Aaron had been born on Earth, so he still had many values from his homeworld that were rare to find elsewhere. For instance, he would never kill the children of his enemies to uproot the evil by its roots, despite such a thing being common sense mostly everywhere.

However, he had left Earth as a teenager. At the time, his heart had been somewhat hardened by Spiritual Energy already, but not too much. The following years of peace in the Ironblood clan — the original Ironblood clan he had been adopted into — would help cement in him the appreciation for peace and calm.

Then the Everwar had come to his arm of the galaxy. No, it had slammed into it. The Ironblood Patriarch had been slaughtered like a chicken in front of all clan members, and a terrible reign of terror followed. Aaron had been enslaved, tortured, and psychologically abused.

His feeble heart at the time had resisted to a point, but his period as a slave was the first hit of the hammer of despair that would forge him into what he was today. He hadn't reached willpower beyond the limits of this world by meditating without experiencing the vicissitudes of life. He had earned it through fire and blood.

Aaron had been born on Earth, but he had been forged on the Everwar.

Hundreds of millions of years fighting for no apparent reason had taken its toll on him. In the end, he had brought peace to the known universe — which was actually just about a third of the entire dimension. A peace that he had told his disciples to enforce in his name.

After that, he had become an invisible sentinel, ready to strike if his disciples ever failed in the face of a powerful foe. No foe had come. He had searched the rest of the universe for something else to do but had found only boredom.

He had ended the greatest war ever recorded but had become a weapon without purpose.

Nowadays, other people's lives held little meaning to him. It was only thanks to the original Ironblood Patriarch that he even had a circle of people he cared for: his clansmen and his allies.

He viewed them like dumb children and treated them as such. Not his children, obviously. He held no parental love for Alys or Lana. They were someone else's dumb children that were under his care, and he didn't reason with dumb people.

He had simply lived for too long to care about the thoughts of people who were too young to understand the reality of immortal life or too weak to matter. Until they proved that they could survive for longer than he took to blink, at least a few dozen years under his command in a war, they simply weren't worth him seeing them as anything else. There were just too many people in the universe for him to care about those who couldn't survive even when he told them exactly how to do so.

Alys was such a case. He had told her she was being ruled by her emotions, that it was better for her to abandon Arcane Energy and start cultivating Mind Energy instead. She hadn't. Though she had said she would do so as soon as she got ahold of Mind cultivation technique, that was already a failure on her part. Just getting rid of the Arcane Energy at once would have already improved her willpower and helped her reign in her emotions. She had shown decisiveness in many important points, but she had acted just like a dumb child in that instance.

Naive people would tell Aaron to properly explain it to her. Poor girl, it wasn't her fault she hadn't understood what he had meant to such depth. Well, he wouldn't guide her step by step throughout all her life. If she succeeded at the beginning of her journey with no pampering, it would become a solid foundation for her to soar in the future, and she would pay extra attention to hard-to-notice signs in her journey that could be beneficial to her. If she failed in the beginning for her journey though, as she was doing now, the damage wouldn't be as big, and she would also learn something from it — namely, to do as he said.

People would literally kill for an offhand suggestion from him in his home universe. Now, he felt like he was throwing pearls before swine.

It was important to note that such a situation was happening with Alys, who had passed his tests just the day before he had told her to abandon Arcane Energy! That's why at least a few dozen years were needed for someone to truly prove themselves to him. Consistently good decision-making was vital if a cultivator wanted to live long.

When dumb children proved themselves, he would treat them like smart children, worth of him wasting some of his time imparting actual wisdom on them. Those could even become his honorary disciples if they accepted him. They were worthy of him investing time in them, and should be smart enough for him not to need to talk to them like dumb apes. He would give them a soft word now and then instead of a cold push. They were smart enough to be taught instead of pushed.

If they kept proving themselves for a longer time, Aaron would finally treat them like responsible young adults capable of thinking by themselves. Those would become his personal disciples. He would spend time and resources in them, for they were past the hammering phase. It would become the time to inscribe runes of wisdom and add precious materials to the weapons they were becoming.

And that was the utmost extent of respect he was willing to give anyone below his level of power most of the time. Exceptional people capable of becoming exceptions existed, but they were far and few between, and usually great philosophers or humble religious figures with legit good hearts.

Now, whoever wasn't a clansman or an ally was either an enemy or unimportant.

Enemies were tools through and through. He would analyze them and determine the best way to use them for his purposes, which usually involved killing them while making a show of it for the right witnesses. He had limits that he usually wouldn't go past, like torture, but even those limits could be bent against enemies. For instance, he would torture an enemy if they had valuable information he needed, but he wouldn't do it for the sake of it, not even for vengeance, no matter how much they might have wronged him. They were tools, and he took no more pleasure in torturing a soul for millennia than in disassembling a screwdriver.

The Psychotic Pigs were such a case. They had had their antennae removed so he could use them to teach a lesson. He took no pleasure in their suffering. The moment the lack of a way to vent their Mind Energy became painful, as he believed it would from his knowledge of beast anatomy, he would kill them swiftly, as that would be needless torture. But until then, they were tools that he would use.

Aaron also wouldn't go out of his way to avoid making enemies. The Everwar had taught very quickly that anyone who dared to bare their fangs at you once would dare to do again unless you dissuaded them of their wrong notions. Such dissuasions were best done quickly and permanently. Dead people couldn't avenge themselves.

There were just too many living beings in the universe for him to care about ending the life of a few here and there. Humans especially were like weed growing everywhere. One of the mysteries of existence.

The end of the Everwar had done nothing to make him believe times of peace were any different from war, enemy-killing-wise. The world was always a merciful act away from drowning in chaos. It only took a single powerful figure letting things go for long enough, and the pests would dominate a region then spread like cancer. Give it enough time, and peace would be gone until a massacre cleaned the disease. A massacre that could've been avoided by not letting things go at an earlier date.

Aaron firmly believed that it was the moral obligation of the strong to be merciless for the greater good.

That included being merciless to oneself. In his book, the powers that be in this dimension had failed in that. Something or someone had Caged the Core, and no one had done anything about it. Though he hadn't thoroughly analyzed the Cage yet, he was sure that even if he couldn't remove it, he could exchange his life for its destruction.

He was a weapon. Weapons that didn't kill their enemies were useless. He would rather die for a purpose than return a loser to his home dimension and merely exist purposelessly for eternity.

His goals, the greater good, were always more important than his feelings or the feelings of anyone else. He wouldn't hesitate in killing even himself to save the entire dimension, so he also wouldn't care about sending Alys or Lana to certain death if it could help him achieve the greater goal.

Not that he would turn them into kamikaze warriors. They might be dumb children, and not his in the parenthood sense, but they were still his people. He would only send them to their deaths if he had absolutely, unequivocally, no other choice. Until then, he would protect them and help them grow according to his beliefs of how warriors should be forged.

The methods he used, though sometimes a bit harsh, had worked for himself, his disciples, and his late clan in the other dimension. It would work for the people of his current clan too. If it didn't, he would sleep well at night, knowing that he had done his best short of holding their hands on each step. But even if he did that, it would only create weak-willed warriors or entitled idiots. He had tried it multiple times. It hadn't ended well even once.

If anything, a harsh but controlled clan environment prepared them for the much harsher and downright hostile outside world.

Aaron was here to save the universe, and to achieve that, he would need warriors, not soft people. For a warrior, showing mercy to an enemy was the same as being ruthless to an ally, for those enemies would kill said allies without remorse most of the time. Even statistically, mercy didn't pay off.

In a war, it was kill or be killed, and he had come to wage war against the Cage, not raise this world into an era of prosperity and mutual understanding.

After clansmen, allies, and enemies came the unimportant people, who didn't matter. They weren't his allies helping him achieve a goal greater than themselves, nor were they enemies to be used as tools.

Usually, they would be ignored. Often, they would be conquered, and thus turned into dumb children under his banner. Sometimes, they would be used to a minor extent if a situation called for it — and repaid later.

Tia was a case of being used and repaid. Aaron owed her for the blackmail, so he was assisting her. The best way for him to assist any unproven person was by subjecting them to his clan's rules and routine, so he was treating her as a clan member until he was done repaying her.

Therefore, just as he had had Alys kill a pig as punishment for not raising an alarm when the pigs attacked, he had ordered Tia to do the same.

That was his way of telling them he found them so useless, he was questioning their ability to even feed themselves using their own hands. He needed them to prove they could slay a beast that had nowhere to run and carry its meat for a few tens of feet, then stick it into a spear another person was holding.

They certainly could do that much. They weren't useless enough to fail in such an easy task, right?! He would even cook for them for the very first time since they had started traveling together, because he didn't trust them to do even that much!

The sheer humiliation of it should serve as a lesson they wouldn't forget anytime soon, resulting in them striving to do better — and hopefully succeeding.

Well, that was the most they could read from that situation. At the very least, they should learn to repay him by doing what he asked of them after he saved their lives. Tia, instead of showing gratitude, had called him a monster. She would rather die than kill and eat the murderous beast that had tried to kill her!

Even dumb children had a limit of stupidity that he accepted, and so he had changed his plans for her. She needed to learn something even more fundamental than showing gratitude, something he had learned the hard way as soon as he left Earth.

Death was part of life.

From the way she hadn't cared so much when he had killed humans but was affected by the corpses of the beasts, he could deduce that animals were the last emotional defense she had to deny the world being a cruel and selfish place. She believed that animals and beasts were intrinsically good and just followed their instincts, while humans were as bad as carnifexes. That only love and understanding could lead to a better world.

Aaron had lived long and seen enough to see that love was indeed a powerful force capable of healing selfishness and creating a better world. That a harmonious society was not only desirable but also possible, and that it led to many wonders. He had been awed by what he had witnessed on that planet so very long ago.

But that was the exception. It required a world with a single sapient race that held love and care above all else as a belief firmly set in their souls. This wasn't the case here.

Love for your enemies?

In the cultivation world, that had another name: stupidity. A cultivator's life was a life of struggle and war! Of blood and death!

Today, he would start desensitizing Tia to death for her own good. He wouldn't have cared about her naivety if she had kept to her parents' shelter. But she was a runaway in a dangerous world.

It was time for her to learn the rules of the game of the wilder world.

"Hypocrite," he said shortly after throwing a dart at Tia's cheek. The shock of being physically attacked would help her obey, but his following speech would go further, give her a moral shock that would make her doubt herself. "When the bandits attacked, you protected yourself behind the ligurus, who had done nothing but carry you docilely! So the ligurus deserve to become your living shields even after serving you just because they aren't as cute as the pigs? But the cute Psychotic Pigs that tried to kill you make you feel sorry for them?!"

As he expected, her eyes widened. He spat on the floor. And before she concluded from his speech that all animals, even ants, should be treated with utmost love and respect, he demanded death of her.

"I don't have time for suicidal hypocrites. If you don't kill a pig in ten seconds, I will leave you behind and believe me, you will not like it. Look around, there are still hundreds of Psychotic Pigs in this cave. They feed on the Mind Energy of other living beings, but we don't cultivate Mind Energy and have no more of it than the average mortal. The moment five or six pigs feed on you, you will die, and it will not be a painless death."

He snorted through his nose. "If you want to become pig food so badly, if you want that your cold body stays here to become food for worms, if you want to die without even leaving a body for burial, feel free to do so. But don't take my clan with you."

He paused for the mental images he had described to be firmly engraved in her mind. Death was a very vague psychological concept for most people, but when an action — or inaction — would inevitably lead to death, especially a death so graphically explained to them, humans tended to do whatever it took to survive.

He resumed after the pause. "The only reason they aren't attacking is because I established my dominance over them, but the moment I leave they will attack you. And if you think I would let you follow me, you are wrong; you would be a risk to my group and I would rather cut the tendons in your feet and arms than allow you to become a safety issue for my people."

He raised his voice. "Choose! Kill or die! Your ten seconds start now!"

The shock was visible on Tia's face. Alys and Lana went pale, but they dared not interfere. Alys was looking at Aaron as if she wanted to say something, but he ignored her.

Growing up was painful, but it was part of life, whether for animals or plants. He was helping Tia, and he didn't need her to like this or him.

"Five seconds," he said. "Three. Two. One."

He released a minimum of his death aura for her to feel the imminent danger and when he opened his mouth to say "zero," Tia finally moved.

Slowly, her hand wrapped around the dagger's grip. She went to the makeshift pigsty and started crying. Then she started sobbing when the Psycho Pigs grunted and ran to the opposite side of the pigsty, afraid of her.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "Forgive me." She kept crying.

Seeing such a pitiful scene, Alys and Lana closed their eyes and also cried. Even Aaron sighed. That it was necessary didn't make it less pitiful.

Soon after, she was almost catatonic as she carried the pig's body and pushed it on the spear over the fire, then sat in fetal position next to it. Aaron nodded gently to Alys and Lana, and both went to console Tia. He spoke his last words on the subject to ensure that their consolation would contain nothing against his teachings.

"Remember, whoever tries to take your life deserves death. Whoever wants to kill you wants to destroy your history, end your future, erase you from existence for all eternity. We only have one life, we need to value it to the fullest. Humans or beasts, our enemies in the world are many. Believing that whoever attacks you is innocent will only make you lose your only chance at life sooner rather than later. Today, you took revenge on your enemy. You did well."

That made Tia cry even louder.

Aaron ignored her, removed condiments from his spatial ring, and seasoned her pig as he had seasoned the rest. The smell of the food soon spread through the room.

He controlled the cooking time so that all the pigs were ready at the same time, took plates and silverware from the spatial ring, and served a piglet on each plate. Tia refused to take her plate or even look at it.

Aaron put the plate with the pig in front of her, on the floor. He looked her in the eye, but she avoided his gaze.

"Even if you refuse my logic to kill your enemies, this pig still died to become your food. If you refuse to eat, it'll be the same as saying that you took its life for no reason. You'll be no different from a carnifex."

She looked full of hurt at him. "You are a carnifex! You carnifex! You monster!" she shouted.

He stared her down until she looked away again. He returned to his post around the fire and ordered Alys and Lana, "Eat."

They obeyed.

Eventually, Tia also ate. She only stopped crying a long while later.

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Madam Selna was furious. The Higher Branch had ordered her to wait!

When her spies informed her that the king's army was attacking one of the Big Five, she wanted to counter-attack immediately and take advantage of the chaos to regain control of the city. With the Royal Army and its allies all focusing in one place, she had her greatest chance of winning with the least casualties possible.

But the order that came from the Higher Branch was straightforward: wait for reinforcements.

She had tried to argue, pay bribes, and even thought of disobeying, but in the end, she only restlessly watched the king regain control of his capital.

At least, the Higher Branch had promised to send a force that would guarantee her victory.

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The king of Illyria was lying on his bed, looking up at the ceiling, thinking of the snowball of chaos that a simple unlawful invasion had become.

To even begin to understand the situation, it was necessary to identify the eight parties involved: Aaron Ironblood, the Temple of Light, the Temple of Darkness, the Arcane Circle, the Kingdom of Illyria, the Ralethean Kingdom, the Thenor Empire, and the Yarns Empire.

The Kingdom of Illyria and the Ralethean Kingdom were neighbors, both vassals of the Thenor Empire. They paid tribute and obeyed imperial laws in exchange for internal stability and protection against external threats.

The Goddess of Light had declared the Thenor Empire the Capital of Light in the world. She commanded both the Temple of Light and the Arcane Circle, and each organization had certain roles and political privileges in the empire.

The Temple of Shadows was an independent entity, commanded by the God of Darkness, who opposed the Goddess of Light.

The Yarns Empire bordered the Thenor Empire. Unlike the Thenor Empire, the Yarns Empire had no vassal kingdoms, it politically structured itself as a giant kingdom.

The Kingdom of Illyria was located at the border the Thenor Empire shared with the Yarns Empire. The Ralethean Kingdom was next to the Kingdom of Illyria, but it wasn't on the imperial frontier, which gave it a much safer and more comfortable position.

The king's dilemma had started when the Raletheans had invaded Illyria for no reason. Illyria, as a border kingdom surrounded by the Raletheans, had had no close ally to ask for help. Thus, the king had tried to ask their overlord, the Thenor Empire, to intervene. Such an invasion against a border country was contrary to imperial laws because it threatened the stability of the entire empire.

However, the Raletheans had bribed the Imperial Adjudicators responsible for the stability of that region. Since the Ralethean Kingdom was much richer than Illyria, there had been no way for the king to cover their bribes.

In theory, the king could've taken the bribe case to the Imperial Court. However, Imperial Adjudicators were appointed by the emperor himself. If the court had found them guilty of corruption, it would have been tantamount to calling the emperor incompetent. The king wouldn't have survived long after that.

As for speaking directly with the emperor and hoping for a discrete solution? The kind had nowhere near the influence needed to talk to the most powerful man in the empire, much less in private.

Six months after the start of the war, the Raletheans had conquered fifteen percent of Illyria despite the king's various attempts to contain the enemy troops. Finally, the king had had only three options left other than surrendering.

The first had been to become a Protector of Light, a special position in the Temple of Light. According to the laws of the Thenor Empire, doing so would have automatically ended the war, as there was no bribe big enough to make an Imperial Adjudicator go against the Temple of Light.

However, that option came with several responsibilities and limitations. Among them, the king would lose the territories already conquered by the Raletheans, without the right to future claim.

He had refused to give up on his right to revenge!

The second option had been to summon a Hero. There were exactly thirteen Summoning Portals in the Thenor Empire. No one knew where they had come from, only how to activate them. Extremely powerful Champion Heroes emerged from these Portals and could change the course of entire wars on their own. Better yet, the summoning ritual erased their memories and put them in a highly suggestible state, temporarily making them mere puppets of their summoners, perfect weapons of war.

The problem was the "temporarily" word.

It was common that after a few years, usually long after achieving their victories, the Heroes would recover their memories and get rid of the suggestible state. The revenge they brought on the Monarchs who had invoked them had inspired multiple children's stories.

The king had preferred not to inspire one more.

Finally, the third option had been to become an ally of the empire it bordered, the Yarns Empire. Discreet inquiries as to the feasibility of it had revealed that if the king did so, he would become another nobleman of that empire and remain responsible for his own territory.

That had been the option he had chosen. The Thenor Empire had betrayed him first with the corruption of its Imperial Adjudicators, and he saw no problem in paying them back with a betrayal of his own. All the Yarns Empire had asked of him had been to get rid of the Arcane Circle and weaken the Mercenary Guild before the troops of the Yarns Empire arrived.

After accepting, the king had put a plan in motion using the Sky Splitter Sword, an ancient family treasure, to weaken both the Guild and the Arcane Circle. He would have attacked the Circle for good right after that plan came to fruition. Everything had been going well until he started feeling inexplicable guilt for his actions.

As a Four Star Psion, he had easily identified that guilt as the result of external influence. His best guess had been that some force in the Thenor Empire that he was unaware of, probably a formation, put that blame on all traitors so they would surrender.

Unfortunately, identifying the influence hadn't stopped it from being effective, and it eroded his willpower day after day. After a few months of intensive research, he had developed a skill to destroy the magical influence, but it required a "last try before betraying the Thenor Empire" action as a catalyst for its activation.

He had chosen to summon a Hero as such action. He had hired a Three Star Shaper to activate the portal, but the Hero from the first summoning ritual arrived dead.

The moment the summoning failed, he had suffered a powerful rebound from his skill and had almost given himself away to the authorities from sheer guilt! The rebound had also had the side effect of compelling him to try the summoning again, and he had ordered the Shaper to do so.

On the second failure, he had been so guilt-ridden that he almost killed himself, and he had wanted more than ever that the summoner would try again!

If she had failed a third time, he would have died.

But on the third try, finally, a living Hero had appeared. However, something different had gone wrong. He had come at the Inept level, had kept his memories, and hadn't been in a suggestible state.

After a brief exchange of words that went wrong, the king had thrown all his mental power against the Hero, trying to complete his skill by mentally enslaving the Hero he had successfully summoned. His "last attempt before he betrayed the Empire" only depended on whether the Hero agreed to help him! With success so close, he hadn't been in the mood for conversation.

But the mind control ability had failed, simply shattering on the Hero's mental defense.

Stressed by the war, resentful that he had would die because of the rebound of his skill, and angry with the Hero who had disrespected and threatened him in his last moments of life, the king had ordered the death of the stranger.

To everyone's surprise, the result had been the loss of two Two Star Royal Guards and a death threat.

The way the Hero had attacked made the king afraid enough that he had regained his senses. Amazed, he had noticed that his mind-control ability hadn't been the only one to shatter into the Hero's mental defenses.

His mind-control attempt had been linked to the skill he had developed to get rid of the guilt, and that one had also shattered. He had been free of the compulsion to kill himself!

Better yet, that skill, in turn, had been connected to the empire's guilt influence, and the Hero's defenses had destroyed that one too! The king had been free of guilt! He could betray the Empire without mental consequences!

Satisfied, the king had decided to ignore the Hero and continue with his plans. After the troops of the Yarns Empire arrived, he would use their power to get rid of the Hero, who was too wild and forceful to be left alive.

His plans had gone wrong again when Madam Selna, the Four Star Sorceress leader of the Arcane Circle, entered the Red Forest and ordered the support battalion to follow. Shortly after, the king had lost one of the three key pieces in the plan to weaken the Circle and the guild, a Four Star Berserker!

The battalion's move and the Berserker's death had been sufficient evidence that Selna knew something was going on, and the possibility of her having learned something from Berserker was great. The king had then attacked the Arcane Circle ahead of schedule, as risky as that had been.

But, again, his plans had gone awry when the Arcane Circle activated a secret countermeasure, mass teleportation, causing them to suffer almost no losses.

As if that weren't enough, the Hero had killed the second key piece of the trap, had been appointed Herald of Light, and the Temple of Light declared war on one of the Big Five merely because the Herald of Light had proclaimed there was irreparable enmity between them!

The king had acted quickly and allied himself with the Temple of Light to send a message of good faith to both the other clans and the Goddess of Light. From the clans, he wanted political and military support, from the Goddess, protection against her herald.

Having sent his message in good faith, he had consulted the Temple of Light regarding the Herald of Light at the same time he had asked the Temple of Darkness how much it would cost to get rid of the Devouts of Light in the city, just to get to know his options better.

But nothing had prepared him for the answer of the Goddess of Light. She had said she wouldn't accept any appeasement offer, but that if he became a Protector of Light, she would try to make the Herald of Light forgive the king.

So, the king now found himself at a crossroads.

On the one hand, he could pay the Temple of Darkness to get rid of the Devouts of Light in the capital, thus ensuring his immediate safety, despite the civil war that would issue. Then he would fight against time to fulfill the conditions the Yarns Empire had set to send their troops.

The civil war, plus the war against the Arcane Circle, would be brutal. If he did it on time though, he would be safe for good.

On the other hand, he could become a Protector of Light, which would be costless, military-wise. Both his war against the Raletheans and the Arcane Circle would end at once, despite his sneak attack.

It would be even more stressful than continued war though. During the ritual that would bestow him with the title of Protect of Light, he would be forced to confess any actions considered evil. That included his alliance with the Yarns Empire and having asked for a quote to kill all Devouts of Light in the capital.

The political and economic expenditure to not get deposed would be enormous.

The king sighed. As much as he liked to think otherwise, he had no actual choice here. The fear of Aaron Ironblood had infiltrated too deeply within him.

He closed his eyes, tired.

That would be his last night of total freedom before he declared that he would become a Protector of Light.