"Aaarrrggghhh"

A chill-inducing cry reverberated within the whole room, as a human was brutally beaten up in it. His fingers were broken and bent at weird angles, while his body was pierced by various thick metallic needles, at places where the sensory neurons were the densest so that pain could be easily sensed. His face was cruelly mashed up, with his nose and half of his teeth broken. His facial skin, blood, and sweat were all mixed up, which made it feel less like a visage and more like a bloodied meat paste.

"Aarrrggh." The horned monstrosity once again started beating him up, with punches landing directly on his already mashed-up face.

"That's enough, Charles. I have already forgiven him, so let it go. He will die if you keep this up." The Skal protested.

"You don't... *punch*.. understand it, Ed. He must be properly disciplined, or else more such cases will arise. Don't you know, he even threatened to.. *punch*..kill the mayor?" Reid replied as he kept on punching Abhin.

Edgar felt like puking when he saw how badly the chained human was beaten, and how blood smeared all over Reid with every punch he landed on Abhin.

"Enough. You beat him anymore and I won't heal him. Would it be fine to you if he dies?" He tried persuading the Shura, just to be greeted by the bloodlust Reid leaked. The bloodlust was enough to make Edgar's mana go awry and so he fell on his knees, struggling and suffocating.

"Stop... STOP IT! Charles."*Cough* Edgar spit out some blood as he begged the Shura to stop.

Abhin would have died of mana-deviation, had he been a mana active individual. Luckily that was not the case and so he was not much affected by the extreme bloodlust Reid possessed.

Seeing Edgar on his knees brought Reid back to his senses and he stopped what he was doing.

"I... I am so sorry, Ed. I didn't mean to. It's just that seeing this scum made my blood boil and I lost control over myself." Reid justified his actions, "Didn't I go out of my way to be nice to him? He is a lab rat yet I tried treating him as an equal and this is how he repays me." His bloodlust slowly started rising back as he thought of what had happened earlier.

"Ya will lose Enola again if ya don't stop right now. He is already on the death's door and will die in the next five minutes if I don't heal him." Edgar continued "Even if I heal him now, didn't he threaten to commit suicide if ya pressurize him more? Please stop before things take a turn for worst." He wiped the green blood off his lips as he emotionally blackmailed the Shura - bringing up his most sensitive spot - so as to stop him. This sent Reid in a dilemma and he had no choice but to disperse his remnant anger.

"Fine, give me a minute and he is all yours then." The shura said as he freed the human. He picked him up from one of his limp arms and brought him up to his eye level.

"Will you ever try to rebel?" Reid menacingly questioned the half-dead human.

However, no one replied as Abhin had already fainted.

Reid realized that he had gone a bit overboard, and at this rate, he might even lose the chance of reviving Enola, but his bloodlust refused to subside, and so had no choice but to vent it someplace else.

"Tch. Here, have him." Reid said as he handed over the human's flailing body to Edgar before leaving the room.

Without wasting a single second, the Skal started treating him. Luckily, the treatment was not at all painful to Abhin as he had already fallen into a coma due to heavy blood loss.

It took him an hour to recover physically and almost four days to recover from the coma, although he was then haunted by constant horrid Migraine.

The migraine too went away in a day or two, and with Edgar by his side all the time(he took a leave from his hospital), another week passed by. Reid never came in the meantime.

His panic attacks once again peaked to about 20 times a day, and the food he got tasted like shit(but was healthy according to Edgar). To sum it all up, his life was hell incarnate. He would occasionally think of Serene, and pray that she was going through things far better than he was.

** **

Eventually two more weeks went by.

A quirky little green Skal barged into that walled cage as he brought in some food for Abhin, causing the captive human to feel enormous gratitude towards him.

"I am sorry, Mr. Edgar. I really am this time." Abhin reaffirmed his thoughts to Edgar. His complexion was a lot better now and he had regained his former beauty, although he was still psychologically scarred.

"How many times have I said ya that it's alright? I have already forgiven ya for what happened back then," Edgar genuinely felt pestered by his constant apologies. And it was not as if Edgar didn't hate him in the beginning, but Reid had already returned ten-fold of what happened to him. Furthermore, they were playing good cop, bad cop, so he himself felt ashamed when he heard the innocent apologies of the human.

On the other hand, Abhin was initially completely flabbergasted by the Skal's behaviour. His hatred for Reid aside, he felt extreme guilt for trying to kill Edgar, as he was the one who kept on taking his side, even after taking a deadly hit head-on.

But as time passed, Edgar's kindness started feeling over-the-top and artificial, causing him to be dubious of the whole scenario. So gratitude aside, he was still on guard against him.

"Does it feel uncomfortable anywhere? One should hide nothing from a doctor." Edgar inquired as strated inspecting Abhin's health.

"No, aside from this awful headache and those terrible seizures." He answered.

"I see"

"He would of course beat ya to a pulp. Ya threatened to kill his mother, didn't ya?" Ed remarked out of nowhere.

"Wait, when did I do that?" questioned Abhin.

"The mayor you met earlier is Reid's mother."

"...."

An awkward silence took over the place.

** **

"Ya brain functioning is pretty normal, kiddo. At this rate of recovery, the seizures would stop in a year or so." Edgar said as he read one of the reports of his medical check-up.

'Crap. A year in this hell is too much for my soul to handle.' the human shivered at the thought of staying a year more in the lab, which was now restored back to its original aesthethics.

"Say, Mr. Edgar, is there any way I can get away from here?" The mansion incident had left a deep impact on him. He now knew that escaping them was an impossible task, yet he still had a sliver of hope left within him, and so he directly questioned the same to Edgar.

"No, not unless Charles gets what he wants." The Skal honestly answered. Abhin got a bit dispirited after hearing him but he did not lose all of his hopes.

'Tch. Lacking... I am lacking, key knowledge to fight that brute.' He made up his mind to lay low for a while and keep on gathering information, as he believed that Reid would not be as blunt as to torment Abhin more after the mansion incident. After all, he was an essential part of the Shura's research and he did blackmail Reid that he would commit suicide if things go on like this.

The next few hours went by in a flash, with Edgar running a few more health checkups on him.

"Mr. Edgar, why is Reid trying to attain immortality? Why.. is he so cruel to me?" Abhin shot a pitiful look as he tried gathering some information from the Gobli... I mean, Skal.

"Hmm... Should I tell ya his whole backstory?" Edgar contemplated out loud.

'Is he not worried that I can misuse the information he gives me?' It seemed as if Reid's total absence for weeks had a positive impact on his recovery.

"Yes, please." Well, whatever the case was, Abhin was getting exposed to more information, and that was all he cared for.

"Well, ya can find most of it on the web anyway, so it's not like Charles would mind." Edgar once again spoke out his thoughts.

"A few hundred years ago, Reid's mother rescued me from my home planet. I have memories, neither of my parents nor of my birthplace, but that's cause I was just a toddler back then. The mayor took me in as her foster son as I was of the rarer Skal race. I grew up with Charles ever since I could remember." The skal began

'Seriously, I do not need that whole of a backstory.' Abhin thought.

"Mr. Edgar, could you please skim on the minor details." he requested the Skal.

"Shh.... don't interrupt. Anyways, we went to the same school and afterward the same university. In the uni, he fell in love with Enola, a Shura who shared similar interests to Charles. After a few years of dating, they married each other."

'How damn generic his backstory is.'

"They eventually joined the Shura Research and Development department, where like-minded Shuras studied topics which helped them advance as a race. There, Reid and Enola gained immense fame and lodged tons of achievements. They were even hailed as the genius couple." Edgar continued as if reminiscing his own achievements.

"And then?" questioned Abhin.

"And then they kept on working, enjoying and living their life to the fullest."

"That's it?" Abhin was quite perplexed.

"Yes. Enola died of old age some 50 years ago. Since then, Reid has been working extremely hard to somehow revive her corpse."

'Damn. That asshole lived a content life, yet he needs more.'(Abhin)

"Aren't they both of the same species? Then how can there be such disparities in the lifespan?"

Well, Reid still looked like a middle-aged man, while his wife had already died of old age, some 50 years ago, so something felt fishy to the human.

"Kiddo, how long will ya live depends on how much mana you can take in, or in other words, how much core mana ya can store in at once. Ya can slowly improve ya core mana capacity -and subsequently ya lifespan- by using ya core mana regularly. That needs ya filling and emptying ya reserves on a regular basis. We herbivores can absorb mana directly from the surroundings, but things are harder for carnivores as they cannot. For them to intake mana, they would have to eat another mana active being either alive or just after its death, Enola was against it and so she died early. It might not look like it but Reid has also exhausted 80% of his lifespan, and he too will die in the next two hundred years." Edgar sounded quite depressed.

"Moreover, he went to extreme lengths to try to reviver her, and pissed off the royals due to it." He continued.

"Wait what, royals?" Things were convoluting rather than unfolding for the human.

"Oh right, ya don't know. There are two subspecies of the Shura, the first ones are carnivoral in nature and are the ones ya will commonly find, like Charles and Enola, and are accordingly termed as commoners, while the second is omnivorous in nature and are rare and are termed as royals."

"???" Seeing the human's blank face, Edgar facepalmed in frustration.

"Dammit, ya know nothing at all. Fine, listen to me carefully, kiddo. Our galaxy is extremely vast and is thus divided into small patches which are either governed by individual autonomous bodies called realms/kingdoms or are governed by the vast democratic Jia Federation. Most of these nations are ruled by dominating species such as Shuras, and amongst the Shuras, the more powerful second kind of Shura were the ones actually in power and thus they were called Royals. Got it." Edgar said bluntly.

"Yeah.. somewhat"

"So, when Enola died, Reid decided to revive her, but he needed to experiment on these special Shuras to further deepen his knowledge on their species as a whole. So what Charles did was to secretly infiltrate the castles of two neighboring Shurian kingdoms consecutively and kidnap their crown princes some 40 years ago. He hid within their own castle and experimented upon them for almost a week, after which both of the princes died*. Charles was caught by them as he was escaping but he somehow miraculously managed to escape. Upon learning about their son's death, the kings were so enraged that they ordered a huge bounty on Charles' head. Both of them lobbied almost every other royal in pressurizing the research and development department in hopes of knowing Charles' location. The R&D was in extreme trouble and they had to behead a decoy to satiate the king's wrath."

"Why did they(R&D) just not hand him over?"

'Things would have been far better for me if they had' Abhin confessed inwardly.

"Because they did not want to lose someone as brilliant as Charles, or that's what he says to me. Well, I personally believe that Charles bribed the R&D officers with some of the research he did on the royals." The skal shrugged, as he himself didn't know of the reason,

"Anyways, the R&D collaborated with Charles' mother and hid him on one of the territories under her. The mayor was enraged at first and refused, but seeing how Reid was after all her own child, she accepted their proposal. Since then Reid has been hiding here. But the situation is deteriorating now. Ya saw how aged the mayor is, right? With her current condition, she might only live for half a year or so. Reid did not want to even lose his mother and so was looking for ways to extend both of their lives and it was then, that ya came in the picture - a descendant of the immortal Ningens."

"He was always in a hurry and harsh on ya because mayor might pass away soon. He probably was worried for his mother's health when he said me to shut up during the outing too." Edgar concluded.