Monk Chen quickly surveyed the area and realized that flowers of different kinds now covered the whole clearing where fire once blazed in the insignia of sage Enduring Blossoms
“What are spacing out for? Come and carry the child, we are leaving.”
The boy lay face down at the epicentre of the bed of flowers while sage Enduring Blossoms stood by the side, the monk looked between the boy and the sage and back to the boy.
“What?” The sage asked
“Is he safe to carry?” Monk Chen asked sheepishly, to his aether vision the boy was literally glowing, with the amount of the sage’s aether within his body.
“Of course he is safe to pick up, I won’t have asked you otherwise” The sage rolled her eyes
The monk looked like he wanted to protest so more but sage Enduring Blossoms continued
“Is this not better? The others won’t give you too much trouble when they feel my aether on the boy”
The monk didn’t protest again, going up to pick the boy in a princess carry, if the boy was bothered he wasn’t awake enough to notice or to make known his grievance.
“Tell me if something is really bothering you” the sage asked noticing the feel of the silence.
“Forgive me, sage. I am confused on something you said.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Okay?”
“If you have sealed the boy’s body from his aether spirit and his aether cores, how will he absorb aether to grow his third, fourth or fifth cores that you will then need to unseal?”
“O.... I can see how that can be confusing. To explain this I have to draw from the history of the disease. The Pale king.... this is an abridged version of the story to save time. The Pale king was know then as ‘dragon king’ one of a few active in our world at the time. As well as being a dragon king, he was also a healer, a sage doctor. That is where the physician in his title comes from. And as most physicians were wrought to do in that time period, he was an experimenter and cataloguer of flesh. One of the greatest contributors to modern medicine. Until he did something ‘beyond the pale’ according to the stories. He experimented on dragon hatchling. Dragons, he found out, were one of a few species that gave birth to their young with an aether spirit already. So while humans have to adapt to the aether over years to get an aether spirit, a dragon is born with one. While having an aether spirit early on provided a huge number of benefits, he theorized it was also responsible for their low birth and slow growth rate. So, he tried to create a new race of hybrid dragons and his first attempt was with humans. Well, he somewhat succeeded -if you can call a population of seven people at risk of losing their minds, a new race- but the cost was near total extinction. So in rage the dragon kings of that time banded together and wiped him out, him and his creations. That is the history, now back to your question, it has been asked in the years since the first evidence of its reoccurring, if the dragons joined to the diseased are new dragons somehow grown with their human counterparts in the womb by some genetic or aetheric disposition. Or, if the dragons are those original seven -one for each major specie of dragons- somehow resurrecting in new hosts. Here is what we know, there can only be seven diseased in the world at any one time and this particular one was able to reconstruct all the cores needed from tier four to tier six and almost tier seven. Granted, this has never happened before so it might be a coincidence but what do you think?”
