Shadow Slave

Some time later, Sunny was in his kitchen, eating the breakfast he had just prepared. He was thinking of all the things on his to-do list.

They were, in no particular order: selling the soul shards he had brought with him from the Dream Realm, and setting up a stable method to sell more in the future; returning to the Dreamscape to participate in duels on the professional arenas to practice Shadow Dance and feed the Mantle of the Underworld with victories; observing Rain and thinking of a way to deal with that whole situation; learning how to properly fight with a spear; visiting Neph; writing a report about the Noctis coins for Teacher Julius.

There were probably more things he had to do, but was forgetting. But he already had enough on his plate.

Finishing the breakfast and staring toward the door of the guest bedroom, where Effie still slept while her spirit wandered the Dream Realm, he shook his head and went out to sit on the porch as he drank some delicious tea.

It was early morning. Sunny enjoyed the pleasant view of the terrace district, watched as Rain walked to the public transport hub on her way to school, and then activated his communicator.

He was going to start with the simplest of tasks.

Navigating to the market section of the network, he habitually imputed his identification number to access the Awakened section of it. Sunny had browsed the wares there before, even if back then he barely had enough money to buy anything.

Today, however, things were different. Today, he was approaching the network as a seller, not as a buyer.

Sunny entered "soul shards" as the keywords and stared at the listings, appreciating the number of zeroes in their prices. It seemed as though the value of shards was not uniform… of course, the higher Rank shards cost much more. But people, strangely, also seemed to care about what Nightmare Creature the crystal came from, and how it had been defeated.

'What the hell?'

were very interested in this sort of thing. Some superstitious Awakened also believed, for

'Weirdos…'

Awakened out there with a pure soul. Even the best of them were

were all pretty much the same, coming from terrible monsters and

was going

pricing, Sunny opened the form to create his own digital shop. Without thinking too much, he named it "Brilliant Emporium" and went

the time to put his soul shards into the auction. Sunny

himself. Before that, the Mordant Mimic had been pretending to be a treasure chest and devouring those lured by the promise of treasure. In the end,

and stared at it

nothing of

sigh, Sunny deactivated the communicator and

I will

***

soul shard to sell. After that, Sunny had to arrange secure delivery, which was somewhat of

how to make his business really boom. Even though the product he was trying to sell was first class — there was not a lot of Fallen Rank soul shard out there, compared to Dormant and Awakened ones — the bidding had not really taken off. He did make a sizable amount of money, but not as

else would ever want to buy, and made the minimum offer. Whoever it was selling

them, but before that, he spent a lot of time training with the Cruel

a short sword, but a spear was an alien beast to him. Even though Sunny