Autophagy

With the dagger in a two-handed reverse grip and its blade directly facing towards himself, Song Lei reached out to his soul and pushed out. He encased himself with a thick, gray layer of soul energy.

He then lifted his face up by forty-five degrees before raising the dagger.

Aligning the tip of the dagger's blade with his face, Song Lei stabbed the tip of the dagger into his glabella. It wasn't much. Just a quarter of a centimeter was enough. Blood trickled down the sides of his nose, staining the corners of his lips.

He resisted the urge to wipe the blood away with his hands and stood there motionless. Suddenly, as he kept the dagger in the same place, he felt something click in his soul. He felt unknown energy descend upon him and caress his soul.

As if someone had turned off the lights, he felt that he lost his vision although that was not the case.

'I'm successful!' Song Lei shouted in his mind with excitement. He had managed to complete the first step of becoming a shaman. Getting up and checking how much time he had left, Song Lei came to realize that he had spent about four minutes for the ritual. Feeling dizzy, he rushed down the stairs, back into room 1401.

Gasping for air, he laid motionlessly on the bed for quite some time. He only got up once he felt that he had the energy to do so.

"This feels like shit..." Song Lei muttered. Finally, as mentioned in the shamanism guide, he had closed his spiritual eye completely. As he had to close it first if he wanted to open it. However, having his spiritual eye completely closed seemed to cause awkward side effects. For example, currently, although he had his eyes closed, he felt as if he had gone completely blind.

"Let's look around a little bit..." he talked to himself as he sat up straight. When he opened his eyes, an awkward sight greeted him. The room, albeit being completely devoid of any kind of light sources, seemed dimly lit.

'How..?' Song Lei questioned in his head. His sight had always been good because of his skill Ethereal Senses, which enhanced his overall senses, alongside providing him the ability to perceive the ethereal. However, it wouldn't work if the place was completely dark.

Normally, the apartment would always have a very small amount of light in its corridors, providing Song Lei the base amount of light that he needed for the Ethereal Senses to work. However, Xiang Yimu's room would be completely devoid of light, creating the need of using his phone's flashlight.

Currently, though, that need for a flashlight was obsolete, leaving Song Lei confused and intrigued.

'I had heard that losing one of your senses causes your other senses to become better...' He thought. "Is this related to that? Now that I've completely shut my spiritual eye, my physical eye has become better? How does that even work if there's no light to see?" He muttered.

Getting up and staring at his hands, he decided to try to understand the degree of the change. 'If closing my spiritual eye caused my other senses to get better, would it get enhanced further if I were to close my eyes?' He thought.

Immediately putting his hypothesis to test, he closed his eyes and focused on his ears.

'With this, I should be able to hear a lot of things,' he guessed. As his senses were isolated from one another, alongside the fact that he was focusing solely on his hearing, the eerie silence that had been enveloping him for a long time was broken down.

A lot of different voices reached his ears. However, all of them sounded echoey and rough. As a lot of different noises were overlapping, he couldn't exactly differentiate between them. Realizing this, Song Lei did his best to choose one of those noises and isolate it from the others. Although it was hard, the noise kept becoming clearer and clearer to him.

"Are you sure he won't notice?" A low voice was finally discerned Song Lei's ears. It was pretty easy to realize that the person talking was trying their best to be unheard. Song Lei was quickly able to deduce the talking person to be Leon Parker.

"Obviously! We have a floor between us. Not even the Wei siblings would be able to hear us from this distance with so many walls between us," A guttural voice with obvious hints of anger in it was heard by Song Lei. Quickly, Song Lei was able to guess that the person talking was Lukas Stampf. He was the rowdiest one among the newbies.

"Really?" Leon Parker said skeptically. "Well, why do you think he told us to not leave our rooms? Maybe there was some danger or something?"

"I think he just wants to feel superior to us," Lukas said. The signs of anger in his voice had calmed down by now. "And we aren't even outside. I just went out to the corridor to meet up with you. That wouldn't create a problem would it?"

"Well... It doesn't seem like it," Leon answered. Song Lei could hear him scratching something, probably his head. After listening to them for another half a minute, Song Lei eventually realized that they weren't going to talk about something important. They had seemingly met up to chit-chat about a few things and relax.

'That's fine as long as they don't endanger themselves...' Song Lei muttered to himself. Diverting his focus from Lukas and Leon, he chose something else to hear.

This time, it was a gentle humming noise that filled his head. It was pleasant to listen to. He listened to the humming in a daze for a few long minutes. It took him about fifteen minutes to finally snap out of it.

'That must be Nakajima Rei. Her ability to use her voice seems to be stronger than what I thought...' Song Lei commented inwardly. Shifting his attention again, Song Lei managed to hear someone writing on paper. Although he couldn't understand who it was, from the fact that it came from the same floor as the newbies, he assumed that it was Jin Ru.

Relieved that the newbies were safe, Song Lei shifted his attention to another voice.

He heard a ferocious swishing noise as if someone was swinging a long stick very quickly. As he focused more to better understand what he was hearing, the swishing stopped.

"It's not good to eavesdrop on others...."