The first wave of this energy reached my body. The moment it touched my skin, I felt like thousands upon thousands of needles kept pricking me deeply without any mercy.

But this was nothing at all compared to the torture and agony I faced the next moments. As more energy arrived, my body started to absorb these.

The plan was to absorb and direct them towards my dantian, the same way I did with the bones from before.

However when the energy passed through my skin, it started to move according to its own will.

I tried to force them towards my dantian like I used to do, but that didn’t yield any result at all. This energy acted berserk, not responding to any attempt of mine.

“It’s… trying to get control over my body!!!” that’s what I felt when looking at the movements of this energy inside my body. Once it entered, it started to roam around, surrounding every single part and organ of mine.

If I left it to do whatever the hell it wanted, then I might even lose control over my body.

“Not without a fight,” I roared, releasing all the energy that I was already absorbing from the bones and instead of letting them flow outside my left arm, I directed them towards my body.

And a big fight erupted between the two energies, one that made me feel pain like never before.

It was like someone was holding a dull knife, cutting through my body parts in a slow and vicious way. Every part of my body started to grow numb fast, giving me an instant scare as I started to feel my head dizzy.

This… This couldn’t keep going on… Not like this…

I knew I had little time to act, and I had no time to even think about how to solve this. So I followed my instincts and rushed my energy out, not to clash against this dark energy but to surround and try to control it.

Even if they got all over my body, as long as they were contained with my energy, they would stop hurting me.

In the first few seconds of doing this, nothing new happened. I was this close from giving up until I started to notice a change.

The clash between the two energies changed from being a direct flight into calmly circulating together. It wasn’t that calm actually, but compared to before it was indeed.

And when that happened, the pain caused by this energy started to go south and slowly faded away. At the same time I noticed that the energy of mine was getting stronger and more abundant, giving me the impression that it was turning part of the dark energy successfully into mine.

But the rate of such conversion was still low. More dark energy gushed at me, and at this moment they couldn’t get into my body, only hanging around my body.

This created a big typhoon of dark energy that surrounded me and hid me within. I had to act, I had to find a way to turn these energies faster.

But when I tried to push my energy to clash with this dark energy, the old pain returned so I had to stop.

“This… Won’t work,” I muttered in dejected tone while the entire world around me turned all pitch black. The dark energy kept gathering around my body, making me feel I was doing nothing at all here.

“Screw it! I have to store these in my shadow world, so I’ll just send them with my energy surrounding it,” As I lost any hope to change this situation, I started to consider risking everything.

Even if I ended up losing much of this dark energy, at least I’d gain a little of it. Without delaying any further, I controlled my energy circulating around the dark one, and pushed the two through my meridians at both feet.

Once they reached there, they vanished like getting sucked by a hidden force. I had no time to see what was going on in my shadow world. After all, once the dark energy inside my body decreased by a noticeable chunk, a new wave of energy penetrated directly through my skin.

This new wave tried to act the same way the previous one did. But I was much prepared this time. The moment they entered, they got surrounded fast with energy absorbed from the bones and branded with my energy through my dantian, and then all were pushed through meridians of my feet.

I had no time to rest, or even breath. I kept doing this for an unknown period of time. I felt like I was pushing a big rock up the mountain. One single pause would cost me everything, forcing me back to the bottom once more.

So I never dared to even shift my attention away. Every time I moved the dark energy with my silver white through my feet to the shadow world, a new amount entered and needed me to deal with them.

It looked like an endless loop, a vicious circle, where the dark energy had no limit and I had to keep myself alert and responsive all the time.

After an unknown period of time, I felt the dark energy coming from outside started to be scarcer. At first this didn’t show much difference, but later on it became apparent to me.

The dark energy… I was already so close to consuming it.

At this moment I never felt regret about losing any of this dark energy. I just realised I bit what I couldn’t chew. So even if I lost most of this energy, this wasn’t a bad thing in the end.

“Phew… It’s done!” After long minutes of struggling with the weakening dark energy, the influx of this energy ceased at last. And I could finally heave a breath of relief.

*Thud!*

Without any surprise, my body fell on my knees, feeling all tired and exhausted. I didn’t deplete much of my energy at all during this process. In fact I suspected that my energy got slightly stronger and was closer to upgrading to the next level.