Sunders checked again and saw several more scrolls scattered on the other side of the bed. But these were “fake”—shapes with no functions, just like Sunders’ own alchemy items such as the ear nail that contained the gravity garden. Visually, they were there, yet they didn’t really exist.
But why is “Aster Barrier” alive? What happened to it? Did Angor do something?
He looked at his student again, especially that weird top hat with a picture of a smiling face on it.
The hat also became real.
As he remembered, this hat with Purification Field came from Devildare. He was sure the hat was another useless phantom item before he left Angor to explore elsewhere.
Sunders slowly had a conjecture in his mind: Perhaps this was the true ability of Angor’s Nightmare Form?
Truthful or not, he could tell from Angor’s terrible condition that doing so cost him a lot of energy.
Sunders sighed and put away everything he collected. No matter what plans he had, he had to wait until Angor woke up.
...
Angor was out for ten Nightmare Realm days. Without certain items such as soul orbs, spent soul energy required a lot of time to recover. Even if Angor knew about training methods that could help with this case, he couldn’t do it while sleeping.
An ordinary apprentice who had their soul depleted so much would fall into imminent danger and perish. Angor stayed well and alive due to the strange scar on his back, which ardently pumped pure soul energy that filled the emptiness in Angor’s soul.
It took ten days for Angor to regain enough soul energy to wake up.
The first thing he saw was Sunders, who sat beside a lit fireplace while looking at a glowing magic scroll.
“Welcome back,” Sunders said when he heard Angor moving.
“Oh, professor...” Angor sat up slowly. “How long did it take?”
“Ah, so you know you lost it? This means your memory is fine. Ten days, by the way. Did you have any strange dreams again?”
Ten days? Angor wasn’t anxious to hear this. The concept of time didn’t matter when they were inside the Nightmare Realm. After all, when they returned to reality, they would find that only one or two seconds had passed.
“No, sir, didn’t have any.” Angor climbed down from his bed and joined Sunders beside the fire. He was glad that the fire was real enough to warm up the small room around them.
“About these...” Sunders swung the Aster Barrier scroll and then pointed to Angor’s top hat. “Still remember them?”
“... Yes.”
“Tell me then. And how did you knock yourself out again?” Sunders turned to look at the fire, allowing Angor to observe his handsome face against the bright light.
Angor knew what Sunders meant to ask and took a moment to arrange his words.
...
“You... ‘want’ them to come to you, and they did?” Sunders widened his eyes just a bit after listening to Angor’s explanation.
Angor nodded. This was how he succeeded in the first attempt when trying to make Aster Barrier appear. There was only a flicker of mind... Poof!
“Your mind can affect projections?” Sunders frowned at the strange yet wonderful possibility.
“I was so happy that I ‘brought’ something, so I quickly tried again on my hat. I didn’t realize the lack of soul energy when I tried to bring my bracelet here as well...” Angor’s voice slowly turned into a whisper.
Sunders checked the boy’s wrist, where the bracelet looked blurry and phony.
“Let me guess, you strained your soul without realizing it and fainted on the bed?” Sunders finished the rest of Angor’s answer.
“Correct, sir.” Angor nodded helplessly.
“It’s just reasonable... You can’t create items out of projections freely. Since your bracelet is a space storage with all types of other objects inside, you can’t ‘bring’ it into Nightmare Realm easily. Still... your Nightmare Form is VERY powerful.”
Taking items from reality into Nightmare Realm meant solidifying their projections, which was one of the core properties of the entire Nightmare Form. Sunders asked Angor to do the test mainly out of curiosity, yet he did not believe that Angor would succeed for real.
Angor just opened up a whole new option for future Nightmare Realm explorations. They could bring different powerful items and weapons and use them against threats.
It seemed that Angor’s current level of strength would not allow him to take many things. However, as Angor’s soul continued to grow, this ability of his would grow as well, and it would only be better in the future.
Once Angor could bring a space storage to the Nightmare Realm, their survivability and chances of obtaining great loot would be multiplied.
Deadly might it be, all wizards who ever stumbled into Nightmare Realm would admit that this place was a huge treasure vault. It wasn’t difficult to find priceless prizes such as Singularity Dispersive Meditation. This unparalleled channeling method book was openly displayed on someone’s desk in Stairs of Hanging Prison, with almost no monsters guarding it. Anyone could take it as long as they knew how to bring the book or its content back to reality.
For this reason, Sunders now considered Angor’s value above everything else he ever got his hands on.
An idea struck his mind, which told him to hide Angor somewhere absolutely secure and never let Angor see light again, thus eliminating all possible threats that might find their way to the boy.
When he looked at the pure and knowledge-thirsty soul sitting in front of him, Sunders chose to discard those dark thoughts.
A thriving little eagle grows his wings by facing freedom and challenges...
After settling his mind, Sunders comforted Angor that he would be able to “materialize” items better as he gained strength. Also, Sunders created a detailed research project, which was used to figure out how Angor’s “soul energy consumption rate” was related to the created items.
It wasn’t difficult for them to reach several initial conclusions.
Materializing common items required negligible soul energy.
For wizardry items, depending on their natures and types, Angor needed to spend 1/5 to 1/2 of the total energy held by the item.
And lastly, Angor could only bring out items he was carrying; he couldn’t create things out of thin air.
After learning these, Sunders would like to know whether Angor could bring lifeforms into existence too. However, he soon decided otherwise because the complexity of a living specimen might dangerously exhaust Angor’s soul energy. Besides, Angor wasn’t carrying any creatures with him.
This meant they had completed one of the main tasks for coming here. Next, they had to find out what kind of items or how many of them that Angor could take back to reality.
Sunders dropped everything he looted from Witch’s Town in front of Angor. This place was projected based on a mortal settlement in the wizarding world, so there weren’t many wizardry-related items. Apart from common objects, Sunders’ “payload” contained some weak magical plants and two monster corpses.
One of them was an unknown beast that lived in the town’s well. The monster had remained dead for quite some time, which caused its body to rot into gluey liquid. Sunders took the liquid that contained the energy of a half-step wizard-level monster using a random bucket he found beside the well.
The other one was a Bloodrose Ghoul; it looked like a skeleton entangled by rose vines. Angor’s keen eyes of an alchemist told him that both the bones and the Bloodrose Ghoul were top-class alchemy materials. Although he had no idea about the details.
Angor thought their adventure finally came to an end when Sunders asked him to carry everything. This meant that he had to lift the bucket in one hand and grab the ghoul’s body in the other while all sorts of items and magical plants were stuffed in various places on his body.
Instead of preparing to leave, Sunders took him to the oil painting where the old witch was hiding within.
Sunders believed that this painting was the most mysterious artifact in the entire Witch’s Town. After some consideration, he decided to consider the painting as another item to be tested by Angor.
Sunders already tried his best to seal the painting so that nothing could get out. To be absolutely safe, he only asked Angor to touch it at the last moment.
When they put the two halves of Twisting Protozoa together, they once again saw the space around them shattering in a spiderweb form.
“Take the painting and let’s move!”