There was one key reason why Aloe wanted to rent the room in this hotel for a night: the elevator. That was what they called those rising platforms, and Aloe had to give them to them, those things were elevators. There just wasn't a better name for them.

  The hotel had the name of 'Highrise' and it wasn't an exaggeration as it had a total of twenty floors. One thing she had noticed, though, was that each floor wasn't particularly big. Modern Ydazi architecture preferred to expand upward rather than outward, making the skyline of the city quite fantastical, but leaving each individual floor a joke.

  Xochipilli and her were anxious to ride the elevator as they had taken the stairs first to get to the room. Xochipilli was anxious because it was a novel experience. Aloe was anxious because she dreaded her weight could collapse the whole contraption.

  She wasn't fat, very important to remark that. It was just that… well, she was built differently. Different bodily materials and a tall build tended to make people orbit the weighty side of the spectrum even if she was slim as such. For her height, at least. Being conscious of her weight was something she had never expected to experience as the heaviest she had ever gotten was around fifty kilograms when she was wheelchair-bound, but normally she was in the low forties.

  Now… maybe she was in the upper hundreds. If not more.

  Aloe feared no one. Her might and mastery of the vital arts had reached an unseen and unfathomable level. But she was scared of weighing herself.

  Women of her estate didn't worry about such trivialities, or at least that was back in her age, but as she lived in a palace full of beautiful women with perfect bodies, Aloe had done her best to not step out of line. Now in this era, however, women put more emphasis on body weight and constitution from what she had seen in the newspapers, especially advertisements. Apparently, there were even pills to help with weight loss. Although she doubted such treatments would work on her. She was at her optimal weight so her internal infusions worked at her utmost maximum potential.

  "Come on, the elevator is almost here!" Xochipilli eagerly shouted, snapping her out of her fantasies as always. Which she was very thankful for.

  Whilst ingenious, elevators were djnnish contraptions. They never stopped moving, meaning that you could get stuck and maybe killed by the moving platform. Of course, Aloe wasn't worried about that happening to her or her disciple, but the same thing couldn't be said for the people who would be on the sibling platform.

  As the platform approached from below, Aloe took a mighty deep breath and finally stepped forward.

  The elevator groaned at her weight, its speed grinding closer to a halt, but fortunately, it was but a mere hiccup as it recovered a good chunk of its speed a moment later.

  The trial had been passed.

  She wasn't that heavy.

  Unfazed and unaware of his master's antics, Xochipilli hopped onto the platform and landed with both feet and extended arms. Aloe had noticed the boy had switched to the potency internal infusion to do that leap. She found that easiness and the will to use vital arts for even the simplest activities endearing.

  The elevator slowly moved upward, which made the rising motion far more dramatic than it actually was. For someone who could jump up hundreds of meters in the air, Aloe was getting a bit of vertigo from rising up a few tens of meters by the sheer virtue of the elevator's slowness.

  Xochipilli wasn't affected by such feelings, instead, he rejoiced in childish splendor. And she didn't blame him, the city of Sadina certainly felt bigger than it was as they slowly rose to the heavens.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Oh, what a glorious vista it was!

  The morning sun illuminated the city with powerful contrasts between the sunlit fa?ades of the tall buildings and the darkened streets that lay beneath them. The colossal windows of the taller buildings of Sadina refracted the light in a myriad of shines, creating a light show that constantly shifted as they elevated further up.

  "What is that?" Her disciple pointed at a slow-moving silhouette on the horizon.

  "I can't say I know," Aloe revealed as she saw the silhouette hiding behind the clouds. "But I can say for certain it's not a bird."

  She could have switched to the acuity internal infusion and observed the silhouette as if it was right in front of her, but she had the feeling that they would know about it more in the future, so she let it be as there were more pressing matters at hand.

  Not wanting to be smashed by the ceiling, they left the elevator as it reached the last floor. Probably there were safety measures to avoid such a scenario from occurring, but she didn't want to test it. Curiosity was sometimes better left as a curiosity.

  As they walked onto the top floor, they found that it was not covered with many windows, and they couldn't get that aerial sight she had wanted.

  "I've found a door to the outside!" Xochipilli alerted her and he tried opening the door to the rooftop. "It's closed…" The child exhaled and panted after failing to pry it open.

  "Let me see?" The young druid moved to the sight and Aloe sneakily shifted to dexterity and pushed her amorphous finger inside the keyhole, and with the help of her passive acuity, she managed to make the pins of the lock click into place. She then turned the knob to the side with her other hand and quickly switched back to glamour before her body turned into an amorphous mess. "It's open."

  "How?" The child exclaimed and tried for himself to open the door. "It was closed when I tried?"

  "Maybe your attempts managed to unblock it," Aloe responded with a giggle.

  It was a bit petty to confuse the boy and toy with him this way, but it was too amusing to not do it.

  Xochipilli barged his way out to the rooftops with difficulties as the wind up there was quite strong and it fought against him harshly to close the door. Aloe gave him a hand and kept the door open for him.

  "Ah, what a good breeze," the old druid held a moan of pleasure.

  She hated that part of the glamour internal infusion; she couldn't let herself express her satisfaction for fear that someone may accidentally become enchanted with her actions. Maybe Xochipilli and she were only here right now, but she didn't know how far the effects of her powerful stance reached, and the boy wasn't immune to it either. He was just too young to be completely affected by it, so that meant she had to also control her reactions when she was accompanied by him.

  As she took in the pleasurable wind, Xochipilli wandered from side to side of the rooftops in glee as he observed the streets below.

  "Be careful to not fall down," Aloe warned him softly.

  "I won't!" He affirmed.

  I don't know why I bother… She held a groan. It wasn't that she was reprimanding the child, but herself. Even if Xochipilli were to fall, she could catch the boy even before he noticed the lethality of his mistake. Though I guess it's better if we both can avoid the scare.

  With a crack of her neck, Aloe walked to the edge of the rooftops and peered at the city from her elevated ground. The 'Highrise' Hotel wasn't the tallest of the buildings in the city, but it was close and it allowed her to discern where the old city was. It was so easy to see the difference between the modern and the old city as most of the Cottonpull buildings started from the old circular walls of the city that the sudden transition was almost comical in nature.

  Of course, the old Sadina hadn't remained locked in time. Even without acuity, Aloe could see how most of the houses weren't made out of sandstone and adobe, but brick and other materials she didn't quite have the name for but looked like some kind of stone. Whilst not as modern nor as tall as the buildings of the newer city, most of old Sadina's buildings were two stories or even three tall instead of the single floor of… antiquity.

  It's only been two centuries. It's not antique, right? Right? She asked herself in distress. Being in her hometown only made her perception of time even more pronounced and stressful. It hurt her how the only real thing that remained in her sight that was recognizable was the palace of Sadina. A place where… she hadn't been the happiest.

  Maybe not the unhappiest, but not the happiest either.

  A part of her ached for the warm touch of a bed companion, yet the other part of her had been the one that had shed her previous body as it had been too painful to keep it.

  "Perhaps it hasn't been a good idea to come here…" Aloe murmured as she fought against her inner djinns on the brink of the tens of floors of height.

  Bii!