After hearing the coughs, Alice and I jerked back away from each other. We looked in the direction of our mother a little fearfully and saw her looking at us with raised eyebrows.
"Well, well, well. What do we have here? How did my cute little children grow up so fast? Looking at that passionate scene, it seems you two have practised it quite a many times."
Mother's accurate words made Alice blush, and she looked down. She tried to explain but, due to nervousness, started stuttering.
"Mo-mom it is n-not like that. I ju-just lost control of my em-motions, and…"
Even though she raised her eyebrows in anger, there was a glimmer of mischief in mother's eyes. I deduced that she had already known about our escapades and was now using our faux pas to find amusement. And she was successful as she got Alice riled up so much.
Even though I wanted to let my cute sister continue her explanation, it was not a good idea to let one's lover suffer the misfortune on her own. So, I decided to pitch in for her help. I looked straight into mother's eyes and declared.
"I love Alice romantically. And this feeling is mutual. I would like to have your blessing for our new relationship."
After declaring my intention, I held Alice's hand. She entwined her fingers with mine and looked at our mother pleadingly. Our mother looked at our actions with a stern look, and an overpowering aura emanated from her. This resulted in Alice's hand to shiver.
I tightened my grasp on hers to comfort her, but even I felt that perhaps our mother would be very against our relationship. But suddenly, the aura disappeared, and mother started laughing melodically, which calmed our nerves.
"~Fufufu~ You thought I didn't know before? I have seen the changes in you since you came back from your travel. And I also knew about our love nest near the pond."
I knew that mother would have caught on to the changes in our demeanours but didn't think that we were exposed from the very start.
(Truly, the children could hide nothing from their mother.)
But Alice was not so quick on the uptake and still asked nervously for confirmation.
"So, can Lucas and I continue our relationship? Are you not against us?"
Mother giggled at Alice's behaviour and put her hands on our heads. She tussled our hair comfortingly and said with an affectionate smile.
"If you two love each other, your mother is supportive of you. Why will I be against you? Even though it is not looked favourably to have a romantic relationship within the same family, your mother will handle all those backlashes."
The feeling of being protected by someone against all odds brought tears to our eyes, and we hugged our mother, who was the strongest pillar in our lives.
After getting our repressed feelings out in the open, our mother's gentleness obliterated the burden of guilt and secrecy weighing down on our hearts. After getting separated from the hug, I found that I had soaked my blood on the clothes of my mother and sister.
Seeing this, mother sighed and commented.
"Let us go back to our house to clean up ourselves, and in the meantime, you can heal yourselves completely. After that, we will talk about your constellation and the suitable cultivation technique."
On the way back, Alice and I walked hand in hand, with mother a little behind. Alice was happily swinging our clasped hands, clearly happy by the positive outcome of her faux pas.
By the time we reached our home, my injuries were completely healed. After taking a bath to clean the blood and small pieces of chunks sticking to my body, I donned a new robe and went to the training grounds to reconvene with my mother and Alice.
They had also cleaned themselves up and were waiting for me. After I came to them, my mother touched my forehead with her finger and briefly checked my condition. After withdrawing her hand, she visibly relaxed a little and said.
"You don't have internal damage, too, and your meridians have evolved to a new level. I know that you linked with a 10th-layer constellation. Now describe the constellation so that I could determine its name."
"Before that, how did you know that I had formed a connection with the 10th layer?"
I wanted to know how she knew that, as I had not mentioned before. Mother nodded in satisfaction and answered.
"It's good that you asked. For every 9 layers of constellations, the colour of the star created from it changes from yellow to red to white. And the stars, formed by forming a connection with the constellations of the 28-30 layers, are blue in colour. And nobody has ever found the threshold above 30 layers. So, it is believed that 30 layers is the final limit. The higher the constellation layer is, the more intense is the colour of the corresponding star."
Getting the new information revealing the many layers of constellations that were far away from my reach, I resolved myself to get stronger and answered the previous question.
I described to her the shape of my constellation as well as its dynamic nature. I followed the example of my sister from the previous day and drew my constellation on the ground. Mother looked at the drawing and beamed thankfully.
"You have good luck, my dear Lucas. The constellation you linked with is called 'Heaven Mending Forge'. It is generally linked by the practitioners for the formation of their second or third star to enhance their smithing ability. And I have a very suitable cultivation technique that is highly compatible with it, 'Thousand Refinement Demon Tempering'. It was a gift given to me by my friend, so make good use of the technique."
My mother turned wistful at the mention of her friend. She must be very close to mother's heart to make her this emotional. I didn't know why, but I believed mother's friend to be a woman. And the thought of her having a close male friend made my skin crawl in irritation.
After coming out of her reverie, mother explained the steps for the cultivation technique.
The technique was abstracted from a beast called 'Mallet Turtle'. The beast has a hammer-like appendage at the end of its tail. It uses this 'hammer' infused with stellar energy to hit its own shell. The shell gets continuously hammered and tempered by the hammer, increasing its defensive strength.
But using the technique, many stellar hammers would temper the whole body of the practitioner. It is like the body refinement all over again with a massive upgrade.
But it could also temper the stored energy in the dantian or, currently, the nucleus inside the dantian. The tempering and hammering would make the stellar energy concentration denser, resulting in explosive strength far greater than practitioners, even with a higher cultivation realm.
The nucleus split into two 'hammers' and one 'sheet'. The hammers toughen the sheet, which then merges back into the two hammers through their heads. From the handles of the hammers, a new 'sheet' of stellar energy separated to undergo the tempering.
This cycle repeats itself endlessly, making the stellar energy stored in the body denser and filled with volatile vigour.
I followed her instructions and found the changes instantly. With each round of tempering of my stored stellar energy, I found an increase in 50% of my strength. But with each subsequent tempering, the time taken increases two-folds.
As the first round of annealing the energy takes about a minute, it is not a very suitable technique to upgrade my strength during a fight.
But it would be pretty helpful to ambush strong opponents and for short fights where all the previously upgraded energy could be utilised at once.
When I was still familiarising myself with my new strength, mother, who was standing beside me, made an uncanny remark.
"Well, for your previous transgression of hiding your relationship from me, you two will get punished. Team up and spar with me."
She had a crafty smile as Alice and I teamed up to face the punishment of our mother.
…..
…..
…..
That day, we siblings finally learnt that we should never try to deceive our mother again. The sparring match turned into a brutal slaughter of our buttocks. She easily dodged all our attacks and somehow only spanked our buttocks when she found an opening. She was greatly enjoying punishing us as her cheerful laughter filled the entire training grounds, completely subduing our painful groans.
Our mother had never punished us, siblings, before and had always taken all our mistakes and mischiefs with a calm and gentle smile.
But after we had found a treatment for her meridians, she had turned more expressive and mischievous. She now laughed heartily. Expressed her anger and dissatisfaction. And even more, she was showing her naughty sides, which we never knew existed before.
Even though it hurt to have my bums swollen red, I was happy with the changes in my mother and was looking forward to the days filled with laughter and contentment in the future.