Chapter 24

Title: The Pet

"Oh wow, what happened to the spirit Nene?"

The spirit in question was the plant spirit that awakened a few weeks ago in Nejime's room. In the beginning, it was nothing more than an outline of the plant it was born on, but now it wasn't even a plant anymore. Instead, it looked a bit like a squirrel climbing on Nejime's arms.

"Oh him, he's been like this yesterday. He's been like this since this morning"

Slowly reaching out his hand he looked at the little spirit's reaction wanting to see what it would do. To his surprise, after smelling his hand a bit he jumped on his arm and climbed around just like he did before on Nejime's arm.

"Can't say I dislike the way he looks now, but do you have any idea what happened?"

Continuing to play around with the little spirit he made funny faces and spoke to it with a funny void.

Nejime couldn't help but laugh when she saw him act like this. This was a side of his she hadn't seen yet. But it couldn't be helped, cute animals and pets have always been a weakness of his and in all fairness who wasn't weak to cute pets.

"I think it happened because was sick of not being able to move and yesterday he saw one of the other teachers play with her pet, so she might have gotten a bit jealous"

"And the result is this? Can I check him out properly?"

Nejime nodded

"Alright little guy, can you trust me for a bit?"

The little spirit looked at Phesto with a puzzled expression before snuggling up to him. Phesto just shook his head before using his energy sense. To not scare the little guy he used a low intensity at first.

As Phesto's energy sense washed over the little spirit it looked around the room a bit before looking back at Phesto and continuing to snuggle up to him.

Taking that as an ok Phesto increased the intensity of his energy sense, enveloping the entire room with an invisible pressure, surprising even Nejime. She knew about the 'slight' suppressiveness of his sensory ability, but this pressure wasn't 'slight' at all. The little spirit was just as surprised shrieking away with a small squeal.

Phesto felt a bit bad scaring the little spirit like this, but he was just too curious. He also felt bad that his curiosity got rewarded as well, with what he was seeing he would probably have to scare the little spirit again in the future.

'System, show me his stats'

With a mental command, the interface popped up.

[Race: Spirit

Age: 1 Month

Name: Little spirit

Connections: Nejime(strong), Phesto(weak)

Physical Strength: 3

Magical Strength: 19]

The little spirit was connected to both Nejime and him, this made sense with what he already knew. Spirits were after all often strongly affected by their environment, so forming a connection with other beings wasn't too odd. How this would actually affect his growth was an entertaining thought for Phesto.

He didn't have a name yet?

"Nene, have you given the little guy a name yet?"

"Yeah, his name's Kyou."

"Oh… nice name"

So he did have a name. Phesto was a bit puzzled before he remembered. Of course the information was false. The system was never able to tell him things about things he didn't know about. Picking things up he didn't notice was entirely different from him never learning about something at all. The little spirit's, Kyou's, name as an example. It only knew the way he called it.

"By the way, Phesto, did you sense anything interesting?"

"Oh, yeah I did. Kyou has a spiritual connection with you. And it's actually quite strong."

"Do you know what it does?"

"It passes circles around magic power between you two, constantly refining it. Technically he is also connected to me but the connection is really weak and though I can feel magic between us it isn't circling like with you."

Hearing that her connection with Kyou was stronger than Phesto's, Nejime had a slight smirk on her face. And for some reason it kind of irritated Phesto.

"Did you sense anything aside from that?"

"Not really, he seemed pretty healthy, but aside from that, you should probably work on improving your sensory skills. That connection between you two could probably help him grow and help you learn more about spirits."

After that Phesto taught Nejime a few sensory skills until evening, at which Nejime left to hold a lesson.

With Kyou on his lap, Phesto thought back to how the system just gave Kyou a name even though it was false, since the system's interface worked off of the information that he knew he had to be more conscious about it. Especially if he were to fight someone and this happened it'd be very dangerous. And though he didn't plan or want to fight, this world was simply too dangerous, so he had to be prepared whether he wanted it or not.

And as for preparing for it, there were still a few skills he wanted to pick up. First, he wanted to improve his smithing skills, so he could make himself some amazing weapons and tools.

Tools could also be used to directly increase his strength. The ascension ritual, though not perfect, was a good example of mortals quickly receiving godlike strength. But it was also very similar to his energy strengthening skill so he'd probably continue using that. The other big options that he could think of were learning actual combat skills, improving his attunement with the spirit realm and meditating to increase the amount of magic he could hold within himself.

The Vastayashai'Rei similar to the ascension ritual were a good example of godlike strength. Just that here it wasn't a sudden increase in strength. Still, with the exponential growth of spirit attunement once he hit level 100 this was definitely a possibility.

And as for meditating and acquiring a large amount of magic, Syndra was a good example of what a massive amount of magic could do. From what he remembered the Ghost Willow tree became a part of Syndra when she was a child. After which his powers started growing at an absurd rate, eventually being able to rip out the magic of the land at a fairly large scale and only stopping after the spirit of Ionia sealed her.

Again, with energy strengthening and some of the other skills reaching level 100, this would definitely become a possibility. But he had to do something about the slow growth of his skills and tools and artefact seemed like the best way.

(A/N: forgot to mention this last chapter, but I rewrote chapter 21 and 22 last week, so if you haven't checked this story out in the time when I haven't posted a new chapter pls go back and reread it, I kind of changed a bunch of things.

Also for the progression of the story in the future, I plan for Phesto to learn a few more skills, reach lvl 100 in the important skills I mentioned and then do a time-skip. During that time skip, I plan for Nene to do a bunch of things and become quite a big deal.

Btw if anyone wonders why Nejime became important, it's because I saw a few comments in the early stages of this novel and I got really mad so I decided to make her important. And now she has grown on me.)