Armad had recently discovered how resourceful Musa, the cook he unexpectedly met in the kitchen, was.
Without any instructions or orders from Armad, the man had improvised a cunning plan that pleased Armad greatly.
The plan was to serve Armad a triple helping of food in the morning, four times in the afternoon, and three times at dinner. He had then told his fellow kitchen staff that the prince had discovered a group of vagrants in the city and needed to help them. He would be visiting these groups under disguise to feed them with the food served to him.
Musa wanted his colleagues to believe that those unusual servings of meals were meant for the needy and not the prince himself.
Knowing how kind-hearted their leader was, the kitchen staff didn't doubt Musa for a minute.
They also saw when he entered the prince's chambers as he served the food. That served to quell any speculations on whether it was the prince who ate the food or not.
No one would dare protest to this even if they believed otherwise, for Musa had already warned them of the consequences of doing so. Revealing this secret, according to him, would attract a heavy penalty from the prince.
So, they all kept their mouths shut. In any case, everything from the kitchen to the accompanying accessories and the staff were all under the control of the prince. His wish was their order.
On his part, Armad didn't think the staff would make any trouble. If there was anyone to be cautious of, it was his solicitor—the judge.
The man would surely hear of the rumors and would investigate. But if he questioned the staff, they could only repeat to him what Musa told them.
That would silence him because he couldn't confront the prince or interrogate him over it. For he knew better than anyone that Armad was philanthropic. His nightly outings under disguise were nothing new to him, as he usually did that to experience first-hand the needs of his subjects.
This perfect alibi initiated by the cook would undoubtedly ensure that Armad's newfound ability remained secret.
At last, he gave a nod to the System to go ahead with the job of converting the nutrients into pills.
Probably due to disbelief or lack of experience, Armad occasionally looked down at his stomach. He wanted to see if its size would increase, for now, satisfaction was out of the question.
He could still feel the pangs of hunger and occasionally wondered if the food he ate truly went to his stomach. But then his mouth and throat were witnesses to the food's passage.
It could be said that the System probably took it as soon as it reached his stomach. Or perhaps it broke down there, only that he could not be satiated no matter the amount of food he consumed.
He left the dining room for his bedroom, and during the moments taken by the System to create the pills, he went to take a shower.
When he was done, he changed into a jumper and meditated for some time.
Afterward, using his pol sense, he searched around the vicinity to see if there was anyone close by. There was none. Even the guards had been earlier excused by him. Though they were still around, since they couldn't leave him unguarded, they stayed at a distance from his rooms.
Satisfied with this, he entered the largest of his sitting rooms. It was spacious and decorated elegantly, but Armad raised his hand and gathered cultivation into his fist. In the next moment, every piece of furniture and ornament vacated the room and floated into the adjacent ones.
Satisfied that there was nothing left to obstruct him, he lowered himself down with his legs folded beneath him.
Tonight was the time to put his Negrinki to the test.
The coldness of the ground seeped into his body until he became one with it. Then he closed his eyes for a long time, and when he was sure that all his thoughts were aligned in one direction, he pulled out a hundred pol years from his core.
Then he extracted the Negrinki from those pol years and placed it before him.
It hovered there in the air in all its ring-like glory. Like any other Negrinki, this one also looked hazy, but it had a red hue.
As it hovered before him, Armad watched and studied the smoky substance before eventually pulling out more pol years.
This time, it was five hundred pol years, and as he did so, he extracted the Negrinki from it as well.
He continued studying it and then added more pol years—one thousand this time.
By the time he was done, six thousand pol years had been extracted from his core.
By now, the Negrinki stood as tall as a fully grown adult and about a meter wide.
He marveled at it. This was the Negrinki he had produced from six thousand years of pol.
His mind was filled with thoughts as he stretched his hand out to feel it.
The first thing that came to his mind was that he didn't have any Negrinki back in the Third World.
Back home, he had only fifty-five pol years. If not for the memories of the prince whose body he now occupied, Armad wouldn't even have known what a Negrinki was.
But thanks to the memories stored in the prince's mind, he understood what a Negrinki was, how to use it, and what it looked like. This was how he found out that the prince had his own Negrinki, which he acquired upon reaching core formation.
It was the norm even here in the First World that Negrinki could only be acquired when one reached one thousand pol years, marking the core formation stage.
He wondered if his control over the Negrinki would be the same as that of the real prince. Or would there be differences since they were not the same person?
He knew that all the other abilities were his own and had been extracted and modified by the System, but he wasn't sure about the Negrinki.
Since he never had it before, he wondered if he had inherited the prince's. Or would his own have looked like this if he had reached the core formation stage back home?
Only time could tell.
When his outstretched hand finally touched the Negrinki, he was suddenly pulled inside by a powerful force.
In the next second, he disappeared from the room and found himself in a strange Negrinki domain.
It was a small Negrinki domain, not larger than his sitting room.
It looked like a piece of land, but where it ended appeared abruptly cut off, beyond which only a vast emptiness remained.
Cautiously, he walked toward the edge and stretched out his hand to test it.
There was nothing there.
And he felt no urge to step into that void.
He instinctively knew that the space he stood on was the only area currently available to him within the Negrinki domain.
He also knew that the late prince's Negrinki had been different from this. But since he had never possessed one before, its mechanics remained a mystery to him.
Armad wondered again whether this was his own or something altered by the System. Or perhaps this was how his Negrinki would have looked if he had reached core formation back home in the Third World.
These were questions without answers.
And there was no one left to ask.
But despite how they lingered in his mind, they were not the most pressing concern.
What mattered now was how to use the Negrinki.
What could it do for him?
And how could it aid his cultivation?
As if responding to his thoughts, the System sent a message.
[The Negrinki could only be of help to you in several ways on your current level of cultivation: It could serve as a vault for you to keep anything you want. It works in such a way that anything you keep can be easily extracted by you anytime you wish. But anything that wanders and falls inside the void would be lost forever.
You can imprison men here and they wouldn't have the power to do anything as long as their cultivation is lower than yours.
And this Negrinki domain could assist you to fight your prisoners even those with higher cultivation than you.]
Seconds later, another message appeared:
[The second way of helping you is by boosting all of your abilities by 3 percent. It shall be activated whenever you launch defensive or offensive abilities.
Moreover, it will weaken any attacks below Deva irrespective of the enemy's cultivation by 3 percent. But beware because there are cultivators whose one percent of strength alone can kill you. That said, you won't notice it even if their strength got weakened by this Negrinki domain because you would be dead by then. These are at the moment all the help that the Negrinki could render to you.]
Armad was satisfied with that. It sounded promising to him. As small as the Negrinki domain seemed at the moment, it would hopefully grow larger in the future.
The prospect of gaining 3 percent strength—or reducing an enemy's strength by the same margin—was quite exhilarating.
It could grow to ten percent, then twenty, or even higher as his cultivation increased.
One thing the System did not mention was whether he could escape into the Negrinki domain when in danger. He thought it might be possible to retreat there when faced with a stronger opponent and no other options remained.
But before he could dwell on that thought, the System responded again.
[No, you cannot do that. A visit to the Negrinki domain is only possible when you are at 100 percent of your cultivation strength. Your cultivation strength drops below 100 percent during combat. This prevents entry unless you are fully stable. Also, you cannot bring anyone there during combat unless your cultivation is fully intact and greater than theirs.]
Way to go, System. Thanks for crushing my hopes, Armad muttered to himself.
Despite that, he refused to see the Negrinki as anything less than valuable.