Shadow Slave novel Chapter 1255

Chapter 1255 Dancing Spirits

With a faint smile on her face, Nephis nodded and raised her sword, pointing it at him in invitation. Sunny summoned the Sin of Solace and took a stance opposite her. From the Forgotten Shore to the basement of his home in the peaceful terrace district, they had trained with each other numerous times. This simple sequence of actions was as natural for them as breathing.

However, today, there was an awkward pause.

Sunny scratched the back of his head and glanced at the jade jian.

"That… isn't going to work, is it?"

Nephis seemed to have come to a similar conclusion, looking at him sheepishly.

'No, what the hell… since when does she know how to emote? This is just too cute…'

He coughed.

The problem facing them was that both had grown too powerful — and, subsequently, the weapons they used were too powerful, too. The Sin of Solace was a Transcendent Memory of the Fifth Tier, and quite a harrowing one at that. Sunny was not entirely sure what the level of Neph's longsword was, but it had to be quite a menacing weapon, as well, considering that it had come from the soul arsenal of a Saint.

It would be already bad enough if the Sin of Solace damaged or destroyed it. But what if Sunny was not careful enough and scratched Nephis in the process? The curse of madness carried by the jade blade would either crush her mental defenses, or at least put debilitating pressure on her mind for a period of time.

Standing some distance away, the spirit of the jian smiled.

"No, no. Don't worry… I'll be gentle."

However, that smile of his was more than a little bit sinister.

Sunny frowned, then dismissed the jade sword and got lost in thought for a few moments. Eventually, a smile of delight appeared on his lips.

"Let's do this."

The shadows around them suddenly moved and flowed toward him, then slowly formed into two inky black swords. One of them was a fearsome odachi, while the other was an elegant longsword.

The odachi was easy to create — this was one of the shapes Sunny had practiced relentlessly, after all. The longsword was a little bit tricky, since he had never created one before. Nevertheless, he was familiar with it as well, and so managed to produce a passable one with some effort.

One would think that manifesting shadows into a weapon would be easier than shaping them into articulated hands, since weapons were static by nature. However, in reality, shaping a sword was just as complex of a task.

A good sword had to possess certain characteristics to feel right in the hand — weight, balance, flexibility and rigidity, center of percussion that Neph had recently mentioned, and so on. It was especially daunting with something like the odachi, which possessed a flexible edge and a rigid spine.

To improve in that regard, Sunny had even studied a bit of blacksmithing on the network. Back then, Clan Valor had been preventing him from visiting the Dream Realm, so he had a lot of free time.

There were many levels to Shadow Manifestation, and shaping was only the most basic of them. Sunny could also affect the material composition of the manifested shadows, although that demanded a higher essence expenditure. He could manipulate the density of the shadows, for example. He could make them feel like steel or porous limestone.

With some effort, he could even make them slippery or adhesive. In the past, all these internal transformations had been very difficult to achieve, but after inventing Shadow Incarnation, Sunny made a breakthrough in his mastery of Shadow Manifestation as well. Now, it was much easier.

All that was to say…

When Nephis dismissed her longsword and curiously took the shadow weapon from his hand, he secretly held his breath. She weighed the black longsword, then swung it a few times to test how it felt. Then, she nodded in satisfaction.

"That works."

Sunny suppressed a proud smile and raised his odachi.