61 Final Preparations

Before beginning, Deon removed multiple spirits from his soul space and placed them in jars along with their needed food.

Without wasting any more time, Deon placed 3 new spirits into his soul space. These 3 were the silver muscle, silver bones and silver tendons spirits.

Firstly, Deon activate the silver bones spirit. Seconds later, he also activated the silver muscle spirit. Finally, he activated the silver tendons spirit.

In the past he could never do this, controlling multiple spirits at once was a skill that had to be learned. Controlling 2 spirits simultaneously was something that most shamans picked up with time, but controlling 3 at the same time was much more difficult.

Deon actually found that the shining bed bug spirit helped with this, so he figured that its silver class evolution would be even better.

His conjecture was correct.

After spending a few minutes like this, Deon grit his teeth and resolutely activated the first stage of the suffering for time spirit.

Instantly, Deon fell back. Thankfully he was sitting down and leaning against a wall, otherwise he would have collapsed to the ground.

His muscles weakened and his body almost entirely gave out. Blood leaked from his nose, eyes, ears and mouth. His vision became blurred, his heart beat kept switching between non-existent and painfully deafening, and all of his other senses were getting muddled up.

It took Deon a good 10 minutes to recover and regather himself.

Despite the extreme looking impact of his actions, Deon was actually feeling a bit excited.

Success! It was difficult, but he expected as much, if not worse! He was currently activating 4 spirits at once, whilst the hardened organs spirit was also passively impacting him.

In his past uses of the suffering for time spirit, Deon managed to work up to the third stage relatively quickly, half an hour at most was needed to adjust and stabilise. He wasn't so hasty this time, it took him 10 minutes just to recover from the initial impact, but he was still struggling under this level of pain.

Although he took his time carefully, Deon didn't intend to stay at this level forever, he had limited time to complete this.

After half an hour, he prepared himself and activated the second stage.

The impact was even worse than the first, but he was more prepared in his mind. His body trembled and he grit his teeth as shockwaves violently rampaged through his body.

After another half hour, he activated the third stage.

Bang!

A shockwave spread through Deon's body, but only he could hear it. Despite being prepared and not underestimating this level of intensity in the least, he was still unable to hold himself together perfectly.

It took half an hour before the bleeding from his orifices finally stopped, and it was a full hour before Deon managed to stabilise and suppress the violent tremors throughout his body.

During this period of time, the 1-Star silver tendons spirit reached 99% completion, at which point he stopped activating the silver tendons spirit, as the final stage could be finished later in a less perilous situation.

Training tendons took the least time, requiring half the time as muscles. Training bones was the slowest, needing twice the time as muscles.

It wasn't long before the muscle spirit achieved 100% completion.

The pressure on Deon's body was reduced substantially at this point as he was now only activating the silver bones spirit. Even so, he was forced to stop as he reached his limit.

The pressure was much lower compare to before, but Deon's mental and physical energy was exhausted by now.

He quickly walked outside and told a guard to enter his tent in 30 minutes to awake him. Deon then returned to his tent alone, before removing his glistening bed bug spirit.

After taking away this spirit which had been holding together his fatigued mind and body, he directly passed out and entered a deep sleep.

After half an hour, the guard entered and helplessly spent 5 minutes trying to wake him up, before he ended up dropping a bucket of ice water onto Deon's face from above. This was barely enough to awake the exhausted Deon, but he used this moment of consciousness to quickly rebind the glistening bed bug spirit.

Sleeping so deeply, even just for half an hour, helped his mind to regain its clarity.

After training for a while longer, Deon finally developed silver bones. With this completed, he returned to the silver tendons spirit and finalised the last portion, absorbing the grey gas into his tendons.

Joyously, after investigating the situation in his soul space, he found that his usage of the hardened organs spirit had also reached completion!

"Good! With this, I have another free spirit slot!"

The hardened organs spirit really was a bit of a hinderance, but after using it for almost a full year, cutting it off and losing all of this progress was not only depressing, but would likely leave him injured.

"I don't have long now…fine, I'll try that."

For his coming plan, he desperately wanted to gain a powerful investigative ability.

"The old demon said that my core spirit should be capable of far more than I have discovered so far…" Deon muttered to himself.

After preparing himself by binding two particular spirits, he closed his eyes for some time, then slowly opened his eyes. He carefully, gently, with extreme caution, directed the ancient demon spirit into his eyes-

TSS!

"AHHH!" Deon actually screamed out in pain, though more so from the shock. The very instant the ancient demon spirit made the slightest bit of contact with the outer rim of his eye balls, his entire eyes and sense of vision felt like it had been ignited and thrust into a sea of flames. He pulled back his core spirit immediately and gasped for breath, but gritted his teeth and fought through the pain.

He hadn't expected it to be so extreme, but naturally, Deon had prepared for any potential mishaps. This preparation came in the form of two new bound spirits in his soul space; 1-Star bronze class petal healing spirit and 1-Star silver class origin eruption spirit.

Deon didn't hesitate to activate the rare, expensive and highly coveted origin eruption spirit. Immediately, one half of his origin energy was absorbed into the spirit.

The spirit looked like a shining flower, it span around as it absorbed his origin energy and gave off a brilliant golden lustre before exploding. Deon harnessed the golden energy hurriedly and poured all of it into his eyes. As he stabilised the flow of energy, he also activated the petal healing spirit.

Petal healing spirit was a typical healing spirit used by all decent 1-Star shaman healers, medics and doctors in the Kingdom of Restari. It was straight forwards and could be activated and used continuously, healing an injury gradually over time. When combined with the golden stream from the one time use origin eruption spirit, the overall effect boosted by as much as 50%!

Luckily, Deon acted quickly and without hesitation, otherwise he could have seriously lost his vision for good!

The origin eruption spirit, when used promptly following a severe injury, had an incredible effect.

His eyes, which had half-melted, made a full recovery within minutes!

He was fine now, but that was far too close, he actually nearly lost his vision! He expected his core spirit to be tricky, but didn't think it would damage his body so violently!

"That was so extreme! I've never attempted to use the ancient demon spirit in this way…I always had a feeling that doing so could be dangerous, but this is way worse than I expected!" Deon smiled wryly and shook his head.

There wasn't long left before he needed to leave. Just as he was about to give up and go join the others, his eyes lit up and he suddenly had an epiphany.

"I clearly can't fuse the spirit with a part of my body; the moment the fusion begins, my body will give out. However…what if I simply don't fuse them?" Thinking this way, Deon quickly summoned his demonic core spirit once again. This time, he was surprisingly calm and didn't show much caution at all.

Fusing with the spirit was too dangerous, but there was no risk at all from merely touching his materialised spirit. After all, he usually summoned the ancient demon spirit into a sword and held this sword in his hand, it was clearly safe to touch.

Whoosh!

The ancient demon spirit flowed out from Deon's soul space in the form of an immaterial black gas, phasing through his body like a phantom, until it left his body entirely and formed two black whirlpools in front of his face. He stood there calmly as the whirlpools formed two streams that very slowly trickled with materialising demonic power, towards the surface of his eyes.

When he felt the connection, Deon waited, but excitedly found that there was no discomfort.

Over the next few minutes, he gradually increased the stream of black gas that flowed onto the surface of his eye. At first, there was no effect. His eyes started burning somewhat as the black layer grew thicker, but Deon showed no change in expression and continued.

The moment that the ancient demon spirit was almost entirely materialised onto the surface of his eyes, it burned like hell and he was suddenly hit with a wave of dizziness. But more importantly, his vision became completely different.

He was only able to maintain this state for a few seconds before the dizziness became too much and he was forced to stop. Deon's breathing was somewhat ragged and by the time he recovered, it was already time for him to leave and meet with the others. However, a broad smile spread across his face, which he quickly hid as he left the command tent.

During those few seconds, he found that he was able to instantly identify the class and rank of every spirit in his tent without even knowing which spirit he was looking at! He had not tested the full extent of this ability, but it already showed great promise.

"Commander Deon, before we leave, I have multiple questions to ask you, most pressingly being the plan of attack." Lieutenant Reana spoke whilst trying to hide her anxiety. Deon claimed earlier that he had a plan, but needed to make his preparations first. The lieutenant trusted Deon and was well aware of his abilities, so she went along with it until now.

But now, they were about to head out, yet they still knew nothing!

"Don't worry lieutenant, I will explain the plan in its entirety soon enough." Deon chuckled and everyone breathed out a sigh of relief.

This relief unfortunately did not last for long, because the following events were simply too shocking, to the point that it left every single person present in the camp stunned stupid.

"Everyone, I apologise in advance for the shock. Please try to remain calm and trust that I'm doing this for the benefit of us all." Deon smiled apologetically, bewildering everyone and giving them all a bad feeling.

"Group 3, now!"

In an instant, 50 of Deon's men activated the same spirit simultaneously, casting a formation over the entire camp and completely suppressing every single shaman within!

Everyone looked stunned, even those soldiers who had activated the spirit on Deon's orders. However, Deon ignored everyone else, singling out a single person…

His gaze landed on Lieutenant Shi.