New energy source

With a smile in his face, Aki approached the puppet.

The moment Aki took a strange soul construct  in form of a knife, the demon controlling the old man's body felt fear.

-"GRAAASCHREESSSSHHHHAAAAAAHHHHAHAHANUUIDJK…"  Rage and fear could be detected in the scorched face of puppet, even if just by the disappearance of the usual demonic smile such entities have.

-Stop complaining idiot, it's not like it is being carved in your soul.

Saying that while rolling his eyes, Aki almost seemed to convince the demon that it would feel nothing, but of course, it had already seen torture sessions for demons and even felt it once.

Suffice to say that by the time Aki had finished with him, the guy who was controlling the corpse was foaming pink bubbles out of his mouth and the elder from before had a magic circle inscribed in his soul that made it so that the spells "Phantom pain" and "Mind heal" are cast at him when mana is infused into it.

Don't let the name fool you though, mind heal is a spell that makes it so that the mind gets more focused and in perfect thinking condition.

Obviously it is not perfect and has its limitations on how much it can heal, but it's difficulty is also very big, while you need a certain understanding of mind and light magic to cast it, so it's largely ignored.

Aki can't go around casting this spell either, but he certainly can engrave it very fast. Who cares about the chance of making errors when you can use two or four spells to steady yourself and fetch the related information in your own brain.

If you're still not confident you can alway use guiding light or one of it's variations and it will guide you in the order of movements.

Uh? You think that's cheating? No no, the Mc hasn't even reached the level to use information magic to its fullest, not deserving even a Lv 1 in the skill.

Those who can are basically military grade supercomputers, or something along those lines, and can make a magical nuke whenever they want. If Aki was at that level he would already have attracted the dragon's and god's attention.

A rank 2 information mage, now that would be funny. There's only two in this world and not even the gods dare offend them.

After all, if there is no world to order, they will simply cease to exist while the mages will just have to look for another house.

Space and time magic are basic requirements for beings such as…  ouch ouch, ok, I will stop, back to the history!

Since he was very tired and the body in front of him only had materials for demon summoning, which he already destroyed while attacking and any equipment that the man had before could only count as miscellaneous such as rings, Aki decided to burn it because it was too ugly.

And so, while he tiredly got to bed and decided to take a nap, not forgetting to get Bakh out of the hole with the formation core.

The Ability to fall asleep while someone is nagging by your side is not something Aki has mastered, but he was tired enough to succeed easily this time.

Obviously, this was not something planned at all, there were just a lot of countermeasures.

The city lord is now explaining everything to the public with Aki's version of the truth, the academy was assured that it was safe to lower their magic shield, the markets started bustling again, etc.

When Aki finally woke up to teach his class and then sleep again, but noticed he was actually feeling stupidly energetic, he sent a message to the academy telling them that he was passing through an epiphany and they would most likely be unable to contact him during his meditation.

That was nothing new. It happened sometimes with Aki already and was actually quite common occurrence to people in general, they just didn't have so many epiphanies in two weeks. Some people thought he was using that as an excuse to slack, but they were never able to track him to begin with, and every time said message was sent to the academy, he came back two or three stars stronger.

Rapidly searching through the fifteen rings the attacker from earlier had, Aki noticed that besides the spacial rings containing material, body parts, torture devices and weapons, drugs and other such things, there was also a very thin ring in their midst. One that didn't seem to have any actual purpose.

Obviously it was some kind of secret! He should have noticed it before when he was cutting the man's hand off.

Yes, he had fifteen rings in one hand, but there were ornamental rings in his other hand too. 23 to be exact.

Oh, you were surprised by him disregarding everything and cutting a "human" to pieces, and them going to sleep.

I should have said it before, but goblins and feral orcs actually smell worse than corpses in general, mostly because they mingle with and eat then, or simply kill a lot of shit.

Besides that, it's just the basic to step naked everything your opponent had and use x-ray vision to check if they had something you have to cut out of their digestive and or excretion system.

Yeah, ok, X-ray vision isn't that normal, I admit.

Anyway, what Aki found was an advanced cultivation technique related to funneling demonic energy into your body and turning it into your own Qi/power/mana or whatever.

Obviously this is not something everyone can do, you need… you actually just need a way to not get crazy during the conversion of energy and everything will be fine.

Of course, the infinite and very chaotic energy from the beyond is something that can easily corrupt the strongest minds, but if you can take it within yourself safely and use it, the advantages are huuuge.

No one is stupid enough to simply try it out, obviously, but along the course of time, people  found a way to focus such energy from alternative means.

No, the method doesn't involve fucking, sucking, strangely specific rituals that requires the sacrifice of your loved ones or orphans.

Not necessarily at least.

To begin you just need to contact the enterprise, and after you have your first demonic familiar, you have right to one month of the most basic energy source from hell.

That, obviously, is not a very good way to cultivate in long term, but it can boost your cultivation to something close to twice as fast in comparison to the overworld normal energy.

That energy source is one of the main reasons why a humongous amount of demons offer their services, the rest being boredom,  lack of money and/or a combination of the before mentioned. Don't mention the fact you can still use other factors to increase your training speed.

Anyway, with such business model, it is quite obvious that they have access to even better resources and they can be bought.

If it is still not clear, right now Aki is using his stalker demon to eat the demonic part of the energy and getting his part out of it while being in a state of near overdose of pills.

A stalker  is basically a human shaped Spider. You know, the full of teeth lower jaw that opens horizontally, a "carapace", six extra limbs on the back, like those of the iron spider, eyes that look like they have a fishnet over then, that thingy flies have on their faces, and lastly, a hair that looks like Sarah's after her turning queen zerg. The normal stuff.

-Th… th…  this is delicious!

They are also very shy and don't like showing themselves at all, and considering their assassination technique in the equation, it is very hard to ever see one if they are not under orders to appear around because of their master.

-Moooaaarr… *insert sexy moaning from a petite girl*

No, Aki is not doing sex with her, it's just that stalkers are a gluttony attuned demonic race, and he is feeding her a lot. Like, really, the scene right now would be very accurately describe by a cartoon scene where a vacuum cleaner suck in a whole party worth of food and drink.

Even if you stare at me like that, it's not my fault demons are weird. What? Yes, of course she has a pussy, but Aki is simply smart enough to completly cover his view and sound of her doing such a thing.

Why would he make an assexual girl have sex with him? Even if she is a demon that doesn't mean that…

Oh, I didn't say that her whole species consists of individuals who consider wanting to have sex strange nor that demons can very easily spawn or use other methods to become parents, did I?

Sorry, I sometimes forget some things aren't common sense to others.

Back to the story, the ring Aki found is actually one that the old man from before, please don't make me tipe that ridiculous name the guy had, used as a battery/substitute for his main one, which everyone is prohibited from taking out, because fuck they're expensive.