Exactly two weeks after Jamie left he returned with Zerrin in tow. He was a bit tired, he hadn't gotten a good night of sleep since Arc had been born, but he still wanted to spend as much time with Arc as possible.
His reaction to hearing about Arc's antics and behavior was not surprising to the couple, merely attributing his intelligence to being Marlev's son. They had lived with Marlev and Jamie for the past ten years and knew his temperament well.
They were more concerned with how Zerrin would react. Zerrin would definitely be able to see the signs of possession or tampering of Arc's soul should one such enemy of Marl's be attempting to hurt her family.
Of course they were unaware about the precautions he had taken to conceal Arc from potential enemies. That gray cloth that he was both clothed in and had his room completely sealed by was made of a special material that would serve to scatter the senses and location of those who would try to scry or divine in that location. It also sealed off the room from any form of soul strikes, making it effectively impossible to take over the body of Arc without first breaking the layers of seals in the fabric known as "Glimmer Weave".
Even the soul formula which he had given Jamie the recipe to was different.
It was specially designed by a friend of theirs who had a bad history with possession arts. Like all Soul Formula, which was primarily used as a substance to nourish body and soul after a traumatic incident to a person's Nexus, it was absorbed almost instantly through the mucus membranes in the mouth, hence why it could be compared to mud in consistency. It was a type of food not meant to be "Eaten" but "Absorbed".
This special formula dubbed "Foreign Expulsion Formula" by the creator used a different set of ingredients that would cause excruciating pain to any soul located in the body, even the original host. This pain would be accompanied by a force that would expel any entity that was asynchronous with the body to a certain degree, though this could take a long time. This was the reason Zerrin made Jamie feed him that formula until he was able to move his body on his own, that was the point at which he could be certain that his Nexus was healed, his body had received enough nourishment to move on its own, and that his soul was no longer fighting for control with any foreign entity that may be within.
However he still felt the need to perform a check-up and watch the baby act as that concoction had never been used on someone so young before. He suspected that the sudden "intelligence" was a side effect of the pain from the process, but he couldn't rule out that a particularly persistent enemy may have wrested control even through the pain. The biggest reason was really that he wanted to spend time with his nephew.
However his inspection could wait until Arc was asleep and he felt it appropriate to wait until Jamie had his fill of his child while conscious before he took any time to play with him.
Instead he spent time catching up with Breda and Nofafi, completing some tasks at the behest of Jamie (disguised while in town of course), and giving some tips and assistance to the two eldest brothers in both swordplay and tactics. For the third son he gave a scroll that had the recipe for a basic antidote on it and told him to work on it with the materials he provided. It was a secret between the two of them that he wanted to be an alchemist when he grew up. He had always been practicing and memorizing a few techniques that Zerrin had provided him when he visited, so he wasn't really as lazy as he looked. To be fair he was still pretty lazy.
When he returned to Nofafi's home to see Jamie still playing with Arc and his blocks, he took a seat next to Breda who was holding Ering and tried to divine some sort of martial or spiritual aptitude from her out of curiosity.
"If the first is a warrior, the second a strategist, and the third an alchemist, I wonder what the fourth will be." He muttered to himself as he made an honestly unremarkable attempt to divine her future, seeing nothing but a mottled blur of colors. He excelled in combat and only barely remembered what little Marl had taught him about it in the past.
Before he could give it another shot he was interrupted a chime that from the cylinder on his hip. Popping it open he took out a black piece of paper, reading it with a grave look on his face.