Dreadwolf, Lord of Runes

"W— Wait!" Ella exclaimed nervously. "If you leave it like this, I won't be forced to obey you anymore…"

Unsurprisingly, Kane nodded, "I know, but that's fine. I don't mind giving you a little wiggle room on my orders, so long as you're still unable to betray me. You're already stuck in my head, where are you gonna go?"

Once again, Ella's emotions were in turmoil She'd never expected to have her leash loosened too much, at least not so fast. It actually felt like a weight was lifted of her shoulders, and a chain wound around her soul had loosened. "I… T— Thank you," she muttered softly.

Kane chuckled softly at her reaction, "Don't thank me too much. It's basically just the illusion of choice, because I can slap the enforced obedience back on you whenever I like."

Ella nodded wryly in resignation, "I know… but it's still more than I expected, and more than you needed to do. So thank you."

Her emotional feed was overflowing with gratitude, making Kane smirk a little. What he did cost him very little, but he took a small gamble on Ella's personality, and figured she'd only become more loyal to him now.

And, based on her emotions, his gamble paid off.

With Ella revelling in her new semi-freedom, Kane focused on Aelia and the others. "Okay, continue," he told Aelia, wanting to hear more about their entry into this base. "I guess the entrance was already busted up like it is now?"

After testing the weight and strength of that coin-like door at the entrance, he knew there was no way anyone at the Core Awakening stage could have done that. And, as expected, Aelia nodded. She started moving towards the door on the other side of the room, followed by Kane and the others.

"Yeah, it was just a gaping hole," she continued explaining. "After it was uncovered, we moved everyone inside. and secured our captives in the fancy cages we found here. Since then, we've prevented our people from leaving while we tried to figure out a way to keep this place without the rest of Primaterra finding out."

Kane smiled a little smugly, "Well, your solution has arrived!" His Mark of Loyalty was naturally the perfect way to keep anyone from revealing its existence.

Aelia snorted, "Yeah, sure. Not the solution many would have preferred I'm sure, but here we are."

Suddenly, the ramling, Mira, spoke up with a sly grin, "Maybe so, but we weren't doing any better. Some of us were only a hair's breadth away from simply taking Ian's suggestion of killing everyone else and selling the location at an auction."

Aelia's face fell, but she didn't offer any rebuttal. Instead, she opened the door in the back and allowed everyone to enter. Here, they found what looked like a smaller scale replica of the previous room, with one glaring difference: the cylinder in the middle was filled with a strange, green, flashing storm of energy.

Kane and Luna looked up at the cylinder with shocked fascination, while Ella sounded shocked in his head. "That… That's pure aether!" she exclaimed.

Kane raised an eyebrow without taking his gaze off the spectacle in front of them, "Aether?"

Ella nodded frantically, "It's what most worlds call the Mystic energy we use to fight and become stronger! I'm not surprised you have a different name for it, since your world still has only had limited contact with others."

Kane nodded thoughtfully. Most people on Earth just called that power Mystic energy, or sometimes mana. Meanwhile, he was surprised to find Ella's shock and surprise was underscored with anger and sadness.

Ella continued, now sounding a little bitter, "Nor am I surprised you haven't seen aether in its pure form yet. On Alfheim we've only just started experimenting with harnessing that power, but we've only met with failure and destruction so far…"

"Destruction?" he asked, obviously wanting to know more about whatever was upsetting Ella like this.

"I… Can we talk about that another time?" she asked him, with a hint of pleading, clearly not ready to discuss this.

Kane just nodded calmly, it's not like he cared that much.

Anna walked up next to him, eyes sparkling with awed excitement. "Awesome, isn't it?!" she exclaimed. "What I wouldn't give to find out how the immortals built something like this!"

'Immortals…' Erik muttered inwardly. 'I need to remember to look into the history of this world.'

But first, he had other priorities. "How does it generate energy?" he asked, frowning. "Can it just run indefinitely like that?"

Unfortunately, Anna shook her head. "It's not generated at all. We charged this machine with those Aurum crystals over there," she explained, while pointing to a heap of white, somewhat transparent crystals on the side.

Instantly, Ella exclaimed in Kane's head once again, this time possibly even more shocked, "Aether stones?!"

Kane sighed at what was clearly another surprising revelation for the woman in his head. "Okay… what are aether stones, and why are we surprised to find them here?" he asked Ella, with a hint of exasperation.

"I…" Ella began but fell back into shocked silence. She was clearly completely thrown off guard by this revelation. "Aether stones are essentially just stones filled with pure aether," she finally explained.

"But I'm starting to question everything I know about other worlds…" she muttered wryly. "Honestly, you need to get confirmation about this from Lady Mána, but I was under the impression that aether stones don't form on planets before the fourth phase!"

Kane furrowed his brows into a concerned frown, "Are you saying this is not a second phase world like Mána promised?"

He'd been feeling confident about his and Luna's future, because fourth stage was supposed to be the maximum attainable on this world, but if that wasn't the case, then he really needed to adjust his plans.

"I…" Ella stuttered, but then quickly shook her mental head in denial, "N— No. All I'm saying is that those are aether stones, and that I was under the impression they don't form on worlds below the fourth phase. I won't discount the possibility I'm simply wrong about that last part, or that there's something entirely different going on."

But Kane's frown didn't leave his forehead, because he knew that these things didn't exist on Earth, which was supposedly a third phase world. Meanwhile, the women around him were all looking at him with surprise at his concerned reaction.

"Master? Is everything alright?" Luna asked him telepathically, with a hint of worry.

"Yeah, it's fine…" Kane groaned back while rubbing the bridge of his nose. "But I really need to have a conversation with Mána again."

Unfortunately, contacting Mána was not as easy as simply talking telepathically with Luna and Ella. He needed to meditate and enter his soul world to do so.

So, for now, he shook his head. "But first things first," he said with determination, before turning to a curious Anna. "How do we turn the power back on?"