The drive from the prison to Aetherpeak took six hours, which included a slight pause that they had to take when they were attacked by an Apparition curse that appeared as a Malevolent wind.
As if being attacked by wind was not unusual enough, that was the day he learned that even wind can suffer illusions. Nero did not mention how absurd that was, since he did not want to give his father any satisfaction. He was, however, beginning to understand why he so rarely encountered danger growing up.
The very nature of Edward's ability was such that even if he was using it, no one would ever know. After all, Edward could just create an illusion of himself not using any ability.
"Old man, I have a problem," Nero said right before they returned to the city. "I have an affiliate with a very elusive innate ability. If I use multiple cards in quick succession, I can sense them, but without them, I can never find them. They're also very quiet, and careful not to create any environmental disturbances. How can I detect them if they are spying on me?"
"Is it a girl? It's a girl, isn't it? Forget it, I won't tease you, lest you give up on the girl. Do you know anything about her innate ability? Is being quiet a part of the innate ability, or is that something she does herself? Does the ability hide her appearance, or does she do it through another way?"
"I think she uses shadows to hide," Nero said, as he recalled the time he sensed her within the research facility. "She used to cause environmental disturbances, but when I used them to detect her, she became very good at avoiding them. She's been trained well, so she produces no sound."
"There are two ways," Edward said, serious for once. "Which way is useful depends on whether she only uses shadows to hide her body, or if she hides within the shadows. There is a difference between the two, which is that in one her body is only hidden but maintains its physical state, while in the second, her body becomes immaterial and hides within the shadow.
"The first is that if she is only hiding her body, within the shadow, you only need to produce a little light. Don't do it in a conspicuous way. Instead, develop a habit of summoning your flame from time to time, watching how it affects the surrounding shadows.
No matter how effective her body is, if it relies on shadows to hide her body, if there is no shadow, or if the shadows diminish the way her ability behaves will change. Even if she is not entirely revealed, there will be hints.
"The second is if she hides within the shadows themselves. This is a slightly more complex situation, and touches upon a topic of other dimensions. You have not studied other dimensions yet, as this is not a topic most people need to delve into before reaching the Mystic realm.
"All you need to know is that if she is hiding inside a shadow, even if you eliminate a shadow, she will not be revealed. Instead, she will move into another shadow automatically. What you have to do in this situation is similar to the first. Use light to affect shadows, but this time, instead of eliminating shadows to search for her body, you affect shadows to test for resistance.
Is a shadow more resistant than it should be? Is it darker than it should be? Is it bigger than it should be? A shadow with someone hiding within it will resist vanishing if only a small amount of light is shone upon it.
"It's more difficult to spot, and requires you to pay more attention. I can train you a little on how to spot the difference in the second situation, but that's all I can do. There are, of course, other ways of detecting those spying on you, but they require high level cards that you can't use right now."
Nero nodded, and said nothing.
When they returned to Aetherpeak, everything seemed so normal that it was hard to believe that they had been at war only a short while ago. If Nero was being critical, the only thing he could say was that there were fewer people on the roads.
They returned to their old home, which felt like an almost alien experience. He had not seen the place since he left the morning he synchronised. Everything was the same, from the furniture to the decorations and the paint, yet his life was entirely different. The neighbourhood also seemed emptier.
The building and the belongings were the same, but the people had changed.
"We're going to spend the night here, and tomorrow morning you can go to your school for a bit to say farewell to your friends. Many of the ones in the draft should have returned. Only those who are KIA or wounded won't have come back yet. By tomorrow evening, your mother will return. Once she's here, we'll depart to… oversee your training.
In a few days, when your service is about to begin, we'll drop you off at the base."
Nero nodded, and strolled through the house suffering from a strange melancholy. He walked back to his room and saw that his blinds were partially open, just as he left them. On his study table, there were a few history books, detailing the history of the Great families of Kolar, just as he had left them.
He walked over to the one with an open page and wiped his finger over the open page and saw not a speck of dust. Someone had been cleaning.
His gaze fell on the contents of the page, which described the Ulnar family, the largest fishing family on Kolar. They owned eight fishing villages, hundreds of fishing boats, and were an integral part of providing food to the vast population of Kolar.
The current Matriarch of the family was only a Mystic, and had taken over when the previous Patriarch of the family, who was an Ascendant, died battling a cursed monster that emerged from Lake Natura one day.
Nero closed the book, set it aside neatly, and instead walked into Patricks room. He hadn't visited it in two years, but now he could avoid it no more. He ignored the fact that the room looked identical to the one he saw a few times in his illusion of a younger Nero, playing with toys.
He walked to the bookshelf and grabbed all the books he could find on card crafting and brought them back to his own room. Since this was his weakest subject, he would have to work on it, and Nero believed in wasting no time.
He started from the basics of the basics.
An Eldrim card had specific dimensions, but the card ingredients didn't necessarily need to match those dimensions. Usually, in the crafting process, the cards would automatically conform to the Eldrim card size requirements. The greatest example of this was that when placing countless layers, they would stack to being thicker than a real card.
The way in which the crafting process would bring about this change was fascinating, and there were several theories about why this was so. But those were more complex topics, and Nero focused on the very basics of the basics for now.
Each card required a base, an aether conduction layer usually formed from aether dust or other aether rich materials, and a main ingredient. Often enough, in the production of an aether card, amateur artisans also used a blank card or a template card. It was also used in mass production.
The most important part of card crafting was to produce a spell model, which required a perfect card recipe. These two things defined how a card would turn out, but Nero still did not quite understand how a spell model was transferred into the card.
To produce an innate card, the spell model was provided by the innate ability itself, but where did the spell models for other cards come from? If it was only a matter of getting the recipe right, then why was it not just the recipe? Why was there an emphasis on the spell model?
He noticed this small, unexplained loophole in the explanation of card crafting, but since it was not addressed at the moment, he just kept it in mind and continued to study. Outside his room, Edward looked at his son, and then walked into the kitchen and began cooking.
It was a quiet, mundane night in the Grant household, with nothing special happening, even though the world at large was not at peace.
Slowly the night deepened, and darkness reigned as the clouds covered the sky. But eventually, even though the heavy veil of clouds, dawn came, and the darkness was pushed back.
With the first light of the new morning, Kolar was rocked by the news on the front page of the national newspaper. In a controversial move, the MIA executed a corrupt judge, and broke the precedent of exiling a felon.