Aaron had been walking the streets toward one of his new stores to check it out when he felt a small burst of Psychic Energy coming from Lana. He immediately turned to look at her while focusing on finding an attacker nearby. He found none. What he did find was an unresponsive Lana.

She was standing still, crying, looking at nothing, with a face of sheer suffering.

"Lana? What happened?" he asked worriedly.

She didn't reply, but he had a good idea already.

He had felt no Psychic Energy enter the now fifty-yard range of his active perception, but he felt the burst coming from her. That meant someone particularly good with Psychic Energy had placed something inside beforehand. Whatever had been in her mind had been so well disguised that even he hadn't been able to differentiate it from her actual mind, not even when he checked on her health.

Now, for whatever reason, that something was gone, and she was suffering for it.

Worst of all, he couldn't tell what was going on. The burst had been too small and generic, and when it came to the mind, there were too many things that could lead to someone despairing. His One Star Arcane Energy could check a mind's integrity, but he needed at least Three Star Arcane Energy to go deep into a mind and actively search for psychological issues.

Suddenly, he felt all Holy Energy inside Lana dissipate into thin air. Lana screamed in despair and fell unconscious. Aaron grabbed her before she could hit the ground.

Now that meant things, but he would rather think about it in a safer place.

He grabbed each girl with a beast under an arm and resumed his walk to the store. He wished he could spare the Arcane Energy to make them float behind him, but that energy was best spent in his active perception for now, as small as its current range was.

A few minutes later, he arrived at his destination.

The store previously owned by the Arcane Circle was a three-floor building located right at the main road that went from the Royal Palace to the city's East Gate and beyond. It sat at the city's second layer, and it was the closest building to the wall to the first layer.

The king hadn't lied. That was premium real estate alright.

It was close enough to the richest and most influential people of the city, who lived the first layer, that they might take the trouble to travel there. It was still in the second layer though, allowing even people from the third layer to reach it with relative ease.

The store's building was made of black stone and had a small garden in front of it. Black metal bars surrounded the property, but the grated double gates were open. In fact, it looked like they had never been closed.

A black metal sign allowed anyone passing through the streets to know the purpose of the place. It had a circle with the words "Arcane Circle Premium Store" written on the edges, and an eight-pointed silver star in the center, all white.

The entrance to the building proper had a larger version of the Arcane door that the Soul Machinist had used. Its purple color on the black stone of the building gave everything quite a mystical feeling.

Aaron could easily destroy the door, but it was his door now. So instead, he took out the key he had received from the Sorcerers and approached. Some hidden formation felt the key, and the door faded away.

Inside, he found a completely bare shop. No items, no furniture, nothing. The Arcane Circle had left him the door out of courtesy, but that was all. It surprised him they hadn't taken the sign outside with them.

He took the sleeping bags and a few pieces of wood from his ring and set up camp inside the store. Then he willed it, and the door materialized once again. That, together with the formations he felt etched to the walls, made him the safest he had been since he arrived in that world.

Now to business.

Arcane Sensory Arts: Precise Analysis!

His Arcane Energy checked every inch of Lana. She was perfectly well in all things but her mind. It had a tear on it.

A horrifyingly large tear.

The human mind was remarkably resilient, capable of adapting to the most stressful situations. Therefore, seeing even a small tear in the mind meant a huge trauma, on the level of weeks of torture. Something two thirds the size of what he was seeing meant huge traumas piled over each other; something on the level of repeated childhood abuse.

The tear he was seeing was so big it was almost splitting her mind in two. Lana had gone through such deep and abyssal despair, most people would break when they reached that point. They would stop responding to external stimuli altogether, just vacantly staring ahead.

Not unlike what she had been doing before she fainted.

That was just the initial shock though. Some resisted the trauma after the mind rested for a few hours or days, and Aaron could only hope Lana's mind was strong enough for that. She wasn't the average mortal, after all. She was a cultivator, and her willpower attribute might be high enough to save her.

That was all he could tell with One Star Arcane Energy, so he focused his small reserves of it on something else.

They were relatively safe in that store, and he used all his Arcane Energy to blanket both Lana's and Alys' souls in care and affection, just like he had been doing for Alys before his energy reserves decreased. Lana's mind relaxed a little, but less than Alys's. The causes of their mental injuries were different, and thus they reacted differently to the pitiful "treatment" he could provide them with.

Aaron then looked at the unconscious members of his clan with a deep frown.

The two girls had suffered from strong mental trauma mere days from one another. That couldn't be a coincidence. He was someone with big ambitions, so those close to him would naturally be exposed to greater danger than the average person. That was too much though. That felt orchestrated.

There was a hidden force acting against him.

He didn't think they knew what he had in store for this world, or they would attack him directly instead of attacking his people. No, whoever they were, these attacks were likely related to him being summoned as a Hero from another world.

Aaron had already determined before that it couldn't be a coincidence that someone as open-minded and talented as Alys had been put in his path. Or rather, it could be. Everything was possible in the nigh-infinite span of multiple universes. With enough time and space, anything at all could happen. But it was unlikely.

Especially because there were organizations dedicated to weaving or reading fate in many of the worlds he had ever visited. In this world, they would be Entropomancers who read the past and the present on a global scale to determine the most likely futures. It wasn't hard for one of them to conclude that the king of a nation with access to a summoning circle would use it, and to place the right people at the right time to take advantage of it.

They could even have people like that already placed close to all summoning circles, just in case. It was the smart thing to do, and someone had certainly thought of that. He would do it too if he were a medium-sized power struggling for growth.

He had known that from the beginning, but he hadn't cared, for they hadn't moved against him.

It was impractical to care. People were alive and life begets change. Different thoughts, ideas, and ambitions would cause the world to move in all directions, like waves causing ripples of the most varied sizes. It was impossible to avoid all ripples, no matter how strong one was, except if they isolated themselves from all contact with reality itself.

Likewise, his own ideals and goals would affect other people. It was simply how community life worked. From his own experience, getting angry over it was a waste of time and effort.

He had suspected that someone, somewhere, had placed Alys close to him. As long as they didn't do more than that or used her position against him, he wouldn't have cared. The stronger he became, the more that would happen. Such was the fate of powerful people.

But straight-up manipulation was something else altogether.

So now, he wondered if Alys' sudden burst of mental growth had been an accident. Anyone strong and experience enough could see her soul wouldn't support that burst, which had been forced by Logan's attack. They could easily manipulate events to lead to that after they saw him teaching her only once.

Worse still, a Master Beast had appeared when she was at that state, causing her mind to shatter apart from the following torture. Lana's mind was almost split in two, but Alys' mind had broken into small pieces. Aaron would need at least Five Star Arcane Energy to heal that.

Before, Aaron hadn't read more into it than sheer coincidence. But the pattern was obvious now.

Lana wasn't much different. Anyone with half a brain could tell she would suffer if the Goddess of Light took everything from her in one fell swoop. The goddess herself wouldn't need to add anything to her mind to trigger the removal of Lana's Holy Energy, so unless that had been misdirection, someone else had planted the packet of Psychic Energy in her.

Whoever had done that only needed to know how the goddess would react to it being removed as it had been and plan things accordingly. For instance, by analyzing Lana's growth rate, they could make it so the packet would be removed at the worst time for her. They only had to set up triggers like an attribute reaching a certain level or her understanding of Light Laws reaching a certain threshold.

And the worst of it all was that when he considered things along that line, it became obvious that the girls should be dead, not merely unconscious.

Fortunately, Aaron was a variable unknown to Time itself.

Aaron had reached the peak of an entire universe. That was a much more overwhelming accomplishment than such simple words suggested. The things he had done were beyond what the wildest mortal dreams or nightmares could conceive. The knowledge he brought to this world was something it had never experienced. Thus, no Entropomancer could foresee the extent of what he could do.

They could make approximations based on past Heroes, maybe. But who could expect Aaron Ironblood's potential and experience?

He was confident no one could have gotten even close to picturing what he brought to the table, no matter how much they might have overestimated him. Only Prime Immortals could catch a glimpse of his potential, and he had found none in this world when he had checked.

So, both Alys and Lana were supposed to die, but he had thwarted the planned timing just by teaching them things this world had never seen before.

Alys's mind had expanded from his teachings a little before she suffered her mind injury. She had even leveled up. And the things he had taught Lana had forced her mind in such an uncaring state, lacking any semblance of ego, that it was a surprise she had even suffered such a great mental injury. He estimated that if it weren't for her singular state, her mind would have broken beyond repair, even worse than Alys', causing instant death.

Moreover, his hidden enemy's plans were so nefarious, the girls would have died anyway if he hadn't cultivated Arcane Energy. He didn't expect anyone in that kingdom to be able to save them from such terrible injuries. Only his arcane blanket of caring gave them comfort and drive enough to keep living.

The issue was that his enemies would eventually understand just how out of depth they were. When their precisely calculated plans didn't work out time and time again, when even their failsafes failed, when they reviewed what he had done to calculate what he could do, they would come for him with the big guns.

He hadn't known it, but he was running against time from the moment he set his foot on this world. For people were alive, and life begets conflict.

Aaron squinted his eyes. He had been too soft, causing only controlled waves of destruction to avoid attracting the Cage's attention. He had no privilege of only worrying about the Cage endangering the very universe though. His troubles were much more immediate.

Aaron had been made a pawn in a game he didn't understand. That pissed the hell out of him. Unfortunately for his enemies, he knew exactly how to beat them out of the bushes.

It was time to topple the whole damn board.