The delivery of the second bottle of uncut spirits proved a good distraction. He generously allowed Khana a taste of it, which resulted in a mess on the rug and her cursing the vile beverage as an evil poison. He consumed the rest over the course of the next twenty-four hours.

  Between that and cultivating chaos, he was seeing rapid progress towards level six. According to his calcutions, he should be able to go from an empty soul to the peak of level five in about thirty-eight days. He had around twenty-eight days of recovery granted to him. Which meant all he needed to level up before he returned to training was for the uncut spirits to provide the equivalent of ten days of his chaos method.

  He didn’t think the math worked out in his favor. But then his newest ally began to donate a daily tea powder elixir to him. Every morning Volithur visited the Casteln’s office to knock back a vial of resources before breakfast. He kept that a secret from Khana so she wouldn’t become upset. He also wasn’t entirely sure the arrangement was entirely above board. There was definitely a sense that the Casteln was buying Volithur’s goodwill and covering it up with shady accounting.

  When the third bottle of uncut spirits arrived at the start of the third week, Volithur felt more horror than anything. He desperately sought any excuse to avoid the stuff, but his greed eventually led him to begin imbibing. He spread it out over two days that time.

  In the middle of the bottle, news came from the barracks of a dramatic confrontation. Ward Kyle had gone insane and attacked the Sergeant with a knife. After that failed, the ward had killed himself while in the infirmary, using his shoe ces as a means of strangution. Everyone described events the same way: the ward just randomly went crazy. There was a subtext about foreign born commoners in there that Volithur pretended not to notice.

  It was strange how quickly the news of Ward Kyle’s death grew stale. Within days, the poor man was never mentioned again. He had made very little impact on the Fifth Household. Handling his suicide amounted to no more than an exercise in paperwork to cover their collective asses. Volithur grimly returned to his efforts to reach level six.

  The fourth delivery of uncut spirits got him extremely close to his goal. Then he achieved it two days before he was supposed to return to training. Volithur ughed like a maniac when he reached level six. This was the same accomplishment that had gained Ulysses the right to move to Tian. The only other people currently in the household at his level were the Marshal and Master Aria. Everyone else was now below him.

  At dinner, he encountered subdued congratutions. Though the nobles had seen his energy accumute day by day until he was bursting at the seams, they still seemed shocked that he had advanced. Shocked and insulted. They did not think he deserved to be above them.

  Or most of them thought that way. The Casteln made a show of appraising him and then gave a polite nod. “Well done, Master Harridan.”

  “Thank you, Master Casteln.” His mouth automatically returned the appropriate response. Meanwhile, his mind tripped over itself. He had been addressed as Master Harridan by the Casteln. Was that correct or was it pandering? After considering his etiquette lessons, he realized that he qualified for the honorific though it was not strictly required.

  Khana made a show of publicly smooching him when she joined him. “Very good, husband. Who knows, you may be getting even more good news soon!”

  “Maybe!” He settled in for dinner, then rexed the next few days. He did only a small amount of cultivation to make sure his soul had some energy in it for training.

  The Marshal evaluated his forearm using his mental senses and decred it fully healed. Then Volithur returned to the training grounds. The soldiers were awkward immediately upon his arrival, then one referred to him as Master Harridan and everyone slipped into the role of unctuous subordinates with no apparent effort. Volithur hardly knew how to handle the change in status. By their mannerisms, he had become a de facto noble to them. He had married a noble, moved into the pace, and now achieved level six in his soul. In their minds, that transted into ‘pretty much a noble now’.

  Volithur spent some time with the advanced group before the Sergeant took him aside to practice with his domain. Their interactions were doubly odd. Firstly, Volithur found himself torn between being happy to spend time with his mentor and horrified to know the man might have killed his parents. Also, the Sergeant didn’t know how to handle a subordinate who had passed him by.

  Unfortunately, Volithur had not improved in his handling of his domain by advancing. His cables of energy were still sloppy and still leaked like a sieve. Towards the end of the lesson, the Sergeant decided to teach something more immediately useful. “Kinetic Domains can do more than form cables. You can also create little explosions by expelling energy. It’s far more wasteful, but it has one major benefit.”

  The Sergeant demonstrated that benefit by rising into the air. Below each of his feet, invisible to normal vision, a glow of cosmic energy emanated. “You can’t lift yourself with cables, but you can propel yourself with explosions. It’s easy in theory. It’s a bit of a challenge in practice.”

  Volithur promptly pushed cosmic energy out of his domain in an attempt to match the Sergeant’s trick, which unched him into the air with far more force than he wanted. He sailed a dozen body lengths and crashed to the ground. After flopping over several times, he came to rest with his face pressed into the mud.

  It was quite possibly the most exhirating thing he had done since the st time he boarded a roller coaster. Not even the bad nding could discourage him from immediately trying again. Volithur got three more ‘flights’ before his waning energy levels forced him to quit. The Xian method of flight was definitely a ‘less is more’ type of thing. It also used energy like it was going out of style.

  Nothing could detract from his new obsession. He was able to fly. He did so poorly and at great cost, but those were just pesky details. He could fly! Over the next several days, Volithur alternated most of his time between shoving chaos into his soul and hovering in the air.

  He wasn’t very good at flying, but this wasn’t a matter of cking talent. Dumping energy out of his domain took no meaningful skill. The challenge was all about matching the energy burn with the desired effect. Too much and you crashed. Too little and you dropped. Just right and you floated there. Actual flying took some serious coordination to pull off. That and a huge pair of balls.

  His primitive ape brain didn’t like to look down and see the ground wasn’t where it should be. It wasn’t unusual for him to switch from ‘this is so much fun’ to ‘oh no, I’m falling to my death’ in a moment. The panic response came on quick and invariably caused him to mess something up. The Sergeant consoled him with promises that he would eventually find it second nature.

  There were reflexes he needed to build up. The basic method was to create thrust at the bottom of the feet. That worked well because the human body was wired to remain upright. If you put steady upward force on the soles, a person stayed banced as they went up. Thrust through the palms of the hand were good for maneuvering because it was very intuitive to try to catch yourself with a limb. But you would also thrust into the back to float forward. Or thrust through the front of the body if you wanted to look downward as you flew – so long as you didn’t mind damaging your shirt, that was.

  All of that required more mental effort, though. You couldn’t just wish to fly and start shooting out energy. Using a domain required focus. Mental effort that would no longer be free to focus on little things like plotting the direction of flight to avoid obstacles. Fortunately, his body was sturdy. So long as he didn’t run into a level eight asshole like Master Aramar, he should be fine.

  A few weeks passed before Volithur’s fascination waned enough for him to notice something odd. His combat lessons were a fraction of the intensity they once had been. That would have made sense for his first day or two back if people were nervous he might still have lingering injuries or be hesitant. Not for weeks, though. And it couldn’t be his esteemed status among the soldiers, either. The Marshal wouldn’t stand for the quality of his combat training dropping off like that.

  So he asked the Sergeant. “Sergeant? I can’t help but notice things haven’t been very intense tely.”

  “Right. Things are definitely weird at the moment. Did you hear about the st battle? Or ck of battle, I should say. The Arahant have been absent from the battlefield since the fall of Aes. Now the Jinn have stopped engaging us. The Lord General isn’t very happy. He made some comments about there not being a point to funding so many auxiliary households if there was no one to fight.”

  The Sergeant hesitated. “This is just specution, Master Harridan, but I’m not sure the Lord General will have any openings in his retinue. I’m sure you will be fine whatever happens, considering the heights you’ve reached. Just don’t be too certain you will go to war beside the Lord General.”