Anger.

“Why am I angry?”

Surprise. Love. Sudden emotion flooded Res, and he gasped and tried to sit up. Something held him chained to his bed, though. When he opened his eyes, he found himself in the same bed in the middle of a wine cellar. Next to him stood an enormous barrel filed with preserved meat and several loaves of bread. On his bed lay a piece of paper with the words: ‘stay here’ written on it.

“Bro, you are in real shit. You know that?”

Res’s anger flared white-hot. “Why didn’t you come back?”

He now felt soothing coming from above him, but he ignored it.

“Bro, they fucking practiced real fucking blood magic on you. How the hell would I know that the Osma kingdom still has actual blood magic? There are hundreds of kingdoms who claim to have blood magic, but in reality, it is only a farce. The only time I got to see blood magic was by a farmer in the northerner mountains who bound his goats to himself. Even then, I wasn’t able to replicate his techniques. Even me! I was as close as one could get to a fucking demi-god. I was lucky to be in the other dimension. Who knew what would have happened to me if such powerful magic touched me?”

With a sigh, Res sent Jason feelings of understanding. When he looked at their bond closer, he noticed that he now had two other aether bonds attached to him. Jason chuckled when he realized that Res had seen the two bonds. “Not bad, heh? Those two girls have it in them.”

A burst of lust and anger shot through Res and he looked into the direction it had come from. “It wasn’t enough to have one person in my mind. Now I have three of them. How ironic.”

A more subdued feeling of hesitance and sorrow shot into him from the other bond. Res reasoned that that was Serafina and the angry one was Xenia. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to wait until her brother comes to visit.”

“Bro, I wholeheartedly agree, but I must tell you that the house has a good chance of being watched by the elite palace guard. I already have the perfect escape plan. Let’s dig our way out of here while cultivating. I haven’t entered your head until now because I didn’t want you to panic, but do I have your permission now?”

Res would have never thought he would say the phrase one day but said it anyway. They needed complete trust, and it was time for him to extend that trust. “You can enter my brain.”

A warm feeling flowed from his neck to his brain and vanished. “Bro, I have great news. I can change my permanent residence from your heart to your brain as long as you promise to never draw on your brain again.”

Res winced when he remembered how it had felt to live without his memories. “Trust me, I will never turn my brain into mush again.”

“Great, but you will need to talk to the two girls. I suspect that you will need to send emotions of comfort and love.”

“But I don’t love them. Or at least I think so. I enjoy their company, but I have never loved anyone. Do I love them?”

“If you need to ask, it means that you don’t. Which doesn’t mean that there won’t be anything. It means that you feel nothing yet. Try to think of the thing you most like about them.”

“Talking with them is one of the things I love.”

Jason’s comment made him examine the concept of love in his mind. He had always written it off as something not worth his time. On closer inspection, he was utterly fascinated by the interconnected web of correlation and …

“Bro, you are wasting time. Send some reassuring feelings already, we need to get cultivating.”

Res thought of their first meeting, the talk at palace bell tower, Serafina’s dark deep brown eyes. He thought about Xenia’s mesmerizing blue eyes and the body warmth he felt when they were napping next to him. All those feelings built up to a crescendo which he released into the two connections. For several moments, the two connections went silent. Then, he was flooded with more reserved feelings from Serafina and passionate emotions from Xenia. When the flood abated, he found himself sweating on the bed and panting for air. Even Jason was panting in the background.

“Bro, we need to find some sort of private room for me. I can’t handle the emotional rollercoaster you all seem to go through.”

He couldn’t find any words for what he felt and so distracted himself with work. “What should we do next?”

“You have serious cuts at your right legs and arm. If you extend whatever cultivation you have now to those body parts, the wounds will remain. The goal would be to change your left leg and arm to aether. You still will keep some scars though.”

He rolled out of bed and shoveled meat and bread into his mouth. This cultivating session would last long. Finally, he sat down in the middle of the wine cellar and began to do some mental exercises. If one was cultivating, one fell into a trance with limited reasoning capacity. When he had said: “down, forward, left arm, left leg” for the five-hundredths time, he reached for aether.

“Potential. Potential is Change. Change is everywhere, so much so that we rarely feel it. When we feel it, we despise it. Is change consistent? Unstoppable?”

The fascinating world of aether opened up in front of him. Somehow, a last remnant of speech fluttered through his head.

“Down, forward, left arm, left leg.”

The thought made him feel down at his feet. He could feel a barrier that obstructed him to reach further down than that. Angry, he let his reach wriggle through the stone and then soil. Two meters, four meters, five meters, ten meters. When he reached fifteen meters, he felt that a liquid was mixed into the rock, so he pulled. Enormous amounts of aether flooded him and he kept on shoving it into his arm like a funnel. Thousands of small ants were simultaneously biting at his hand and the aether raged havoc in his arm.

Judging by the damage the aether had already done, if he were to give up now, he could never use his arm again. Through the pain, he felt his body descending the hole he was digging. The pain became so intolerable he begged him for the black abyss of unconsciousness, but his rational refused. Finally, the torrent of aether subsided, and he sat up to the waist in icy water. Looking up, he could see the torchlight of the wine cellar. He realized that if his tunnel were to collapse, he would be dead before he knew it.

“Bro, that was perfect. Look at your arm, man.”

Limply hanging by his side, his arm was still glowing with aether. Yet, his biceps had already taken on the appearance of normal skin. The parts that hadn’t taken on the color of his skin were still numb. The other body parts were indistinguishable in feel from his normal fingers.

“Bro, do you know how boring it is to count seconds? I had to sit through counting to 64834. That means you have been digging here for over fucking eighteen hours. I don’t want to alarm you, but Xenia’s brother is most likely stationed at the Warwick castle. That is the only castle fit for a royal to be in.“

Res nodded but stopped himself before he dove back into cultivation. “Why do you know of Warwick castle? It was built eighty years ago.”

Jason choked off like the old woman. “Sorry, ghost business.”

“That ‘ghost business’ is getting on my nerves.”

“What should get on your nerves is that her brother will arrive in roundabout five hours.”

Res gulped down the lump in his throat and Jason continued. “You will need to use that wonderful new arm of yours. It seems barbaric to sacrifice a part of your body, but you can grow it back. Shoot out a beam of your influence in a certain direction and then pull in.”

Res gulped down the lump in his throat and closed his eyes. He felt the solid aether in his arm and focused on the task on hand – spreading his influence. Slowly, he drew on the arm, but half measures weren’t in his arms repertoire. Instantly, he held the energy equal of eighteen hours of cultivating in his hand - He couldn’t resist releasing it. A beam with a radius of thirty meters shot out of his body and into the soil at an upward angle. The power that flooded his body told him he could do anything and beat anyone. It punched through the rock in an instant and pierced higher and higher into the air until it stopped eight kilometers above ground. As fast as it had begun, it subsided.

The aether source on his arm had vanished, which didn’t mean that he was aetherless. An unconscious grin appeared on his face as he pulled on the matter that was in his domain. Nothing. No movement. He strained to pull in harder and harder, but it felt like towing a three-story house. His physical body toppled over into the murky water from the strain, but he kept pulling. Finally, the soil next to him began to tremble.

“Aether is potential. Potential needs a slight nudge.”

Aether trickled into him. The flow of aether turned into a merry stream, a river, a vast torrent, and finally a crushing ocean. He used a funnel once again to concentrate aether in his left leg, which began to burn. Yet, he pushed on through the excruciating pain. It felt like hundreds of nails were shoved in and out of his foot while he was forced to run. The pain brought him to the edge of madness as he laughed about having a nail in his foot. After hours of torturing pain, his leg had turned to aether. He still had some left-over energy, which he forwarded to his left arm. The pleasant chills that came with getting feeling back in his arm felt like paradise. Yet, someone kept tugging on him, so he let go and found himself back in his body. He was standing right in front of an enormous tunnel and Res could glorious sunlight at the end.

“Bro, shit. RUN!”