Day to Day Life

He slept, he ate, and he mimicked his sister until the monotony of babyhood ground down his patience. Babies cried a lot. It was a universal truth, one he now understood from a first-person perspective.

He couldn't do much about it, though. So he learned to like being held by their mother, basking in the warmth of her embrace. Damn psychology—hardwiring him to crave comfort in the simplest of ways.

Abel took care of them too. The man moved like a shadow, always there, a quiet sentinel. He acted like a grandfather, but Wes couldn't shake the butler vibes. Personal servant, perhaps? The kind that kept blades hidden in sleeves and secrets buried under a polite smile.

The strangest thing was, Wes didn't feel anything about Abel. It was like the man was a fixture, as natural as the crib or the soft blankets. He'd wake up, and Abel would be there—silent, still, like a ghost that had learned to live. Wes had good instincts, and they all screamed that Abel was a dangerous fucking dude. But there was no proof, only the quiet shiver in his gut. Oh well.

Eventually, he got a look at himself in a mirror. Abel made a show of it, his baby voice as grating as ever, telling them how handsome Wes was and how pretty Esther looked.

They were still infants, wide-eyed and squishy. Baby-fair skin, but Wes was as bald as a potato. Unfair. Esther had a crown of soft red hair, and they both had blue eyes. Would they stay that way? He hoped so. There was something uncanny about those baby blues staring back at him, knowing too much.

Pretty sure the skin tone came from their mother, but as a baby, it was hard to tell what his own features would become. He probably had red hair too. Their father's, most likely. But there wasn't much to do except speculate. God, being a baby was boring.

He couldn't cultivate. He couldn't train. He couldn't even hold his head up right half the time. So lame.

Weeks blurred together, time reduced to naps and feedings, but Wes was always listening. His mother's plans leaked through the soft lull of nursery rhymes and whispered conversations. She was selling off assets, a slow dismantling of her life's work. The why made his heart beat faster—she was preparing to journey into the stars.

It had been his greatest dream, his deepest desire: to break free of Earth and soar into the black tapestry of space. And here he was, only a few months old, already riding that wave. Life, for once, played fair.

It wasn't just Earth that had been transformed by mana—no, the whole solar system had been touched. The planets, the void, the very sun itself—all now wrapped in a membrane, a cosmic bubble of rules and restrictions. Like Earth, the solar system had its own shell, and beyond that, an ever-expanding series of barriers and boundaries. Every layer meant something new, something different. Typically, the further you went, the more the restrictions loosened, like a diver surfacing from deep water.

Portals could be constricted but never closed. That was another truth. The goblin portal had taught him that. When they finally found it, they built a stone gauntlet around it—a crude barrier to push back the tide. It never lasted. The portal's energy gnawed at the stone, wearing it down until a new gauntlet had to be built every year. A Sisyphean task, but what else could they do?

Constricting one portal allowed others to open more easily and more persons or beasts to come through existing. A give-and-take system, a balancing act where stability was an illusion. Wes hadn't seen it himself, but the stories from other races painted a vivid picture. There was mana tech that could constrict portals, devices that could choke the flow of travelers and invaders he was told by other races, but since earth was so constricting back then, he had never experienced it.

But you didn't have to use portals you could travel by shuttle—he'd dreamed of that as a kid. Sleek ships that cut through the void, stepping stones to the stars. He'd heard legends of the strongest cultivators, those who didn't need shuttles at all, who could wrap the void around themselves and move as they pleased. That had been a pipe dream back then, and even more so now. But it was still a dream.

Portal travel was pretty popular mode of transportation and trade once planets settled in and wasn't an all out war for supremacy.

Months passed in a blur of crawling, teething, and testing his baby body's limits. Every muscle flexed, every limb stretched. His world was soft blankets, cradles, and the constant vigilance of Abel's watchful eye.

Then his grandfather showed up…