Shadow Slave novel Chapter 2553

The graceful silhouette of the Ivory Island drifted among the clouds above Bastion. Contoured against the golden sun, it looked both beautiful and peaceful from the ground... however, the atmosphere within the walls of the Tower of Hope was far from tranquil.

In fact, it was tense and somber despite the suffocating power of the five people gathered in a spacious council room on one of the great pagoda's seven floors.

Sunny, Nephis, Cassie, Effie, and Kai were seated around a table, wearing grim expressions. Cassie was talking, and the more she said, the heavier the mood in the room became.

Sunny heard each word clearly and grasped their meaning flawlessly.

At the same time...

He found himself getting distracted as his newly altered mind spread far and wide, absorbing thousands of different perspectives with the same degree of focused clarity.

It was a strange state of being, and one he was still failing to get used to. The reason for his current state was, of course, the fragment of Weaver's lineage he had collected in the Palace of Imagination...

Mind Weave.

‘No wonder I was out cold for so long.'

The four previous fragments had put him out of commission for a short while and caused him indescribable agony. Absorbing and assimilating them had been a torment — but the Mind Weave was different.

Maybe it was because it had altered his mind on a fundamental level, or maybe it was because the suffering had been too great to endure even for someone as used to pain as Sunny, but he simply passed out as soon as Weaver's awful reflection fused with his own. So, he did not remember experiencing any pain at all.

That was a wonderful boon, without a doubt... however, Sunny had remained unconscious for two weeks as a result.

The chaos his absence had caused was significant. The conquest campaign in the Burned Forest had almost collapsed, the restoration of the Dark City had fallen behind schedule, and the numerous projects he had been busy with had stalled. Nothing he couldn't salvage had transpired, luckily, but there was plenty of catching up he had to do.

If there was one silver lining that had come out of this mess, though...

It was that Nephis seemed to have thawed after their recent spat. In fact, she was more attentive to him now than she had been before, albeit in a subtle way... which secretly pleased Sunny a great deal.

The body of a Sovereign was enormously enduring, meaning that a few weeks of coma were not going to harm it in any way — so, Nephis had not really nursed him back to health. But staying by his unconscious body for many days, not knowing when his condition would improve, must have rattled her quite a lot, or at least forced her to put things into perspective. No, not even an unconscious body... with Sunny out cold, his incarnations were released and reverted back to being independent shadows. That must have been even more difficult for Nephis to endure.

As a result, the distance between them disappeared, almost making it seem like there was no disagreement between them.

Almost...

Sunny sighed slightly.

In any case, he did come back to his senses eventually. And when he did, the world was quite different from how it had been before — or at least Sunny perceived it differently from how he had before.

The difference was so startling, in fact, that he had spent a few more days entirely disoriented.

It was difficult to describe the tectonic shift that had happened to him with words. Mind Weave... did not exactly make him smarter, wiser, or more intelligent. However, it did increase the volume of his mind immensely, making it seem almost limitless.

Sunny was not unfamiliar with this trait, since he had achieved something of the sort himself over the years. First learning to perceive and process the world from both his own point of view and that of his shadow, then slowly expanding the scope of his mind to encompass all of his incarnations while at the same time learning to cope with the increasing reach of his shadow sense.

Sunny's control over the Shadow Legion had increased tremendously, for example. His ability to envision and execute impossibly complex and intricate patterns while weaving had taken an enormous leap, as well — so much so that it felt like he had been crippled before, and was only now experiencing weaving as it was meant to be. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

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