After he was sure that Kanshou had left, Mitch fell back on his couch mentally exhausted. There was no pain now, but the experience was burned deeply into his mind. He could feel his brain trying to drag him down into those memories, and he was just barely managing to keep his thoughts out of the abyss. If he fell down that rabbit hole, he may never be able to make his way out again. He had enough pitfalls ahead of him as it was.

To distract himself he did some research into the claims Kanshou had made about how much energy the stones had. His city used about 73 trillion BTU a year, which was nearly 6.1 trillion BTU per month. Which meant, if Kanshou was correct, each spirit stone was the rough equivalent of 1.5 megatons of energy. Yes, that is the measure they use for nukes: the big ones. So, according to Nukemap, if he detonated all three stones in the city center, about 4,500 kilotons, nearly 900,000 people would die: without including fallout.

“Fucking batteries my ass!”

He had held those things in his hand. In his fucking hand. He had barely missed hitting them with the supernatural equivalent of a death ray.

Mitch wanted to throw them in a box or something as if that would have any effect. He had three, count them: three, nukes sitting on his kitchen table.

He couldn’t handle this right now.

His mind spinning, Mitch stumbled to the bathroom. Bracing himself against the countertop, he stared at his reflection. Tracts of dried effluvia snaked their way up and over his face, caking in his hair. His eyes were bloodshot and haunted, his face haggard, his cheek bruised from the slap Kanshou had given him. His shirt had a hole in it and was stiff with dried blood. There was a discoloration at the crotch of his jeans. At some point, he had wet himself without even noticing it.

How was this asshole supposed to do anything about his situation? He faced forces unimaginable. His ability to survive each day was in question. His handler was a psychopath. He had no knowledge, no skills, and no resources except three rocks that would put Little Boy to shame. Who the fuck was he kidding? All that lay ahead of him was desperation and death. If his lifespan was extended as Kanshou’s had been, he was looking at hundreds if not thousands of years of servitude, dancing to the tune of some devil he might never even meet.

He was a grain of sand attempting to challenge a mountain.

Standing there, staring at the disgusting wreck of who he had once been, toeing the cusp of despair, something changed. Some emotion he didn’t recognize shot through him tearing apart the shell his weak mind had been building around itself. Then every shred of doubt, every vestige of depression, self-doubt, and guilt exploded in a flame that consumed each iota of his debility.

The feeling was too much to contain, and Mitch let the smallest part of it out in an unidentifiable roar. No one would have recognized the noise as having come from a human. Bestial was too weak of a word. This was the sonic embodiment of something for which existed a word, the true meaning of which only an unfortunate few would ever understand. Unreasoning, implacable, eternal: Wrath.

The emotion seemed nearly sentient and burrowed its way into Mitch’s heart and mind. It made a home for itself in his bones, nestled in his marrow. It distilled his fear and suffering, his trepidation, his guilt over not telling the world about what he knew, the deaths of so many, into a bitter draught which he placed firmly at the feet of Kanshou and those behind him.

The warden and his ilk would be destroyed, or he would die in the attempt. If he died, his shade would pull them with him into the underworld. As long as anything of him remained, he would work toward their annihilation.

At that moment something changed again, and the raw and wild emotion coursing through his being calmed. It did not fade, it crystallized. It became cold and deadly. It etched itself into his soul.

Mitch’s scream faded and he stood up, his back straighter than it had been in months. The air in his bathroom was a whirlwind which centered on him. There were wisps of pale orange mist rising from every inch of his skin before being sucked into the tempest. The edges of his clothes were smoldering. The tracks of filth had been burned away. His eyes glowed slightly.

What Mitch saw in the mirror now satisfied him. The brittleness that had almost destroyed him had been forged away leaving only clean steel, imbued with a deadly purpose. He was weak now, but that would not always be so. He would find his strength, build his power and then when the time was right, he would unleash it.

The warden withdrew his mind from the stone in his hand and smiled a genuine smile: his first in ages. He was pleased. It had been another gamble, not dulling the boy's pain during the process, forcing him to remain conscious through the whole time. It could have broken him, but instead, he had responded as hoped. The boy’s reaction had been a bit more violent than expected, but no matter. Now the boy would follow the correct path; the path of blood. When that path ended, when they had wrung everything of value from him, they would unmake him and reap their rewards.

Many miles away, in a cave beneath the depths of the ocean, beyond the reach of the sun, a blue glow emanated from an array of many compasses. A pair of dark eyes opened, and a man stood for the first time in centuries. He had not expected things to become lively this quickly.

Who would have thought that a simple experiment would have such results?

When the punishment, a rather ordinary one, had been issued his teacher had managed to get an experiment approved to go along with it. In addition to restricting the energies, destroy all of the schools and any cultivators beyond the mortal stratum; rewrite the histories and turn truth into myth. Eliminate all practical knowledge of the energy and its uses and see what bubbles to the top when it returns.

He had been dispatched along with Kanshou to regulate things, the book to Kanshou’s bludgeon. It had been his job to monitor for problems with the experiment: lost knowledge being uncovered, a magical fossil being found, anything that might disrupt the clean slate they strove to create. The array around him had been designed to allow him to sense the entirety of the world which is all he had done for the past millennium, informing the warden of anything that might pose a problem. Between his knowledge of theory and the warden’s brutality, they had rewritten the world to suit the image designed by their superiors.

He had been as interested as anyone else in what would result from this trial, and truth be told he still was. But, a millennium of watching the warden snuff out anyone who found anything they shouldn’t; a millennium of seeing every murder and war in excruciating detail; a millennium exposed to the ruminations of all the philosophers and artists of this world had soured him toward the whole thing.

His superiors might only wish to skim out what would benefit themselves, but he wanted to see what someone from this world could do if they became mighty.

There were two prospects at the moment. More might surface later, but for now, only two showed much potential. The warden had gotten his claws into one already, but the other remained. If Kanshou wished to forge a sword, then he would create its sheath.

In his time here he had begun to think of himself as the Historian, his name not forgotten, but shelved with the other irrelevancies. He liked the title better anyway. He had always enjoyed books and scrolls, escaping the cruel and tyrannical world around him within them.

Leaving a clone to continue processing the input from the array the Historian stepped out into the world.