To his surprise, he didn’t feel the potion splashing down his throat.

“Bro, you dork. You are already iron cast. Start cultivating already. You know the drill, right? No biggie. If you finish with the twelfth brain, you pull them all together to create one giant brain again. After that, you begin with the other organs in your body. I would propose to improve the eyes. You don’t need knowledge for body parts that aren’t your core. Pump them full with aether.”

With the freedom of not being able to hurt yourself, Res felt around himself in glee. The fact that he held nothing back allowed him to reach even more aether. Further and further, he reached out until he could feel some sort of resistance. All around him, a rectangular space was blocking him from reaching further. He got angry at the resistance and pushed against it. In his mind, he imagined the resistance to be butter, air, nonexistent. With a lot of effort, he had gained an inch on the resistance. Then, he pulled. Amounts of aether he had never felt before, crashed down on his small form and pressed him down. They seemed to taunt him with his powerlessness as he tried to form an extra brain. Some part of his consciousness asked:

“Why is there so much power?”

He realized that most of the power was coming from the pesky barrier. Armed with this knowledge, he only pulled from his surroundings until he had completed three of the nine brains. The power cost rose exponentially, and the air would not cut it anymore. With a groan, he began to once again burrow into the surrounding barrier. When he had dug about five centimeters into the wall, he pulled. Res was close to blacking out from the aether that reacted to that pull. With animalistic desperation, he redirected aether and created extra brains. *SNAP* *SNAP* *SNAP* .

Three brains sprung into being and he had to absorb twenty centimeters of the barrier for the next ones. *SNAP* *SNAP* Only one to go, but this time, he had to dig over a meter into the barrier. *SNAP* Some deep part of him was urging him on and telling him he had no time left. Even when he dug four meters into the barrier, the energy he received was miniscule. When he had reached nine meters, he could finally move the twelve brains by an inch. His inner clock was telling him he didn’t have much time left. So he drilled as far as he could go with no regard to how wide his influence spread. For an eternity, he explored the barrier until he felt his control reach a limit. Then he pulled.

This time, it wasn’t like being crashed by a wave, instead his entire world turned into aether. He blacked out for a second, but regained a tiny shred of consciousness to create a crude funnel into his brain. It was all he could do to hold that funnel intact. Sharp pain shot out from his spine into every part of his body. If he could, he would have screamed, but he couldn’t move a muscle. The ultimate form of torture – Helplessness. It felt like his memories, his emotions and his being were ripped apart.

“Why should I hold that funnel anymore?”

Yet, a question bounced around his muddled mind that made him hold on. “Who are you?” That powerful, all-encompassing being had asked him: “Who are you?” He didn’t know right now who he was, but he was something. Something.

“That sounds stupid”, a snide part of commented. Despite the pain, he held on to the fact that he was onto something. Res compressed the enormous wave of aether to levels he had never thought possible. The iron body potion stopped him from exploding while the aether flow pressed harder.

Suddenly, the flow of aether stopped, and he found himself back in his body and panting on the ground. When he felt his hands touching the dirt-packed floor, he laughed. “I am fucking alive!”

The voice of Jason chimed in: “We are fucking alive!”

When he had said his peace, he collapsed on the floor, still panting. “Bro, you won’t believe what I am about to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“Did I lose a leg?”

“Worse than that. You have no brain anymore.”

Res chuckled. “Nice one. I can still think, dummy dumb.”

“I am not kidding. Your brain has been replaced by rock solid aether.”

“You are one hundred percent sure?”

“As sure as I can be. Why did you pull so much in, anyway? Then you funneled it into your brain like someone with suicidal thoughts. Ohh, I can see nothing wrong with getting a fuckton of explosive aether into my brain. You are a lucky bastard, you know that?”

Res had played along with the joke, but Jason’s tone was serious. “You aren’t joking, aren’t you? My brain consisted out of aether before.”

“Yes and No. You see we are made of tiny building blocks called atoms. For various reasons that will be difficult to explain, they have lots and lots of room between them. If we cultivate, we fill up that space with aether, but your brain, your entire IS aether. There is no physical brain anymore.”

There was a long silence while Res considered his situation. “I can think all right, not that I would notice if I didn’t. I suppose it doesn’t make any difference. I feel normal at least. Do you know by any chance how to continue cultivating from now on?”

“No one has ever been dumb enough to funnel fucking aether into the brain!”

“Do your enchantments still work?”

“Bro, those weren’t damaged. The only thing that worries me is the question: 'What would happen if you use aether?'. Do you explode now? Does everything work fine? I have no fucking idea!”

Res opened his eyes and was greeted by a wide expanse of nothingness on all sides. When he looked up, he saw the ladder hanging around fifteen meters above him. An endless expanse of dirt surrounded him. “Bro, you actually carved that much out. I only thought you could do about three meters.”

Res whistled. “I should switch my profession to a construction worker.”

With an aether push, he was at the trapdoor and pushed against it – Locked. Before, he would have panicked, but now he could dig his way out of the bunker. With an aether reinforced fist, he hammered against the trapdoor. After five minutes of pounding, the trapdoor opened and Res shot through. He came face to face with Silvia, who was only covering herself up with a bedsheet and an unknown man in the same attire. It only took him a moment to add two and two together.

“You enjoyed the pill, didn’t you?”

The elderly man was the one to blush while Silvia only continued her questioning. “What did you do? I had to lock you in because if you had exploded, you could have done serious damage to my stock. This is a trustworthy alchemist, by the way.”

Res thought about how he could tell the truth without giving away anything. “I wanted to use a complicated technique, but it backfired. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself down in that pit. On a different note, do you have any identity concealing potions?”

Silvia seemed like she wanted to ask him more questions, was distracted by the old alchemist. Res had to hold himself back from vomiting. “Yes, in the bottom drawer of my desk.” Finally, she waved Res away. “I would like for you to stay in the waiting room. I will be back soon.”. Giggling, she tugged at the man’s arm and both of them vanished into an adjacent room.

“Bro, Ugh. That was fucking disgusting.”

With an unpleasant taste in his mouth, Res went back through the herb warehouse and once again into Silvia’s office. He found countless tiny vials in the bottom drawer of her working table. He grabbed as much of the clinking vials as he could stuff in his pockets. Hundreds upon hundreds of farmer nuts lay scattered all over her desk. After a brief look to check whether anybody was around, stuffed a linen sack full with the nuts. After five minutes, he had produced the five nuts he needed to pay Silvia and deposited them on her desk. After some thought, he added the note: ‘I hope they will satisfy you’.

“Bro, that joke never gets old.”

Only then did he bother to look out the window and notice that the sun was already hanging low in the sky. When he looked back at the nuts he had left for Silvia, he realized that filling a nut a quarter full meant that it held for longer than ten hours. With a shrug, he made a mental note to lower the doses on his next batch and left the room.

Outside, he collided with Emma who was spurting out. “Master, I have finished the fertility potion and … ” She trailed off when she saw that it was him.

“Emma, what time is it?”

“What did you do with my master?”

“She is having fun wrestling with an old alchemist. Naked.” Emma covered her ears and began to sing a lullaby. “What time is it?”

She barely paused her insistent singing. “Eighteenth Bell”

“Bro, we are too late for our date! We can’t leave bad first impressions. Fly there as fast as you fucking can!”

“What about the elite palace guards?”

“Coming late to a date hurts as much as exploding.”

He grinned at James’s priorities, ran to a window, and jumped out of it. If he was going to die, he would go out with style.