Chapter 18: Family.

"I don't get it." I said as I worked on my new project, But it wasn't working; my mind was elsewhere.

Jasmine spun on her personal floating chair and looked at me questioningly. "Is it another thing about your research?"

I looked back at her, spinning on my own chair, and replied, "You got awfully chill, you know? Where has the annoying princess who forced me to the ground gone?"

She just shrugged in reply, uncaringly.

"Nah, it's something else." I said, turning back to my work and wondering how to continue, "Jasmine, I come from another world."

"Yeah, me too." She replied nonchalantly.

"I figured, since you always say stuff like, "No technique in this world is as good as this one," you weren't exactly making it a mystery." I replied.

She shrugged, but I had to inquire, "Is it that obvious that I'm not from here?"

"You have knowledge of how the world works that I can't even fathom; that alone is proof that you come from very far," She replied. "But others that don't know you as well won't notice, especially since you barely go out at all."

"I guess that's true too," I replied back, with a hint of frustration in my voice. "It's just that the people here are too weird to me; we have no interests in common!"

"Like when you tried to make friends with that Jing guy? It was painful to look at." She said it amusingly.

"You were looking?" I replied, horrified at the implications of what that possibly meant.

If she could still see me even when she was in the green realm, then...

Oh no.

"When you get to my level of cultivation, you see even things that you wouldn't want to see, and yes, that too."

Oh no.

"I can explain." I said it immediately.

But she shrugged and said, "The price of my silence is a few new dresses; I saw a few nice ones when you went shopping last time."

That was going to drain my finances; every single coin of my hoard was mine to waste!

"One." I negotiated.

"Three."

"One and two sets of underwear."

"Four full sets, dresses plus underwear."

"That's not how negotiation works!" I replied in faux-outrage.

But she just smirked at me and said, "It does when I say so, three full sets."

"Well..." I pondered, changing the direction the negotiation went in and devaluing her side of the deal: "You don't actually talk to anybody other than me; who would you even tell that to?"

"That is true," she shrugged, "But in twenty-nine years I will be free. You wouldn't want the world to know that the big bad Sovereign, admired by countless people as a paragon of virtue, does that kind of research, would you?"

I narrowed my eyes and replied defensively, "It's not my fault; my previous body was much better endowed!"

She just sighed in reply, "Men..."

"What do you know about men, huh? You're a kid!" I replied childishly, throwing the worst kind of taunt that I could possibly imagine.

"Again with calling me a kid! You're just blind, "Paracelsus"," she replied, stressing the fake name that I still regretted choosing. "I am among the most beautiful women in the entirety of the divine realms; people kiss the very soil I walk on!"

"You're short!" I replied right where it hurt the most: "And you're a child; there are no beautiful children; you're all ugly!"

"Who's childish now, huh?" She replied back, glaring at me dangerously.

I just narrowed my eyes at her.

We were at an impasse.

Then I started chuckling, and she did too.

Play-fighting with her was nice; it brought my mind back to the old days, the happier days, when my brother and I used to do just the same when we were younger.

Good times.

I wiped a tear from my eye and continued, "I needed that; thanks, Jasmine."

"Are you still sad?" She replied, and I could see a hint of concern, but I just ruffled her hair in reply: "Hey! Stop it!"

"No, it's fun; you're really mature for your age, you know that?" I asked back, skipping over to reply to her question entirely.

She just nodded with a smile and changed the subject to, "Tell your beautiful and mighty master, what is plaguing your mind?"

"It's just," I sighed, struggling to find words, "The people of this world are weird; the girl that passed by earlier said that there might be serious injuries, as naturally as saying that the sky is blue, and it's just a banquet."

She looked at me, but she didn't really understand. Even if she was also an outsider, where she came from was very similar; I could see it in her eyes. She replied, "How is it in your world?"

"Violence is not as prevalent, I would say," I stated with a sigh. "People fight, but it rarely becomes physical outside of sports."

"Eeh?" She replied, stretching her reply, "That seems like a weird world; how did you get here in the first place?"

"I don't know; I was there, then I woke up here, in a body that is not mine, stranded." I cut my reply short to not take out my whole emotional baggage on her.

She seemed solemn at my words, changing her attitude from her previous laid-back attitude she had adopted from me: "Someone incredibly powerful has to be the cause; few have the power to do something similar."

"That's what I figured too, but there isn't much I can do about it; anyone who can do such a thing is like a God to someone like me." I sighed. Every time I thought about it, it was excruciating. Thoughts of "why me" or just "why" in general swirled in my mind, but no answers came back.

"Cultivate." She replied.

"Cultivate, huh, but can it really make me so strong as to question someone like that?" I replied.

"There is no need to question them," she continued, "you just have to become strong and kill them."

I looked at her. There was no emotion in her eyes when she said that; it was unsettling.

Killing everyone seemed like the way of this world, but I wouldn't accept it.

"I won't kill anybody." I shook my head and said, "Only if it's the only choice, and there is always an alternative."

"What if the only alternative is dying yourself?" She replied.

"Then that won't be my choice, but my opponent's to kill me," I said. "Between taking the life of another thinking, rational being like us and showing them mercy, I'll always take the latter."

After a few seconds of pondering, she said, "Then what of that beast in the forest? It hasn't been long since you took a life."

"It's not the same," I said, shaking my head, denying the very notion, "That was the cycle of life; I was a predator and it was prey; people, intelligent people, aren't prey."

Silence continued, and after a few seconds, she once again opened her mouth, saying, "You know you might die because of these ideas of yours, right?"

"Then so be it."

"The people you love might die too."

"It's great that the only person that I love in this world is my super strong master, then." I replied with a smile on my face; no ounce of embarrassment could be seen on my face.

The one I came to see as a sassy little sister muttered with a blush, "Preposterous..."

I chuckled and patted her head before being mercilessly shooed away as she shoved my floating chair to the other side of the room.

I brought the chair back to the working table and got back to doing my thing, the chaos in my mind no longer clouding my thoughts, as I felt the energy in my body once again grow denser by one stage.

"Oh, what level am I at now?" I asked the girl still sitting nearby.

"Seventh level of Nascent Profound, your speed is preposterous." She commented, to which I just hummed in acknowledgment.

"I was working on a way to get even faster, but it was a dead lead." I said it offhandedly as I applied another microscopic rune to a stone tablet.

Wood was too easy to ruin; the new and more complex prototypes needed better materials.

She arched an eyebrow and asked, "What did you try?"

"I tried making artificial openings so I could get more entry points, but it didn't reach the experimentation stage."

She laughed, saying, "Well, obviously, doing that would mean going against the way of the world itself; no being across the many worlds can have more than fifty-four openings."

"Why." I asked back, spinning another rune into my device.

"Because that's just the way it is." She replied.

So naturally, I continued, "Who decided that?"

She didn't reply, her mouth hanging slightly open. "Huh."

"Exactly. The theory might have worked, but I didn't have the knowledge to make it a reality." I commented.

She continued, offering her helping hand with a hand on her chin, pondering the issue: "What do you need to know? Maybe I can help you."

"Well, I know how the veins behave, more or less, how they interact with energy, and what happens to them in response to physical trauma, but I still don't understand the material they are made of."

"What do you mean by material?" I received the same question once again, but this time it had to be in a different context.

"Look." I said, taking out a microscope from my tattoo, together with a sample to look at that I had put aside, that the tattoo was too convenient. "This is a tissue sample from Jing's injury; it's from the operation on the veins to put them back together. From my senses, there should have been a residue of vein on this, but there is nothing out of the norm when I look at it, nor when I put it in the ERI."

"Well, that is obvious; spirit veins are the first thing to disappear after separation from the host." She replied.

"But why? What do they decompose into, and where do they go? There is no trace here, physical or magical."

She seemed stumped by those questions, and so was I.

I really hoped I didn't have to pull a Leonardo Da Vinci to resolve this mystery, but it seemed more and more likely to be the only solution.

"So what, you're going to give up?" She asked, not in mockery but as a genuine question.

"Yes, I know far too little and have far too little time to work on something that might not work, because in the meantime... ta-dah!" I said, revealing the holographic tridimensional image of myself spinning in the palm of my hand.

It was featureless; I said that it was mine only because I was visualizing myself and recreating my proportions while making it.

"What is that?" Jasmine replied, clearly not impressed by how foolish she was.

"This, my dear mascot," I got punched for calling her that, but I didn't regret it, "Is the future of my ERI, look."

After my words ended, the figure became almost completely transparent, and inside of it, while still in two dimensions, was the imprint of my profound veins, spinning together with the figure.

"Oh." Jasmine mumbled as her eyes widened slightly.

"Oh, indeed, after I figure out how to do tridimensional scans, I can use these as visualization aids, making them bigger and smaller as I wish, and the more detailed the scan, the better the figure." I said.

"That's nice." She said shortly, before changing the topic completely, "How come you accepted going to that banquet with that Lan Xueruo girl?"

"That's her name! Right!" I exclaimed at the revelation—at least I had gotten Lan right—"And you really don't care about my creations, do you?"

"No, so why? You never go out and work all day; why the change?" She replied, mercilessly shooting down my excitement at my new puppy, which I was going to use to make holographic puppies—actual puppies—a lot of them.

"I'm tired; I need a break." I stated, my voice barely hiding the two sleepless nights I had just finished.

"Huh, go to sleep." She said, or ordered, from her tone.

"Yes, ma'am." I yawned, making my way to my room. "Night Jasmine."

"Goodnight." She replied, vanishing, a smile still on her face.