There are times in a man’s life when he realizes he has sufficient firepower to do the things that he wants. I had such a memorable moment on that day when it that came to me. All of my set pieces were arrayed around me.

  They were looking at me.

  I would tank.

  Or rather, I would provide the emphasis that we needed to tank. Our way back out of the city was going to require a lot of qi. I had a renewable source of dream aura that was in between myself and the team’s next objective. I kept packing the aura down.

  Look, I’m not going to lie. The position of “meat in a fist sandwich” flattered me. I was the point man. I was the muscle dude that flexed on our enemies before punching them through a wall.

  However, it was gonna be a long day if I was the main force behind us moving back-and-forth. I needed to draw in as much dream and nightmare aura as I could. In my mind, I was already thinking about how close I was to achieving the fifth realm. My core felt right; almost full. A few more of these guys would do it. There were only hundreds of them in front of me.

  As the reality of advancing again dawned upon me, mundane problems came to the fore.

  I wanted to rest. I wanted to eat something.

  I wanted to push forward.

  I didn’t know how long I would be incapacitated while I advanced. Not only was this fifth realm, but I didn’t know any fifth realm cultivators enough to ask.

  If I had to go super saiyen in the middle of nowhere with my guy supporting me?

  I could do it.

  I could not do closed door cultivation for a week.

  I barely had before we were overrun here.

  I’m not saying that I was going to deny myself. The pleasure of using these dreams and nightmares to fuel my cultivation, but I was thinking about the brief period of incapacitation between realms where I had to take a nice bath or shower to get rid of all the impurities that I had sweat out of my body.

  By this time, I thought I had been done removing impurities. There couldn’t be that much left.

  My core filled more and more with each blow. There was probably a good five pounds of sweat in there that I was about to lose just to get to where I needed to be. If it wasn’t for the aura replenishing and sustaining me, I would be in far more of a dire situation.

  Min was guarding me, keeping me on track. She felt stronger, drawing upon the lake of qi that my core had become.

  Our contract had evolved, or at least our relationship had. Where once she had done so much to undermine me, now she gently nudged the spirit beasts around, providing crowd control and watching my back.

  She wanted to advance as much as I did. I could feel her pushing. Where once her aura had felt like it was the ephemeral smoky thing that I couldn’t pin down, now she felt like a stone.

  You see what happens is when you’re a married man and you come back to your town. And it’s under siege by demons. You want to take your wife out with you? So what it had become a small procession turned into a larger line of refugees trying to follow us to safety. Because, when demons were being slayed left and right or steep spirit beasts were. Actively deterred from following us, refugees took notice. Internally displaced people of western jewel realize where the power was when they could feel me from blocks away.

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  They also could feel what I’d like to call my therapeutic touch.

  When you’re a therapist, you develop your bedside manner, as doctors call it. This means that you have to build up a report with somebody or you have to be affable, or you have to be kind and genial. Doesn’t mean you have to be nice; let me be precise, you do not have to be nice; you have to be kind.

  You have to care.

  Some of that was leaking out of my aura. I had fully unveiled my aura as I was ahead of our line of refugees. Moving East and south through the blocks and canals that divide the city up.

  The compound itself was doing fine at repellence therapy attacks. But if I had a train of thousands of people following me because I was in the hope of this poor doomed city, that I was gonna have some actual problems with management.

  With the word, the people there guarding.. Upon opening, I observed they had already begun accepting people. Hundreds rushed back into that large compound. In the urban center for safety. I couldn’t save everyone but the people that follow me because I am my aura?

  I can say those people, I could say that. And I’m on and I can save the whole city if my people would just keep moving.

  Good feelings were made better by seeing good friends helping each other. I was like to see the helpers in a situation like this where everything seemed dire and helpless. I wanted to be a helper but I knew I couldn’t do everything. Having friends with me meant I could do the most good. Bringing people here to safety? It was a side quest but it made me feel warm inside.

  I would take it.

  Any help.

  I could give to the city to make it right. Felt like the right thing to do, also potentially. This might end up with me being bothered less, which was exactly what I was going for.

  A man asked about boundaries after all. I can’t always be there for every little thing like a breach of a containment field that clearly was escalated by somebody wait too much time with their hands and a death wish.

  The worst part about this was that people still can’t follow me and my group after we didn’t We were still going East and there were a few blocks left but it was like they were all deciding to do exactly the wrong thing and exactly the wrong time. I couldn’t shoot them away because we were a safe spot and a sea of chaos, but it’s the same. But if all things if this hadn’t happened, then I would have told him to get the heck out and stay home. The problem I kept seeing repeatedly with the 3 star tall spirit piece that kept wrecking people’s homes indiscriminately. What kind of normal human do against their home?

  None of them could withstand that kind of pressure on its own, combined with the fact that many of these spears had auras

  These ores could be deadly in the wrong hands or close enough

  It was.

  Impossible for freedom to imagine how humanity had flourished here when it looked like they had been struggling against a foe that could easily destroy them. How this had ever become a place where people could live and go to school and raise children baffled me.

  But then again there were people that lived in new jersey so there had to be a way right

  There just had to be.

  We finally reach the edge of town comma hundreds of people once again following us as we left the relative safety of the urban environment and moved into the farming and forested areas outside. Now look. You can’t toss a stone in America without hitting an aid worker or someone that works in healthcare or charity. But in western jewel? There was no such industry.

  Most people here were strong, somewhere in the realm of a college athlete. That meant nothing against cosmic horrors just at the edge of my understanding.

  “The opening is here,” Lee said, pointing to the place where a stream of beasts and cold air was coming through. “Are we in the right spot?”

  His eyes flashed blue and then faint blue lines popped up. It was a sight like his daughter’s dream ability.

  She was next to him.

  Egiya paused, holding up a hand. A second series of blue lights joined the first ones. The lights streaked towards the opening and then banked to the right, a sharp turn. “They tried to trick us. The totem that they went after was no the one directly next to the opening. There are two?”

  Her father grunted. “There are two closer ones. This was deliberate. Only a few cultivators understand formations on this level.”

  It sounded like an inside job. “Well, shit.”

  “That narrows down the potential culprits. It has to be one of those people, doesn’t it?”

  He gave me the stare of a man who was deciding who of his friends had been an enemy all along. The poor dude’s world was being rocked to the core.