"Teacher... can you tell me what exactly happened?" the shadow man asked.
His eyes flickered between clarity and confusion, like someone on the verge of madness.
"You came to me for help?" Kru looked at him, an inexplicable feeling passing through his mind.
This shadow man seemed to have some connection to him, though it was not particularly deep.
And yet...
Kru suddenly remembered that, with Phantom Vision, he had been able to see the phantom relationships behind all things.
Of all the many illusions, he had chosen the shadow connected to this person.
He had thought it was merely a casual choice before, but now it seemed that perhaps it was not.
"I can vaguely sense a power on you that feels familiar to me," the shadow man said. "It seems there is a pact between us..."
Kru looked at him and sensed the shadow power within his body. He then detected some fluctuations within it, more or less confirming that the other man was not lying.
"If that is the case, then we need to be open with each other."
Kru looked at the shadow man, then seemed to recall his name—Atata.
A name that felt somewhat familiar, yet also strange.
Afterward, Kru and Atata roughly exchanged information.
After Atata regained consciousness, he had felt that the shadows were exceptionally close to him. Whenever he was within them, he could always sense one thing—he was not supposed to be like this.
The mismatch between his self-perception and reality had once made Atata think he had gone mad.
But when he woke this morning, he entered the shadows once more and sensed something.
There were things within those shadows, things that seemed to have been left behind by himself.
It was through that sensation that his perception had changed