Helena was sitting with her legs crossed in her house. After building some houses, people had gone back to their normal living situation.
'Normal' was a bit of a stretch, as far as honest descriptions went. Fetching water had been a problem at the start before Jacob had set up some Water Gathering Formations, and people had started learning Water Spells.
"Helena, sweetheart, Andrew asked if you can check his progress with the Fireball Spell," her mother was a sweet and useless woman who had married an engineer who had worked on the building and maintenance of ski lifts and other implants for skiing. It was probably one of the most boring jobs in the world, but it had brought home a lot of money, and no one had complained.
Now, her mother was barely able to cultivate, and her father had, as usual, disappeared in the background as one of the sentries of the city. She wondered how these two people had birthed her. Multiple times she had been tempted to take a DNA test.
She didn't love them as much as she should have. On the other hand, they doted on her so much it was frankly embarrassing.
Helena was their Golden Child, the smartest, the most beautiful, and now even the most talented. Helena had never questioned such an outcome, to be honest. It only seemed natural that it would happen.
To be frank, she was just conscious about who she was and how good she was at things. She wasn't arrogant or stuck-up about it, or at least she thought so.
She smiled at her mother and nodded.
"Thanks, mom. Tell him I'll be down in a minute."
She had just attempted to feel the infamous Oriole realm that had been eluding her since Jacob and the others had left St. Peter, and she had spent most of her time cultivating like this.
Helena needed to be the strongest, be in charge of her life, and not fade in the background like her parents.
I wonder if there is something wrong with me.
She just hadn't felt much toward her parents for her whole life. She had never been mean to them, nor she had used their doting unfairly. Instead, Helena always behaved like the perfect child and tried to live by the highest standards. She was so good at school and random competitions she had taken that universities in Italy had already scouted her, a true rarity for their country.
She went down and found Andrew in her living room. The man was pretty non-descript, and his talent was average at best. But, unlike Geneva, he did not stand out one bit. He wasn't bad-looking, and he was just very plain.
"Hi Andrew," Helena smiled and slightly inclined her head.
"Oh, Helena, thank you for taking your time to see me. Unfortunately, I am a bit stuck with the Spell. I try to practice as you said to, but it just doesn't work that well. I ran out of Mana really fast, and I'm always afraid of burning myself to a crisp every time I feel the Mana in my Meridians getting a bit turbulent."
How this guy could be Geneva's husband was one of the biggest mysteries in St. Peter. Helena had to give it to that woman: if she herself had had such a low talent, she would have never fought nor trained so hard. Instead, Geneva had fought Charybdes like a madman. She had probably killed many more than anyone else, excluding Jacob, Helena herself, Juliet, and Frederick. But Helena considered all the previous people cut from a different cloth.
"Your Mana can experience some turbulence. You should probably try to hurt yourself a bit to get used to the scare, you know?"
The man had a sad expression while nodding.
The fact that his marriage was a mystery for everyone was the reason Andrew had sought out Helena to get stronger.
So far, it had been kind of a failure.
This was the reason Helena didn't like project groups: there was always someone who would slack off or just not put down the required amount of work to excel. And that was unacceptable to Helena.
"Well, let's go out, show me what you can do," Helena said with a smile, without breaking her image one bit.
Only Jacob had the special power of upsetting her so much that she would bring out a part of her she hadn't known she had.
"Thank you," the man said in a subdued tone.
He just wanted to be stronger to keep up with his wife. And if Andrew was really willing to put in the work, Helena wasn't opposed to helping him.
"I wonder when the little Jacob fellow is coming back," Andrew said, "he gave me some liquors the last time, even cigarettes! But now, they are all locked behind the Contribution System. It's so unfair. You are close to him, right? I hope you get some privileges! My wife would beat me up if she knew about the cigarettes. But I mean, it's the apocalypse, right? And Jacob said cancer gets killed by our natural Qi now."
If there was one thing Helena didn't like about the man was his chattiness.
Jacob this, Jacob that.
And if I leave St. Peter, Jacob will take it away from me.
Helena hated what Jacob could do to her, how upset she could become, how unbalanced her life would be whenever he was close to her. And that was the main reason she wanted to leave, to go away.
People usually listened or didn't act crazy. Everyone had a bit of awe for her, but not Jacob. He clearly liked her.
Loved her, he said.
Jacob was this huge destabilizing force that she had never met in her life. Not in a good way, though. It wasn't the 'oh my, he's whatever I always lacked in my life.'
No, Jacob was all she didn't want in her life.
She wanted to be strong, people who would take sensible decisions alongside her.
That bastard had even refused to share the goddamn Ancestral Bond at the beginning, trusting more Juliet, the hothead delinquent.
Goddamn men.
"I got a more powerful Cultivation Technique," Helena said with a sour smile and didn't answer the rest of Andrew's babble.
"Oh yeah, Jacob gave me a special one too," Andrew smiled.
Uh?