Spiritual Traveler was a skill that opened up a whole separate world.


    The first, and most dangerous part, of Spiritual Traveler was that it left my body completely defenseless. My awareness would leave my body, and my body would be unconscious the whole time my spirit was absent. The proximity ward that I set up would let my soul know if someone was close to my body, which would hopefully buy my spirit enough time to fly back and deal with whatever was messing with my body.  There were several E-rank Personal Mana Shields that I put into place for additional security.


    Once that was taken care of, I activated Spiritual Traveler and began my journey through the Spiritual Plane.


    The Spiritual Plane was essentially an overlay of the world as I knew it, with everything reflected in relation to the presence of mana.


    A normal rock or boulder would have very little mana in it, the air had a very small amount of ambient mana around me, and plants would have a modest amount of mana.


    The real gatherings of mana were the creatures around me.  I could guess at their shapes from their mana outlines, even though I could not see their physical characteristics.


    It was a disconcerting feeling, seeing the insides of creatures—their hearts, lungs, brain, and core—which were all densely packed with mana, and then I could see the dense threads of mana traveling in mesmerizing webs throughout the rest of the body.


    Mana Sensing was essential at this point. Mana Sensing, I already knew, did not require eyes or normal organs to function—it was based around my soul, which was currently outside my body.


    Previously, all mana had appeared as white to me. Now, with my C-ranked Mana Sensing, I could now see the attunement of mana, represented in various colors. There were creatures digging through the ground that were Earth-attuned, which had brown mana. There were fish swimming in the a nearby stream that ran from the snowy cap of the mountain that had a light blue coloring to their mana.


    Several vultures circling in the sky showed me that Air-attuned mana was white. Most plants around me were green.


    Of course, this was a gross oversimplification of everything that I saw.  In truth, the world was a vibrant and psychedelic blend of colors.  The vultures had streaks of brown mana in their guts, and the plants around me had traces of white in their mana composition as well.


    It was like seeing the world in a whole new way—seeing many of the same things, but with a completely different framework.


    The circumstances of movement with this skill was one that I had been unclear about until now.


    As an incorporeal spirit, it didn’t take any amount of force at all to move my spirit from one place to another.


    <This is a C-rank skill, which will let you move, accelerate, and decelerate at incredible speeds,> Samantha said.  <Your max speed should be well over 100 mph, in your “Old-world” terms.  But of course, you don’t want to be going that fast, because we want to take the time to study this mountain.>


    <There are a few things that you should be looking for,> Samantha said, as my spirit started climbing the mountainside. <Unattuned mana is clear, like water.  Illusion magic is tied to air and light, so you should look for high concentrations of gold and white colors.>


    Why is light gold? Shouldn’t light be white, since white light holds all the colors?


    <Don’t think too hard about it,> Samantha said. <It’s your subconscious doing the filtering anyway.  I wasn’t going to get into it, but this is really an example of synesthesia.  Mana doesn’t actually have color. It just has attunements, which your human brain is interpreting as a color, since your dominant sense is sight. If your dominant sense were smell, then maybe Water-attuned mana would smell like water, Earth-attuned mana would smell like dirt, and so on.  Now, reach out with your senses and try to pinpoint the nearby Illusion magic.>


    The way Samantha said it implied that she had already located it. I quickly filtered through my many senses, searching the area for white and gold.The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.


    Eventually, I managed to find it. Or, them. There were several underground orbs of condensed gold and white mana planted in an orderly fashion around the foot of the mountain.


    It seemed the orbs were just a few inches below the ground, at times.


    <Shit,> Samantha said.


    Excuse me?


    <It’s shit. Feces. I think you’re aware that some species pee everywhere to claim their territory? Sandmen leave their feces, which are dense pools of illusion-attuned mana, that the Sandmen can still draw from. They also function to make anybody who walks by more susceptible to illusions, weakening their perception and slowly infiltrating their senses, so that when the Sandman strikes, the groundwork is already laid. It is something of a rudimentary Illusion Ward.>


    The idea of dealing with weaponized feces was extremely unappealing to me.


    So, what should I do? I asked. Would I be able to just use my E-rank Personal Mana Shield to block it?


    <Since it is a mana-based attack, Personal Mana Shields would counter it.  However, they are E and D-rank attacks, which means they would quickly trump your E-rank Personal Mana Shield.  If you had your C-rank Personal Mana Shield, then this would be a different story.>


    <For now, if you notice the way the illusion mana spreads, it is generally localized to the ground.  As long as you stay floating maybe 100 feet in the air, the illusion mana won’t spread to you now. Depending on the concentration of illusion mana, we will have to wait and see if we will need to waste a Soul Explosion on this Sandman, or if we can risk approaching it in person.>


    For once, Samantha’s approach sounded extremely reasonable.


    Between my heightened Mana Sensing and my Spiritual Traveler spell, I felt like I was able to get a good sense of what the mountain looked like.  I could see dense rows of trees about halfway up the mountain, glowing brightly with green mana, and hundreds of roaming animals—Dire Rats and some kind of cross between birds and dogs made up the majority of the monsters here.


    It wasn’t hard to find the Sandman, hiding in an underground cave two thirds of the way up the mountain.


    The Illusion-attuned mana inside the Sandman was incredibly dense.  The blend of white and gold colors was almost blinding, which made the Sandman’s location even easier to find.


    The Sandman was also surrounded by illusion-attuned mana. Or, to be more precise, the Sandman was surrounded by its own shit, as Samantha said.


    To my confusion, though, there was another Sandman, just a few hundred yards away from that Sandman. Both setups of illusion-attuned mana surrounding a dense combination of mana the size of a bear were identical.


    As I explored in growing confusion, I found a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, Sandman made of mana. Two were roaming the mountainside, and the other was at the peak of the mountain top.


    Why didn’t you mention I would have to fight a pack of them?


    <You won’t.  This is where the Atropos Schema’s mechanics come in to play,> Samantha said, going into her lecturing tone. <You have a C-ranked Mana Sensing ability, and the Zone Lord’s illusion affinity is D-rank.  So normally, you would think our ability would trump the Zone Lord’s.  But this Sandman is fairly smart.  He essentially copied and pasted his own internal mana in several different places, as an additional defense against Mana Sensing.  So, the mana that you are seeing is real—but only one of them is the Sandman.>


    <Unfortunately, if you were to add mana to Perception right now, it wouldn’t affect Mana Sensing—it only affects your normal bodily senses.  If you had line of sight and you put all your mana into Perception, then you would likely be able to see if one of these versions was real or not. But that would be time-consuming to reach line-of-sight with each one of these illusions, and wasting time is dangerous, when there are dozens of E-rank and D-rank illusion spells seeping into your brain.>


    So, what’s the plan?


    Samantha sighed. <Jarek, at some point, you’re going to need to start thinking for yourself. For your own benefit. You keep acting like you’re sick of me, and then the moment we’re in a tough place, you ask me what to do. Well, if you’re not going to start thinking for yourself, you can always just start treating me more like a person, and less like an evil computer program taking over the world?>


    I sighed. If it were up to me, I would come back when I have a C-rank Personal Mana Shield. Then I could take my time defeating the Zone Lord.


    <But you’re forgetting that the Zone Lord will be gone by then.  Any minute, really, the other Hell Mode Challengers could appear and try to take down the Sandman.>


    Oh, right.


    <Anyway, I do have a solution.  These illusions look perfect, and they look identical, but that is actually their weakness. If you look carefully, you will see that every Sandman has mana flowing in exactly the same patterns, even though some of them are doing different things.  If a creature is walking, then its mana should flow differently through its body. Think of it like how blood pumps more vigorously through your body when you are active.  But we don’t see that kind of mana movement in the two Sandmen that are moving around the mountain.  So that means those two Sandmen are fake.>


    That leaves three more possible Sandmen, I said.


    <Don’t worry. I have a plan to differentiate between the three.  Unless you want to give it a shot?>