Autophagy

As the recruits went back to their rooms to unpack, Song Lei sighed a breath of relief. Having to act in such an imposing manner was nerve-wracking. However, if he wanted to be the type of leader he hoped to be, he would need to look relaxed and confident in front of his subordinates. He couldn't let them feel that he was nervous, nor could he act too cold and make them feel intimidated.

"*Sigh... This has become troubling..." He muttered as he put his hands into his pockets and started descending the stairs.

"I was hoping that it would be easier but it seems like I've gotten too used to being alone..." He thought out loud. Initially, when he had first come to the apartment, the place was awkwardly loud. He would hear occasional laughter, constant whispers from somewhere unknown, someone scratching the walls angrily. Random thuds and knocks... These noises would constantly resonate inside the apartment.

However, after Song Lei had cleaned up the 14th floor and the apartment had taken a lot of damage, the place had gone silent. Those thuds and knocks were nowhere to be heard. The whispers and laughter had long died out. With this, the apartment had plunged into an enigmatic silence. It was honestly hard to get used to it. At one point, Song Lei could swear that he could hear his inner organs working.

The beat of his heart, the gurgling of his bowels. The stream of blood going through his veins...

However, humans were adaptive beings. Even though it was definitely disturbing, he eventually managed to get used to it.

Since then, he would appreciate all this silence. He would appreciate how it left him completely on his own, able to think loudly and clearly.

In the end, getting too used to something seemed to be a big problem. Having four more people that breathe and have beating hearts by his side made him feel disturbed.

After ascending the stairs and entering his room, Song Lei leaned against the door and slid down. Finally having his much required free time, he opened the system shop and bought the next page of the Origin Shamanism of Soul Guidance.

After taking the paper out of the system, he, once again, started reading.

"Now that you know the dangers you might face in pursuit of shamanism, you should decide whether you want to continue or not."

As Song Lei read the line, he sighed deeply. Although he had to be careful, for some reason, he couldn't feel even a tinge of hesitation inside his mind. And this caused him to feel that something was wrong. However, even that feeling disappeared quickly, leaving its place to an inexplicable excitement. Song Lei acted according to this excitement and started reading again.

"For those who decided to brave through this, I shall continue. You have to close your eyes. For this, you need a nothingness that's not volatile. The pseudo-nothingness that I explained before. To find it, you have to wander through barren lands. Try to go wherever your mind tells you not to. However, this'll definitely lead you to dangers other than a pseudo-nothingness. So be ready for any danger that might come your way."

"Let's assume that you've found a nothingness. What you have to do is to draw a circle on the ground. However, do this very carefully and slowly. There's no need to be hasty inside a nothingness, as it can lead you to your death."

"Once you have drawn a circle with a radius of about one and a half meters, you should split it into twelve equal pieces."

"You then have to carefully draw these given symbols into those pieces," The book read. There were twelve different cleanly-drawn symbols that Song Lei hadn't seen before. There was a triangle with a circle stuck on top. There was a rectangle that had a few protruding triangles out of it.

'What do these mean..?' Song Lei thought. However, no matter how hard he thought about it, he couldn't find an answer. They were too abstract to be associated with anything. Song Lei was expecting them to be very complex symbols with lots of parts to decipher, however, they were instead very simple symbols that didn't seem to have much subtext to them. 'Only if I was able to identify a single one of them, I would be able to get the general concept of it...'

Not being able to figure out, Song Lei instead decided to memorize all of them, in case they came up somewhere else.

After he was done with that, he continued reading the next part.

"After you are done drawing, and making sure that you haven't spent much time inside the nothingness, you should be able to advance to the second part of the ritual."

"For the ritual, you should have an Iron dagger, engraved with the correct runes given below."

As Song Lei looked further down the page, he realized that the aforementioned runes were written in Chinese. Although he was confused by this for a few seconds, he quickly realized why that was the case.

"There are no languages in the New World..." He muttered to remind himself. In the New World, what language you wrote and spoke in didn't matter. The message would always be translated for whoever was on the receiving end. Although this made things very convenient, it also created a big question.

Why?

Why would such a thing happen in the New World? How could this be possible? Although Song Lei had pondered over this question many times before, he couldn't achieve an answer. What surprised him more was the fact that Aston was also completely out of ideas. Even he couldn't bring an answer to this.

As such, being words that were meant to convey something, the aforementioned runes were instantly translated for Song Lei to read. Those characters were clamped together tightly, making them a bit hard to read. For that reason, Song Lei lowered his head and looked at them more in detail. Only until then was he able to start reading properly.

"To the unknown ether, by the grace of the omnipotent Sky God...."