It was when Nash was sitting up in his "bed" that night, deep in the grips of insomnia, that he came to an important realization.

He rubbed his eyes and shifted his body to the least uncomfortable portion of his bedding as he listened to the sounds of the still-active gas station on the other side of the door and the dopplered sounds of cars and the music they blasted roaring down the road, disappearing as fast as they appeared (not accounting for traffic, of course.) A feeling of disbelief permeated his bleary mind, and for a moment the mixed emotions the thought - or rather, the impression of a precursor of a fully articulated thought - made it difficult to arrange the concepts colliding in his skull.

I'm strong, comparatively, he finally thought, his hands dropping to his blanket covered knees as the full impact of the realization shook him to the core.

Yes, he knew intellectually that few people were true cultivators, and that even those that were cultivators didn't have the same resources he and his former peers had had to pursue their growth, but it was only now that he felt it viscerally.

As a cultivator, he had been consistently in the middle of the pack; just barely exceptional enough to avoid bringing shame upon the Emerald family, not high enough to be considered an actual prodigy or genius. After all, he was only in the Second Calcification at his age. While nothing to scoff at, to be considered a true genius, he would have had to be at least halfway through the Third Calcification, and the top five of the city (and thus the nation) in his generation were all in the Fourth, with rumors of one of them being about to breach the Fifth.

Nash's own father was in the fifth, though that was unsurprising due to his age.

But here, he was more than a little above average. He had been untouchable to the thug he had taught a lesson to yesterday, and that was only a difference of at most a major realm.

The fire cultivator's movements had been uncharacteristically sluggish and his flames were dim and sputtering, at least from what Nash remembered from sparring with other Young Masters. The difference between the quality of their cultivation techniques (even not considering the advantage a Second Calcification cultivator had over any within the First) had been like the difference in the height of the top of a mountain and the deepest point of the cave systems beneath, like the difference in coordination between a two-year-old child and an adult athlete, like the brightness of the moon that could only retreat into indistinguishably when the sun was in view.

Nash closed his eyes and breathed slowly.

He felt a sensation like water trickling through the bone of his sternum, odd but not uncomfortable, especially with how acquainted he was with the feeling. The needle-width stream of Densified Aether went through his channels, more like capillary action than pressure moving a fluid through a pipe.

Through his channels it climbed up from where they wrapped along his bones like creeping vines, avoiding where the veins of Aether branched out into a wire frame mesh over his skin, eventually reaching just behind his eyes; his optic nerve. It itched, as it always had. At the endpoint of its journey, the lums were unraveled slightly in a pattern forced by the protrusions on the inside of the channel, and proceeded to perform the function Nash had set for the channel.

Nash saw. He did not need to open his eyes, but he did anyway.

For a split second, a guileless smile came over his face; this view had always been beautiful to him, with how the world that was familiar (and familiarly bland) was suddenly overlaid with another, one that he could usually only feel and not see.

The Luminiferous Aether didn't judge his progress, or withdraw its beauty from him if he failed. It just was. It would be there whenever he wanted to look and long after, and had been there long before, no matter what was happening.

He took a few moments more to bask in the sight of the Aether, but then collected himself once more to focus on the more practical reason he had used his Greater Luminiferous Vision.

His eyes quickly jumped past his own channels, over the intricate system of lums-carrying tubes and the tubules that branched out from them, quickly glossing over the wire frame that surrounded his body and clothes, just millimeters above his skin.

He looked outwards, through the walls. Behind them he couldn't see with his physical eyes, but could still see the Aether; when he had first started to learn the Greater Luminiferous Vision method of his family (one of the most prized of the Emerald family's techniques,) the supplementary and utterly separate depth perception that extended onwards and onwards into pinpricks of agitated Aether and faraway cultivator's channels had given him more than one headache.

At this point, due to years of experience, its use had become second nature.

Behind the walls, little clouds of Aether vibrated as light passed through them while floating circulatory systems, pumping lums through invisible cultivator bodies, danced around and went about their individual days. Nash could see channels at many different stages of cultivation, distinguished by their brightness, opacity, and the bubble of liquid Densified Aether present on everyone past the Sternum Etching stage.

None of them walked closer to his (attempted) sleeping place or noticed him, all absorbed in their own activities. Here was the part that Nash was never sure whether he loved or hated, where he felt oh so small and alone; most days, his reaction was governed by his previous mood in unpredictable ways, but now Nash felt very little.

An emotional numbness seemed to propagate through his mind, leaving him feeling like his brain had gone mute. Every thought felt like he had to force it into his internal monologue instead of letting it sloshing around ponderously inside his skull in a mixture of many dull emotions, more of a vague impression of a fully realized thought with a few notes of an emotion peppered within than anything else.

Blearily, he focused more on the relative cultivation levels of those around him, his eyes flitting between his own channels and those of others through the walls. He saw many, not bothering to count them; he saw mortals and cultivators, standing, sitting, walking, roaring down the road in a car or on a motorcycle (judging by how they sat.) With each glance at his own channels, each comparison with another passer-by unaware of his surveillance, the realization that was keeping him out of the embrace of sleep only grew stronger.

Every one of the cultivators close enough for him to distinguish their form against the endless backdrop of the Aether would be trivial to defeat, at least on their own.

Nash didn't get to sleep until an hour before his alarm blared out of his phone.

What he did do, though, was cultivate; for the first time in almost a week, another infinitesimal layer of calcification formed on his channels. It would be the first of many in the next few days, as his long-lost enthusiasm for growing stronger gripped him once more.

----------------------------------------

While the scion of the Emerald Family slept fitfully in a dilapidated gas station, wrapped in a messy nest of cheap, unwashed sheets, rumors were beginning to spread about him; all of the parties involved in the discussed event would have been displeased by that development to varying degrees, but in the absence of credible threats of violence the information spread anyway.

It hopped along, from person to person in person, from one phone to many others through group chats, in blogs, in forums. The rumor spread like an infestation of invasive kudzu alongside a hot, sunny rural highway, creeping into everywhere and practically impossible to get rid of without pulling out and burning every single one of the roots.

Like organisms, rumors are also prone to mutation. What had started as a shaky, vertically-recorded video of a portion of the beating on a bystander's phone and an anecdote by that same cameraman had grown and grown into a million different stories within the day.

Depending on the person relaying the story and how many times they were telling it (and, of course, to who,) the cashier was anything from an undercover Cultivator-policeman busting a robbery threatening his cover story, to a member of a rival gang, to the guy who went to a cultivator gym down the road from their cousin's girlfriend's brother's apartment.

The narrative around the event, the sheer skill in both cultivation and martial arts shown on the cashier's part, and the absolute absurdity of a seasoned brawler in the employ of a gang getting effortlessly beaten down combined to create an incredibly compelling (and memeable) video that would doubtlessly be passed around the internet for years to come.

Inside of a seedy diner, closed for the night, the boss of the gang in question held a small pile of print-outs of screenshots and chatlogs.

He bit down on the cigarette in his mouth, his hands clenched in anger so hard they had started trembling. Smoke curled and wafted through the air, pouring out of his skin with the color and intensity of a bonfire filled with plastic trash; his cigarette smoked too, but the tobacco smoke was lost in the larger cloud of the cultivator's anger. His anger only grew (and the available oxygen in the diner only declined) as he shuffled through the sheaf of still-warm printer paper, committing whatever names he could to memory, scanning page after page of the people daring to laugh at his gang.

He stood up, the papers falling out of his hands at the same time as the cigarette fell out of his mouth. They floated around, scattering to every corner of the restaurant, gliding, tumbling, sliding onto and around the floor in the way that only paper can.

The bottom of a fist slammed into the thick wooden table.

The table splintered where it was hit, a rough hole lined with shattered splinters, shaped like a cut-out of a baseball bat in the side of the table.

The table buckled slightly, dipping down in a valley towards where it had been struck, but somehow managed to stay standing.

"I'm going to kill them!" The Boss screamed, pacing. Smoke billowed from every inch of his skin, coming up from under his clothes, his boots, his hair. He screamed again, though this time he refrained from destroying any more of his own property. "I'll make them regret messing with the Crimson Bonfire Gang! They will regret not giving us face!"

At the front of the restaurant, another figure stood, servile in his demeanor.

He stood stiffly, imitating a formal manner of clasping his hands behind his back and still managing to make it look vaguely shifty. Visible in front of his face was a small cloud of steam that billowed in a snakelike path through the ubiquitous smoke; the steam was, in fact, his tears.

Brought on by the stinging of the smoke on his eyes, they flowed freely as he refused to show weakness by blinking the smoke out of his eyes. The tears dripped out of his ducts and immediately started boiling off as they hit his skin, which he had used his fire-element cultivation to subtly heat in order to avoid showing any signs that he was unfit for his position in front of an emotionally volatile Boss.

The Boss's outburst continued for a few more minutes. The entire time, the Boss's subordinate stood, stock-still and glad he needed only minimal levels of oxygen. In his head, he noted every broken or damaged piece of the diner and tabulated their prices and which of the gang's debtors he would need to harass to get the diner back into good enough condition to open up again tomorrow - they had a few professionals in crushing debt, and they were always happy for the false hope that just a few more favors would finally pay it off (not that the Crimson Bonfire Gang ever intended on letting them.)

Once the Boss had stood still for a few seconds without staying something, the subordinate cleared his throat.

The Boss's head immediately snapped to face the source of the sound.

He stood hunched and sweaty, straggling bits of smoke still trailing off from his fingertips, little spiraling whorls of foul-smelling smoke bubbling up from underneath his fingernails. His hands were curled almost into claws, covered in dust and little splinters lodged into his skin. Fresh cuts and scratches criss-crossed his arm from the tip of his fingers all the way up his forearm, particularly on his knuckles. Little red rivulets of blood welled up from the cuts, mixing with the soot trapped in his arm hair.

For a second, his face was twisted once again into a rictus of rage and a lance of terror struck the subordinate, freezing him in place. The subordinate slumped slightly in relief once the Boss restrained the expression.

"Yes?" the Boss spat, his brow still furrowed. "What do you want, you imbecile?"

"Sir," the subordinate said, "Would you like me to move that hit up the priority list?"

"Of course. Moron."

"Understood, sir. Would you like for me to make arrangements for the diner as well?" He pulled a ratty, crumpled notepad out of a pocket in his jacket and removed the pen attached to it. Clicking the pen, he flipped the notepad open with one hand and began to scribble on it in a heavily modified shorthand that made sense to nobody but him. "Those booths were getting rather old, anyway; a splash of fresh ones would do wonders to get the decor back into fashion," he said, noting down what damage he had already observed (as well as discovering some exciting new ways that smoke could damage a building's interior on the way.)

"Yes, yes, that's true," the Boss said, picking splinters out of his skin. "Exactly what I was thinking. The old ones, they were colored garishly - clashed terribly with the current fashion. Do order some new ones, now that I think about it - as well as that disrespectful little rat's head on my doorstep, if you will."

"Absolutely, sir." The gangster walked out of the door and began calling a few relevant numbers as soon as it had swung closed.

For a second, his finger paused over the icon of one particular contact, though a few hesitant seconds later he rang that one as well. I might well need that one in the end, he thought, his foot tapping on the ground as he leaned against the brick wall of the alley, waiting for that particular person to pick up.

It wouldn't take long; they didn't tend to sleep much, and had little else to do at this hour.

From what I saw, I'll need all the help I can get - I am going personally, after all. One more man won't hurt, even if it's him.

----------------------------------------

For Nash, the morning had seemed slated to be another slow one. Maybe three or four customers meandered through the aisles blearily, picking off highly caloric and minimally nutritious food and drink from rickety plastic shelves and hooks.

However, that seemed like it was about to change; on a whim, Nash had activated his Greater Luminiferous Vision, and he saw a procession of six cultivators making their way out of a vehicle and towards the gas station.

In Nash's Aetheric sight, they looked like vascular systems walking, as if some cosmic administrator had disabled rendering for everything but their veins and the blood they transported, collected in a teardrop on where their Sternum Etching kept it. He could see the droplets of lums being siphoned off from that teardrop, diminishing it ever-so-slightly and sending the removed fluid first dribbling, then coursing through channels that Nash knew not the function of, though he could guess.

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Soon, they actually came close enough that Nash could see them with his corporeal eyes as well as his Aetherial.

He cut off the trickle going through that channel - if things went as he expected, he would need whatever lums he had for what came next. Watching them warily through the dirty, advertisement-plastered window, his eyes followed their every movement until the one in front opened the door and they all filtered in.

Nash's hand crept towards a prepared bottle of ordinary-looking, half-drunk soda, and he rested a finger on one specific point around the base of it, specified in permanent marker.

The thugs - for that is what their demeanor suggested - walked up towards the counter, fanning out around it, cutting off every avenue of escape. Quickly, Nash counted how many of them there were and used short bursts of Greater Luminiferous Vision to ascertain their cultivation levels. Six of them, he thought, Five in the First Calcification, one in the Second. They're really serious about this, huh?

"Hello," said the one in front, rather genially. He was in the First Calcification, and seemed to be doing his best to draw Nash's attention away from the encirclement.

"We're from the Crimson Bonfire Gang. You harmed one of our members; your punishment is to be death. If you kneel before us and beg, we will grant you a quick death. There is no point in resisting," he said, his eyes already starting to glow orange.

"So, what'll it be? A quick death, or wasting our time?" he asked, his head cocked to one side, little gouts of flames coming out of his mouth with every syllable. The tongues of flame licked the skin of his lips and cheeks as they climbed up his face, making their way up to his hair where they took root like the hairs were candle-wicks, casting an eerie glow over his face and wafting a terrible smell through the room.

"I guess that hackneyed old story structure is true to life," Nash said, his eyes flitting about and taking in every one of his opponents. "Kill the little one, his friends come. Kill them, the big one comes. Kill him, and the old one comes, and so on unto infinity, " he said, doing his best to look bored.

His eyes settled on one of the thugs, who was particularly massive, as well as the highest of cultivation in their number. "I see you're saving both of us some time, at least. You're doing the first two steps all in one trip; how efficient of you."

Before that last sentence was even completely finished, he flexed one of his pathways and dipped the hand near the bottle into the Aether, bringing it out of phase with physical reality. He fished blindly in the bottle, but with confidence, having Aetherically marked what sat at the bottom of the over-sweet liquid with runes that he could feel with his incorporeal hand.

He brought a small section of one finger in reality, slipping it into the metal loop on one side of the small knife and then bringing that along with his finger into the Aether. He spoke once again, his tone much calmer than he actually felt.

"Luckily for you," he said as his hips twisted and his arm flicked out, still incorporeal.

That arm stayed incorporeal until the exact moment where the edge of the knife dipped back into reality, cutting a red canyon into the talkative thug's throat.

"I like to be efficient too."

The thug had no time to react to the unexpected strike.

He gurgled and, after a few horrible moments where everyone watched in horror while he scrabbled uselessly at the geyser of blood that was his carotid artery, his flames sputtered out and he crumpled onto the floor, nothing more than a limp body.

Nash spread his feet out wider and raised his hands, suppressing the shaking of his hands.

"So," he said, forcing a rakish smirk onto his face, "Who wants to go next?"

That inflamed the anger of the remaining five thugs.

A flurry of attacks rushed at him, coming from practically everywhere except directly behind him; gouts of flames, whips of smoke, more mundane attacks like fists and knives and bats all flew towards him, forcing Nash to dodge what he could and dip out of the way of whatever he could not. This state of affairs continued for perhaps a dozen more seconds, more than enough for Nash to take stock of the situation.

Each of the thugs were nothing compared to Nash on his own. Even combined, they hadn't even scratched him yet, and weren't even getting all that close.

If one of them had managed to get a hit in, it wouldn't have done much of anything unless it was the Second Calcification brute doing it, though that equation admittedly changed when one considered being dragged to the ground and getting their skull kicked in by four First Calcification fighters.

He didn't know if he could maintain this indefinitely, but he could get pretty close; the problems started to become apparent when it came to counterattacking, to actually ending the fight instead of just surviving it second-by-second.

If he committed to attacking one of the First Calcification juniors, he could probably take them down in one or two of his attacks and reduce the amount of attackers, but he would either have to take a few hits or expend a large amount of lums to dip the rest of his body out of the way of the attacks of his chosen thug's fellows.

No, engaging here wasn't the answer; he simply had to change the environment.

He retreated until his back was up against the wall - normally a terrible move, but what he had planned mitigated that.

He snuck glances at the wall when he could, aligning himself with what he guessed was the thinnest part, and jumped off the ground up and backwards.

He could feel a weightlessness in his body as he slipped wholly into the Aether, timing his return carefully so that he was both through the wall and above the ground; if he did appear "inside" an object, it would simply be shifted into the Aether in his stead, but that would most likely overdraw his reserves of lums, not even to mention that the rest of the wall would still be present around the caught limb.

For a moment, he floated blindly in the Luminiferous Aether. The beauty of the endless empty expanse, which differed only in the vibrations of the medium and the objects that bridged the gap between the Aether and the physical world (such as a cultivator's channels,) did not escape him, but he had no time to appreciate it.

He counted in his head the fractions of a second left until he shifted back into reality, and then dipped back 'up' into the physical world, stumbling a bit as he touched the ground.

Nash felt his reserves drain slightly as a small divot was carved into the ground, a convex concrete disc being forced into the Aether to make way for his shoe. A bit off on that one, he thought as he reoriented himself, running back towards the front door of the convenience store.

He stopped on a dime, standing above a crumbling concrete wheel stop, kept in place with rusting, bent rebar sticking up from the asphalt of the parking lot. He squatted down and wrapped his hands around the barrier as best as he could, shifting the heavy concrete into his arms and rearranging his grip until he could heave it fully off the ground and over his shoulder, a shower of dust and crumbling concrete raining down and bouncing off of his clothes.

By now, Nash could hear the shouts of the thugs from inside. One of them had spotted him through the window, and had started running for the door while shouting to the others, who responded by pointing at Nash rather unhelpfully and shouting at each other while they also began to run for the door.

The first one to spot him opened the door and charged at him, jumping in the air to deliver a reckless but powerful punch.

Nash chucked the mass of concrete at him.

He saw the thug widen his eyes, struggling to process the massive slab of concrete heading straight for him. The thug tried to adjust his trajectory to avoid an intersection with the improvised projectile, but he was too slow, his arms and legs swimming through the air like molasses in Nash's vision.

Soon, the concrete did strike, and it shattered in two; it, however, came out of the collision better than the thug did. It impacted just above the knee, shattering it and sending the thug tumbling end-over-end, reaching out with his fingers to try and catch himself on the pavement and failing. He skidded across the ground unable to direct himself after his head slamming into the hard surface nearly killed him.

Unlike a mortal's skin would have, his enhanced First Calcification body did not tear from the friction of the asphalt, but that was a small comfort for the thug; he had landed hand-first in a pile of newly broken glass.

Using well-practiced footwork and the physical capabilities of a Second Calcification cultivator of his caliber, Nash reached the fallen thug before the next thug had even reached the door. To the eyes of the ganger on the ground, it must've looked like he had teleported in, though he wouldn't get to contemplate that thought for long; Nash's sneakered foot rose up slightly and stomped down with all of his might, crushing the skull and pulping the brain matter all the way through.

Two down, four left, Nash thought, wincing as he was forced to dip his foot out of the physical world to remove his foot from the hole left by the improvised and overzealous trepanning. He returned to his stance and faced the thug who was just coming out of the door.

This thug approached him rather more cautiously than the last one had, shuffling towards him in a boxing stance and glancing behind him periodically to check on whether his buddies were close enough to support him.

He was another of the First Calcification foot soldiers, and looked more nervous than anything.

Even with his opponent's obvious reluctance, Nash didn't want to let him get the backup he needed; Nash skipped in, a few long slides taking him only a few feet away from the thug in a single one of the weaker cultivator's breaths. Nash lunged in, making the trajectory of his fist obvious but threatening in its speed, a heavy stepping uppercut going straight for the thug's solar plexus.

Just as Nash had hoped, the thug panicked. He tucked in his elbows in a futile attempt to protect his vital organs, and by then Nash had him.

Up to the elbow, his forearm disappeared, dipping into the Aether. A grotesque cross-section of bone, flesh, and ligament was visible as Nash got closer to the thug, finishing the movement despite the absence of the striking surface.

In the small pocket between the other cultivator's forearms and his torso, Nash's hand reappeared without his forearm. It moved as if it was still connected to his elbow, still rigid even though the connecting piece was in an entirely different layer of reality.

The thug's sternum cracked, shattering into hundreds of individual pieces that scattered through the cultivator's skin.

The knuckles of Nash's hand didn't stop there, either; they pushed further in, unhindered by the broken bone and overstretched, tearing skin. Nash felt something collapse under his hand before his hand finally stopped.

Probably where his trachea diverged into the bronchial tree, Nash thought, drawing on the hours of anatomy tutoring he had been subjected to to enhance his cultivation technique's efficacy. He withdrew his hand, suppressing the bile that rose to the back of his throat as he saw his cultivator opponent's futile attempts to breath, achieving nothing but wheezing.

The thug dropped to his knees, and Nash's eyes left his dying form.

Instead, his eyes flitted to the door and the people standing in front of it. The door was slowly swinging closed, the three remaining gangers having all filtered out of the door. The big brute stood in the middle, the others flanking him on each side; one of them was standing a bit farther back than the other two and was covered in bruises, a small sputtering flame wreathed around the fingers of what was obviously his non-dominant hand. He kept glancing towards the exit, and had a nervous look on his face, and that look led to a dawning recognition for Nash.

"Oh, it's you," Nash said, pointing towards that thug. "That fire cultivator with the stupidly dim flames. I didn't recognize you with two functional arms. Since you've gone through so much effort to meet me again, perhaps I should make sure I can always recognize you."

The thug's eyes bugged out and his weight shifted rapidly between his feet as he glanced from side to side. "I don't want no more trouble," the thug said, fruitlessly smoothing back his greasy and tangled hair. "It's just that..."

His fellows grimaced, looking at him with disgust and rage. "You coward," the remaining First Calcification junior said, pointing an accusing finger at the oily outlaw.

That was when the thug made a decision, and that First Calcification reeled back in pain and surprise. His hand came up to his face, now lacking eyebrows and looking extremely sunburnt as he attempted to recover from the sucker punch the thug had delivered, swaying on his feet.

Then he crumpled onto the ground, every muscle in his body relaxing as his obviously concussed brain temporarily stopped sending the right signals.

For a moment, everything was silent as everyone (including, amusingly, the thug who had thrown the fire-wreathed punch) stood in silence as they attempted to process the scene. A disbelieving smirk grew on Nash's face, and he was the first to break the silence. "Well, that's one way to get yourself into my good graces," he said, watching with an amused expression as the thug used the moment of collective confusion to bolt, running off into the distance. "That saved me a good bit of trouble."

At once, the largest thug - the one in the Second Calcification realm - moved as if to chase the errant criminal.

Nash wasn't going to let that happen, and he was more than happy to let the thug know that with a running kick directly into the knee of the large man, leaving him to stumble and limp back into a stance facing Nash.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk." Nash clicked his tongue at the thug before him. "I think you have bigger problems right now," he said, flicking out a quick jab and dipping into the Aether just enough to give the thug a black eye and a healthy fear of his jabs.

The thug recoiled from the blow, and Nash used the opportunity to flood him with many more combinations of punches as he considered how to approach this opponent, this time none of them dipping into the Aether, a measure to conserve his remaining lums. He's durable and surprisingly good at blocking, but something seems wrong with his cultivation. A Second Calcification shouldn't be this slow, nor this weak - his arms keep collapsing under my strikes.

However, despite those caveats, the final enforcer wasn't in the Second Calcification realm for nothing. Even hobbling as he was on an injured leg and still recovering from being hit in the eye, he did credit to whoever trained him, if anyone.

While his defense was somewhat unpolished, it was effective, especially when combined with his use of his more active channels, showing that he hadn't slacked on those either; the asphalt of the parking lot had rose up to meet him, wrapping around his ankles and rooting him securely to the ground, but somehow sliding easily along the rest of the asphalt while remaining contiguous as he moved his feet.

The secure base of the ground wrapping around his legs lent him allowed a variety of defensive techniques - his balance was now impeccable, and he blocked and dodged the flurry of attacks coming away with increasing ease, leaning a superhuman amount and whipping his body around without any loss of rooting.

So, Nash tried to kick him in the legs again. His attack barely missed as his opponent narrowly pulled that leg out of the way.

The flurry of punches resumed, but now with a variety of kicks mixed in, most targeting the legs and knees, forcing the asphalt-wielding thug even further on the defensive.

Soon, he was entirely on the back foot, being repeatedly forced backwards further and further, not given the space to throw even a single punch. Nash adjusted the timing of his strikes once more, just enough to throw off his opponent, and dipped his right arm into the Aether; a hard cross came, unblockably dipped in the Luminiferous Aether as it was, and hit square in the gut of the doomed cultivator.

The cultivator thug wheezed, dropping to the ground on one knee and letting out another breathless cry of pain as his injured leg slammed into the unforgivingly hard ground; the asphalt, once having rose up to his ankles to assist him, had dissolved and dispersed when he had lost concentration, the lung-shredding dust blowing in the wind.

The cultivator coughed the best he could with nothing in his lungs and breathed greedily, though obviously in pain. Nash's arm reappeared, and he used it to grab the other cultivator's hair, oh so casually gathering a lock of it and wrapping it around his fist.

Up came his knee, down came that hand.

Between both was the thug's already rather unfortunate face, and it only got uglier from there.

A one-sided beating later, Nash dropped the battered and bloody thug and let him fall onto the ground.

For a moment, all he did was suppress his nausea and simply breathe, but then his eyes caught a flicker of movement from the fallen thug. Curiously, he regarded the twitching fingers of the fallen man, and one eyebrow rose as he saw a small wave of asphalt undulate, a wave of solid material rippling through the ground and heading for one of his bloodstained shoes.

Tenaciously, the slow ripple approached his shoe, and Nash sent a trickle of lums to his eyes, regarding the channel of lums from the large man through his hand to the ground and eventually to the ripple with a distant interest.

The ripple finally reached his boot and sped up, opening up like a hidden crocodile shifting in one's vision from a floating log on the surface of the water to a blur of a snapping mouth.

Before it could close, Nash dipped that foot into the Aether. He rose his leg, brought it back out of the Aether, and stepped over the mound of asphalt. "You really are quite stubborn," he said, gingerly cupping the cultivator's chin and raising it so he could look him in the bleary, concussed, and hateful eyes.

"That's quite the cultivation method you've got there - or maybe it's just you, but I digress," he said, attempting to channel some of the threatening nonchalance he had seen his father use whenever someone seemed to be even thinking of defying him. He smiled, an obvious curiousity filling his eyes. "You know, I can think of a few important families, ones that run academies, even, whose methods wouldn't let them defy death the way you're doing it right now."

Nash dropped to a knee, coming closer to the thug. "The real question is how someone like you is at the beck and call of some two-bit gang. The... something something fire gang? I haven't bothered to take note, as of yet," Nash said, chuckling. "My point stands, anyway. To reach the level you have without the support of a sect or a clan, as far as I can see? Quite impressive. That's why I'm not going to kill you any more than I already have." The eyes of the broken man lying on the floor widened, but didn't reduce in their malice, and Nash continued. "I'll be honest. Those last few knees were intended to kill you, but I think if you can crawl your way to a hospital in the state you're in, you deserve to live. For now."

His hand pulled away, and he stood up, walking back to the entrance of the gas station. He stopped just before the door and turned his head, looking at the thug's crumpled form out of the corner of his eye and over his shoulder. "If you survive - big if, that - find me, or don't. I don't care. Just keep in mind that potential like that is sought out; you don't have to wallow in the filth of the underworld for much longer, if you don't want to. Just take nearly any prestigious entrance examination - I'm sure they'll have you, which'll allow to to graduate to the real gangs. Good luck."

The door was closing behind Nash when he had a sudden realization. Wait... Did I just monologue?