"This… a Halo Manual?"
"No, it's a skill that is both a Halo Manual and a skill."
Emrys mused in disbelief, looking at the panel.
In this world, Halos worked by defining roles.
When you awakened your halo, you didn't just gain power—you gained a source of power.
An example Emrys had seen was someone awakening a Fire Halo.
Through it, the Fire Awakener could absorb the Fire Element in the air using their Halo Marks, thereby drawing fire into themselves.
But to truly employ that fire, one needed another set of manuals called Battle Manuals, related to their elements.
Any of these things were in a price range beyond his imagination and were usually only obtained through joining a Halo Academy.
Yet here was a manual that also granted him a skill at the same time!
Looking deeper at the skill, he found it a bit hard to comprehend.
"Oblivion."
He had never heard that word before, but if there was one thing he could do to understand it, it was to cultivate.
He could cultivate now, gain enough Oblivion energy, and then employ the skills, which—according to the description—seemed to be some type of physique.
But first, looking around him, his stomach curled in disgust at the gore and corpses, and he turned back up to look at the sky.
"I need to get out of here."
He mused and got to work.
Two hours later…
BANG!
Emrys slammed onto the ground headfirst, tumbling over a couple of corpses before coming to a stop.
CREAAAK!
He snapped his neck, his teeth grinding against each other from the tingling pain.
"Tsk, I can't climb back up!"
The pit was too deep, and there was no hold to climb at all.
[Cultivate and reach the second level of your manual, and you will gain enough power.]
The panel flashed.
"Cultivate here… amongst rotten corpses?"
[This place holds the bodies of those long forgotten. It has the highest concentration of Oblivion Energy in a hundred-mile radius.]
It flashed, and he stood rooted for a while before it occurred to him.
The Oblivion Element worked hand in hand with erasure.
All the corpses around him belonged to people most similar to him—sold off and forgotten.
This made the place more saturated with Oblivion energy than most.
And just like how cultivating fire in a volcano would greatly boost a Fire Awakener's power, cultivating here would also boost his cultivation far beyond any normal place.
"But the smell…"
He mused, turning down, only to quickly snap his face up as the gore and blood replayed in his vision.
But then he quieted down, slowly turning to look at the ground beneath him.
"Who am I kidding? I just devoured one of the legs."
He mused, scoffing at his own hypocrisy.
Without wasting any more time, he moved to a corner of the wall and sat down.
"How do I cultivate?"
[Try to feel your Halo Marks.]
[It's somewhere around your head. Once you grasp it, then try to lure it out.]
The system panel flashed, and Emrys hummed.
He closed his eyes, and silence reigned in the pit, leaving only the buzzing of flies.
The smell was terrible, but as he focused fully on cultivating, it quietly began disappearing.
Both the smell and the buzzing.
Time rapidly passed as Emrys' heart slowed.
Darkness was all he saw at first, but quietly enough, he began to sense a light source within it.
They were like rays—pitch-black, shining from within the deep.
Emrys slowly followed the dark rays, sinking deeper and deeper until, all of a sudden, he felt himself pulled forward, and what he found next shook him.
It was a Void, one that gave him a strange feeling of familiarity, as if he had been here before.
At the highest point of this Void, there was a crescent moon.
A moon that didn't radiate a single color of light, yet at the same time seemed to radiate them all.
It was eternally changing—pitch black, crimson, purple, white.
It held countless rays shining in its depths, its aura leaving Emrys in a state of awe.
"This is it… the Oblivion Overlord Halo."
He mused in quiet awe, but in the next moment, he focused his attention.
Now that he had discovered his halo, the next step was to draw it out.
His attention sharpened once more, his will blooming out through the Void to draw the crescent moon closer—but the next event shook him.
Instead of the moon coming toward him, all of a sudden, Emrys found himself being pulled forward toward it instead.
A force he could not explain—neither fast nor slow—bringing him closer to the moon in the sky.
The various rays cast illumination upon his figure, and when he reached the crescent moon, his hands quietly reached out, gently touching it.
RIIIPPPLEEE
In the outside world, a ripple of multicolored light spread through the darkness as the phantom of a crescent moon with ever-changing lights appeared, hovering right before Emrys' forehead.
Emrys opened his eyes at that moment, finding the floating halo.
"I did it…"
He mused quietly in faint disbelief.
Now that the halo was in the outside world, it was much smaller.
But Emrys was able to immediately feel the changes.
His blue eyes now held the image of a crescent moon in their depths, allowing him to see the world differently.
Within the darkness, there were motes of light flying around—
Red, dark, and pink—with the first two colors making up the majority of the motes' concentration.
"These… these are Halo Essences."
He mused quietly, and looking at the corpses, he was able to recognize why most of the halo lights were dark and red.
That was because the majority of the bodies here were demons, and naturally, Demon Essence was dark and red.
"I've found my halo and brought it out. What's the next process?"
Emrys asked the system, which blinked out a reply:
[Now, you'll…]