The first thing they needed to find out about Angor’s right hand was the reason why it absorbed nightmare energy and used such energy to improve Angor’s mana pool.
As universally known in this world, one’s mana pool stored “purified” mana, which was converted from primal mana. How could nightmare energy enter one’s mana pool?
The best approach to do research on this subject was to take Angor somewhere full of nightmare energy, but it seemed that Angor’s soul could not absorb nightmare energy like his right hand, which was proved when he entered the Nightmare Realm in his soul form. This was why Sunders decided to take him to Pocratee.
Besides, Sunders would like to know more about this strange village where Angor broke his limit and became a level-2 apprentice.
While it was true that a plane passageway that connected to the Nightmare Realm was here, the village did not have much nightmare energy drifting about. To better observe Angor’s hand, they had to incite “quantitative change”, meaning, going inside the plane passageway.
After recording the space coordinate of the entrance, Sunders took Angor into the dark portal.
The extremely scarce elements inside the passageway could only support basic cantrips. Sunders used Light to illuminate their surroundings and began wandering inside the passageway with Angor.
Nightmare energy did not exist just anywhere in the passageway. It took them a moment to find a spot where the energy felt rich enough.
As soon as they arrived, something happened to Angor’s right hand.
Sunders asked Angor to take off his glove earlier. Now they could see the green sigils crawling all over Angor’s right hand while eagerly absorbing rays of nightmare energy around him.
Sunders watched for a while before asking, “Do you sense anything dangerous in particular?”
Angor shook his head. Just like when he caused the energy storm but was standing in the storm’s eye, he could not feel anything.
“Check your mana pool.”
“Um, the energy is going for my mana pool and... expanding it.”
Next, Sunders dragged him away from the energy-rich spot, and Angor’s right hand stopped drawing energy when it couldn’t find enough.
“How did you level up so fast last time?” asked Sunders.
“I just, meditate like how I usually did. But the growth of my mana pool was several times faster compared to when I meditate elsewhere.”
“Do it now. I’ll see what will happen to you.”
It wasn’t hard for Angor to enter a meditation state in this tranquil and empty space.
Sunders expected his student to fail because there wasn’t nearly enough primal mana here to use. However, as soon as Angor started meditating, Sunders clearly saw him gathering the drifting nightmare energy around them even though they had retreated to a place where the energy was weaker.
No doubt that the energy was nurturing Angor’s mana pool again.
After several hours, Angor reopened his eyes while feeling extremely refreshed. While meditating in this place, he could almost see his mana pool growing larger and “fed” by the second.
“How did it go?” said Sunders.
Angor carefully examined the condition of his mana pool before saying, “About 20 times more efficient than my usual training. I usually needed a week or two to gain such growth.”
Sunders expected a similar outcome but was still surprised to learn about the amazing result. He already tried and realized he could not meditate here at all. It had to be something to do with Angor’s special property.
Last time Angor was here, he did not have “Shava’s right hand”, which meant absorbing nightmare energy for his own use was originally something Angor could do.
And the right hand only served as a tool that assisted this process.
“Perhaps it’s your Nightmare Form again...”
Unfortunately, Sunders’ own Nightmare Form was rendered unavailable, and they could not easily find another Nightmare Form to help with their research.
Sunders then took out some papers and began calculating something. “You meditated for 6 hours and consumed nightmare energy that equals the capacity of 6.5 standard-sized nightmare stones. Back at the energy-rich area, your right hand took in energy equal to 3, within one minute...”
Sunders reached a shocking conclusion that Angor’s right hand could terrifyingly hasten his training speed.
“Let’s keep going. Now, try to absorb nightmare energy from nightmare stones.”
Angor tried and failed.
“So that’s a no. Maybe the energy stored in nightmare stones had undergone property shifts that made them inactive. Next, I will reach my spirit power into your mindspace and observe how the conversion works.”
Angor nodded and allowed Sunders’ spirit feelers inside.
Time went by swiftly as they were devoted to various tests.
...
One week later, they returned to the abandoned village of Pocratee.
Sunders recorded lots of data during the week, which helped him figure out the properties of Angor’s Nightmare Form more directly. However, the only solid conclusion he had right now was that Angor’s Nightmare Form could utilize nightmare energy extremely well. By doing so, Angor could train faster than some of the most talented apprentices in this world, if they did not take potential drawbacks into consideration.
Angor also learned a lot from the experience. For one, Sunders shared all of his findings with Angor. And during the tests, Angor managed to ascertain how to “switch off” his right hand and prevent it from excessively absorbing energy, as well as the minimum energy level for this “function” to activate.
The secret lay within the green sigils.
As they discovered, the sigils could do three things for Angor at the moment—enhancing his normal illusions and turning them into powerful nightmare illusions; releasing “inactive” nightmare energy into the environment like nightmare stones, which was mainly used for maintaining a Nightmare Domain; thirdly, absorbing available nightmare energy.
They assumed that there were more “functions” to the green sigils, but for now, these three properties were very helpful to Angor.
If Angor was to go to Sleepless City again, he no longer needed to use his soul form because he could tell his right hand to stop absorbing energy, which might cause energy storms.
On a side note, Sunders had not discovered any obvious defects regarding Angor’s ability. Even so, Angor claimed that he would not rely on this method unless necessary since the extra strength was not gained through effort.
Though this did not help them understand the nature of Angor’s Nightmare Form in the least, they did allow Angor to stop his right hand from causing unnecessary troubles.
They spent another day at Pocratee, during which Sunders did some further observations about the village.
Meanwhile, Angor also wandered around the place and pretended that he was “observing”, with the true intention of looking for the “Staff of Immortality”, which was mentioned by the Grand Priest of Krakoks.
Angor had an assumption that Dodoro’s strange water bowl was actually the staff since Dodoro himself had lived for a thousand years as a mortal, which should absolutely be considered as “immortal”.
Yet Angor had checked the item many times and never discovered anything special with it.
Since he had a chance now, he thought about looking around the village again, more carefully this time.
But once again, it was soon proved that Pocratee was simply a deserted mortal village. There were no supernatural-related items at all or anything of interest for that matter. Angor only found several medicine books composed by mortals, which were rotten beyond use.