"Someone called me, right?" Aiden asked the wisps as he stopped in his tracks. "That sounds like the butler that follows the viscount around."
Caelum was doing the surveillance overhead, and he began to flash an alarming red light from seeing the threat to Aiden's time off. The teenagers who beat him up was coming southeastward, and the boys wearing silver capes he clashed with during lunch approached their direction from the southeast. Both groups will converge to where Aiden was currently at so he urged them to hurry.
"What are you doing?!" he yelled before flying down. "I'd be more than happy to see you beat up but all your enemies are catching catch up to you. Are we runnig away or not?"
Aiden took no more than a second to think. He shrugged his shoulders, and without looking back, bolted for the staircase once again.
"He already loathes me to the fullest," Aiden said as he jumped down the staircase. "I can't make him hate me more that he already does."
Aiden immediately hopped into Mr. Busty who arrived before any other carriage.
"You sure are one trustworthy steed," Caelum beamed proudly. "Told you he's the best one there is."
Aiden rubbed Mr. Busty in the head, took a carrot he kept from lunch out of his pocket and gave it to Mr. Busty. "Let's head home, Mr. Busty."
. . .
Aiden immediately slumped onto his bed upon stepping into his room. The exhaustion finally getting into him. Even the three wisps felt his exhaustion as they lay on his pillow.
"Now I know why you mortals only get to live for less than a hundred years," Caelum said, his faded light molding him into a blob next to Aiden. "Your days are exhausting as heck!"
"You're right for once," Lucius said, as he too, turned into a blob on the pillow. "This is the most exhausting day I've had in a thousand years."
Riven settled silently beside Aiden, and without any of them realizing, the four slept their way through the night, all of them being woken by the sunlight for the next day.
Aiden got up when the rude maid barged inside his door. This time, she didn't bother wasting a word for him, she simply rolled her eyes and tossed a fresh set of uniform in his face.
"Lord Greyson ordered you to join them for breakfast," she said before slamming the door closed.
"That father of yours," Riven said. "Wants you to join them for breakfast."
"Great!" Caelum said. "He's the viscount, right? That means he has some potent cultivation. If he slaps you himself, who knows what spells you can bust out."
Aiden nodded his head, genuinely considering the idea.
"Wait," Lucius wondered. "I'm sure he'd beaten you up before. Did you also feel a tingling sensation coursing through your veins then?"
Aiden shook his head. "I don't know. He always hit my hands with a stick when he taught me stuff when I was younger." he said, "Other than getting hit by a stick or being starved to death, he never laid a hand on me."
"Well," Riven said while looking at the sunlight seeping through the windows. "Would you look at this sunshine? What a great day to get slapped by your father for the first time, right?"
Aiden groaned. "I was right to savor the rare kindness from yesterday."
When Aiden had finished dressing himself up, he took one glance at himself with the broken mirror in his room. For a second, his eyebrows furrowed. The three wisps beside him also noticing the oddity in him.
"Bastardsson..." Lucius mumbled, "Your bruises..."
"They're all gone." Caelum continued, disbelief apparent in his tone.
Aiden's jaw locked in place, the anomaly also taking him by surprise. None of the bruises he had from yesterday's scuffle was in sight, even his busted lip was completely healed.
"Can you heal yourself?" Riven asked him, and he shook his head.
"No." he said, "This is new to me, too. All my bruises usually disappear after a day or two. But never after a few hours."
The three wisps gleamed the same color of blue, their thoughts mirroring each other's.
"Riven..." Caelum faced Riven. "Did you do this?"
Riven bobbed himself from left to right.
"Maybe. But not consciously."
Aiden wondered what the three was rambling on, about to ask for an explanation before a knock interrupted their wonders. The chauffeur who called Aiden yesterday, whom he also ignored, greeted him with a plain expression.
"It's time for breakfast, Young Master," he said. "Don't make Lord Greyson wait again."
With that, the butler left.
"You should hurry before your father finishes eating," Caelum said. "You can't miss this opportunity to get slapped."
Aiden nodded and made his way down the sweeping staircase to the main dining room, where gilded chandeliers cast a warm glow over an elegantly set long table. The atmosphere felt bittersweet and nostalgic; the last time he dined here was a few years ago, before the woman who birthed him passed away, leaving him to descend into a deeper pit of suffering.
The long table could cater dozens of people, but there were only three plates prepared. Lord Greyson sat on the opposite end of the table, and Aiden sat on the other side. He could barely see the viscount from such a distance. Then, his so-called stepbrother arrived, taking the seat on Lord Greyson's right side. The scene painted a normal father-son dining together—with an outcast named Aiden sitting on the farthest side and an empty plate.
"This is bad..." Caelum said.
"You're feeling bad for him too?" Lucius asked him.
"No, they're way too far apart how is he gonna get slapped from that distance!" He replied.
Aiden took a quick glance at the wisps. Without any second thought, he pulled his chair , dragging it on the marbled floor for quite a distance before finally settling in on Lord Greyson's side without saying anything. He glanced at the wisps once again, with a subtle look of pride on his face.
"Problem solved," Aiden thought to himself. He increased the chances of getting slapped, and paved a closer access to the food.
Though he did startle the entire mansion from his maneuver—a few maids failed to supress their gasps. Lord Greyson himself looked stunned, and only his stepbrother kept a straight face after what he had done yesterday.
Lord Greyson cleared his throat, masking his surprise with a stern face. "I was told you had some mishaps at the academy yesterday..."
"Dean Martha, that snitch," Caelum sneered before turning to Aiden. "Seems like you're about to get punished for what happened yesterday."
Punished?
Aiden shrugged. That was old news to him.