There were many things John Newman did not know, and some of them, he genuinely felt bad about. Failing to look at the Mother of Water’s actions from more than one angle? Naïve, but understandable, given her actions. How he would allocate the budget for the next quarter? Not a pressing issue, but he should know about it. What to do with demons? Still not something he was sure about and still something that genocide was the potential answer to, as horrible as that sounded.

Not knowing that the asteroid-sized, golden-scaled, rip-and-tearing, grown-up crocodile-dragon he called his light spirit was actually a renowned advice giver?

That just showed that he didn’t show enough interest in the private life of his male friends and family.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Stirwin hadn’t spent the millennia previous to the contract with the Gamer just sitting around inside his seal. There had been a lot of time to think and a lot of time to talk to several elementals that came to visit him. First out of curiosity, then out of awe, they had sought him out. With time, Stirwin had turned into some renowned guru.

While waiting for the elemental girls to gather a few trustworthy individuals (and for Siena to become released from whatever her mother was doing), John followed the advice-giving. Most of it was the basic kind one expected. A little motivational talk here, a bit of listening and encouragement there, nothing too out of the usual.

At other times, Stirwin absolutely ripped people a new one.

“Celestial Devourer, I just don’t know who my heart belongs to. I love both of them and I don’t know I can live without either, so I can’t figure out what to do,” a very suave looking elemental, basically a gentleman of a dark complexion with a suit of gold, confessed. “What do you say, who should I stay with? How should I break the news to them that I’ve greater interest in the other girl?”

“Do I understand correctly that you informed neither of them of the relationship you had with the other?” Stirwin’s growl was accompanied by him rising to his feet. As suave as the gentlemanly elemental may have looked, it was only normal to be intimidated when four-metres of crocodile dragon suddenly shoved their maw into your face. The answer was delayed, as the advice-seeking male audibly gulped. “ANSWER!” Stirwin demanded, his deep voice reverberating in the air.

“Y-yes, Celestial Devourer!” the gentleman answered.

Raising his left front leg, Stirwin warningly placed a claw on the smaller elemental’s chest. “Listen closely. You deserve neither of them. What you will do is: you will gather both, get on your knees, confess what you did, and if they forgive you for what you did, then you can think about the future of your relationship. You have built it on the lie of being true to one of them. Even if you intend to become monogamous now, you have rot inside your foundation. You will own up to your mistake and not repeat it in the future. Do you understand?!”

“Y-yes.”

“Good lad,” Stirwin backed off, his tone switching from threatening to benevolent, “return here once the affair is done. I will gladly help you out further, no matter what may happen to you.”

“Thank you, Celestial Devourer!” The gentleman disappeared into a trail of light, returning to his home plane.

There was a momentary lull in the people running up to Stirwin, as the crocodile laid back down. People seemed to gather their courage, before running the risk of getting similarly curtailed in their excesses. In that pause, a certain cat tapped his way up to the magical reptile. “Look at you, being useful for a change,” Copernicus remarked.

“Look at you, being tiny,” Stirwin responded in a playful baritone. “In this form, I could squish you quite easily. A revenge for all the times you played mouse with me.”

“As if it didn’t entertain you,” Copernicus mused his response, walking up the tail of the much larger elemental and finding a comfortable place to lay down between the ridges of his back. “Funny that you have such scathing words for a gigolo while serving the greatest pervert of the age.”

“John is straightforward with his desires, otherwise we would have a problem,” Stirwin told the sun cat. The Gamer expected some warning gaze to be directed his way as the follow-up of that sentence, but the crocodile just turned to the line again and waved for the next person to approach him. When it came to this topic, Stirwin had never been disappointed by John and so he saw no reason to even give as much as a word of caution.

John appreciated that. He hadn’t gone through all of the troubles of being honest with his intention of building a harem to get lectured as if he had never given it any thought. The closest he had ever gotten to ‘cheating’ on Rave was when he had decided to make Aclysia in the shape of A2. Creating himself a sexy servant before disclosing his harem building intent may have been rather crude. However, he had done nothing but create her before having the talk about this topic.

A couple more people came forward, asking for more milquetoast advice. Ubun and Korus kept standing at the side of the Celestial Devourer like massive guards. Of all the elementals, it seemed Stirwin would need the least amount of help to keep things running. Leveraging his previous reputation and the principled nature of light elementals, he would reign over a pretty peaceful court.

John looked up to the sky and yawned. Although it was still bright as day, the silhouette of the Father of Light had disappeared and he had been awake for quite a while. Thanks to his superhuman Endurance, he could have pushed himself to remain awake for several hours more, if not a few days, but that would be an unpleasant experience. Better to have an orgy and get some shut-eye.

His teeth snapped shut when the darkness that blocked his connection with Siena carved knowledge directly into his understanding. No words, no voice, just a series of meanings that told him that he was now allowed to come to the Shadow Island. Without any hesitation, he began to move. The harem followed him, while Stirwin stayed behind. Copernicus assumed his item form, turning into a copper wristband around Rave’s arm.

It was another deceptively long walk. Getting used to the new distances continued to be a bother and, due to impatience, they decided to simply run the majority of the distance. It was only him, Rave, Aclysia, Beatrice and Metra at this point. Although John was the slowest out of that group, he still had 100 Agility, allowing them to cross the distance in a fraction of the time even a Olympian marathon runner would normally require.

The sky turned dark when they went past the decrepit stone arch that symbolized the entrance to the Shadow Island proper. It wasn’t a slow shift, as it was for the Light Island or the Midnight Forest. Instead, the very moment he went past that gate, he was under a starless sky. What little light was around came from the neighbouring islands. Shimmers on the horizon, dulled due to a dark mist that was only visible while being inside of it.

It was as quiet as it was dark. The ground was a mixture of dark sand and grey moss, eating the sounds of their steps. “Spooky,” Rave said and raised her hand. Carefully, she created a ball of light in her palm. She was ready to extinguish it immediately. Last time she had done something like this, they had gone into the Midnight Forest for the first time and the residents didn’t take kindly to the invasion of a small sun into their sacred night.

The shadow elementals that were uncovered by the Lightbearer’s illumination reacted more with curiosity than aggression. Fragments of shadow that stubbornly hung around even as the radiance vanquished their natural manifestations, the shadow elementals took the forms of shades that hushed over the floor. They ran tiny circles around them, touched their feet and then darted off like children that had gotten away with something forbidden.

They returned a few moments later, tagged them, and then vanished again. The pattern repeated three times and then John was sure of it. “They want us to follow them,” he said.

“Let’s do it then, might be interesting,” Metra remarked. “We’re searching for their mother anyway, right?”

“Technically, we’re looking for Siena, but I’d assume they’re at the same spot,” John retorted as he went into the direction the shadows kept scurrying towards. It didn’t take too long for more intricate shadow elementals to show themselves. Large insects, creatures of black crystals, gorgeous women with seductive curves and sharp teeth, equally gorgeous men with mysterious eyes and hands that could crush skulls, birds, cats and other animals. Of all the elementals, the shadow ones came in the most varied shapes.

A whole group of those gorgeous women nested nakedly in a group of bleak trees. Pale bark and pale skin intertwined for a pleasing view and they cooed temptations in John’s direction. The Gamer ignored them; he had more pressing concerns and even more gorgeous women with him. He had gone through enough trouble taming the one shadow spirit he had and he still didn’t know what kind of situation she was in.

Just like he had quickly figured out what the small elementals wanted him to do, John knew where they were heading after just a few minutes of walking. A ridge of mountains, darker and with more pronounced spires than those found on the rest of the Guild Hall, was clearly visible against the intense light from the temple to the north.

The mountain was filled with caves, but they ignored all of them but one. A particularly large entrance led into a tunnel so slanted one had to be careful not to fall and slide down over a dozen metres under the surface. The deeper they went into that cave, the more the darkness and silence changed. They went from being the ambience of the environment to being that which dominated the space.

“That’s weird,” Rave mumbled, looking at the sphere in her hand. It gave barely enough light to show the outlines of dripstones on the ceiling and floor around them. “I ain’t spending less mana on keeping this up, yet it keeps getting dimmer.”

“That’s expected, really,” John said and narrowed his eyes at the ceiling. Somewhere around here, the elemental essence had to be located. “You can feel the Mother of Shadow being around, right?” He stopped when he finally caught the movement of droplets flying from the spikes on the floor upwards into a pool under the cave’s ceiling.

“I gueeeeeee-“ Rave started and her word stretched out, causing John to turn around to check what she was startled by. Just barely, he caught a grey-skinned hand reaching out. Sharp, dark red nails tipped slender fingers, which closed around the sphere of light and extinguished it with the effort John would have expended to kill a fly.

For a moment, the darkness was absolute. Then, as if it was moved several layers down in a photo manipulation program, it took to the background and revealed a female shape.

The grey arm belonged to a body of the same colour. The person’s curves were slender, her chest almost petite and hidden by a dress of dark, flowing mist. When she took several steps, her smooth, long legs cut through the long skirt as if it was a tender waterfall. Gracefully, she almost seemed to hover through the absolute darkness they now found themselves in.

She was beautiful beyond even a poet’s description. Her eyes were of a greyish blue, a surprisingly normal colour, and had an exotic almond shape. Her mouth was a luscious display of sultriness, curved into a flirting smile, revealing a hint of teeth and the sharp canines. Her nose was an oddly cute button, partly hidden by a strand of white hair that ran across her face. It and all the other strands of her hair were so long that John couldn’t see the end of them. They faded into the darkness, became one with it. Some laid and dragged over the floor, others hung as if attached to something else in the darkness.

The woman moved up to John, put her arms around his neck, and stretched up. She did all of this with such fluidity that nobody even had the opportunity to do anything if they wanted to. Stretching past his lips, she reached his ear and whispered, “Fade.”

The sound etched itself into his mind, heart and soul. It wasn’t a word, it was power vocalized, a meaning made clear through all languages and understandable even in the absence of any. Under normal circumstances, John would have thought it an incantation, but the window that appeared persuaded him otherwise.

It was her name. The name of the Mother of Shadow wasn’t just an assortment of syllables that she was called with. Her name was the very concept of something fading, vanishing into nothing. Her name had power beyond anyone else.

The oldest elemental slowly backed away. “Keep taking good care of my adorable daughter.” In person, her voice was the opposite of the presence of her mind. It was nothing but velvet and kisses on his ears. “Disappoint me, and I will see you ruined.”

With those words, she faded. The darkness around them lost its completeness and the silence transformed into a quiet. The tiny sounds of drops of shadow essence uniting with the upside down pond was all that could be heard for a moment. Then there was a long, frustrated sigh.