The moment Sunny surrendered to shadow, the world ceased to resist him.
Sound dulled. Pressure vanished. The violent tremors born from colliding Saints became distant ripples passing through an ocean in which he no longer possessed weight. His body, dissolved by Shadow Step, was no longer flesh or bone but a two–dimensional truth pressed flat against reality. He existed as absence — a silhouette etched across broken stone.
Becoming a physical shadow was simple in principle and brutally delicate in execution. His Awakened Ability allowed him to step between states, but sustaining that state while shaping it was another matter entirely. If his focus slipped, even slightly, he would either snap back into his human form or disperse into formless darkness, vulnerable and exposed. There was no muscle memory to rely on here. No instinct. Only control.
And control, fortunately, was something Sunny possessed in excess.
The first step was expansion.
The Shadow Lantern continued to vomit darkness into the battlefield, its [Gates of Shadow] held open by his will. The shadows pouring from it were not ordinary silhouettes cast by light — they were dense, ancient, and obedient. In his intangible state, Sunny reached outward with Shadow Control, the Dormant Ability that had once required deliberate concentration but now responded to him as naturally as breath.
He overlaid the released shadows onto himself.
They did not simply gather. They merged.
His own shadow, bound intimately to his soul, acted as an anchor. The foreign darkness flowed into it, layering, thickening, expanding his silhouette outward like ink spreading across parchment. What had once been the shape of a human grew broader, taller, more grotesque. Limbs stretched. A tail elongated. Horns began to curve from what would have been his brow.
But this was only raw material.
A mound of clay.
The second step was blueprint.
Within the silent, depthless stillness of shadow, Sunny summoned a memory older than his current body — older than the current era's fragile balance of politics and Aeons. He summoned the image of the creature he had once been during the Second Nightmare: the Shadowspawn in its prime.
The apex — an Awakened Devil to be adapted into an Ascended Demon.
He held the image in his mind with absolute precision. The elongated and curved spine that allowed for impossible contortions. The inverted knees designed for explosive bursts of speed. The extra pair of horns that had emerged when his Devil-ranked body reached its zenith. Four skeletal arms, each long enough to strike from angles humans could not comprehend. The tail — heavy, muscular, predatory — capable of crushing bone or anchoring his body mid-motion.
Shadow Dance guided the visualization.
It was not merely a fighting style. It was a method of understanding form through motion. Sunny did not imagine the Shadowspawn as a static sculpture; he imagined it moving. Attacking. Twisting. Leaping. He imagined the way its weight distributed through limbs, the way its center of gravity shifted during a spin, the way its claws met resistance and tore through it.
Only then did he begin construction.
He started by subtracting.
A body of shadows required no blood. No organs. No lungs. No fragile systems of digestion or respiration. Those were weaknesses inherent to flesh. He erased them from the design. Where a human body required arteries and veins to circulate life, he repurposed those pathways into channels for Shadow Essence. Where nerves once transmitted pain and sensation, he wove conduits for awareness — intangible lines that connected his core to every extremity.
The musculoskeletal framework came next.
Bones were unnecessary, yet structure was not. He formed a lattice of compressed shadow to serve as an internal skeleton — denser along stress points, flexible along joints. The spine he crafted with obsessive care, segmenting it into articulated plates that allowed for serpentine flexibility without sacrificing stability. Each of the four shoulders required independent reinforcement; each joint needed to bear rotational forces beyond human tolerance.
He thickened the thighs, reinforced the inverted knees, and shaped the feet into clawed structures capable of gripping earth or blade alike. The tail received its own internal framework — layered segments that could coil or snap with whip-like precision.
All of this he sculpted directly onto his own shadow and the surrounding darkness, using Shadow Control not as a blunt instrument but as a surgeon's hand. The blueprint existed first within his mind, then upon his soul, and finally in the layered mass of shadows obeying him.
The horns were last.
Four of them, curving backward and outward from a skull that was no longer human. He shaped the cranium elongated, reinforced, and ridged — not merely for aesthetics, but for impact. The horns were not decorative. They were weapons and anchors, capable of hooking, piercing, and tearing.
As the body grew more complete, Sunny felt something shift within himself.
The human mind, constrained by flesh and social conditioning, loosened its grip. The Shadowspawn was not polite. It did not second-guess. It did not hesitate to maim when killing was an option. During the Second Nightmare, that mindset had been his greatest weapon.
Now, he welcomed it.
He allowed his thoughts to align with the body he was forging. His perception broadened. His priorities sharpened. Efficiency over elegance. Kill zones over flourishes. Yet he did not abandon his humanity — he integrated it. The grace he had learned as a swordsman fused with the brutality of a Nightmare Creature. Shadow Dance bridged the gap, ensuring body and mind were not disharmonious.
He refused to become a puppet of instinct.
He would be its master.
The final step required commitment.
Until now, the structure existed in the intangible plane — a shadow layered upon shadow, blueprint impressed upon essence. To make it real, to give it weight and presence in the physical world, he invoked his Ascended Ability: Shadow Manifestation.
The peaceful silence shattered.
Darkness condensed.
He felt gravity seize him again as the mass of shadows compressed, folding inward around his core. What had been two-dimensional thickened into three. Depth returned. Resistance returned. The world rushed back in.
And less than a second had passed since he entered the shadows.
The Shadowspawn Shell stood upon the broken shoreline, jet-black skin rippling.
Four-armed and crowned with horns.
Layers of shadow clung to its frame like living smoke, coiling and dispersing with every subtle movement. Within its chest, buried beneath reinforced folds of darkness, Sunny's true shadow — the one that represented his soul — pulsed quietly. It was protected now, but not invulnerable. A precise attack could still pierce through if he grew careless — leading to soul damage even if it was a physical attack.
He flexed one clawed hand.
Strength flooded him.
This body was designed for predation. Humans relied on Aspects, intelligence, and Essence manipulation to overcome creatures stronger by default. Now he possessed both — the innate lethality of a Nightmare Creature and the cultivated mastery of an Ascended swordsman.
He attempted to inhale.
There was no breath.
No lungs expanded.
And yet, he perceived the world.
Vision returned in monochrome. Color vanished entirely, replaced by gradations of light and shadow. He did not know how he saw without nerves or eyes in the traditional sense, but he suspected the mechanism mirrored how he used his shadows as scouts.
Strangely, the independent shadows he commanded retained color.
He did not.
It amused him. Surely, those fools wouldn't get cocky.
He attempted to speak.
Nothing emerged.
'Of course.'
Without vocal cords, there could be no sound. So he summoned the Extraordinary Rock, conjuring it into one of his hands before pressing it into his maw and allowing it to fall down his shadow-formed throat. When he spoke again, the voice that reverberated outward was deep and layered, echoing from within the fiend's chest.
"Yanqing… bare yourself to me!"
The Mantle of the Underworld flowed over him next, reshaping to fit the monstrous anatomy. Onyx armor clasped around elongated limbs and reinforced spine, encasing tail and shoulders in hell-forged plates. Soul Serpent returned to his grasp in the shape of a massive odachi, proportioned now to match his towering frame.
Finally, Weaver's Mask appeared over his face.
With its three false horns layered atop the four real ones, he appeared crowned by seven.
Yanqing stared.
Behind him, dragons and demon-blacksmith reshaped the heavens and earth with each collision, but for a moment, the young swordsman's attention was wholly captured by the figure before him.
Then battle fever reignited in his gaze.
He raised a hand.
And drove it into his own eye.
The act was so sudden, so deliberate, that even Sunny stilled. Blood spilled down Yanqing's cheek as he tore free the orb, and in its place something bloomed — a stem of steel unfurling into a bladed flower.
Sunny's expanded shadow sense pierced into Yanqing's soul.
The change was immediate.
His Soul Core, which had been steadily draining, surged violently. Essence flooded back into him in quantities that defied conventional limitation.
Yet it was not the oppressive dominance of an Aeon's will. There were traces — hints of The Hunt's sharp focus, whispers of the Abundance's regenerative persistence — but they did not overwhelm him.
They were present.
Contained.
It was as if Yanqing embodied a truth so rigid that even external Paths could not bend it fully.
He spoke two words.
"Cry Havoc."
The sky filled with blades.
Not dozens.
Hundreds.
They manifested in layers, ranks upon ranks of steel suspended in mid-air, each one vibrating with intent. The density of killing force eclipsed even what he had displayed before.
Sunny sighed through the Extraordinary Rock.
"Of course."
He allowed his three shadows to surge into him.
Augmentation struck like lightning.
Every metric multiplied. Strength, speed, reaction time, durability — all quadrupled as Esssnxs flooded the Shadowspawn Shell's pathways.
The first wave descended.
This time, Sunny did not brace.
He advanced.
Four arms moved in coordinated harmony. Two intercepted descending greatswords, snapping them aside with bone-crushing force. One deflected a volley of spears. The fourth seized a spinning disc of blades and hurled it back toward its master.
His tail lashed, encased in armor, smashing through a cluster of sabers before whipping upward to catch another mid-flight. His horns hooked and redirected blades that would have otherwise pierced his flanks.
Yanqing did not retreat.
He intensified.
Swords multiplied even faster, fed by the relentless surge of Essence within him. They attacked in complex geometries, overlapping arcs designed to restrict movement and force exposure.
Sunny responded not as a swordsman alone, nor as a beast alone.
He became both.
He danced through the storm, cycling between human techniques refined over countless battles and predatory instincts born from the Nightmare. His upper right arm parried while his lower left claw raked forward. His inverted legs propelled him into a spin that transitioned seamlessly into a downward cleave. His tail coiled around a summoned spear and used it to pivot mid-air, redirecting momentum into a crushing kick.
Yanqing struggled to parse the latter half of Sunny's movements. Human sword logic did not account for four independent arms, a prehensile tail, and horns used as grappling hooks. Nightmare Creatures did not align with the concept of swords, battle, or combat.
They aligned with Voracity.
Steel clashed against shadow and armor.
Sparks flew in black and white.
Behind them, the demon blacksmith roared as chains lashed skyward and dragons dove through lightning-laced storms. The world bent under the weight of Transcendence.
Yet on the fractured shoreline, another ascent unfolded.
Blade and Dan Heng warred through raw might and elemental dominion, each strike threatening to tear open the fabric of the realm.
Sunny and Yanqing pursued something different.
Precision.
Refinement.
Supremacy of form.
Yanqing's storm of blades converged into tighter patterns, fewer wasted motions. Sunny's movements sharpened in response, every strike economized, every parry purposeful.
Claw met sword.
Horn scraped steel.
Odachi collided with conjured greatblade.
Neither yielded.
Amid dragons and demons, amid lightning and anvil, amid a sky that recoiled from its own destruction, two Ascended carved a quieter, deadlier path upward.
Not toward godhood of scale.
But toward the pinnacle of skill.