Early September in Tingen — the weather had already shifted from cool to slightly chilly, but the afternoon sun at three or four o'clock still felt warm.
Klein passed through the Wall of Spirituality and the bay window, floating in the air outside his bedroom, looking down at the pedestrians and carriages coming and going along Daffodil Street.
Just then, a man in gray-blue work clothes suddenly looked up in his direction.
Klein was startled and wanted to hide on the spot, but he couldn't find suitable cover.
He circled once, saw no other way out, and tried to slip back inside. But a glance from the corner of his eye revealed that the man's gaze had merely swept past the second-floor window, following a sparrow the entire time before unfortunately losing track of it.
In Tingen's urban area, you could still occasionally spot birds.
Phew… I forgot — ordinary people can't see me at all… Klein let out a sigh of relief, feeling that he hadn't fully adapted to his current state.
With renewed confidence, he lowered his altitude, approaching the reasonably wide street, and simply floated above the pedestrians' heads.
Once he closed the distance, Klein immediately discovered that his "gaze" was now roughly equivalent to spiritual vision, requiring no separate activation, though it had range limitations.
In addition, apart from auras and emotional colors, he could faintly perceive the existence of each pedestrian's soul — hazy, ethereal, and translucent.
In my current state, it seems I could pass directly through flesh and attack the soul… Klein nodded thoughtfully.
He circled once, preparing to test his maximum speed, then flew toward Iron Cross Street with all his might.
Before long, he stopped, having arrived outside the apartment where he used to live.
It should be about the speed of a regular car from my previous life — the kind that cruises on the highway… What a pity I still can't freely enter and leave the Spirit World, or it would be perfect… Though, if you get lost in the Spirit World, the consequences are supposedly very serious… Just as Klein finished his self-assessment, he felt his emotions turn low and gray, weighed down by an indescribable heaviness.
He looked around and saw the area shrouded in a darkness invisible to ordinary people, one that sunlight could hardly dispel. Residual emotions — numbness, despair, pain — layered upon one another, almost tangible.
"Just like what I experienced with my spiritual perception after advancing to 'Diviner' last time — the middle and lower sections of Iron Cross Street haven't changed at all… I wonder how many years it took to accumulate this level of oppression and gloom…" Klein recalled the past, sighed, and rose to the third-floor level.
There, he finally felt the sunlight and escaped the oppressive emotions.
Klein flew along the lower street, occasionally seeing residents in tattered clothing with numb expressions and malnourished bodies. He even witnessed two cases of "natural" death — both from the kind brought on by prolonged hunger, failing health, and sudden illness.
Who knew how many people painfully passed away here each month? Yet bankrupt farmers and former slaves from the Southern Continent would soon fill their places… Klein exhaled silently, changed direction, and flew toward the South District.
That was Tingen's industrial zone, where steel mills, lead white factories, ceramic factories, printing plants, metalworking shops, and machine manufacturing facilities stood packed together, one right up against the next.
As he flew on, Klein saw towering chimney-like iron furnaces, saw the pervasive dust, and saw a heavy gloom only marginally better than that of the lower street.
The area was saturated with emotions of exhaustion, pain, pessimism, and numbness, and workers past their thirties were in the minority.
Just as Klein was about to lower his altitude for a closer look, he suddenly felt a wave of weakness — from the inside out.
"My spirituality can no longer sustain this state…" Klein was alarmed. His first instinct was to rush back home, but then a better possibility occurred to him.
"I was 'summoned' here, so ending the 'summons' should naturally send me back!" He calmed his mind and carefully sensed his own state and the surrounding environment, and unsurprisingly discovered that somewhere impossibly high yet impossibly close maintained a subtle connection with him.
Following this connection, Klein tightly wrapped the "Sun Blaze Talisman" within his grasp and projected a powerful intention to end the "summons."
A massive, terrifying suction force came rushing in, and his transparent-to-the-point-of-invisible figure leaped with it, vanishing from the material world.
…………
Boundless gray-white mist spread in silence. The illusory, motionless crimson star did not flicker. Klein reappeared inside the majestic palace that resembled a giant's dwelling, at the head of the ancient, mottled bronze long table.
That was the entire process... and... Klein looked toward his own spiritual body with surprise and delight in his eyes, seeing within it a warm and pure, thin golden slice.
"The Sun Blaze Talisman!"
I actually managed to bring a real material object above the Gray Fog by summoning myself! He could not conceal his smile as he took out the talisman, turning it over and over in his hands to confirm that it was not some visualized virtual product.
Klein stood up, paced a few steps with a sense of accomplishment, and thought with eager anticipation: