Nash Refraction Emerald woke up from his dreamless sleep far later than he intended to.

The first thing he did was look through the haphazard scattering of notes on the table, arranging them as sensibly as possible - he would have to read them later.

He looked over to the counter, and saw a soggy note floating in a puddle of slime.

Thankfully, he could read it without removing it from the disgusting soup.

Young Greenstone, the note said in a formal script, a lovingly made calligraphy done in cheap ink. For materialization, you are likely missing the purpose of the coiling structures. They are meant to transfer matter into a medium it is unsuited for, and back; pay attention to them.

I took the liberty of throwing the Emeralds off your track. I cannot do it again, and would not even if I was able; it is your battle.

Seek my help if you require it - this is all I shall offer without a request.

It ended with the signature of Old Man Looking-In, every loop formed into a watching eye and the sinuous writing arranged like vines criss-crossing the length of an old tree, draped with mosses. Directly afterward, another line of text was scrawled, more messily, nearly in the margin.

Do not rely on it overmuch, for some things can only be learned through experience.

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It was a normal parking lot; cracked asphalt, broken glass glittering in the overbright sun, gravel in the cracks of the surface kicked around by wind, rain, tires, and shuffling feet.

It was difficult to go through a parking lot like this without a sense of lethargy, the rundown place and sun beating down onto the scattered trash seeming to suck the energy from your bones whenever you spent too long within.

'Too long,' of course, was any time at all that could possibly be avoided.

An old man with the surname of Beryl found himself with business in this unfortunate place; over the phone, he argued with a subordinate that the location must've been a mistake, or had been found far too late.

No sign had been found of the Young Master of the Emerald family except for a small plastic tracking device, the barbed pin still attached to a few stray fibers of plastic fabric.

"You must have gotten the address incorrect," Beryl said, his raspy voice deceptively even. "This is not an apartment. This is the parking lot to a dry cleaning business. The tracker must have been discovered and removed; these past few days have been wasted."

Beryl sighed, unable to contain his displeasure. "We should have spent that time doing it the correct way instead of screwing around with some over-complicated gadget. The Young Master hasn't been in this place for days."

The voice on the other side of the line was also impatient, in their own way, but it was masked by the crackling interference in the line; in this part of the city, the cell towers were ancient, never updated and only minimally maintained.

"You insisted on going there yourself, sir," the voice said, outwardly deferential but with an undercurrent of frustration. "Before you left, I was attempting to bring it to your attention that you should have brought your backup, or at least let us investigate the premises remotely first."

"That would have taken too long," Beryl replied. "I had already instructed you and your men to be ready at a moment's notice - the Patriarch will allow no more delays in bringing back his son."

"Is that true?" the voice asked. Now, the ice in the voice cut through even the intense crackling of the poor reception. "I seem to recall that this is not your first attempt at recovering the Young Master; perhaps if you took us with you before confronting him, he would be back by now."

Beryl's hand clenched, crushing the plastic of the tracker into tiny shards. "Initially, the Patriarch asked me to do this alone," he said, his syllables short and filled with derision. "A task like this requires discretion. Do not remind me of my failure; it is the only reason you have this opportunity. Be thankful for it, junior. It is a tremendous boon to your Aquamarine family that you are allowed to attend to such an important task."

The voice went silent for a few seconds.

"Very well," it said, each syllable carefully measured. "I will be over there personally soon to assist. I shall bring a few others from my family; they are former military men, skilled in tracking and asset capture. The Aquamarine family shall not disappoint, senior Beryl," the Aquamarine heir said. "However, it will be for the sake of the Patriarch, not for you or the Young Master."

"That is acceptable," Beryl said.

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Nash sat on his floor once again. Instead of weights, his lap and the floor around him was filled with a carefully curated selection of notes and diagrams, anything he could find relating to Materialization.

Most of the pieces of paper arranged in a semicircle around him and nestled in his lap were drawn personally by him, a summation of every possible source.

Others were particularly useful pages of material, pirated and printed off the internet. Each one illuminated a concept that had once eluded him or clarified one he already understood.

In his lap, the one on top of the stack was a piece of paper written in his own hand. The only thing on the paper scrap was a hurried scrawling of the advice Old Man Looking-In had given him through the letter; next to it sat another piece of paper, this one lined, with more organized scrawlings. Bullet points specified exactly what he wanted from his new channel.

His mind was perfectly blank except for the specifics of the technique he was creating; arrangements of 3D geometry were firmly grasped within his mind, his focus nearly entirely on them, him being afraid that letting them go for even a moment would spell the doom of the attempt.

On the scratched linoleum floor of a cheap apartment, the heir of the Emerald clan sat, creating a channel of his own design.

And then he failed, and failed, and failed again. He failed a total of three times, each one of his attempts fizzling out, not taking properly in his Aetheric channel-clusters.

On the third time, he believed he had made progress, but found as soon as he inspected it that it was fundamentally flawed, and was forced to destroy it to start once again.

Each time he failed, he read through each of his notes once more and reviewed his tried-and-true channels where they sat in the Aetheric position of his body.

His Greater Luminiferous Vision was used as often as he could spare the lums for the operation of that technique, as it allowed him to not only feel the proto-channel forming within him but also to see it happening, to visually compare it with his pages of densely-annotated diagrams and correct every little mistake.

A few hours later, rather anticlimactically, a tendril of energy-made-matter emerged from Nash's palm. For a few seconds, he marveled at it, still not quite processing the new addition to his power and the input of the tendril's proprioception.

Then, the sheer joy of the moment hit him, a torrent of pride and satisfaction buffeting at his psyche like a tsunami.

Rarely for him, the smile on his face was genuine instead of performative in any manner as he looked over the channel over and over again, devoting every lum on his Sternum Etching to either seeing the channel or cementing it, Calcifying it with the Emerald cultivation techniques.

Soon, it was almost a quarter of the way to being equivalent to a First Calcification channel, and his lums were drained nearly entirely dry.

He couldn't cultivate it any real amount for quite a while... But nothing said he couldn't try it out a little bit.

He stood up. It was time to practice.

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A cultivator-thug meditated on the floor of a seedy gym downtown, feeling the asphalt of the parking lot beyond the walls pull at his channels from afar.

In front of him was a punching bag, and every time he reached a certain number on his internal count, he stood up quickly and sent a powerful strike at the bag, shaking the poorly-installed brackets that kept the dented, punctured bag hanging from the ceiling.

The gym had everything that was standard for an establishment of this type; grimy floors that hadn't been mopped since before the current owner had bought them, overfull trash cans with extra complimentary trash strewn in a small radius around them, the smell of tobacco and other drugs, and the usual clientele.

The clients of the gym were of the hard sort, or at least liked to think they were; tattooed gangster small-timers or wannabe cultivators, teenagers without even a Sternum Etching yet that wanted to be either of the former, and the few actually dangerous men that everyone else had an instinctive sense to avoid whenever possible.

The Second Calcification thug was of the latter type.

The other gym-goers gave him a wide berth, and a few of the more particularly jumpy ones flinched whenever he stood up out of nowhere and sent another ceiling-rumbling strike into the bag in front of him; several of them left and considered canceling their memberships as they saw the state of the bolts holding the brackets to the ceiling beams, equally the fault of the installer and the strength of the bulky cultivator that hammered on the heavy bag.

Mid-strike, his phone rang. He pivoted immediately, bailing on the kick he had just thrown, and walked over to a nearby bench without second-guessing any bit of his movement.

He picked it up, and smiled at what he saw on the screen; it was short text from the new Second of the Crimson Bonfire Gang.

believe the cashier is now calling himself Eidolon. fighting in the Motorcycle Rider arena. if you give him to the Boss alive, you'll be rewarded. he doesn't need to be intact. it read, with all the poor grammar and sentence fragments expected from that type of communication.

The cultivator didn't bother responding. He shoved his phone into his pocket, gathered up the rest of his equipment, and immediately left.

It was perfect, after all. What better way to prove his worth than to kill the Emerald in an arena, for all to see?

He could finally prove that he was not lesser.

He had to.

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Eidolon sat in a metal folding chair once more, leaned forward in his seat, his arms crossed and elbows sitting on his knees.

The seats near him were mostly empty, despite their proximity to the arena itself; earlier, a drunk had wandered up to him, grabbing quite obviously for his mask. Nash had overestimated the drunk's cultivation and what he had intended to be a simple warning shove had sent the drunk careening through the crowd, knocking over a few folding chairs before being caught by an annoyed Motorcycle Rider goon.

Obviously, the gang member had a lot more experience handling both drunkards and the fights that tended to spring up in their presence than anyone ever really wanted to have, swiftly sitting the drunk man down with a few slightly more sober friends not interested in taking him out on a stretcher.

Afterwards, Eidolon could practically feel the glare of the ganger on him, though he wasn't approached. That decision was likely due to the Motorcycle Rider not wanting to needlessly antagonize someone of his personal strength, although the fact that the drunk had been trying to reveal his identity may have been a factor - Nash doubted that, though.

Whatever the rationale, however, the rest of the waiting for the match went more smoothly, several different Motorcycle Riders seemingly always finding a reason to be hovering fairly close to where Eidolon was sitting.

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He ignored it, of course; there was no point in taking offense to a frankly reasonable precaution, and besides, he had something more interesting to be preoccupied with.

Within the Aether, the manifestation of his recently created technique was currently stored.

Nash was still practicing moving around the rope of energy, and had progressed from moving it with all the precision and power of a hallucinating garden snake to a still drunken, but significantly better form of movement that would best be likened to a a primitive flail or ball on the end of a chain; powerful, hard to stop once it got started, but difficult to direct accurately.

There were a few interesting properties of the Aetheric rope, as Nash had found out through experience.

For one, the interior of the fibrous structure wasn't exactly solid, acting more like a gel that Nash could move to adjust the weight distribution. Additionally, that gel had some odd effects when it came to distance, none of which he actually understood yet.

Additionally, the structure could suddenly contract whenever he willed it, the weave of the casing pulling in on itself, shortening the whole structure. It wasn't full manipulation yet, but Nash would take it; especially given that he had stopped just before the First Calcification was finished on the channel, weakening it but giving him more flexibility on tweaking it until it was exactly how he wanted it.

The downside for that, of course, was that the power was much less than he would have wished. Due to the permeability of the channel, the amount of lums he could push through was rather limited, and much of whatever he did push through would leak out rather inefficiently. Of course, this quite reduced the power of the technique, especially in the short term, something he was already prematurely dreading as he was called into the arena.

The announcer was once again gesticulating violently in the ring, pacing back and forth, spinning on one leg, his short form filling the arena through a combination of force of personality and moving around enough that there was nowhere to stand in there that he hadn't been yet in the past six or seven minutes.

He beckoned Eidolon on stage with a theatrical flourish, his arm spinning around until he leaned back and pointed at him. "And first on stage tonight, our mysterious newcomer! Can he prove himself once again‽" He paced around even more, sweeping his palms to present the ring to Eidolon as he made his entrance by walking through the ropes once again.

"Eidolon, you've risen to both of the challenges we've put in front of you so far! To be quite honest, and I believe our wonderful audience here," the announcer said, cupping a hand to his ear to encourage the crowd to be louder, jeers and cheers both.

"Anyway, I believe all of us here can relate to my initial feeling! When you first walked into this ring, I thought you wouldn't be going out, and you doing it anyway lost quite a few people quite a bit of money!"

Eidolon stayed silent, even when the microphone was brought to his masked face.

"Guess I shouldn't have expected anything else!" The announcer chuckled, exaggeratedly imitating a good natured laugh. "Well, I've delayed long enough. For our other contender, we have someone who came out of retirement specifically to fight our upstart here!"

Under the mask, Nash's face furrowed in both concern and confusion.

Why would anyone here request to fight me specifically? Perhaps Apeblood's backer, or someone in league with Discordant Scream? he thought, though even those reasonable explanations did little to assuage the unsettling feeling he had about the situation.

The announcer leaned back, pointing to another figure in the crowd. "Will the illustrious GRAVEPAVER come up into the arena!" he shouted once more, struggling even with the speakers belting out his voice to overcome the screams of the crowd.

From where he had pointed, a tall, bulky cultivator stood up, making his way to the stage. Eidolon got a good look at him as he stepped over the ropes, and noted what he saw.

His clothes were covered in little pouches, like quivers for arrows, each one full of something and pulling at the fabric with their sheer weight. Most were sewed to his 'tacticool' clothing around the front of his shirt, though there were a few scattered in other locations, covering wherever they could without impeding his movement.

Small plates of armor were riveted to the clothes also; vambraces, pauldrons, and greaves had been added, still leaving most of his body unarmored. One curious thing about the plates of armor was that they were not made of any sensible material, but instead appeared to be made of rock or concrete of some sort, and it showed in how each heavy footfall of the cultivator wearing it shook the floor.

"Gravepaver! Anything to say about your opponent‽" The announcer slid in, his arm stretched out to reach the much taller man's chin. Gravepaver took the microphone from his hands, and spoke into it.

"So, you're calling yourself Eidolon now," Gravepaver said, and Nash's suspicion that they had already met grew by the word.

"You may not remember me, but I certainly remember you - very difficult to find you, by the way. Putting me in the hospital didn't make it any easier, but here I am anyway."

Eidolon searched his memory for a Second Calcification cultivator he had fought recently, and came up with a thug that used the parking lot beneath them to assist himself. "The gas station? You and four others?" he asked, his voice just loud enough for the man in front of him to hear him, not bothering to make it any louder for the benefit of the audience.

Gravepaver stalked forward, his hands down low. He passed the microphone to the announcer almost as an afterthought, and stopped just before Nash. "Yes, senior. It seems that the noble-born has deigned to remember me. I am going to kill you."

"Very well," Nash said, settling into his stance, every muscle relaxed, ready to begin as soon as the announcer left the ring.

"You humiliated me," the thug said, "I believed I was near the top of the mountain, but found I hadn't even left the valley yet. You taught me much, in those few words, but I cannot bear to exist in your shadow. I will learn all I can from you, and then you will die."

Silently, the announcer slinked his way out of the arena, the motorcycle-helmeted man ducking under the ropes before pushing his visor slightly up once again and speaking into the microphone. "Our competitors are certainly eager today - I believe I just heard Gravepaver say that he intended to kill Eidolon, and it seems PERSONAL!"

The crowd whistled and screamed, and several people held up cardboard signs, permanent marker hastily scrawled onto them celebrating the return of Gravepaver. "Well, no point in delaying. FIGHT!"

Immediately, Nash threw out a jab, testing his opponent. Gravepaver had barely begun getting into his stance, and his face twisted with fear and surprise as he flinched out of the way.

Not holding back, Nash immediately launched into a leg kick, his shin slamming Gravepaver's leg in the thigh, just above the knee.

Already off balance, Gravepaver was unprepared for the flurry of strikes that followed, in effect a repeat of their first fight; Gravepaver hurriedly retreating, putting up the best defense that he could manage against every one of Nash's strikes.

Eventually, Gravepaver's defense broke. This time, Nash wasn't even forced to dip into the Aether for the strike that finally hit, a mundane feint proving effective enough. A hard cross slammed into his face, jerking it to the side and busting his lip.

However, the blow somewhat glanced off of Gravepaver's face, which was unusually strong even for a Second Calcification cultivator, and while Nash was recovering from the overcommitted cross an elbow struck his face in turn.

Nash stumbled back, both him and his opponent creating distance to recover and reconsider. Both settled into their stances, and a few probing strikes were made, each unsure of what the other was capable of.

A jolt of fear shot through his system when he saw a shard of his mask broken off onto the floor between them, but he suppressed it - he had no time to bother with that as of now.

A problem for future me, he thought as he slipped under one of the thug's clumsier punches and retaliated with one of his own, a left hook aimed almost exactly where the larger man's liver should have been.

The fibers of his handwraps were cut open, though his hand was spared, as his hand crashed into a pouch filled with solid asphalt and shattered it into pieces.

The shards exploded outward from the force of the punch, some driven into Gravepaver while others flew outwards, some sprayed into the direction of the crowd. Some of the shrapnel clipped Eidolon, cutting his clothes but not energetic enough to slice the enhanced skin underneath.

Capitalizing on the momentum of the strike, though it was deadened by the armor, Nash brought his other hand up in an uppercut that Gravepaver barely managed to block, his hands hastily interposed between the strike and his chin.

That left him unprepared for the next attack; a tendril of space materialized, already swinging at the thug's leg. It hit, sweeping the larger man off his feet, and Nash moved in for a ground and pound.

As soon as Nash was on top of him, his fist raised for a strike, all of the asphalt on Gravepaver's body suddenly turned liquid.

It moved sluggishly, but was close enough to him to stick to his body despite his attempts to evade it.

Rather than clinging to his skin or burning him like actual liquid asphalt would, it still seemed the same temperature and texture as solid asphalt except for the simple fact that it flowed. Consciously-directed waves of solid asphalt aimed to wrap around his body and trap him, Nash standing up abruptly in an attempt to break Gravepaver's grasp, and failed.

His voice raspy from the gut shot and short on breath from the weight on his torso, Gravepaver spoke. "I don't remember you doing that," he laughed despite his injuries, spitting the blood that trickled into his mouth from the split lip. "Either that's new, or I just didn't warrant that. Either way..."

Gravepaver rolled to the side. Taking advantage of the asphalt trap around Eidolon's legs, he rolled onto the top, the asphalt flowing in just the right manner to force Nash to comply.

Assisted by the asphalt, he grabbed for Eidolon's head, mostly able to ignore the smaller man's struggles. He cackled loudly as he reached. "I've gotten stronger!"

Nash pushed what he could of his body off the ground and entered the Aether. Some of the wooden floor came along with him, as did some asphalt, still wrapped around his legs.

Kicking off of whatever else floated in the Aether with him, he struggled to remain in the Aether long enough to ascend high enough for what he intended to do next.

Leaving the Aether, he reoriented himself in midair. Still weighed down by the asphalt on his legs, he fell down on top of a startled Gravepaver, driving a hammerfist into his head.

Both of them fell to the ground, Nash from simple gravity, Gravepaver from a probable concussion.

While Gravepaver recovered, Eidolon took out the rope of Emerald-technique spatial energy.

He focused the weight towards the end and slammed it again and again on the solidified asphalt enveloping his knees with all of his might.

He managed to chip away at one with his enhanced strength, freeing one of his legs, but his frantic attempt to free the other leg was interrupted half of the way through by Gravepaver standing up, still clutching his head.

Nash was forced to dip much of his body into the Aether to avoid the spear of road surfacing that flew at him with all of the force a Second Calcification cultivator could muster. Exhausted, the thug stumbled forward, grimacing as he saw the attack fail.

Immediately, Nash rolled away, rematerializing his shoulder mid-roll. As soon as he had rolled out of the way of another asphalt projectile (this one smaller than before, and much slower,) he began working on removing the asphalt around his other knee.

In the first strike, he glanced off. In the second, the Emerald-energy flail sent spiderwebs of cracks through the asphalt and a shock up Nash's knee. The third got the worst of it off, and the rest flaked off on its own as Nash stood up, still encumbered by the asphalt weighing him down at the shins and thighs, but standing anyway.

Every muscle shaking, Eidolon got back into his stance and faced Gravepaver, who was similarly exhausted. Gravepaver flicked both his hands above his head as if pulling his sleeves back and the remaining pouches of asphalt on his body flowed along, climbing up his body like snakes coiling their way up a tree. Taking the moment to breathe, Nash watched impassively as the asphalt formed into clubs around Gravepaver's fists, simply too tired to muster any emotion or tactical consideration.

The next exchange was more instinctual than planned, more habit than anything.

He was not fighting to win, he was not fighting to survive, he was simply fighting because that was what had been ingrained into his muscle memory since he was a child.

Eidolon - or rather Nash, since he was far too tired and on the ropes to bother keeping up any sort of persona - was not sure of how much time passed. What he was sure of was that the exchange was rather sloppy on both ends, Gravepaver throwing slow, ponderous attacks that Nash still barely dodged or blocked. Nash's counterattacks were by the book but lazy by necessity, his flagging energy doing him no favors in generating any real power or speed.

Twice, he was too slow and a particularly speedy punch from the thug clipped him, once in the ribs and once in the face. Each time, the blow from the heavy asphalt had nearly crumpled Nash, and most of the parts of his mask that still remained had broken off. Shards of the mask had embedded into his face, sending rivulets of blood mixing with the sweat dripping from his face and onto the floor.

Eventually, the exchange ended when Nash had thrown a simple, sloppy cross to Gravepaver's face. He had dropped to the ground, wood splintering under the weight of the asphalt on his body, and stopped moving.

Nash, practically delirious, took a while to figure out why he was the only one standing.

He looked down at the crumpled form of the thug and waited for him to get up, for the fight to continue, for the asphalt on his body to force the broken, beaten body off the ground and fight again.

It didn't happen.

His gaze was captured by movement towards him in the corner of his eye. The announcer had stepped in, ducking under the ropes and holding a microphone. Stepping over the unconscious body of Gravepaver, the announcer lightly pushed up on the visor and stood next to Eidolon, his microphone raised.

"Well then!" he shouted, his lively voice the only energetic thing in the ring, apparently unbothered by stepping in the puddles of sweat and drops of blood. "That was the best fight of the season so far, at least for this division! An old favorite came back to suppress Eidolon, the underdog of our little operation here, but was crushed instead!"

More words of equal levels of cheesiness came, but Eidolon tuned them out.

His muscles were trembling trying to extract whatever energy they could to keep him standing, his mouth was dry, his face was bleeding; he was in no condition to listen to the insubstantial ramblings of a crowd-wrangler. He simply waited until the overlong speech was done, he was led out of the ring, and he received his money.

It was only after he left the arena, too exhausted to any more than the bare minimum to conceal his trail, (barely deviating off of the shortest route and passing through only one wall,) that he froze right in front of the door to his apartment.

His hand on the doorknob, the other one holding the key, he had one terrible thought.

My face was definitely on display up there, wasn't it?

He unlocked the door.

Eh. Still not Future Nash yet, and that’s his problem.

He sighed when he collapsed on his bed, still clothed.