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.

Now that he had received a vast boost to his power through sacrificing the miraculous coins to the white altar in the Sanctuary of Noctis, less than four hundred fragments stood between him and being able to create a third core.

That meant 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 he chose to avoid.

Their deaths rewarded him with shadow fragments, while their bodies gifted him soul shards that were then sold and converted into Memories, and through those, into shadow fragments as well, this time for Saint to consume. It was a virtuous, but exhausting and wildly dangerous cycle.

And as 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 — and without it, to practice Shadow Dance.

That second task, however, had turned out to be much harder than Sunny expected.

Before plunging back into the Dreamscape, he decided to be careful and check what the situation with Mongrel was. A quick search on the network could tell him if everyone had forgotten about the masked swordsmen or not.

And as it turned out… they did not.

To Sunny's dismay, he found out that in the month of his absence, the people infatuated with Mongrel had not only persisted in their excitement, but also brought it to a whole new, truly ridiculous level.

All of them were flooding the network with theories and discussions, and countless individuals — even those who missed out on the initial sensation — were waiting with bated breaths for one glorious moment.

The return of Lord Mongrel!

With each day that passed, their anticipation only grew stronger.

No matter how discrete Sunny could be, once he appeared in the Dreamscape, it was going to create too much noise and attract too much attention.

'Damn it all! What a disaster!'

He was on verge of pulling his hair out in despair. It was worth remembering that the persona of Mongrel — oh irony! — had been created to help him stay anonymous, potentially in order to safely glean secrets about the sovereigns in the future.

What a joke it was, that the faceless phantom he created ended up being much more famous and recognizable than its creator.

In any case, the situation was seriously messing up Sunny's plans. He simply couldn't use Dreamscape, which caused his progress with Shadow Dance — and the Mantle of the Underworld — to stall.

And if that wasn't enough, there was another unexpected problem he encountered. That one wasn't as inconvenient and pernicious, but made him worry a lot, for whatever reason.

It was that Sunny had not heard from Mordret again after returning from the Ivory Tower.

Despite the fact that several weeks had passed, the lost prince remained gone. Sunny's head, once again, had only one voice resounding in it — his own. Usually, that would have been a good sign, but Mordret's absence made Sunny tense and full of vaguely bad premonitions.

What could have happened to his mysterious helper? Was he simply unable to establish contact outside of the Sky Below and the Ivory Island, or had something happened to him?

There was no answer.

Sunny even took out the mirror shard from the Covetous Coffer and smeared a few drops of blood on it, to no result whatsoever. The piece of mirror remained the same — absolutely dark and refusing to reflect anything.

It was after one of these fruitless attempts that Sunny left Effie to enjoy the dinner he had cooked for them by herself and went out to sit on the porch in a dark mood.

It was early evening, and shadows were slowly growing longer and deeper. Maybe because of his exhaustion, or maybe because of how used he was to being safe in his home, but Sunny got consumed by thoughts and lost track of his surroundings... something that rarely happened.

…That was why he was so shocked to hear someone's voice just a few meters away.

"...What are you staring at?"

Sunny blinked a few times, then focused his sight on the person who had addressed him.

In front of him, at a bit of distance, just between the sidewalk and the path leading to his porch, stood a fourteen-year-old girl in a school uniform, with black hair and dark eyes… and a very unamused expression on her pale face.

Sunny's chest grew cold.

'Crap!'

It was Rain.

Looking right at Sunny, she sighed and repeated:

"I said what are you staring at... brat?"