Chapter 42

"Got some bite, I'll give you that," the man drawled, circling. "But that limp's starting to show. Maybe sit down before you embarrass yourself further."

Aster didn't answer. His Faith valve was wide open, the Point Burst Scripture screaming through his channels, heating muscle and nerve alike.

But his mind was sharp.

He fired another tether — angled burst left. Landed, twisted. Another volley of wind blades chased him. He dropped behind an overturned table, used it to block the worst, then burst out the side.

His Faith limit was coming fast. Too many charged bursts. The Scripture burning him from the inside out. Tendons aching. Shoulders locking.

He quickly scanned through the rest of his Glyph-scripts before his attention landed on a Glyph he'd extracted from a Daydream-Jellyfish.

He smiled.

If the drunk wanted to catch him — Aster would give him the chance.

He let his breathing grow increasingly ragged. Let his guard sag. Widened his stance just enough to look unstable. The blood helped sell the performance for him — he looked ready to drop.

Bleeding. Bruised. Cornered. He met the drunk's eyes.

And smirked.

The bastard took the bait immediately. "Cute. Let's finish it, then."

He surged forward.

The Glyph-Script activated instantly, wrapping around Aster like a flickering veil. The tether snapped. He moved — one last anchor, high above the beams.

But the resulting illusion didn't.

The illusion held its ground, body slouched, lips twisted into that same damn smirk.

The drunk didn't notice the difference.

Why would he? People saw what they expected to see. And right now he expected victory.

The scimitar flashed.

The blade punched straight through Aster's chest.

The blade passing clean through.

The drunk paused mid-lunge, confused. His triumphant roar died in his throat as the illusion flickered — then warped. The figure began to dissolve in waves of shimmer, fading like smoke off warm water.

"What the fu—"

Above him, the real Aster dropped like a meteor.

Plummeted like a falling star, staff gripped in both hands, Faith channels fully open, the last of his reserves pushed into raw velocity. Aimed directly at the top of the drunk's head.

The man barely had time to look up.

CRACK.

The staff connected with a sound like a tree snapping in a hurricane. Full weight behind it.

The drunk hit the tavern floor like a sack of wet bones, the scimitar skittering away in a lonely arc

The impact echoed through the floorboards, leaving a wet smear of fractured ego.

Aster landed light on his good leg. Leaning on his staff to prop himself upright. Blood dripped from his calf in steady, rhythmic taps against the stone.

He looked down at the drunk with clinical detachment.

"Maybe next time," he muttered, "stick to groping beer jugs instead of children."

The two surviving goons froze halfway through rising from their seats. One took a cautious step back. The other grabbed the table's edge like it might sprout legs and carry him to safety. Neither made eye contact.

Smart.

Aster's gaze drifted toward the drunk's scimitar.

The weapon wasn't particularly impressive now that the fight was over. Just curved steel. Wind glyphs. Cheap silver inlays. A ridiculously barely-stable Gale-Bellow Core.

And yet the memory of those last thirty seconds refused to leave him alone. Not the blade, but the speed.

Point Burst was faster — technically, in a straight line, Point Burst could launch him across a room before most people finished blinking. The problem was everything that happened after.

He accelerated. Stopped. Redirected. Accelerated again.

Every movement was a separate decision. A separate expenditure of Will.

The drunk hadn't moved like that. The bastard had simply... flowed. Like the air itself had decided walking was optional. No pauses between movement. Just constant acceleration.

Aster's eyes narrowed.

I've been solving movement like an accountant.

Point Burst was incredible for repositioning. Ambushes. Escapes. Burst aggression. But it wasn't mobility — not really. It was teleportation with extra steps.

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The drunk had nearly killed him because his speed existed between Aster's movements. Had occupied the spaces between decisions. And that — that was interesting. Dangerously interesting.

His attention drifted toward the unconscious drunk.

A grin slowly spread across his face. The kind that usually preceded either profit or criminal activity. Sometimes both.

The Guild had rules regarding compensation after duels. And if he remembered correctly — the winner was entitled to inspect damages and seize declared stakes.

The unconscious bastard might have just funded Aster's first real weapon.

Aster crouched carefully beside the unconscious man.

The two surviving goons tensed.

"Relax." He gestured vaguely toward their friend. "I'm robbing him academically."

The statement somehow made them look more concerned.

Aster reached toward the man's Stomach Palace. The spiritual lock resisted for approximately half a second before collapsing.

The storage space unfolded before him.

And Aster immediately understood several things.

First: The man was an idiot.

Second: The man was an idiot with money.

Third: The man was an idiot with money and absolutely no organisational skills.

The internal storage looked like someone had emptied a warehouse into a tornado. Broken weapons. Half-empty liquor bottles. Monster parts. Clothing. A suspicious amount of rope.

Aster chose not to investigate that one. Some questions improved by remaining unanswered.

A few low-grade materials. Some Wind-aligned cores. Interesting. A decent quality beast hide. Useful.

Then —

Aster paused.

Something caught his attention near the back of the storage space.

Long. Pale golden-silver. Almost metallic.

He pulled it free.

The entire tavern seemed to inhale.

The bone was nearly six feet long. Dense. Smooth. Covered in naturally occurring wind channels running through the structure like carved rivers. Even dormant, the thing hummed softly. Air curled around it. Dust shifted across the floor.

"No way."

One of the older artificers sitting near the contract boards nearly choked on his drink. "What in the Astral Hells—"

The artificer pointed. "That's a Zephyr Drake femur."

Aster's heart skipped.

Because he knew exactly what that meant. Zephyr Drakes were apex aerial predators — fast enough to outrun storm fronts, rare enough that most artificers spent entire careers hoping to acquire a single intact component.

Greater D grade.

The older artificer whistled.

Aster couldn't take his eyes off it. The natural wind lattices. The impossible lightness despite its size. The way Air-Aether was already drifting toward it in the room.

Ideas began forming immediately.

Dangerous ideas. The best kind.

Movement arrays. Acceleration scripts. Wind harmonics. An artifact built around increasing his mobility. Something that could bridge the gap between bursts. Something that could keep him moving after Point Burst ended. Something that would let him fight inside the spaces between decisions.

The same way the drunk almost had.

Aster's mouth slowly curled upward.

The Zephyr Drake femur hummed softly in his hand.

Aster felt something dangerously close to optimism.

He stored the Drake bone and watched the drunk's friends drag him toward the infirmary. The barmaid — the girl — was gone. Of course. Bolted the moment the fight spilled open. Smart. Sensible. Alive.

Aster exhaled, rolling his head back with a sigh. Victory felt strange.

He reached for the contract chip still lodged in his Dantian and pulled up the specs for the Torment Poison Spikes. If he wanted to make use of this bone, he needed significantly more Faith for the right materials to accompany it. Time to get back to work. Each spike needed to harmonise with a single core — spirit bindings across multiple bodies, complex but doable.

He was already lost in logistics — plotting annealing routes, glyph layers, stabilisation runes — when the barmaid returned.

Aster blinked as she emerged from the crowd, pulling none other than the stall owner from earlier — Mr I'll-Stare-at-You-Like-You-Stole-My-Cabbage — who looked, somehow, even more agitated than before.

She walked straight to Aster, pulling the old man along by the wrist.

"This one, Father," she said, voice tight. "He's the one who saved me."

The old man didn't hesitate.

He dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around Aster's legs like a drowning man clinging to a lifeboat.

"You saved my daughter!" he wailed. "You — you glorious, magnificent, misunderstood cultivator — you rescued her from those walking piles of horse shit and I—I—!"

"Oh gods, please don't cry," Aster muttered, horrified.

Too late.

The man sobbed. Audibly. Moistly. He clung tighter, pressing his face against Aster's hip like this was a soap opera and Aster had just returned from war.

"I devote my life to you!" the old man bawled. "My name, my business, my kidneys! All yours!"

Aster leaned back slightly, trying to dislodge him with the same energy one might use to flick off a really clingy spider. "Okay. That's a lot of commitment for a bar fight. Maybe let's start with a handshake and work our way up to vital organs?"

The old man finally pulled away, wiping his eyes on his sleeve with the shaky dignity of someone who had just ugly-cried all over his new business partner.

"I... I don't expect you to understand," he said quietly, looking up at Aster with an expression halfway between awe and terror. "You're from the Material Realm."

Aster raised an eyebrow. "I also have a tax file and a list of childhood traumas longer than my birth certificate. Don't get too jealous."

But the man didn't laugh. His face stayed solemn.

“You get assigned mentors. Get access to school libraries. Have Cultivation assistance.”

His eyes dropped.

"But when you're Astral Born? You're barely even considered a person. I've seen Astral Born children die of core poisoning because no one tells them they need to cycle the workshop's ambient intake. If you hadn't stepped in, they would have... they would have killed her. Right there. And no one would have stopped them. Not a single soul. Maybe a few would've complained about the mess."

His voice cracked.

"But you? You didn't even hesitate."

The man blinked, then his face changed. Twisted into something like fear. "They'll come back. They'll come for her now. She could disappear before — keep her head down. But now they've seen you defend her. They'll know they can hurt you through her." He dropped his gaze and bowed again. "Please. Take her away. Before they come for her."

Gods above. Aster thought. All I wanted was to register an artifact and bully some creeps.

The old man must have sensed the hesitation, because the next moment he grabbed Aster's hands with the desperation of someone pawning their last chance.

"My stock — all of it — yours at cost. Anything you need, I'll source it. Monster parts, glyphs, raw Spirit Ink, bindings. Phoenix Resin, Songsteel, you name it. My contacts span far and wide."

Behind him, the girl stood stiff as a pole. Not meeting his eyes. Just staring at the floor. No tears or hope. Just waiting, hands clasped behind her back, every muscle braced for rejection.

It wasn't fair. It wasn't supposed to be his problem.

And yet.

"You had me at Phoenix Resin," Aster muttered.

The man's voice cracked. "She'll make an incredible assistant. She’s clever. Sharp. Learns fast"

"And she doesn't scream at unstable Aether pulses?"

The girl looked up at that.

“Ok, I’ll take her. In exchange for not leaking snot all over my pants and becoming my material broker."

He couldn't quite help adding: "And add that Tornado-Toad Core I was looking at earlier. I'll need a proper artifact if you want me to keep offering protection."

The man blinked, then kneeled. Again.

Aster groaned. "Oh, for fu— get up. If you keep kneeling, someone's going to think I'm running a cult."

He held out his hand. "Welcome to the team."

The man practically launched himself at Aster's hand to shake it, like a starving man being offered food.

And just like that, Aster gained:

One traumatised artificing assistant. One merchant whose emotional stability was best measured in single-digit percentages. One dirt-cheap material supply line that would give him a serious leg up in his artificing career. And most importantly. Two surprisingly high-level components toward his first proper Artefact

He glanced down at his calf wound. Still bleeding steadily.

"Great," he muttered. "I'm emotionally compromised and leaking."