For once, Gaius felt like his age — scared and nervous — as he scaled the mountains and hills of Heritage.

Of course, almost everyone on Earth would feel this way were that person be in Gaius’ shoes now. The young boy was flying upwards, his body unsteady as he defied the laws of gravity. There was a huge difference between being on a plane or even falling in a parachute and flying upwards with nothing physical to support the body. He couldn’t almost begin to describe the sensation — even strings attached to his back wouldn’t cut it, and would frankly be more reassuring than the current state he was in now.

If Gaius had to put it, it was the feeling of strapping rockets to your feet and arms, but there was no compensatory mechanism built into them. If his legs even shook slightly, his flight would become wobbly, and if his arms decided to flay around in flight…well, if he hit a mountain, there probably wouldn’t be much of him left that could feel scared. A transparent barrier extruded outward from him, but Gaius knew that firstly, the barrier would compress if it hit something, up until it was a centimetre away from him, and secondly, he would still feel the impact anyway.

Overall, it was a harrowing experience that Gaius didn’t want to go through in the middle of a fight or in front of a crowd of Harvesters, so the young boy had to flee all the way to Heritage to practice flight.

Thankfully, the other abilities of the Stellar Core were far simpler. Gaius had sent a projection to climb up the hills to convince any observers who might be watching. The projection defied gravity and the conventional notion of how one should walk and climb, but unless these observers moved close enough, they would never notice it. As for climate control…well, that required even lesser work.

His projection would do the hard work, while Gaius continued to study at a flying school of literal hard knocks. His vision spun around madly as the boy entered a controlled spin…and then followed it up with a fountain of projectile vomit. Bile flew out of his barrier as Gaius retched, creating a spiral of green that one might think was an eruption of emeralds from nowhere…from afar, that is.

Gaius retched again as bits of bile, now under the full control of gravity alone, bounced off his barrier. He’d never felt so sorry in both Orb and Earth before, and his eyes were dismal as they tracked the falling bits of green bile shoot downwards with a preternatural speed.

At such heights, even staying still in the howling wind was an exercise in stability. The barrier, though indispensable, increased his effective surface area, which in turn increased the strength of the wind blowing against him.

Gaius ascended violently as he fought off the waves of nausea that were still assaulting him, trying not to waste any scrap of time. His senses heightened yet again, making the sensations from his churning stomach even clearer even as the young boy continued to work on his stability.

Time flew by slowly.

Gaius could see a small black dot spying on the projection he’d sent up the hill. Sure, the observer had blended in by wearing even a facemask of white, but he probably never accounted for the possibility of someone seeing him from above. The back side of his head, covered in black hair, stood out like a sore thumb in a field of white.

There were some implications to this act. First, it seemed that spying on Gaius himself was probably backed by some factions in the Congress, seeing as he made no effort to conceal these actions from anyone behind him. Of course, the possibility that the observer was an idiot could not be ruled out, but Gaius had at least a healthy respect for the general intelligence of the people here. Second, and more worrying, was that there probably was a trigger that prompted some members or factions of the Congress to act in such a manner.

Gaius wasn’t too sure about what it was, but it was likely that information had begun to leak out about the seller of the ether cores and the buyer of the Stellar Core. The latter was less likely than the former, given that the old man at the Exchange had something to do with it.

The young boy withstood a particularly strong surge of wind, and heaved a sigh. It seemed that the Artificers and the Apothecaries were beginning to hone in on the source.

The young boy shook his head and snapped out of his introspection. The waves of nausea had ended, and Gaius was going to practice flight manoeuvres all over again. It was truly fortunate that he was invisible, that the Stellar Core was bending light by condensing qi all around him…since there were actually multiple spies watching the projection of Gaius climb up slowly. If they had noticed that Gaius had swapped out into his lecturer’s cloak at the start, these observers might have felt something off.

But they didn’t, so that was it.

Gaius landed just as his projection reached the top of the hill. His poise was visibly more confident as he landed directly onto his projection, which vanished immediately.

The young boy surveyed the hilltop. There, in the middle, were a mound of snowpyre corpses he’d left last week. A small pile of ether cores he’d dug out of the snowpyres remained on the ground there, as inert as it was last week.

He breathed out in relief. Gaius knew that gemstones, if placed together, could create phenomenon that were more often than not lethal; they could entice snowpyres and give rise to monsters of energy.

It seemed that the cores weren’t that problematic.

After gathering the cores that Gaius left behind last week, the boy turned his attention to the small mountain of snowpyre corpses. The problem with those corpses was that they were visibly dissected. If it was just one snowpyre corpse that was dissected, it wouldn’t be a problem. But people would guess something was up if hundreds of snowpyres were cut up.

The young boy wanted to monopolise the supply of ether cores. After all, their value would drop if more people knew how to obtain them, and he doubted if the Harvesters considered the concept of sustainability when hunting snowpyres. He’d told Mai that one of them had dropped while fighting a monster of energy, but judging from her reaction…well, that wasn’t a really good course of action.

The Stellar Core lit up as Gaius drew a sigil on the air. It was a simple one, one that targeted anything within range with a rapid oxidation process driven primarily by combustion.

A glorified firestarter, in other words.

Flames crackled, and for the first time in Heritage, Gaius felt warm.