Nagasaki Soyo and Kocho Shinobu were neither Persona users nor Shadows.
The massacre they had carried out yesterday in the subway Impression Space had not been some spiritual duel of wills.
They had simply crushed everything with power from another world.
Pure brute force.
Then Toyokawa Sakiko looked at Wakaba Mutsumi and returned to the main subject.
"How is it? Can you control it?"
Mutsumi closed her eyes and sensed it for a moment, then nodded calmly.
The Pixie, which had been lazily sprawled over Geto Mutsumi's finger, seemed to receive some kind of signal. It immediately stopped acting spoiled, its butterfly wings vibrating faster as it rose lightly into the air.
Pixie traced a graceful arc through the air and hovered right in front of Sakiko's nose. Then it spread its tiny hands and aimed its palms at her.
A faint green light shone from Pixie's hands.
Then Sakiko suddenly felt vitality welling up from deep within her body.
It was not violent. It was like a warm spring, flowing through her limbs and bones in an instant.
Her whole body felt as if she had suddenly sunk into a hot spring.
However, that wondrous sense of fullness only lasted a few seconds before the vitality receded, and the light in Pixie's hands dimmed.
Mutsumi said, "This is an ability that restores a small amount of life force."
Sakiko's eyes lit up. She asked eagerly, "What about the rest?"
Mutsumi thought for a moment, reviewing the information fed back to her through the technique, then said, "Its basic attributes are extremely low. Its attacks are weak as well. It also has different affinities toward different types of attacks."
She paused slightly.
"However… I can sense a kind of growth potential in it that cursed spirits don't possess."
"According to the information returned by the Potential Avatar, cursed spirits in its original world, while also born from human negative emotions like Shadows, are generally produced when specific people harbor negative emotions toward specific things."
Mutsumi gave an example.
"For example, if a student is severely bullied at school, they will develop negative feelings toward the school, as well as hatred toward those classmates. Guided by that intensely directed curse, the cursed energy spilling out from the negative emotions around them will flow precisely toward that school."
"That cursed energy will accumulate somewhere in the school. It might be the rooftop. It might be the bathrooms. It might be an abandoned classroom. Day after day, year after year, as hatred continues to pile up, quantitative change eventually becomes qualitative change, and in that constant cursing, it hatches into a concrete cursed spirit."
"But that kind of cursed spirit is actually very weak. After all, its source is only that bullied student, or perhaps a handful of people who know about the situation and also feel negative emotions. The number of people involved is not very large, so the total amount of cursed energy gathered is naturally extremely limited."
"The more important issue is the flaw in how cursed spirits grow."
Mutsumi spoke of the key point.
"Cursed spirits can only accumulate cursed energy while they are still in their unhatched embryonic state. Once they are born and leave that gestation state, their rate of accumulation drops off a cliff."
"And once they evolve into a complete form, their strength may even stop growing entirely. They can no longer make even the slightest progress. In other words, after a cursed spirit has fully taken shape, no matter how much resentment or fear gathers afterward, the cursed energy directed toward it can only replenish it. It cannot make it stronger."
"It's somewhat like jujutsu sorcerers. A sorcerer can constantly recover cursed energy. In the long term, a sorcerer can produce an infinite amount of cursed energy, but the total amount of cursed energy their body can contain has an upper limit."
"Cursed spirits are similar. Once they enter their complete form, the cursed energy that gathers can only be used to replenish them. It can't strengthen them further."
"As for those terrifying special-grade cursed spirits, every one of them already obtained an enormous amount of cursed energy before birth due to some widespread social consensus or collective fear."
Mutsumi gave a few examples.
"For example, the Slit-Mouthed Woman is known by an enormous number of people. Because her urban legend is so widespread, almost every child walking alone at night, and every adult who has heard the rumor, will unconsciously feel fear toward her. Tens of millions of tiny fears gather together into an ocean."
"Or take the many humans who die in forest disasters, wildfires, tsunamis, and avalanches. Their deaths cause people to fear nature, which leads to the birth of cursed spirits related to natural disasters."
"Because enough people are directing emotions toward them, they gather far more cursed energy. That is why they are special grade from the moment they are born. But even special-grade cursed spirits still cannot advance further."
Then Mutsumi changed the subject.
"But Shadows in our world are different."
"Although Shadows are also born from negative emotions, they all originate from the sea of everyone's collective unconscious. In that sense, Shadows are fundamentally of the same source."
"That means Shadows have the possibility of becoming stronger through fusion."
Toyokawa Sakiko rubbed her chin, then nodded.
"I see. Then let's test how effective it is."
After that, Geto Mutsumi began continuously collecting Shadows in the underground Impression Space.
To improve efficiency, the young Gojo Sakiko and adult Gojo Sakiko assisted him in capturing them.
Sakiko shifted her attention onto the two avatars and said,
"Let's make this quick. Mutsumi, you only need to focus on absorbing them."
With Gojo Sakiko's Limitless and spatial manipulation, the three Potential Avatars first used Blue's attraction to rapidly move between the various levels. Each time they arrived on a new layer, they used gravity to gather all the Shadows together.
A Blue compressed to its limit appeared at the center of each layer. Its attraction became a visible storm, forcibly tearing every Shadow into the air.
At the heart of that attraction, Geto Mutsumi opened both hands and absorbed every Shadow.
The instant those Shadows touched her, they had no power to resist. They collapsed and twisted, turning into black spheres one after another, falling into her mouth.
Layer One, Layer Four, Layer Seven, Layer Nine…
Their coordination was extremely smooth. In less than a minute, the three Potential Avatars had completed an entire round trip. Apart from Layer One, which had not refreshed because of everyone else's presence, they collected all the Shadows across the seventeen layers.
Everyone gathered again.
Geto Mutsumi raised both hands, palms facing upward. In each hand sat a Pixie.
Although both were only palm-sized, the two Pixies looked very different. Their hairstyles, facial features, clothing colors, and subtle design details all varied significantly.
They let out faint buzzing sounds in Geto Mutsumi's palms, occasionally moving closer to sniff each other curiously.
Standing nearby, Nagasaki Soyo looked at the two adorable Pixies, a hint of reluctance flashing through her eyes.
"Do we really have to fuse them?"
She looked at the two tiny creatures that seemed to have walked straight out of a fairy tale, her voice trembling faintly.
"Isn't that… a little cruel?"
Toyokawa Sakiko said from the side,
"Generally speaking, Shadows like these don't actually possess human emotions."
"All of their behavior is just a reflection of outside stimuli. It's the same as Mutsumi at the very beginning, and Mortis now."
Sakiko turned to glance at Wakaba Mutsumi and Mortis, then continued,
"However, Mutsumi and Mortis have continuously interacted with humans in the real world, and they have already developed true selves. These Shadows, on the other hand, have only been wandering through the Impression Space. They don't have any true feelings. They're only imitating."
Mortis, standing behind Soyo, strode forward and clapped a hand on her shoulder.
"Even I, their fellow Shadow, don't feel sad about this. You, an actual human, don't need to get so sentimental."
Soyo gave Mortis an annoyed look.
In truth, it was only because Mutsumi and Mortis were Shadows that she subconsciously extended her affection toward these creatures as well.
On top of that, when the Shadows had looked like snarling black masses, that had been one thing. But now that the ones in Geto Mutsumi's hands had become cute little fairies, she couldn't help feeling a little reluctant.
However, once she understood that the Shadows in the subway Impression Space had no real intelligence and were merely empty shells, she naturally wouldn't continue indulging in misplaced sympathy.
As for Shinobu, there was even less to say.
The world she came from was so cruel that, when tactics required it, people would not hesitate to fill a hole with lives if it meant securing a result. Having grown accustomed to that, she naturally had no objection to fusing two cute fairies together.
Once no one opposed it anymore, Geto Mutsumi's fingers slowly curled inward.
The two Pixies hovering in her palms instantly froze, then twisted back into two black spheres.
Geto Mutsumi slowly brought her hands together. The black spheres distorted violently, fused, and became a new black sphere. Its size showed no obvious difference from the previous two.
Then cracks spread all across its surface.
With a muffled shatter, the sphere broke apart, turning into specks of black light that scattered into the air.
A brand-new Pixie appeared in Geto Mutsumi's palm.
It resembled both of the previous Pixies, yet was also different from either of them.
Toyokawa Sakiko stepped forward, bent down, and brought her face almost right up to this newly born Pixie. She carefully observed it from top to bottom, then stretched out a hand beside it to compare its height.
After making her judgment, she said,
"It's clearly bigger. About one-third larger. Its height hasn't increased by much, but overall, its volume seems to be the two from before added together."
Geto Mutsumi closed her eyes and used Cursed Spirit Manipulation to carefully sense the feedback.
After a few seconds, she opened her eyes and nodded.
"That's right. Its basic attributes are almost the sum of the previous two. There is virtually no loss."
Sakiko's eyes shone.
"No loss? That's an excellent start. Keep going!"
For the next stretch of time, Geto Mutsumi stood in place and continuously released the Shadows she had just collected to fuse them.
After more than a hundred repeated experiments, Wakaba Mutsumi worked out a few patterns.
"Identical Shadows can be directly fused. The new Shadow will inherit all of the negative attribute power from the two previous Shadows, as well as all of their skills."
"And when a Shadow strengthened through fusion reaches a certain stage, it will undergo a qualitative change and awaken a new ability. Pixie, for example, can awaken a skill that removes negative statuses such as dizziness."
As she spoke, Geto Mutsumi held up a Pixie about the size of a cat.
Then she turned her wrist, condensed another low-level Shadow into a black sphere, and forcefully pressed it into Pixie's body.
This time, the black sphere encountered some rejection as it merged.
Pixie's body suddenly swelled, then hiccuped and spat out a wisp of black smoke. In the end, its size barely increased.
Geto Mutsumi continued,
"If they are different Shadows, and one is simply fed to the other, then only part of the negative-emotion power can be inherited. The loss is massive. As for whether skills can be inherited, that depends on whether the inheriting Shadow has the aptitude to learn that skill. If it lacks the aptitude, the skill is completely lost during consumption."
"But different Shadows have another method of use."
Geto Mutsumi turned two completely different Shadows into black spheres at the same time, then made the two spheres collide with each other.
What appeared next was not either of the previous forms, but a brand-new individual that looked like a snowman.
"Two different Shadows can be fused to create a new Shadow."
"And this new Shadow will fully inherit all of the negative attribute power from the two Shadows. As for inherited skills, that is likewise limited by its aptitude."
However, because the hundreds of Shadows they had captured were all from low levels, Wakaba Mutsumi temporarily could not determine the exact rules behind this fusion system.
The only thing she could confirm was that fixed Shadow combinations produced fixed new Shadows.
As Toyokawa Sakiko listened to Mutsumi summarize the rules, she felt that the Potential Avatar Mutsumi had summoned was practically overflowing with potential in their world.
Identical types could perfectly stack attributes.
Different types could fuse into new forms without losing attributes.
If this pattern continued, and if fusion truly had no upper limit, then as long as they kept collecting and fusing thousands upon thousands of Shadows, sooner or later, quantity would inevitably become quality.
They could forcibly synthesize a terrifying existence whose base stats surpassed young Gojo Sakiko—perhaps even surpassed Ryomen Soyo.
Cursed Spirit Manipulation was far too compatible with their world!
Then Wakaba Mutsumi continued,
"And I also found that Shadows seem capable of being synthesized into things similar to cursed tools."
As she spoke, Geto Mutsumi handed over a ring.
This ring had appeared during her repeated tests of feeding materials to Pixie.
At one point, when Pixie's energy reached a certain threshold, she suddenly felt as though she had grasped some kind of inspiration.
Geto Mutsumi used Cursed Spirit Manipulation to turn Pixie into a black sphere, then followed that inspiration and abruptly clenched her five fingers, crushing the black sphere.
The sphere collapsed completely, black smoke leaking through the gaps between her fingers before scattering and vanishing.
Then this ring appeared.
Through Geto Mutsumi's sensing and testing, she determined that it was something similar to a cursed tool.
As long as someone wore the ring, they could consume cursed energy or mental energy through thought to release a weak lightning strike. It also carried a special negative effect, giving the target a chance to enter a paralyzed state, causing their body to stiffen and leaving them unable to move for a short time.
The ring had fully solidified Pixie's basic lightning skill.
Join here to read ahead.
In Star Rail, Ultra-Beast Armored — Have I Caught "Equilibrium"? l (Chapter 80)
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I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter250)
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Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
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Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 248
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Multiverse Crossover: The Perf 66
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The Violent Girl Group Is Beat 125
Uma Musume: The Horse Girl Who 67
Uma Musume: From Beginner 145
Becoming a Horse Girl, I Will 85
Uma Musume: I Want All 120
I Can Copy Unique Skills 115
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Uma Musume: Today Is Another Romantic Battlefield 105
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The Most Filial Son Under Heav 85
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Hell-Difficulty Dungeon? 55
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Checking In in Demon Slayer 85
The Reincarnating Trainer of Tracen Academy 100
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Tanya Starts from Re:Zero 80
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The Gacha Merchant Who Started 80
Honkai's Otherworld? Wait—Who Are You People?! 80
Emiya Shirou, Determined to Slay Every Curse and Evil Spirit 57
The Uma Musume Who Became 55
I'm Definitely Not the King of 60
After Maxing Out Every Class 45
Naruto: I'm Konoha's Local Men 35
Honkai: World Modulation Mode 34
I, the Elden Sword Saint 27
Dio Brando Is Challenging FGO 24
No One Knows Pokémon Better 18
I, Sakazuki, Won't Go Down Tha 20
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