After buying some food and other necessities and putting them in my storage ring, we walk out of town. We walk outside and pass a few wagons that are going out of town, though after a few hours of walking the sun is starting to set and I can see that Angelica is getting exhausted.
"Angelica come over here." She stops moving and I walk up to her before using a shadow hand, I pick her up and have the hand follow next to me. I then put my grimoire up there and I keep walking while playing Tetris against myself.
I keep walking and playing against myself as Angelica keeps trying to fuse some spells together. After a few games, I feel something tapping my shoulder and I see a shadow hand tapping my shoulder to find that it's actually made of string.
"Nice work, is the strings corruption effect still apply?"
"I don't know" I then take the magic circle she made and cast it while trying it out to find what the limits are.
After testing it for a few minutes I had gotten the basics of it down. What the spell actually did was make a bunch of shadow strings that while not having the main thing from my other strings, can be used to make shadow weapons or appendages that pack a serious punch.
After my experimentation I find a few of my magic circles altered that give them greater effect and less consumption. I'm genuinely impressed, I mean she made literally everything I had better. This is the perfect opportunity to give her something.
"Thanks Angelica, these are great. Since you gave me these new spells, why don't I give you something?" I then start writing down my cultivation technique on some loose-leaf I kept in my storage ring before handing it to her.
I can see her smiling, so that's something at least. Never thought she would know how. I then keep walking for a little while until the sun sets. I then take out the tent and go to take away my shadow hand only to find that Angelica had fallen asleep.
I put her inside the tent before I close it up and make a fire. After I close the tent I look to see two notifications pop up.
[Magical Metals]
[Hostiles that have magical metals are headed your way. I suggest redoing our arm with them, but whatever floats your boat]
[200SS] [Bloodlust Hallucinations] [Remodding magic metals to our arm]
Seeing that someone is probably going to try something if I fall asleep, I decide to cast a multitude of hands around to snipe the area as I close my eyes.
I can hear someone walking over and I decide to open my eyes just enough to see someone approaching me with a blindfold trying to cover my eyes.
When he puts the cover over and tries picking me up I had already surrounded the tent with hands to prevent the Angelica from hearing. I then quickly shoot a string into the back of his head and stand up.
I use my enhanced eyes to see past the blindfold. Keeping it on makes them think they have an advantage they don't, and that makes my life so much easier. I watch as 2 girls and one guy walks over to me all wearing armor.
One of them starts casting fireballs at me and I dodge out of the way before dashing towards them. One of the guys swings his sword towards my ribs and I just flip over it before taking a string and shooting it into his eye.
The guy screams and falls to the floor, while his comrades keep attacking with fire and wind spells from behind. I just make a massive shadow hand to stop the magic before putting my palm out and firing a laser beam to distract them while I shoot strings into their backs.
They try to dodge but my strings pierce right through their spines, they fall to the floor before I turn a shadow hand into a shadow scythe and cut their heads off.
They collapse to the floor while I go and take their belongings. I take the armor from the guy and all of their jewelry. I examine them to see that all the rings they wore had spatial stones, and they were full of coins, some herbs and their grimoires.
I open their grimoires to find disappointingly little in terms of spells. They were all ineffective and I could have easily though of them myself. I just cut out the pages and put them inside my book using the shadow strings as binding.
After walking back to the fire I smirk and remove the hands before I close my eyes and wait. After a second I can hear someone dashing towards the tent and I activate the shadow hands below the tent and have it grab him.
I quickly rip out his heart and crush it then shooting a string inside his leftover lung. As I wait for a few seconds the notification finally appears.
[Quest Completed]
I look over to my arm and find that it had new gem added onto the shoulder of my arm, and that it was absorbing the life of the grass below me. I quickly turn the new function off and look over the new features of my arm.
Aside from being able to absorb life for energy, my arm could now run on mana and turn electricity into and vice versa.
The cannons that came out from my arms take less energy and are noticeably more powerful. The energy that used to be needed to vaporize the stump of a tree could now vaporize the whole tree and four behind it.
This wasn't even the best part. I could basically store spells inside the shoulder by connecting it to my shadow and shoot them out from my hand without giving it away by using a circle. Though this added a bit more mana being consumed, I consider it worth it.
After I clean up all the bodies I look inside the tent to see Angelica having rolled out of the blanket with her mouth open and my cultivation technique nearby on the floor.
I just put the blanket back over her before leaving the tent and waiting for the sunrise.