Summary of Chapters 2-15

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Note: Chapters 2-15 set up the rest of the story, but they are a little dull. If you don't want to read the full thing (though I recommend reading the full thing), read this.

Also, if you do decide to read this, read chapter one first.

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After Jean arrives on the battlefield, a mysterious man named M takes him to his house, where he helps Jean recover from his injuries. Immediately after waking up and talking to M, M has to leave to take care of some business, and a bright light appears. It's a notice screen that tells him not to trust M. 

Whatever the thing providing the notice is, it appears to be just as discombobulated as Jean is. It claims to know little about itself and most of the world, but it does seem to have quite a few useful functions, such as reviewing his memories to reveal that M seems to have supernatural powers, namely magic, which he didn't disclose to Jean.

Through a conversation with it, Jean decides to not finish the job of killing himself for the time being because he wanted to know more about magic. Learning more about magic is only a distraction, but living for the sake of a distraction is better than living for nothing at all.

Then, it showed him his status, which is a videogame-like screen that Potestas, which is what it will ask to be called, can change as it wishes to suit Jean's needs. Jean also discovers that they are entirely intertwined. Potestas is inside Jean's head, so he doesn't need to click on anything or utter verbal commands to communicate with it.

But when he falls asleep again, he is tormented by dreams of two hells. The first is that of an alien city of iniquity ruled by a leviathan. Blood, sexual atrocities, hate, abuse, alcohol, and unrestrained pleasure flowed through each building. There were no homes, only people. It was more than an empire of sin and vice; it was a state of death. There was no life, only a facsimile of it. To live in the leviathan's city would be worse than death.

The second was a plain of Asmodeus that resembled a desert. Its heat and hurricane speed winds could kill, and when Jean looked upon the desert, he saw nothing but sand, at first, but loosely covered by thin layers were skeletons, millions of them. The heat and sand had baked off all the flesh from these corpses and was slowly wearing them down to nothing.

Many of the ribs were thin enough for a toddler to break, and the skulls had holes in them. The toes and fingers had been lost or worn away, and many of the limb bones were loose, scattered throughout the wasteland. As a femur flew past him, understanding hit him. There was no sand here, only bones. Many of them had been slowly crushed into so many tiny shards that they resembled grains of sand, but it was still only a field of bone.

After the second hell disappeared, a void encapsulated him, and with nothing to do, his mind turned to the hells he saw. They were both extremely different from one another, but they both epitomized a different facet of the same harrowing diamond. He saw the hell of pain and desolation and the hell of iniquity. He didn't know the name of the diamond the hells described, but he knew that he wouldn't want to know.

Inexplicably, a sense of longing for the second hell appeared, but it did not appear because he adored physical agony; he simply knew it would be better for him to be there than where he was. Not in the void or first hell, but where he was now. When he realized this, he awoke to the now he wished to escape, and the void gave way to the light of wakefulness.

Jean had been screaming while he slept, for excellent reason, so M's face appeared above him as soon as he woke up. Out of Potestas' warnings and his own caution, Jean tried to lie to M about why he was screaming, his memories, who he really was, and more. 

However, M found out very quickly and hoisted him up into the air by his neck before a slow growl emanated from M's neck, "I. HATE. Liars. Do you understand?" With that, Jean decided to fully cooperate and wouldn't lie to M again, so he came clean and told M all he knew, which wasn't much.

However, M was also trying to play his cards close to his chest and chose to lie to Jean as well. M is a man of morals but isn't legalist. He knew what the Great Good was and how to pursue it. M then revealed that every time somebody comes to them from another world, a disaster appears. He wouldn't kill him, but maybe he should.

A minute went by as the two of them pondered the situation. "What do you think we should do now," Jean asked.

"Well, we could do a lot of things, but it ultimately depends on what you want to do. You have the chance to create an entirely new life how you want, but it almost seems like you don't want that, which is an issue."

Jean felt a slight indignance at that last part but held himself back. "I want to learn."

"Learn? Learn what? What for if you don't want to use it for something?"

"Don't worry about that. I just want to know things. Magic, in particular, is of extreme interest to me because it's something that's been romanticized intensely in my past world. I know almost nothing about it, so I'd love to learn just about anything."

"...Alright, I can teach you." Jean smiled brightly. "But in exchange, I want to know more about your past world and what made you want to leave it."

M also insisted on teaching him their language, Asc, first, as he had been using a translator spell up until that point, but Jean wouldn't be able to use the spell for a while, and M wouldn't always be there to translate.

M then left the room so Jean could get dressed, saying, "I would normally invite you to my study so that we can get started, but I'd like you to be clothed before you trot out in front of my wife and daughter."

Jean and Potestas were stuck in conversation as they considered a few things before M called Jean out of the room, and a string of words slipped into the chat screen before it closed. 'Call me Potestas,' it read. A weird look came across Jean's face. He didn't know it was so egotistical, choosing the Latin word for dominion, authority, and control.

After studying basic phonetics for a time, Yun, M's wife, called them out for dinner, where M introduced Jean to his family and his family to Jean, which consisted of his wife Yun, his daughter Lin, and his sons, Gao, Zhang, Li, and Huang.

Gao and Zhang had a friendly spar after dinner before M invited Jean back inside to continue their tutelage. After, Jean and Potestas had another conversation, where Potestas revealed that he required spirits to make Jean grow more powerful, saying, 'I do not require souls, mind you, but spirits, which can be harvested when the body and soul separate.'

'What is a spirit, then, if it is not a part of the soul?'

'If your soul (which is you) is like a fetus, then the womb is your body, and the spirit is the placenta. The spirit connects the body to the soul and enables the transfer of necessities between the two, particularly information. This is necessary because the soul determines what choice is made, but the body's brain performs the calculations, makes the necessary judgments, and presents the choice to you.'

Jean scowled, in a foul mood. 'So, I have the path to eventual omnipotence, but I have to perform human sacrifices to use it? I have to be a murderer?'

'No, you need spirits, which come from death. Nobody said that the spirit had to be human or that you had be the one to kill it. You could work as a butcher in a market and slowly grow stronger over massive periods of time, if you wanted, but if you truly desire for something more, then you won't do that. Human spirits are far more potent than others because the intelligence of a human requires a healthier spirit to transmit the information.'

'Hah! I don't desire for something more. I don't care. I might do something for more intelligence so that I can explore whatever I want intellectually, but I truly don't care enough about anything else to kill anything, much less a human.'

After, Jean slipped into a slumber, where he had a dream about a third hell. This one was far more powerful than the other two and scarred Jean. It was the domain of wrath. The other two hells were also hells of wrath, but they represented either the past or future of wrath, whereas the present of wrath, which is its domain, is complete and unadulterated. 

The hell of pain and desolation is the future of wrath, as pain and desolation is the result of wrath. On the other hand, the past of wrath, which is to say its source, was the hell of iniquity. Iniquity is the source of wrath and its past. 

The present of a sin is its domain and its strongest form, and wrath's domain had such a profound impact on Jean that he lashed out, acted violently, and screamed for four days, during which time, M had to make sure that Jean didn't die because of his own violence. Jean even destroyed his own skull, which M had to heal.

When Jean appeared in the hell, his mind twisted and was transformed. A body formed around his soul, and a new spirit manifested to connect the two.

His body and spirit formed specifically to express rage that was not his by killing those he didn't know. It was senseless, vast, and blinding. A mushy field of human remains spread before him, miles and miles in all directions, with a dark sky of smoke and oblivion above him.

Massive behemoths waded through the rotting and burning remains to kill, maim, and mar one another, their bodies masses of blood and gore, with facsimiles of mouths roaring blind challenges to one another and the world as their bodies worked to end each other, to empty their rage, before they themselves were ended.

Jean was smaller than these behemoths, but his fists still ripped apart the flesh in front of him when he struck. He struck over and over again at whatever appeared in front of him; he battered whatever faced him; he clawed and used his nails to carve away at flesh; he took mouthfuls of blood from the others and screamed incomprehensibly as pain destroyed him; flames adorned his body as he burned alive in the chaos.

The ground beneath Jean grasped at him as corpses clawed at his feet and legs to empty themselves of their own rage. He worked his hands away to stubs. His feet could no longer support him as his Achilles was rent in half by a claw from the ground; the chaos around him took his head, and a skull sent flying from a behemoth's battle took his left breast.

But nothing would ever stand before such enmity. Even health, reason, logic, and death itself would relent, and his body reformed itself from nothing so that it could fight. Muscles wound themselves around half-formed bones, and sinew sprung from his skin to connect it.

From nothing, a new victim was formed as a fresh soul arrived, and a new spirit and body were molded to fit it in front of Jean. The image of an innocent young teen appeared in the midst of abominations, and it was cut down without mercy before it unleashed its own anger and was transformed into just another part of the hell.

Its body joined the fray and cut and killed and destroyed, and when it did, it became only another body in this spectacle of unending destruction.

The massacre went on with no end in sight for days before Jean encountered a behemoth himself. As he approached, his fists flew after a leg with the same diameter as his torso but found no purchase, so he bit the leg's exposed bone, but it was as hard as iron. His teeth were lost, some destroying his gums and being lodged in his skull and the roof of his mouth before others replaced them and he tried again.

But it had no effect, so he switched back and drew his fist behind him before it impacted the bone again and was destroyed. He pummeled it, but more damage was dealt to him than the giant, as fleshless fingers flew out and were discarded and lost. His hand bones splayed out in four directions before reforming moments later, only for them to be mangled again. 

Less than a second passed between each hit, but nothing happened to it despite Jean's manic fervor. But when it raised its foot, Jean was dwarfed by it, and when it stepped down on him, he was thrown down through layers and layers of bodies as bones pierced his neck, face, and body. His arms and legs were lost somewhere above him as he lay at the bottom of a pit before being covered in an avalanche of gore as the behemoth's foot lifted up.

And there he lay until the same void as before, that expression of nothing, appeared in front of Jean. After realizing what this hell was, he awoke to face M's rage. He had to go four days without sleep to ensure his safety, after all.

However, M calmed himself down quickly, and although Potestas was panicking and urging Jean repeatedly to cover whatever information he could about the hells because they didn't know anything about their nature and whether dreaming about them was normal or not, Jean came clean and told M everything he knew about his dreams, which wasn't much.

M tried to play his cards close to his chest again, but he relented and gave in to his desire to tell the truth and told Jean everything he knew about it, too, which also wasn't much. In the end, they learned that the diamond, which M knew as the abyss, had seven regions of three hells, respectively representing the past, present, and future of their aspect, with a domain that represented the present at the head of each set of three.

M had also been researching the abyss before this and promised that he would try to search for a way to rid Jean of these nightmares. M then also revealed that his home was in an uninhabited forest near a coast. The Royal Hegemony was to their northeast, and Vespucc was to their southeast.

They were at war, and Vespucc had a unit of elites dedicated to hunting down individuals from other worlds like Jean. For this reason, Jean would have to learn magic before M let him leave for two reasons: self-defense and so that M could keep tabs on him.

M couldn't let a potential disaster leave just because he didn't want to kill him and for the sake of his personal research. He could be dooming thousands of lives. So, he decided that Jean had to learn to carry what is effectively a duplicate of his consciousness with him that would report back to him, and that would require magical skill to sustain.

After their conversation, M let Jean come up out of the lab and cleared things up with his family. They were more guarded against him than before, but that was understandable. The next day, M began to teach him magic and continued teaching him Asc.

The next week, he could hold unsteady conversations with the others, and through that, they began to bond. He hit it off with the sons almost immediately, and over time, M's family became his own. He was like an honorary or adoptive son to them.

He had never had a real family before that. The one he had on Earth had been... broken. It was only him and his parents, but neither of his parents were ever really there. Not for him, at least. 

His father was dead, and his mother was too immature to do anything for him. It was not that she couldn't do anything but that she never looked past her other desires. Before his father died, they had been married. But when they had Jean, his mother immediately divorced him and sued for child support.

But after his father died, her money dried up. She tried to con another man the same way, but nobody would marry her because she had Jean already, so she took it out on him by physically and verbally destroying him. And when he cried, she cussed at him until he stopped. There was never any remorse in her eyes for anything she did.

When her attempts at finding someone else to pay for her spoiled habits failed, she turned to social media to try to gain a following, but her narcissistic personality and ungrateful attitude showed through the screen and drove away the few people she could find to give her money.

Eventually, when everything was gone, she whored herself out to whoever would pay to avoid the responsibility of a regular job. She always drank a little, but after that point, it grew worse and worse until sobriety was a rarity. Then, when that wasn't enough, she got high. She fell further and further into self-destruction until she overdosed when Jean was 17.

He cried at her funeral but not because he missed or ever loved her. He cried because he yearned for the parents he never had; he yearned for the mother she could have been and because she separated him from the only one he felt ever loved him, his father. She separated them however she could because she wanted to feel control, and this was the best she could do to control others, to make his father beg to see Jean, only to do everything she could to deny him.

She used Jean as an excuse to get his father to give her money, but she used it all for herself. It was all spent on vanity and fun, while Jean was an accessory to her glamor. He was her genius son she raised all by herself. She raised a prodigy all by her lonesome! She was the best mother among all her friends! She was always the best everywhere she had ever been!

No, she wasn't. Intelligence is almost entirely genetic, and while social circumstances, such as how one was raised, schooling, and more can influence it, it primarily influences the knowledge one has, not their intellect. Geniuses are not primarily the product of their parents' efforts, but their potential. 

Great individuals must be both made and born. After they are born with workable potential, they must make themselves into someone worthy of greatness. Others can help, but the bulk of the effort must be their own. Jean was born to be great, but he never was. He amassed knowledge for himself but only for himself. Without knowing it, he fit the self-serving shoes of his mother perfectly.

In the end, all his education and personal achievements were wasted when he died. Or it would have been wasted if that had been the end. Here, he had a second chance to make proper use of his given tools. But just because a person has a second chance does not mean that they will make anything of it.

Gradually, being with this new family, Jean was healing. He began to laugh with them, participate in their games, began training with the boys physically, advanced by leaps and bounds magically, and started to learn more about the world.

Eventually, he began to think that staying here forever wouldn't be so bad. It was a heaven, and he understood why M loved his family so much. They were the music of life. They drew spiritual sustenance from one another's very presence. They were rough on one another, but familial love still abounded between them.

But one day, M announced that he would be leaving the next day to the University to pick up some materials and find some information that he'd been meaning to find for a while. 

Soon after he left, though, Jean began to rifle through his office to sate his curiosity about the state of the world and the family's business dealings. But while he was doing that, Lin, M's daughter, found him. Instead of ratting him out or yelling at him, though, she sat on the same chair he did, nearly on top of him, and showed him how to find out what they were doing using M's system of coded files.

After that, she showed him a wooden box the size of a large jewelry box. Inside were rows of neatly stacked letters, going from front to back. They were her parents' love letters. Through them, she told Jean the story of how her parents got to be married to one another and a small part of their pasts.

Lin told him that they were both great individuals worthy of respect, though they both had flaws and were ultimately human. However, they made sure that their flaws were no longer a part of who they were, regardless of if they may have been. They were stories of a kind of redemption. 

Jean agreed with Lin's assessment of it, saying "They do seem like they've earned the respect they have. Shame your father was such a coward at first, though."

"It's more than just a shame, but yeah. Unlike him, though, I know how to get what I want," she said as she leaned into him a bit. 

Over the course of the next week, Lin and Jean spent time together every day. He taught her a small bit of magic, but most of it went over her head. She learned very slowly, relative to Jean, so teaching her was a little frustrating sometimes, but he bore through it so that he could see her face light up every time she finally understood something and managed to actually make something glow, explode, change shape, or do anything, really.

Halfway through the second week, only Yun, Jean, and Lin were home. The boys trusted Jean enough to leave on their father's orders to gather certain materials for him, and the other two were more than comfortable around him. 

In the afternoon, after dinner, Jean was sitting in the open air on a cushioned couch on the porch behind the house. The front of the house was surrounded by forest, but the back opened to a lake, which the sun reflected off in incandescent shows of glamor. He was studying some of M's notes on voids.

He felt it had some relation to the void he used to see when he saw the hells, but he couldn't understand the notes. He'd have to ask M when he came back. He wanted to try to increase his attributes to help him understand, but his status looked almost entirely the same as it had before the third hell, and he wasn't willing to kill for it. 

He tried visiting the property's slaughterhouse to find some lingering spirits, but it was hardly helpful. Each spirit there was worth significantly less than a point of experience, and there wasn't enough to amount to anything worth mention.

There, Lin approached him from behind before sitting right next to him and asked him what he was reading, to which he replied honestly. Then, they settled into a slightly tense silence as Jean tried to read as much as he could, afraid that he would make it awkward if he looked at her directly, and she studied the side of his face. She was distracting him, so it was more than a little hard for him to read, but he tried for several minutes regardless.

Slowly, she started, "Jean..." She paused.

"Yeah?"

She leaned against him and said, "Jean... Jean, I like you. I like you a lot. I wasn't sure at first because you were so strange and I wasn't sure how to take you, and how you screamed at night, it was terrifying, and I thought you were dangerous, but I know how I really feel now. You're funny, and smart, and handsome, and I—I want to be with you. Is.. Is that ok?" She shook and nearly broke under the pressure.

He paused for a moment, stunned, before responding, "Y—Yeah, yeah, that's more than ok." He wanted to reciprocate her feelings but hadn't said that most important part. "But... what about your parents? And brothers? Are they ok with this? I don't want to face them down. We both know I'd fold in a second. I can't stand up to them."

"No, they'll be fine," she quickly assured him. "I told Gao about what I planned on doing before he left, and it took him a few minutes to think, but he said that he'd be fine with that as long as it didn't go too far. I also asked Mom, and she likes you, so she said it was fine, too. My family loves you, Jean, especially Dad. They're more than ok with it." An even greater untold profession lay in her heart. It was more than her family that loved him.

Jean inhaled and stayed silent for several seconds before letting the breath out and definitely replying, "I think it's more than ok that you like me. Honestly?" He paused again, considering his words and the consequences one last time. "I feel the same. I'd love to be with you"

Lin beamed, feeling relief flow through her body as she let out her shaky breath and suddenly hugged him from the side, burying her face below his arm. He grinned, too, and set the notes down before deftly rotating his body to put his back against the side of the couch and his feet up, with her still attached to him.

Slowly, he moved her to his front and wrapped his arms around her, one around her back and one around her waist. She moved to settle her head in the crook of his neck as he hugged her tight. They rested there for quite some time, perfectly content to just feel one another's body heat and hearts beating.

Jean's mind was still a mess, as he didn't know how things took such as sharp turn. He was glad they had, but he wasn't sure why they had. If it weren't for Lin's forwardness, he would have taken M's path and simply ignored his feelings until it was too late. Jean was still a coward at heart. He would never take the initiative. Never.