"Damn! What just happened to him?!" William was puzzled by this. He tried to knock Leo back to his senses, yet nothing happened. William was in the middle of his training and didn't sense what was happening around him. He didn't feel Leo's presence and didn't know what happened for him to end up in such a state.
"Jeremy, hurry!" The only thing William could think of was to look for help. He tried to spread out his spirit sense, ending up suffering the great limitations exerted from the place over him. So, he went out, looking for anyone from Leo's legion. And luckily the first person he met was Jeremy.
"This… What happened? Tell me everything!" Jeremy wasn't any less shocked by what happened to his boss and friend than William. The latter simply explained everything, honestly telling the truth.
"This can't be right…" Jeremy was lost in thoughts for a few seconds, "he came to notify you of the Cardinal decision. They agreed on inviting you to one of the main bases of our Cult, letting you check our grand library in this continent. But this…"
"Is this a side effect of your… Ways?" William didn't know much about the Cult or how these people train. He thought this might be a side effect for their special training methods, or an exhaustion Leo suffered from overusing his power when dealing with the Nightmare monster's curse perhaps. Yet from the reaction of Jeremy, he could tell this wasn't the case.
"No, I never heard of such a thing before…" Jeremy firmly shook his head, "this is serious! Let me contact the Cardinals, let them know what just happened."
Jeremy didn't do this here. Before leaving, he asked William to keep an eye over Leo until he'd return. He also asked him to not spread news, so others wouldn't feel worried over their boss.
Jeremy held high hopes like William that this weird status was something temporary, something that would easily be solved by the Cardinals. Jeremy didn't think this was the effect of their training or techniques, but he got his ideas about the possibility of this being the result of a curse or something.
That was why he decided to go directly and inform the Cardinals about this weird situation. Before he'd left, he recorded Leo using a recording crystal, to show this to the Cardinals.
As he left, William started to take this matter quite seriously. "Leo came here perfectly fine. They went outside to check for that damn Nightmare monster and returned without any result or clue. Jeremy was with him moments before he arrived here. And he was perfectly fine by then… That means whatever happened to him originated from here…"
William's thoughts paused here. If that was true, then whatever caused such weird status to Leo was indeed with him in the room when he was training.
The first thing William did was to inspect his body and spirit. When he checked, he didn't notice anything unusual at first.
"That's weird…" as he didn't get a clue after carefully searching the room, he decided to give it a try and train again, "I'll use a recording crystal this time and see what's wrong…"
William sat cross legged, trained in the same technique he was training in before. He didn't just use one recording crystal, but seven, arranging them all around him and Leo, to see if anything unusual would appear when he'd start training.
He didn't train much this time, just spent five minutes before cancelling his training. When he went to examine the recording crystals, he got the shock of his life.
"This…" his body even trembled when he saw the three gigantic shadows appearing out of nowhere the moment he started training. This was the first time he saw such a thing. And what made him more shocked was the fact that the other two spirits, the supposedly dormant spirits, were in fact active!
He closely watched the seven recordings one by one and saw clearly the three gigantic shadows appearing just moments after he started training.
"I used to train alone, so no one ever saw this… But Leo did…" William now realised what happened to Leo. and he also got an idea about what caused such a weird effect on him.
It wasn't his fox spirit, but the other two. When he trained just now, the dog and the snake glared again at Leo, a move that told William a lot about what really happened.
"One spirit can corrode the entire world if it got the power to, and the other could suck dry spirit power from any living creature… What troublesome bastards you are!"
William knew the crux of the problem, yet he knew he couldn't tell anyone about this. This was his secret, his fault if others learnt about what happened to Leo. And so he decided to keep this for himself, and even destroyed the seven crystals after watching their content once more.
"It looks like my spirit is struggling against these two… What are they trying to do exactly? Crush my spirit and control my body or what?"
William felt more headache the more he thought about this. He didn't hurry things out before as he considered these two spirits in deep slumber and quite harmless.
The worst he thought about was that these two spirits would flare up from time to time, negatively affecting his body and spirit. Yet from the recording he could tell these two spirits were active all the time and were already starting to rebel and fight against his spirit.
"I need to assess the damage more thoroughly," he took out another crystal, a candle, and checked his spirit and spirit power again. This time, he closely inspected everything, taking almost an hour in doing so.
"This is weird…" At first, he didn't see anything unusual. His spirit power didn't decrease as he expected, and the dog and the snake spirits were lying in peace, sleeping deeply within the fox's body like two sly and sinister monsters.