?’Shadow,’ the girl thought, eyes narrowing to a slit as she got serious all of a sudden. She had been wondering what the Essence was, but never had she expected to see Shadow.

It was a very rare Essence in the Blueflame Continent.

‘Good thing I have a Light sword,’ she thought. Surely Light and Shadow countered each other to some level. She hoped so at least. This was too new for her to be sure about anything.

Ning threw the scythe in his right hand again, the weapon flying toward her like a dagger. She struck it aside quickly. ‘Why does he keep throwing it? Why not just use the weapon for what it is, a conduit?’ she wondered.

The thoughts vanished quickly though as another thought took over. She needed to search for the string the flying scythe was attached to. It had to be.

‘There!’ she noticed something she hadn’t noticed before. While the string or thread or whatever the scythe was attached to was transparent or thin to the point that she couldn’t see it, it did leave a shadow beneath her with the sun overhead.

She saw Ning pull back the scythe and immediately turned to look at the other scythe fly toward her. But she didn’t panic and kept calm.

The shadow of the thread that combined the two weapons was there, so she just had to cut the thread. With the scythe flying, she knew just where to cut the thread.

She would cut the thread right at the base of the scythe’s handle.

Her Light sword glowed bright, and she swung down in an overhead strike, attacking right along the thread—

Her eyes went aghast as she sensed nothing. Her sword felt no contact. No tension that she cut, no object it touched. She had cut nothing. There had been nothing.

“How?” she couldn’t help but voice it out loud. “I cut the… how is there nothing?”

She wanted to know. This was just too mysterious for her to keep calm and to herself.

And with that, she did exactly what Ning had wanted her to do. Ask questions.

As if a showman, he flourished the scythes in his hand, spinning it around a few times before holding it tightly. His stance loosened and he stood up straight, as if not going to fight, and started speaking.

“This is a weapon I made,” he said, showing the two scythes. “Did you notice how I said ‘is’ and not ‘are’? That’s because these two scythes are in fact part of the same weapon.”

The girl looked confused and even the referee to the side didn’t understand what was going on. “What are you talking about?” the girl asked.

“These two scythes are one,” he said before quickly tossing one away. At the same time, he pulled on another scythe and the first one came flying back.

The girl’s eyes narrowed. “Are you saying what you do to the first one happens to the other other one too?” she asked.

“No,” Ning said before dropping to a thought. “Although that would make for an amazing weapon. I’ll have to see. But then again I don’t know if that can be made with Essence. Might have to use Mana or Qi.”

“What?” the girl asked.

“Nothing,” Ning said quickly. “It’s not like what you said. The two scythes are tied together, that’s all.”

“No, they’re not. I tried cutting whatever was tied between them. There was nothing.

“But there was,” Ning said, tapping his foot on the floor where the shadow of the thread that tied them was still there.

“Yes, I can see the shadow. But what you tied it with doesn’t exist.”

“Oh no, this is not the shadow of what ties them together,” Ning said before giving a large grin. “This is the shadow that ties them together.”

The girl took a long moment to try and understand before asking. “What?” She thought she heard something incorrectly. There was some sort of hidden meaning to his words that she… ꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ᴡᴀᴛ ᴛᴏ ʀᴀᴅ ᴍᴏʀ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛʀs, ᴘʟᴀs ᴠsᴛ oᴠel ꜰre.nt

“Wait…” Her eyes fell on the group where the thin shadow moved from the shadow of one scythe to the other. “No… their shadow. Their shadow is what is tied together.”

“Exactly!”

Ning’s beaming smile was seen by everyone in the audience, and he had no doubt numerous questions were popping up all around him.

“The two weapons are in fact a single weapon created using Shadow Essence and Shadow, and during its creation, I created the conjoining line to be the shadow itself,” he said. He waited for people to speak amongst themselves, voicing questions and confusions that wouldn’t reach him.

The girl in front of him though did a fine job replacing them. “How is that possible?” the girl asked. “How can you make a weapon where there is… nothing? There is nothing physical connecting the two things.”

“Nobody said there had to be,” Ning said. “You can hold the light in your hand, and you get surprised when I tell you shadow connects these two things?”

“I…” the girl paused. “I just haven’t seen anything like this before.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Ning said. He didn’t doubt there were many more things he could do during the creation of conduits that hadn’t even become known to be possible in this world yet.

One would have to go to some other advanced worlds with Essence energy to find out what could truly be done with it. He had a hunch that they weren’t using Arrays to nearly as well as they should’ve been used. No, he knew it.

“So, do you understand what this is exactly?” he asked the girl after she was silent for a while.

“Kind of,” she said. “But it is more of a physical weapon than a conduit, is it not?”

“I haven’t shown everything it can do just yet,” Ning said. “Let me not waste time and get on with it.”

The girl sensed unknown Essence being used around Ning and prepared herself for some sort of attack.

In the next instance, a large puddle of darkness poured around Ning’s feet and in that puddle he fell, vanishing from the stage itself.