〚 Story by: AyyyZelos 〛
The Sun. A representation of life itself. It's no wonder that it rejects beings without the breath of life inside of them.
Besides just inflicting severe scorching pain upon Keal, the sun also drained some of his spirit.
Any injury would do so as spirit was essentially a ghost's flesh and blood but sunlight is even more deadly to ghosts.
Now Keal had to rethink his plan of action. He couldn't possibly go out under the light of day, that was a clear death sentence.
No, he had to hide beneath the blanket of the night sky, or at the very least find something to create a large enough shadow for him to take cover under.
After all, if he could stay safe from the sun under the shadows of the surrounding trees and foliage he should be able to do so with other shadows.
With that in mind, Keal decided to return to the graveyard in search of any possible safety precautions from the sun.
Phasing through the shed once again he reached out for the damaged shovel, only to realise he can't come into contact with physical objects due to not having a solid body.
Instead, he attempted to lift the object with his spirit, but failed due to a lack of sufficient control over it, after all being a ghost may have made absorbing spirit come naturally but the same can't be said for controlling it.
"Well, this sucks… Guess I'll just have to practice then." Sighed Keal, not really minding the setback since it wasn't like he had anything better to do with the sun out at the moment.
And so Keal practices controlling his spirit to lift the many objects around him, from broken spirit tools to tiny pebbles on the floor.
Creating arms of spirit modelled after his own he attempted to lift a small stone from the floor, he managed to pick it up only for it to phase through the hand made of his spirit.
To combat this he pushed more spirit into the arm, making it thicker and less see-through.
And lo and behold he could interact with objects!
But this brought a question to his mind, 'If I can do this with arms formed from spirit, why can't I do it with my own arms?'
And so he tried and succeeded.
Picking up the faulty storage ring was quite a novel experience for Keal, making him wonder if this is what having a body was like.
After all, just having the memories of someone with a body was different from actual hands-on experience.
Deciding to put the ring on one of his fingers to use as a constant training tool Keal moved onto the next aspect of his spirit control training, telekinesis.
He wanted to know if it was possible to use spirit to control objects from a distance, as that would make things a lot more convenient for him.
He picked up a box of nails from the table at the back of the shed then removed one to practice with.
Completely surrounding the nail with spirit he attempted to lift it by making the spirit move up and it worked, but he realised that this was both incredibly wasteful and the exact same thing he was doing when he tried to condense an extra arm out of spirit.
So in the hopes of being more energy efficient, he turned his spirit into the shape of a thin string and lassoed the nail before lifting it up, spirit not having any physical mass negating the need for momentum as you would need with regular string or rope.
He pointed the pointy tip of the nail towards the wooden door and catapulted it forwards as fast as he could, making it penetrate half of its length into the door.
Satisfied with his new ability Keal decided to look for any objects that could provide him with sufficient shade to cover himself with.
The largest object being the broken shovel, didn't help his plight much.
Instead, he did what any sane person would do and used his spirit to viciously tear one of the thin wooden fence walls off of the shed before lifting it above his head.
"Casts a big enough shadow but I'm burning through my spirit way too quickly." The fact that the wall weighed a lot more than a single nail probably accounted for the increased strain on Keal's spirit supply.
After an hour of practicing his control over his spirit and controlling many objects, he could now multitask and control up to 7 small objects at once with perfect control. Past that his finesse slipped a little.
Looking at the damage he caused to the shed by ripping one of the walls clean off of it he laughed to himself.
Through the newly created gap in the wall or lack thereof, he noticed that the sun was about to set.
'I guess I can explore further once night hits, but before that, I should check to see if there's anything of use here since I won't be coming back.' He thought to himself, giving a quick look over the graveyard.
The graveyard was pretty barren is it was so the only thing of any note was the shallow grave where the Dragis siblings had buried their brother Adam alive in a coffin and left him for dead.
So he used his spirit to lift the dirt surrounding the coffin and brought it into his view.
Ripping the door off of the coffin he was greeted with the sight of an emaciated mummified corpse that was shrivelled up like a raisin.
Unceremoniously he spread a thin layer of his spirit around the corpse to see if there was anything of note on its person before floating away in disappointment.
"Only a little longer until nightfall." He eagerly awaited his first proper hunt since his birth, brimming with anticipation for all of the delicious spirit he could devour from the prey that was unlucky enough to catch his eye.