Rargnes screamed in pain as Heze's personal doctor rushed towards him.
"My fingers! My fingers!"
His body dripping with sweat, Rargnes was screaming, his body convulsing in every direction.
"Help me hold him down!" said the doctor in the non-invader language. Some men grabbed Rargnes and restrained his limbs with all their strength.
A chop of the hatchet. Rargnes cried out as the goblins attacked him relentlessly. He swore. Why had he even shot at them? Now they were taking revenge! One fingertip at a time was sliced off by the sadistic goblin.
He was on the ground, lying against a building, on the floor, the inhuman pain as the goblin looked down at him, machete in hand, a bow lying on the ground, cutting off his fingers.
"This is what will happen to you if you persist on this path!" his voice told him.
A scream of horror, and Rargnes woke up in the military center room that served as his prison. He looked at his hands in horror, his heart about to explode.
How could a vision hurt so badly? Foam had come out of his mouth, even though no wound touched his body. But Rargnes understood; he had imagined it, and so it had become real.
---
Sengrar arrived at his bedside and saw Rargnes sitting on a stool, staring blankly at the floor. He tried to talk to him, to lift his spirits but Rargnes responded with silence. Sengrar was blurry to his eyes, like everyone else.
He saw images passing before him that he had never seen before, perhaps memories of people who were definitely not him.
The screams chained together, the voices rose, the cups shattered on the floor. He felt the fear. The fear of all these people whose dread was far more severe than even Rargnes' slaughter of innocents to obtain their energy.
His heart was racing. His breathing was labored. His arms fell limp in the abandonment of his mind. He heard the cries of rage, the violence of the blows a father struck his son and wife. The visceral hatred engendered by vengeance.
He alternated between first and third-person visions, between executioner and victim.
Their lives were full, his numb. He was jealous of them. Even if they were of horror, of anger, they were sensations! He preferred that kind of life to the great void.
Sengrar's face came into focus, a worried, pained look. He left the room with a little pat on his back. At that contact, a vision entered his mind.
He was a child from a first-person point of view. It was early afternoon - if the immortals had not changed the vision of the day. He was looking down at the ground, like now, in front of the corpse of his dead dog.
His father, in a magnificent suit, came up to him.
"It's just a dog," he told him.
"It wasn't just a dog! It was Hooper!" said the little boy, crying.
"That's life, my son."
"Why? Why did you give me a dog, a mortal dog, if it was just to see it die?"
The little boy was in his adolescence, about twelve or thirteen years old.
"I took him for that, Sengrar." the immortal said bluntly. "The disease would have taken him even if he was a superior breed of dog, and then the grief would have been greater. We all need to shed off our childhood,
and the sooner, the better."
"I would have preferred an immortal dog." Sengrar's tears streamed down his cheeks. How could his father, having lived for centuries, understand the whims of yet another son, another tool?
"Everything that does not improve deteriorates, Sengrar; that's just how things work. Our code tells us to awaken our sons so that they can cultivate from a young age. Would you have preferred to live with those peasants who knew nothing about immortality before they reached fifty - an age where few people survive? Look."
He tilted his face towards a red star.
"Do you see it? It's the tempter of all sins. If -"
"But I don't care about any of that! My dog is dead! Dad!"
His father gently stroked his head and then said firmly:
"I will never allow my son or a member of my family to become a member of the Red Star. Do you hear me? Never. The cruelty of life is what will make you cultivate throughout time despite the death of all your loved ones. It may seem hard in the short term, but one day, you will thank me, and if you don't, then I would prefer survivors of the mine ordeal as family."
Time passed, and the little boy engraved the lessons in his heart in his own way. He cultivated tirelessly from the age of twenty when his father opened the path of cultivation for him. Despite the years that passed, he never stopped cultivating, which earned him a good relationship with his father, who, however, gave him no resources.
After all, he was a bastard of mortal blood.