The first order of business was digestion—not of food, but of the energy Sith had taught me to siphon from the world itself. Sith had been uncharacteristically kind in providing a detailed manual on how to draw ambient mana from the atmosphere and refine it into the dark essence my shadow required.
Truthfully, he didn't strictly need to; my old man's recordings had already touched upon the basics of energy absorption. However, Sith's version was tailored specifically for the dark path I was now walking, optimising the flow for a human body undergoing a shadow transformation.
As the mental link to the memory beads faded and the beads themselves settled back into their dormant state, I finally had a moment of stillness to explore the other half of my new reality: the Sponsorship Interface.
