Shadow Slave

Sunny lay still for a while, then summoned the runes and looked at the dreadful number:

Shadow Fragments: [197/2000].

He sighed.

The task of pursuing power had turned out to be much more difficult than he had anticipated, and for one simple reason: after becoming an Awakened, he now received fewer fragments from killing Nightmare Creatures.

If before he could get two by slaying an Awakened Monster, now it was one. If before he could receive four by slaying a Fallen Monster, now it was two. What's worse, his hopes of growing strong by hunting down scores of Dormant creatures had been mercilessly crushed, because he didn't receive any fragments from killing those weaker than him at all.

Which was a real disappointment. Who didn't love punching down? Sunny was at the very bottom of the power structure for most of his life, so he had been really looking forward to having an opportunity to bully something weaker than him, for a change. Alas, it had turned out to be a waste of his time.

Of course, Sunny had also become tremendously more powerful. He could handle himself in a fight with Fallen Beasts, and even Monsters… especially with the help of Saint. That was the only reason why he had not fallen off behind Nephis, who was still alive somewhere in the Dream Realm, and growing more powerful with each day.

He had not managed to diminish the gap between them by a lot, but at least he was not worse off than at the start of this.

Thinking of Changing Star, Sunny looked into the distance. A somber expression appeared on his face.

'...Think about something else.'

There was only one bright side to all of this.

While Dormant creatures did not bring him any shadow fragments, they did bring him Memories. And those Memories could be fed to Saint.

Her own counter now showed:

Shadow Fragments: [157/200].

'Not bad…'

low, eerie sound of giant iron links scraping against each other interrupted his thoughts. The island Sunny was currently on seemed

summoned the Moonlight Shard and walked over to the corpse of the Dread Wolf.

Chained

territories claimed by humans, they bordered the Hollow Mountains. That was one of the reasons why Sunny had

wasn't the

the Awakened population here was not very large. Notably, there were not a lot of Masters and Saints here, especially

Nightmare Creatures of all kinds, from Dormant ones, to Awakened, Fallen, and terrifying Corrupted abominations. Each island had its own menagerie of horrors, and the

least he had thought that way, at the start… right now, he was starting to suspect that it was more of a place where he could

said, the Chained Islands

of the Nightmare Creatures. The place itself was capable of killing a person… or, rather, its sky

island, there was the usual sky with the sun, the

there was another sky in this strange land, the one that was below the islands. It was always dark, and the ethereal lights burning at an unimaginable distance in its vast expanse only looked like the stars. No one

thing that humans knew was that the Sky Below was seemingly endless. On his first day on the Isles, Sunny had asked what was down there. The answer he

"Nothing."

into the Below was not immediately dangerous, but there was nothing there. Some crazy daredevil had once fought his way through the hunting grounds of Nightmare Creatures that dwelled beneath the islands and spent a whole week flying straight down. He had to turn back, eventually, because out there in the boundless darkness, his mind began to show signs of breaking apart.

Sky Below

was rather deadly. The higher one went, the more crushing their weight would become, until they would either

Every island in the region went through cycles of ascending and descending, and as they rose too high, the

had to get off the

from the corpses of

glistened with