Eric reached for his umbrella, unhurried, and popped it open before settling it against his right shoulder, both hands wrapping loosely around the handle. From a distance, the effect was almost theatrical, elegant in a way that drew eyes without meaning to. Before he turned to leave, he murmured something low under his breath, and the quiet zone he'd raised around their table dissolved back into the ordinary noise of the café.
"Come on," he said, glancing at Adrian. "Let's walk."
They set off down the footpath together, and neither of them looked back.
For the next ten minutes they wound through block after block, turning corners without any obvious pattern, Eric steering the conversation deliberately away from anything that might have sounded strange to anyone listening in. Adrian, for his part, played along without needing to be told twice, though the effort of pretending everything was fine sat visibly tense in his shoulders the whole time.
Eric felt the moment it finally happened, that faint, persistent pressure at his back lifting all at once, gone as suddenly as it had arrived. Whoever had been watching them had broken off and, from the sudden absence rather than any visible departure, most likely teleported away entirely.
He let out a slow breath and allowed his shoulders to ease slightly.
Around them, the street had already returned to its ordinary rhythm, people talking, walking, entirely unaware that anything unusual had just happened a few feet away from them. Adrian's heart was still hammering, adrenaline refusing to fully drain out of his system even now that the danger, whatever it had been, was gone. It was frightening. It was also, in some strange, guilty way, thrilling.
"Who was that?" Adrian asked, a bead of sweat tracking down his temple.
"Someone following us. That's all I can say for certain. I don't know who, but we're safe for the moment."
Eric turned to him with an easy smile, and something about the warmth in it settled Adrian's nerves almost immediately, despite everything.
"So," Eric continued, as though nothing at all had just happened, "you had questions. Go ahead, ask."
Adrian blinked, caught off guard by the whiplash. "Wait, seriously? We just got followed. By something. Aren't we going to talk about that?"
"There's nothing more to say about it right now."
"What if they're still nearby? What if they're just hiding?"
"They aren't."
Adrian stared at him, half convinced the man might actually be a little unhinged. Eric said it with such total, unbothered certainty that arguing further felt pointless, though Adrian couldn't shake the feeling that he was missing something.
What he didn't know, and had no way of knowing, was that Eric had already sent one of Uriel's kin, a Lysi Nova-ranked Angel Spirit drawn from the earring in his pocket, to investigate the moment he'd sensed the gaze on them. The Angel had chased their follower down long enough to spook them into fleeing, and its report had come back clean enough. Auri Nova, maybe low Nova at best. No immediate threat. For now.
Adrian shook off his unease and pulled his thoughts back to something that had been nagging at him since the café. "Right, um, okay. You said resources need to get absorbed to advance ranks, but where do they actually come from? It can't just be regular stuff lying around Earth; that seems way too easy. So either there's some special place they grow, or you're getting them off monsters, except as far as I know there aren't any actual monsters walking around."
Eric huffed a short laugh, lifting a hand briefly to his mouth before settling it back on the umbrella's handle. "Sharp. You're not wrong on either count. No magical growing fields, no monsters hunting resources out of the ground. So where does someone like me actually get them?"
He glanced down at Adrian, something faintly amused in his expression. "There are two main ways. First, interstellar merchants. They travel between planets trading resources, sometimes even ordinary goods, to whoever's buying, Aura users and normal people alike. They keep themselves well hidden, but if you actually need to trade, they're never that hard to find. You can even put in a request and have one sent your way."
"And the second way?"
Eric's smile didn't waver, though something underneath his tone shifted, quieter now, more deliberate than before. "The second way is easier to show you than explain. As it happens, it's the same place I already mentioned."
He stepped closer to Adrian and rested his left hand on his shoulder. A faint warmth spread from the contact almost immediately, and Adrian glanced down just in time to see a thin trace of gold light slip from Eric's palm and sink beneath his own skin, gone before he could really process what he'd just seen.
"Just focus," Eric said. "Don't fight it."
Adrian nodded, though he had no idea what exactly he was supposed to be focusing on. He didn't ask. Somewhere over the last hour, he'd apparently stopped being the type of person who asked before following instructions like this, and that thought alone was unsettling enough without adding anything else to it.
Eric took a step forward. Adrian matched it automatically.
The world lurched sideways.
It felt like stepping into water that wasn't quite water, some invisible resistance pressing against his whole body at once, distorting everything around him into wavering, formless shapes. His stomach twisted violently, and he squeezed his eyes shut on instinct, too disoriented to trust anything he was seeing. He kept them closed until a voice finally reached him, familiar in shape but wrong in tone, colder, flatter, missing whatever warmth had lived in it before.
He opened his eyes.
The first thing that hit him was the noise. Voices overlapping in a dozen languages at once, some of them not sounding like language at all, more like clicks and low humming tones that somehow still carried meaning he could almost grasp. Hundreds of figures moved around him in every direction, most hooded, faces kept deliberately hidden, though plenty didn't bother hiding anything at all. He caught sight of skin in colors that had no business existing: deep blue, mottled green, a burnt orange-red; some figures with four arms folded neatly against their sides, others with gills fluttering faintly along their necks with every breath.
Above him stretched a ceiling that shouldn't have made sense and somehow did anyway, a tangled mess of exposed metal piping bolted alongside sheets of what looked, absurdly, like ordinary cardboard, patched together into something that held despite every reason it shouldn't. Lamps hung at irregular intervals along it, casting warm, uneven pools of light across narrow rows of stalls beneath. Vendors called out prices for things Adrian didn't have names for, plants that pulsed faintly with their own inner light, fish suspended in floating orbs of water, bolts of cloth that shimmered and shifted color depending on the angle he looked at them from.
He turned in a slow circle, trying and failing to take in all of it at once, his mind simply refusing to file any of it under something familiar.
"This isn't real," he murmured, mostly to himself. "This can't be real, this is—"
"Hey. Look over here."
Adrian turned toward the voice, grateful, at least, that the hand on his shoulder hadn't moved, some small, steady point of contact in the middle of everything spinning around him. He looked up, already bracing himself for the familiar warmth of Mike's bright blue eyes.
What he found instead stopped him cold.
The man standing beside him was still handsome, unmistakably so, but every single feature had changed. Pink hair, pulled back into a neat ponytail. Eyes that didn't match each other, the left one a sharp, vivid pink that matched his hair exactly, the right a softer, dustier rose. There was no smile anywhere on his face. His eyes carried none of the warmth Adrian had spent the last hour practically bathing in, flat and cold instead, distant in a way that made something instinctive in Adrian's chest recoil.
He stared, and stared, and couldn't make his mouth work for several long seconds.
"Wh—" His voice cracked. He tried again. "Who are you? Where's Mike? What did you do with him?"
His whole body had gone rigid, some deep, animal part of him screaming to run, to put distance between himself and this stranger immediately, except the hand still resting on his shoulder held firm, and his legs, traitorously, refused to move at all.
The stranger's mouth curved slightly, something faintly amused flickering behind those mismatched eyes as he finally released Adrian's shoulder.
"My name is Eric Heisenberg." His voice was steady, almost gentle despite its coldness. "Mike Jackson was never real. He was just a persona, a face I built using a relic. In this place, nothing works except Rank 0 relics, which means what you're looking at right now is simply me. My actual face." He tilted his head slightly, studying Adrian's reaction with something close to curiosity.
"Notice anything else?"
Adrian turned the question over, searching his own head for whatever "else" he was supposed to have noticed. The charm was gone, obviously. That warm, magnetic pull he'd been drowning in for the past hour had vanished the instant this stranger's face had replaced Mike's. But that wasn't quite it either. Something underneath that felt colder, harder to name.
Then it hit him, and his stomach dropped straight through the floor.
He'd told this man everything. His home life. His loneliness. Details about his family he hadn't spoken aloud to anyone, not even to the one person who bothered talking to him at school. He'd handed all of it over freely, easily, to someone he'd met less than two hours ago, without a single flicker of hesitation.
He hadn't questioned any of it. Not once. Not even now, standing in the middle of an alien marketplace with a total stranger wearing an unfamiliar face, some part of him was still leaning toward trust rather than away from it.
Why do I still want to believe him?
"You figured it out," Eric said, and there was something almost approving buried beneath the frost in his voice, though it did nothing to soften how it landed. "Fast, for someone who only woke up a few hours ago."
"Which pathway," Adrian managed, his voice thinner than he wanted it to be, "makes something like that?"
"The Deceiver Pathway," Eric said it plainly, without inflection, as though naming a street or a shop. "You've already felt what it can do, and that was just a relic, a fraction of what a real user of that pathway could manage on their own. Keep that in mind every time you meet someone new from here on."
Adrian swallowed hard, his throat working around nothing. Somewhere in the market's endless noise, a bell rang once, thin and distant, and it seemed to swallow itself into silence a beat too fast.
He hadn't just been tricked. He'd been rewritten, quietly, invisibly, some deeper layer of himself reshaped without his ever noticing it happening. If a low-ranked relic could do that much, what did that mean for the real thing? What did it mean that he might never fully know, the next time it happened, whether his own trust in someone was actually his?
The thought settled into him like something cold pressed flat against the back of his neck. This world wasn't just dangerous. It could unmake you from the inside and leave you thanking it for the privilege.
Eric didn't wait for him to finish processing. A thin strand of pink light unspooled from his palm, humming faintly as it wove itself into shape, and before Adrian fully understood what was happening, one end had looped snugly around his own wrist, the other vanishing into Eric's closed fist.
"So you don't wander off," Eric said, already turning away.
He reached up, unclasped the small silver cross from his ear, and slid it into an inner pocket without ceremony, his gaze sweeping once, slow and deliberate, across the crowd pressing in around them. Whatever he was looking for, he apparently didn't find it.
"Stay close," he said, and started walking, pulling Adrian forward by the thread now tethering them together, deeper into the shifting, murmuring dark of the market.
"Every Aura user has a primary Aura," Eric said, not slowing his pace even slightly. "That's the one you naturally awaken with. Yours is Destruction."
"Right," Adrian said, already slightly out of breath, trying to match his stride. "Got that part."
"You can gain additional primary Auras later, through various means. Each one's unique. No two people anywhere in existence share the same one."
"Okay—"
"Secondary Auras are different. Only two have ever existed since the universe began. One's called Meditation Aura, sometimes Survival Aura. Every Aura user can eventually awaken it through training. Grants a broad set of abilities, echoes of powers from other pathways."
"Wait, so I could—"
"The other's called Plasma Aura, though the method to awaken it is kept locked away by the head of the Hoshina Family, so realistically, nobody outside a handful of people actually has it."
"Who's the Hoshina—"
"This place we're standing in exists in a separate dimension, one connected to every Meditation Aura user in existence. Formed sometime during the Dystopian Era, founder unknown. It's grown into something between a marketplace and a home for a lot of people since."
Adrian gave up trying to interject and just let the words wash over him, nodding along despite understanding maybe one word in five at this point.
"This is only a fragment of one layer, by the way," Eric added. "There are effectively infinite layers total. Only a hundred and eight have been fully mapped so far."
A hundred and eight, Adrian thought numbly. Cool. Normal. Totally digestible information.
"Only Meditation Aura users can enter at all. You're only here because you're freshly awakened; the Realm barely registered you, which let me bring you through without resistance."
Somewhere behind Adrian's eyes, an image formed of his own brain as a small, overwhelmed filing cabinet, drawers flying open one after another, papers labeled Hoshina Family and Secondary Aura and 108 Layers spilling out onto the floor faster than anyone could file them properly.
He barely had time to process any of it before his shoulder collided hard with something warm, damp, and extremely not human.
"Oof, sor—"
He looked up.
A pair of enormous, glassy eyes stared back down at him, set into a head that bulged unnervingly above a mouth ringed with eight fleshy, writhing tentacles where lips should have been, each one lined with small, glinting teeth. The smell hit him half a second later, something between low tide and spoiled milk, thick enough that Adrian's whole body locked up on reflex.
"Nope," Adrian whispered, frozen solid. "Nope, nope, nope, I would like to go home now, please, this was a mistake, I take it all back, I don't want powers anymore, I just want to be a normal boring human being who has never met an octopus with teeth—"
Eric's hand shot out without even glancing over, closing firmly around the creature's shoulder. He fixed it with a flat, unimpressed stare.
The octopus-thing froze, some primal terror flickering behind its enormous eyes, and then shuffled backward and around them without another sound, vanishing quickly into the crowd like it had somewhere very urgent to be.
Adrian let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, his heart still hammering somewhere up near his throat.
"Um." He turned to Eric, wide-eyed. "Mr. Eric. Sir. Why did the octopus man just... nope out of existence like that?"
"Just Eric," he said, not breaking stride. "And that was Aura pressure. Everyone leaks a little of their Aura constantly; it's how you can gauge someone's rank without even fighting them. Push harder, and you can make that leak felt as actual pressure. How much depends on your control, and your rank sets the ceiling. That Octofi was an Auri Nova, decent control, here shopping for resources like everyone else. He could have thrown down, technically, but the gap between our ranks isn't something a fight would've fixed in his favor. It was simply much smarter to walk away than engage."
Adrian's eyes lit up. "Oh! Like Reiatsu."
Eric glanced sideways at him, one eyebrow lifting slightly. "Like what?"
"Bleach. It's an anime. Stronger characters just kind of... radiate pressure, and weaker guys straight up collapse just standing near them. There's a whole scene where this one captain just releases his Reiatsu and half the room drops to their knees."
"...Sure," Eric said, clearly filing that reference away as one more thing he didn't fully understand about this generation. "Close enough, I suppose."
Adrian nodded to himself, satisfied, mentally slotting Aura pressure neatly into a category his brain already understood, and finally let the rest of it go quiet for a moment.
After walking quietly for a while, Eric slowed down, then stopped in front of a stall cobbled together from old wooden supports and ragged strips of cloth. A brown-skinned, burly man sat cross-legged on a threadbare carpet behind it, his square-jawed face framed by a thick black beard, a simple hood pulled loosely over his head as he sorted through the jewelry laid out in front of him.
He glanced up, and something warm flickered behind his light brown eyes the moment he recognized who was standing there.
"Well, look who finally decided to show his face." A grin spread across his weathered features. "How've you been, brat? I figured you'd outgrown buying cheap charms from an old man like me by now."
Something in Eric's posture eased, just slightly, the corner of his mouth tugging upward into something rare and genuine. "Never that busy."
The burly man's gaze slid past him to Adrian, taking in the thin pink thread of gravitational Aura still linking the two of them together. "And you've dragged in a new customer for me too. I'm touched." He let out a booming laugh, loud enough that a few nearby stalls glanced over before returning to their own business.
Eric crouched down on his heels beside the stall, already sorting idly through the charms without quite deciding to buy anything yet. "He's a newbie. He had awakened just today, actually. I was walking him through the basics of Aura when someone started tailing us."
The burly man's grin faded a shade, his brow drawing together. "Tailing you how? Casual, or the real kind?"
"The real kind. I tried to lead them into a trap, but they caught on faster than I expected and bolted before I could pin them down."
"Hm." The man stroked his beard thoughtfully. "That kind of instinct, catching a setup before it closes, that's Deceiver work, or maybe Beauty Pathway. I am sure which one, but definitely something built for reading people."
"That's what I was thinking too." Eric picked up a black bracelet, turning it over between his fingers, his tone staying light even as the words carried weight. "You should keep an eye out, just in case whoever it was manages to connect the dots back to you through me."
The burly man waved a broad hand dismissively. "Please. I've been keeping my head down in this market longer than you've been alive, relatively speaking. Let them come sniffing around. I'll know before they get within ten stalls of me." He paused, then added, gentler now, "You watch your own back too, yeah? Don't need you getting yourself killed before you finally pay off that tab you've been running since you were sixteen."
Eric huffed something close to a laugh, the sound rare enough that even Adrian noticed it. "Wouldn't dream of dying in debt to you specifically."
"Damn right you wouldn't." The man's grin returned in full, and he turned his attention to Adrian, spreading his arms wide over the spread of charms in front of him. "Hey, kid! Welcome to my humble little shop. Fresh awakening means you're sitting somewhere around weak Nova right now, which means you need protection more than anybody else walking through this market today. Take a look, I promise you, nobody else here carries quality like mine."
Adrian lowered himself onto his knees in front of the spread, eyes tracking over the assortment laid out before him. Rings, bracelets, small carved pendants, tangled cords with beads strung along them in patterns he couldn't begin to decode. To his untrained eye, every single piece looked genuinely impressive, gleaming faintly under the lamplight in a way that made his fingers itch to pick each one up and examine it properly.
"Don't be fooled by the shine," Eric said dryly, still crouched beside him. "Most of what he sells is decent at best. He rarely gets his hands on anything actually good."
"HEY." The burly man's voice cracked across the stall like a whip. "Don't expose me in front of a paying customer, you absolute traitor."
Adrian glanced between them, biting back a grin. There wasn't a trace of real anger anywhere in the man's tone, just wounded pride, performed loudly enough for the whole row of stalls to hear.
"So wait," Adrian said, turning a small pendant over in his hands, "you keep calling your stuff relics, but he's calling all of this charms. What's the actual difference?"
"Charms are a type of relic too," Eric said. "They are just a weaker type. There are no serious drawbacks and no lasting effects, but they don't last nearly as long. Mystical relics and dreadful relics hit much harder, but they come with a real cost attached. Charms are what people buy when they can't afford something better, or haven't found anything suited to their pathway yet. And unlike proper relics, which only ever exist as one single copy, charms can be mass produced. That's the trade-off."
"You can also line up a bunch of the right charms together," the burly man added, leaning forward with sudden enthusiasm, "arrange 'em in the right formation, and use something called an Aura Technique. Bit advanced for you right now, kid, but tuck that away for later. Good thing to know exists."
Adrian nodded slowly, filing that away next to the growing pile of other things he barely understood yet, and went back to sifting through the stall's offerings. A few minutes passed in comfortable quiet, Eric occasionally picking something up and setting it back down, the burly man watching Adrian's face with open amusement every time something caught his eye.
Eventually curiosity won out entirely. Adrian looked up. "So how'd you two actually meet, anyway?"
The burly man let out a low chuckle, scratching thoughtfully at his beard as he leaned back on his hands. "Now that's a story. You sure you want it? Might make you think less of him."
"Oh, absolutely," Adrian said immediately. "Tell me everything. Every embarrassing detail. I need leverage."
The man barked out a laugh loud enough to draw glances from two nearby stalls, slapping his own knee. "I like this one," he said to Eric, jabbing a thick finger in Adrian's direction. "Boy's got a spine already. You should keep him around."
The burly man scratched at his beard, eyes drifting off somewhere distant as he dug through the memory. "Now let's see... yeah. Yeah, I remember it now. Must be, what, twelve years back at this point? I was still just a charm seller, same as I am now, sitting in this exact spot probably." A fond, faraway smile tugged at his mouth. "This brat here had awakened naturally, and somehow, on top of that, managed to unlock his Meditation Aura too. He barely had a clue how to use either one yet. He wandered in here completely by accident, no idea where he even was."
He shook his head, chuckling under his breath. "I remember looking at him and thinking, no way. No way this scrawny kid actually got himself here on raw talent alone. He told me where he was from, how he'd stumbled his way in. I helped him find his footing enough to get back out, and after that, he just kept coming back. Buying charms off me, helping around the stall when things got busy. He was a smart kid, sharper than most adults I deal with in here, if I'm honest." His voice softened, something almost wistful creeping into it. "Once he made Lysi Nova, he got married and settled into his life properly; Then, he started coming around less, which is understandable. People move on."
Adrian sat frozen through most of that, none of it fully landing until one detail finally broke through the noise.
Twelve.
He turned his head slowly, and for a moment he couldn't even find the words, just stared at Eric like he was trying to reconcile two completely different people occupying the same body.
"You told me," Adrian said, voice quieter than he meant it to be, "only really talented people awaken naturally before sixteen."
"I did say that." Eric didn't look up from the charm still resting between his fingers.
"You awakened at twelve."
"I did."
"And you didn't think that was worth mentioning."
"It has no bearing on anything I told you." Eric's tone stayed level, almost bored, and somehow that made it worse. "The information was accurate either way."
Adrian opened his mouth, then closed it again, something tight and unfamiliar twisting behind his ribs. He didn't know exactly what he'd expected. Not this, though. Not sitting across from someone who'd apparently been extraordinary his whole life and had simply never bothered saying so, like it was too unremarkable to bring up.
"Don't read too much into it," Eric said, and something in his voice shifted, quieter now, closer to sincere. "Talent gets you noticed early. That's all it ever really does. It doesn't finish anything on its own."
Adrian blinked. "What do you mean?"
"Plenty of people awaken young. Plenty of them never amount to much beyond that first impression." Eric finally looked up, meeting his eyes directly. "Talent puts you ahead of the line. It doesn't keep you there. What actually matters is what you do with the years after that moment, whether you put in the work, whether the right opportunities ever show up, whether you're careful enough to survive long enough to use any of it. Skip even one of those, and the talent means nothing. Worse than nothing, sometimes, because it convinces you that you don't need the rest."
"Listen to him, kid," the burly man cut in, his usual booming humor tempered into something steadier, more grave. "Talent without work is just a pretty story that goes nowhere. Look at this one. He blazed straight to Lysi Nova by sixteen, fastest I'd ever personally seen, and now, eight years later?" He gestured loosely at Eric. "Still sitting right there. Still Lysi Nova. And I'm just an old charm seller who never awakened anything special in my life, and even I know that much." He shifted his attention back to Eric, some genuine curiosity slipping into his voice now. "Speaking of, how's your rate of control coming along? Must be getting close by now."
"Close," Eric admitted, something faintly tired entering his tone for the first time. "A few more months, if I gave it my full attention. I can't, though. Too much else is demanding my time right now, so I'm doing just enough to keep from slipping backward, nothing more. And even once I finally get there, that's only the start of the real problem. I'll need resources I don't have yet, and this time a ritual too. None of it's going to come easy."
"Can't you just get everything ready ahead of time?" Adrian asked. "Like stockpile it before you actually need it?"
The words were barely out of his mouth before he felt his own face heat with embarrassment, the answer arriving almost as fast as the question had. "Wait, no, never mind, you don't even know what resources or ritual you'll need until you've actually hit full control, do you? Nobody's going to burn real money guessing blind like that."
Yeah, Adrian thought, wincing internally. That was a dumb question. A very dumb question. Adrian, buddy, you had one job.
Mortified, he dropped his gaze to the spread of charms in front of him, mostly to avoid eye contact with his own embarrassment, and that was when something small and black caught his attention. He picked it up, turning it over between his fingers. It looked almost identical to the ring Eric had made him touch back at the café, the one that had apparently rewired his entire existence in under a minute.
"Hey, uh, what's this one do?" he asked, holding it up.
"Bumps your luck a bit," the burly man said, barely glancing over. "Also sharpens your gut feeling for danger, gives you a heads-up before trouble finds you. Only good for another two weeks or so before it burns out completely, though."
Adrian's eyes lit up immediately. "Wait, so it's basically a spider-sense ring?"
"...Sure," the burly man said, clearly having no idea what that meant but deciding not to ask.
"That's so cool. I want this so bad." Adrian was already holding it up to the light like it might start glowing on command.
Eric leaned over slightly, glancing at the ring with mild interest. "It suits your pathway's quirks well enough, oddly. You want it?"
Adrian nodded so fast his neck nearly cricked.
"Normally two Aura stones," the burly man said, holding out a hand as though weighing invisible currency in his palm, "but for you, one."
"Hmph." Eric crossed his arms, studying the ring with exaggerated skepticism. "This thing isn't worth a quarter of a quarter of an Aura stone, and you know it." A beat passed. "But I won't haggle today."
The burly man's entire posture sagged with relief, like a man who'd just dodged a very specific and familiar bullet. "Wise choice. Very wise."
"You say that like I usually don't have a choice," Eric muttered, though there was no real bite behind it.
He reached into his pocket and drew out a small, glowing stone, pale blue and faintly translucent, wrapped in a thin shell of shimmering white. The burly man's whole face brightened the instant it landed in his palm, practically hugging it to his chest before tucking it away somewhere inside his robes with the reverence of a man safeguarding a small, precious animal.
Adrian slid the black ring onto his left middle finger, admiring it for a second longer than strictly necessary.
"Okay, but seriously," he said, glancing up as they both got to their feet, "what even is that stone? You just handed him what looked like a chunk of the Infinity Stones, and he acted like Christmas came early."
Eric huffed something close to a laugh. "It's called an Aura stone. Emergency fuel for your Aura reserves if you ever run dry mid-fight. It also primarily happens to function as the universal currency across the entire Aura region."
"So it's basically space money."
"...Sure," Eric said. "Space money works."
They said their goodbyes to the burly man, who sent them off with a booming "don't be a stranger, brat," and started making their way down the busy road, presumably toward wherever this "Visie" person Adrian had heard mentioned twice now but still knew nothing about actually lived.
Adrian walked in silence for a moment, turning something over in his head before he finally worked up the nerve to bring it up.
"Hey, so," he started, "thanks for the ring. Genuinely, that thing's awesome; I already love it." He hesitated. "But I feel weird just, like, taking it. I don't have any Aura stones to pay you back with, obviously, but just so I know, for future reference, how much is an Aura stone even worth? Like, in actual money. Dollars."
Eric didn't slow his pace. "You don't need to pay me back for it."
"No, I know, I just want to know the number. Purely for informational purposes."
Eric glanced sideways at him, expression completely flat. "A single Lysi Nova-grade Aura stone converts to roughly a hundred thousand dollars."
The words landed, sat there for a full second doing absolutely nothing, and then detonated.
"A HUNDRED THOUSAND—" Adrian's voice cracked halfway through the sentence as he physically jumped, both feet actually leaving the ground for a split second, nearly yanking the pink tether taut between them. Several nearby vendors glanced over. One four-armed alien selling fish paused mid-transaction just to stare. "DOLLARS?! FOR A RING THAT GIVES ME MILD LUCK AND SPIDER SENSE FOR TWO WEEKS?!"
"Roughly," Eric said, entirely unbothered.
"You just handed a guy the equivalent of a small house because I asked one dumb question about premonition rings!"
"He undercharged me, if anything."
"UNDERCHARGED—" Adrian pressed both hands to the sides of his head like he was physically trying to keep his brain from leaking out through his ears. "I have been walking around this entire market touching things! I picked up like six different rings! Do you understand how much anxiety you have just retroactively given me?!"
"You're fine. Nothing broke."
"That's not the POINT, Eric!" Adrian spun in a slow circle, staring wildly at the stalls stretching out in every direction around them, suddenly regarding every single object in the market with the reverence and terror of a man walking through a museum made entirely of live grenades. "Every single thing in this place could be worth more than my entire future! I nearly knocked over a jar of glowing snails back there! Do you understand?! A jar! Of snails! That could've been my COLLEGE FUND, Eric!"
Eric kept walking, entirely unmoved, though the very corner of his mouth twitched, just slightly, in a way he clearly hoped Adrian wouldn't notice.
Adrian noticed immediately. "You think this is funny."
"I really don't."
"Your face says otherwise."
"My face says nothing."
"Your face is LYING, Eric."