CHAPTER 79: MASTERED

Four months had quickly went by since that first night with the caravan. He still had another two months before the caravan arrived in the capital city of the western desert. But Night didn't mind the trip. The daily travels with the caravan were quite interesting for Night.

Most of the demons in the caravan were considered commoners in the hierarchy. They were demons that functioned independently of the hierarchical clans for one reason or another. These independent demons were going to the city in order to try their chances to get into one of the top clans. If they could get into one of the ten main clan, then their family would be guaranteed to be taken care of in the future. It would be like winning a lottery. Of course, their fate was up to chance but they all seemed to hold out hope that they would be successful in earning some position in one of the eleven controlling clans in the city.

In his spare time, Night chatted with these demons often. He also interacted with them as much as he could in a social fashion. The commoner demons had never seen a powerful demigod be so nice and talkative with lower level people before this time. Of course, Night wasn't hanging out with them just to be nice. He was siphoning information from the demons in his regular daily conversations. Going to the City, Night felt like he needed as much background on the City of Setting Sun and the leading clans as possible. He had been slowing gathering that information and finally felt that he had a good understanding of the situation in the western capital city.

Besides his socialization, Night gladly assisted in the defense of the caravan during travel. Nothing too dramatic had happened on their journey. Most of the defense incidents involved attacks from intelligent beasts or roving bands of independent demons. These demons seemed to be similar to those commoner demons in the caravan. However....instead of going to the bigger clans for shelter, these demons had decided to form their own nomadic clans that robbed resources from others. These fights happened once every one or two weeks or so.

After witnessing the first few fights, the caravan members had started to become a little weary of Night. He always took captives during any fight with beasts or demons. The captives would never be seen again after entering his tent. All except one human demigod that Night had dragged around for months. No one really knew what he was doing, but they assumed that it wasn't good. This caused some level of fear among the caravan members, but some of that fear was mitigated by Night's friendly attitude with everyone.

The behind the scenes story was that Night was using the frequent fights as a way to gather resources for the three Keres. Over the time in the caravan, Misery had been her usual self begging for food. However, beings below the demigod level didn't seem to benefit her anymore, so almost everything went to Grief and Distress. Grief had formed her blood body months ago and still needed blood to grow in strength. Distress was always training in the soul space and was getting very close to being strong enough to form her own blood body. The resource demands from these women were pretty high. Night finally understood why the information he had on Keres said that they thrived on battlefields. They definitely needed a lot of blood and death to get stronger.

While he did spend time helping the Keres, Night could only contribute when there was a fighting happening in defense of the caravan. So....most of Night's time was spent trying to master the Presence Concept that he had started working on back at the Ammon Clan. His focus on understanding this concept was based on three reasons. One, he needed a guaranteed way to conceal that he was human. Two, he wanted to get into the storage ring to find out what goodies were inside. Three, he still felt like he was weak and wanted to get stronger.

Night had been focused on copying the presence of the Level 2 Demigod that he had captured when he first joined the caravan. The man was being kept alive with heavenly energy and nourishment stones. Night had went though a pretty hefty expense keeping the guy alive while trying to figure this concept out. However, Night felt like he had actually started to make some progress over the last two months. Tonight, he felt that he was close to having some sort of break though.

Night was as familiar as he could get with the traits of the man's physical and soul presence. But he felt like he was missing a step in his application of the concept.

Running out of ideas, he decided to observe the man in his dream world. Maybe it would give him some insight.

But after the tormenting of the Keres, the man's dreams had grown chaotic. Seeing the horrific dream scenes repeatedly, Night started to grow bored with watching the same thing over and over again.

He changed the dream into a basic everyday life type of scene for stability. Night had also decided that he would try to copy the man's actions in his dreams. Maybe he needed to copy emotion or something like that in order to master the Presence Concept. He didn't know what the hell he was doing so all he could do was try out possible options.

At first, Night just copied the man's movements and behaviors in the dream, but that didn't seem to work. Then, Night had the idea of just living as the man in the dream world. Maybe that would give him some inspiration.

In the dream world, Night shifted his physical appearance to be exactly like the man. When the shift in appearance occurred in the dream, Night felt a moment of enlightenment. Maybe he could use the same process of shifting his presence in the real world. He knew the feeling of the whole process in dreams....if he could find that same feeling in the real world...maybe he could master the Concept of Presence. He finally felt like he was onto something.

Quickly exiting the dream world, Night found himself sitting on the rug in the tent. With an intent focus, he began to try to manipulate his presence similar to the way he did in a dream. Instead of the easy shift that occurred in a dream, Night could feel some resistance to change....but....excitedly....he could actually feel a change in his soul.

He could feel his soul energy depleting as he continued with some type of shift.....the second that the shift in his presence was complete....in almost that same exact instant...he felt the sensation of a concept breakthrough. He was finally breaking through in the Presence Concept.

Feeling depletion of his soul energy as the breakthrough was occurring, Night instantly had a sense of panic. When he had broken through in the Concept of Dreams, he had an extremely large demand on soul energy. That time, he had killed a lot of guards in Manco Oasis to supplement his soul energy level. This time he didn't have a large group of enemies nearby to draw energy from. Luckily, Night still had a bunch of soul stones in the bag next to him. Hopefully..... those soul stones would be enough to help him breakthrough.

He reached over to grab a handful of the soul stones. Night started absorbing the soul energy like crazy as another layer of soul concept began to form around his soul. In a manner of minutes, the soul stones were completely absorbed and turned to dust. But Night needed more soul energy.

He didn't really have any other option, so he began absorbing the remaining soul energy of the level two demigod. He had originally planned to use this guy to create Distress' blood body, but that wasn't an option now. After a minute or so, he absorption had steadily declined to the point that he was stable. He had no soul stones left and the Level 2 Demigod seemed to be only seconds from dying.

"Quick, Grief," Night called internally as he pulled a blood stone from his pocket, "Come deal with this body for me."

Grief's body started to form around the blood stone and it wasn't long before she was sitting next to Night in the tent. With a swing of his knife, Night sliced the man's neck and Grief's blood body began to absorb the blood. Night also began to finish off the remainder of the man's soul energy. After a few minutes, the process was over for both of them almost simultaneously.

"Please guard me. I need to consolidate my advancement," Night said to Grief as he slumped over and passed out on the floor of the tent.

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When he awoke the next morning, Night felt absolutely incredible. Reaching out with his soul perception he could see everything within almost a mile radius around him. Technically, he was now a Level 2 Demigod....in both the Truth of Darkness and the Great Truth of Reality. He had two mastered concepts of darkness and two mastered concepts of reality. He should be equal in power to a normal Level 4 Demigod.

Seeing Night wake up, Grief looked at him from the side with her usual emotionless face, "I would like to go back now. I feel like I am close to making some advancement myself."

Night quickly took Grief back into his soul space, pocketed Grief's blood stone, and started to prepare for the day.

He had so many things that he wanted to try out.....but now was not the time. Now he needed to pick up camp and get ready for today's travel.

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The day had been an absolute torment for Night. Night was so excited that he didn't even hear the few demon commoner voices whispering about the disappearance of the demigod that Night was always lugging around. As soon as the caravan stopped for the night, he quickly setup his tent and went inside to start his highly anticipated check of the space stone ring.

Night sat down in the tent and began to exert his presence concept. Before he could access the ring, he need to get used to using his new concept.

Night spent a while testing what he could do with his new concept. He could feel a shift when he exerted his soul strength on the concept. But even though he knew that he applied the concept.....he could see no changes himself. Getting aggravated with the lack of results, he pulled a blood stone from his pocket.

"Misery, can you come help me for a second?," Night asked.

"Sure, I'll be out in a second," she responded. Night took out Misery's blood stone from the pupil of his fake stone eye. Then, Night felt her transition into the blood stone. He sat the small stone on the rug in front of him and a body started to form.

"What you need, Night?," she asked as she finished materializing..

"I want you to watch me and see if you can tell any difference when I use a concept," Night said with a bit of anticipation in his voice. If this didn't work, he would lose his mind.

Night began to run through a series of tests with his new Presence Concept. He would test something and Misery would verify what she was experiencing. After a few hours of review, he had pretty much understood the full capability of the concept. Essentially, he could exert his soul strength to cause others to perceive the presence of anything he wanted within the limits of his soul strength. He could shift the appearance of his body or soul to mimic things or people. It wasn't exactly a physical shift. It was a like his soul influenced other souls around him to see and feel what he wanted them to see and feel. The power was like an illusion but with a little added strength since it applied directly to the soul.

The applications of the concept were also interesting. Night could basically copy the presence of other things. He could disappear into the room by mimicking the presence of furniture. Or he could appear as someone else or even appear as a plain stone. However, the skill did have one drawback. The larger the area that the concept was applied to.....the more rapidly his soul strength would start to decline. He could make the inside of his tent seem like a complex forest full of wildlife without any error, but could only hold the skill for a few min.

In chatting with Misery, Night realized that this concept was essentially an illusion ability that directly tricked the soul of others. Even Misery wasn't immune to the effects.

"Misery, how does this look to you?," Night said as he pulled off his eye patch revealing a stone eye with a spot missing for her blood stone. Night focused a minuscule bit of strength into his eye and soon it appeared like he had his normal eye back.

"I like it," Misery said, "but you should keep the red pupil.....it looks bad ass."

Chuckling at Misery's feedback, Night shifted his appearance to show an normal eye with a dark red pupil and smiled at Misery. She actually applauded him with a few claps. The whole thing was really superficial since it didn't offer Night any real benefit. But now he could at least walk around without the odd looks when he wasn't wearing an eye patch.

"Thanks, Misery," Night said, "You can go back now."

Misery smiled and said, "Anytime, but you better get me and Distress some more food. I think Grief has went into that hibernation similar to what happened to me when I got stronger."

Night was surprised by her comment. Looking into his soul space, he could see Grief laying down in the cabin in a meditative state.

'Great,' Night thought, 'I have gotten stronger and Grief should get stronger too. With Misery included, we would be no weaker than a small force like the human family that ran Manco Oasis. They only had three demigods with our same levels after all.'

Night finally felt a little more secure about his upcoming visit to the City of Setting Sun. He also felt a little tired so he moved over to his resting place to relax. He wasn't going to sleep now though. He had one more thing left to do tonight.

Night looked at the ring on his finger and smiled.

'There better be something good inside,' he thought before applying the full strength of his presence concept and easily gaining access to the space inside the ring.