these cursed ruins in the absolute darkness of the night. However, even he was always

the Fallen creatures who dwelled here from the

out weaker monsters to hunt. There weren't a lot of

Sunny had made into his profession, and that