Shadow Slave

After that night, Sunny became really busy.

'Delegating… that's the secret of success.'

That was his thought after Aiko joined the Brilliant Emporium as a manager. With her help, he went through all the necessary paperwork to make his improvised network store seem legit. Sunny noticed the difference right after listing the soul shards he had gathered from the inhabitants of the Sanctuary for sale. Not only did they got purchased much faster, but the price was also pleasantly higher than expected.

He also didn't need to spend a lot of his severely lacking time on managing sales, delivery, and purchases. Aiko streamlined the process and created a simple and efficient system where he handed her the inventory and the updated information on what items the Awakened wanted to receive from him in the Dream Realm, and she did the rest.

While its volume of sales was not overwhelming, the Brilliant Emporium started functioning as a real business with a constant level of activity and a slowly growing client base. Sunny just had to collect the money and spend it on low-tier Memories to feed to Saint.

Well, and remain alive while getting the soul shards, of course.

Sadly, despite how appreciative of the concept of delegating he became, this was the only part of his busy life that he could entrust to someone else. All the other things he had to do were either too personal, or too secretive to recruit anyone to help.

No one was going to do his research for him, so Sunny had to spend time writing reports, bringing them to Teacher Julius, and working with the old man to make them worthy of being rewarded with contribution points. Nothing had brought him quite as much as the Forgotten Shore report had, but the points were slowly accumulating.

Similarly, now that Cassie was gone on a long expedition, he was the only one of Neph's friends — of which there were only two, really — who could visit her. That was not a burden, but took away some of his time nevertheless.

He also kept an eye on the runes describing her status, and saw the number of soul fragments in her possession increase at a frightening speed almost every day. Sunny didn't know where Nephis was and what she was doing, what kinds of enemies she was fighting, but they must have been as powerful as they were ample in numbers.

He had to keep up.

altar in the Sanctuary of Noctis, less than four hundred fragments stood between him and being able to create

that he had to continue venturing into the wilderness of the Chained Isles to hunt down Nightmare Creatures. Armed with the Cruel Sight and the ability to infuse its blade with either invisible soul damage or radiant divine flame, he was now able to go further than he had before, and challenge creatures that previously

and through those, into shadow fragments

if the pressure of having to keep up with Changing Star wasn't enough, he also had to continue training, both with the spear — with the help of Effie and his taciturn demon

task, however, had turned out to be much harder than

to be careful and check what the situation with Mongrel was. A quick

turned

dismay, he found out that in the month of his absence, the people infatuated with Mongrel had not only persisted in their

and countless individuals — even those who missed out on

of

day that passed, their

Sunny could be, once he appeared in the Dreamscape, it was going to create too much noise and attract

all! What

of Mongrel — oh irony! — had been created to help him

that the faceless phantom he created ended up being much more famous and recognizable than

the situation was seriously messing up Sunny's plans. He simply couldn't use Dreamscape, which caused his progress

one wasn't as inconvenient and pernicious, but made him worry a lot, for whatever

was that Sunny had not heard from

again, had only one voice resounding in it —

mysterious helper? Was he simply unable to establish contact outside of the Sky Below and the Ivory Island,

There was no answer.