Chapter 950: The Shouldn’t Exist Prince
A wiseman once said, that a man’s true colors are shown in times of desperation.
While that’s well and good, it lacks gravitas.
Personally, I like the saying to be: Desperation is the forge of heroes and villains, it simply depends on what they’re made of.
Or something like that.
-The words of a scholarly twin, after having to defeat his own.
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“Well then, Prince. What is your choice in this matter? Will you defy what the universe has thrusted upon you and live your life as it intends, or do you want to dictate it for yourself?,” Buzza asked in a tone of voice suggesting he was teaching people how to invest, and not like he was grafting the parts of dead monsters into people.
“Or perhaps you don’t mind continue living as a-”
“Hey!”
Seeing as he struck a nerve, Buzza stopped himself and raised his hands in a placating manner. He didn’t stop talking though.
“I’m just saying, wouldn’t it be grand to reappear after being kidnapped in a blaze of shining glory? With power that can demand respect?”
“That…,” Alain trailed off as he thought inward of himself and this choice.
‘It shouldn’t be a hard question for me to answer, so why am I hesitating?’
As to understand how he got to this point, a little backstory is needed.
…
The Radiant Feather continent prides itself on…multiple things, but there are a few things outsiders notice a lot sooner than the rest.
For example, on a political scale Radiant Feather prides itself as being the one and only “united” continent that hasn’t had a war occur on their soil for a little over five hundred years. Despite being home to hundreds of kingdoms, and dozens of empires, all of them swear neutrality and fealty as part of Senate of Illumination, and its head chancellor.
That said, while there haven’t been any “official” wars, there have been plenty of “unsanctioned” skirmishes between kingdoms, sects and factions.
On a personal scale though, Radiant Feather prides itself on its higher than average amount of children per family and the ability to care for them.
Whereas most people would have families of four, people in Radiant Feather had families of six on average.
Naturally, this included the families of nobility and royalty, who enjoyed the idea of having many heirs.
Prince Alain just so happened to be the fourth child of eight siblings. Not exactly a middle child, but not exactly the youngest either.
However, being a child in a royal family wasn’t always as good as it sounded.
Prince Alain and his seven other siblings, were all scions of House Vullede of the Gallito Kingdom.
On paper, this meant that and he and siblings had the “privilege” of being born into a family that had been ruling the Gallito Kingdom since it’s founding, due to being a family that had managed to produce an Aether Emperor every generation.
In practice, this meant that Alain and his siblings were born into a surprisingly cutthroat family that valued merit and cultivation above all else.
That sounded fine on the surface, since most noble houses could get their scions to Aether Grandmaster at minimum…unless you’re someone like Alain Vullede.
A man who wasn’t physically able to cultivate.
Now, based on the previously mentioned characteristics, one would assume that he would abused or looked down upon by the rest of his family. After all, it would be a mark of shame to have someone in the Vullede family unable to cultivate.
That didn’t happen.
For such a prestigious family, abusing and harming a scion, even one without any future prospects, would be considered churlish and uncivilized.
Instead, they went with a less obvious method of dealing with Alain: willful neglect.
The fact that Alain couldn’t cultivate meant that no matter what kind of trouble he got himself into, no matter what illicit deals he may commit, it didn’t really matter to his family.
They just sorta nodded their heads and moved on, maybe occasionally sign or stamp something he needed, but other than that…nothing.
As well, unlike a certain young master on another continent who went through something similar, he didn’t have a lover to call his own to help him through this dark time. He only had himself.
“The prince that shouldn’t exist”, that’s what people would’ve said about him if they actually tried to acknowledge him.
Alain, on the surface, used this neglectful relationship to live a life of hedonism, debauchery and pleasure.
Deep down however…he hated it.
He hated the fact that he couldn’t do anything without his family’s status and money, he hated the fact that nobody seemed to care that he existed, he learned for the wider world to recognize him in any capacity.
Hated, loved, it didn’t matter.
Alain just wanted somebody, anybody, to…not just see him, but recognize him as well.
To understand that he was a person, and not just some meaningless trinket that was left on a shelf, not a mistake of nature that should’ve been swept under the rug.
This led to a rather.. interesting cycle.
First, he gets depressed and desperate enough to find a solution to fix himself, only to fail miserably due to the latest cure-all proving to be a dud. Then, he would get depressed enough to go on a hedonistic vacation spree, lasting roughly two to three months.
Then he would go back home and begin this cycle all over again.
Evidently, it was in one of these depressive episodes of going on vacation, that Alain Vullede thought it was a good idea to go to Roaring Tide on a personal vacation.
Unfortunately, he had decided to visit the continent around the exact same time that the Fallen opted to attack Willow Scale City, which was originally going to be his first stop.
Which leads us to now.
…
‘Oh…that’s why I’m hesitant,’ Prince Alain realized as he thought back on his past efforts to fix his lack of aether channels.
Every single time he tried to make do, spent coffers of gold for this elixir or another, tried this exercise or another, he’d get screwed over.
That wasn’t the case this time around.
He had not just one, not two, but four examples of Buzza’s work performing what could only be described as a miracle.
Sure, the old guy now had three eyes and looked like an ogre, but he had gone from senile old man to remembering that the clan’s matriarch was his beloved niece.
“My word, Little Yuan? Is that you? You’ve gotten so big!”
And that slave girl may have gone off her rocker and had crystal skin, but she went from having zero cultivation to being as strong as an Aether King. Granted, she was also muttering something about the bonds of blood being the strongest form of love, but that was probably nothing.
“Soon my beloved, soon…”
But none of that mattered to him.
Who cares if he went a little nuts, who cares if he looked a little monstrous?
All that mattered was that after all this time, people were going to notice him.
“Do it. Give me whatever body part that’s in there the power I want, the power I need, to force the world to respect me,” Alain said with conviction in his voice.
For his part, Buzza couldn’t help but make a pleased buzzing sound at hearing someone speak with such [Desire] in their voice.
They always made for the most powerful of experiments.
However, as Buzza reached his hand down into the box of pilfered parts, something…unusual happened.
“Now then, I believed I have a skull here that would-”
SOUND OF FREEDOM, MOTHERFUCKER!
“-what the fuck?”
Before Buzza could bring out a skull that would have turned this prince zero to a burning hero, one of the parts in the box acted on its volition.
A set of wings that numbered eight in total and shined with the colors of the rainbow had suddenly and violently, launched itself from the box and towards Prince Alain like a bat out of hell.
Most people, when seeing a set of severed wings come bursting out of an amorphous demon box, would probably panic and do all they can to avoid being impacted by such a thing.
Prince Alain though, did no such thing.
Instead, seeing these wings, he simply stood there with both his eyes and arms wide open.
As if he was welcoming the incoming wings like it was an old friend.
‘What…what is this feeling?’
As he kept his arms open, the wings flew directly into them, but they did not crash into his chest as expected.
Instead, moments before impact, the wings turned into a ball of light that merged with Alain’s being.
What followed was…painful to say the least, but blissfully so.
“Gah! My body…feels like its on fire!”
After all, it’s not everyday someone is blessed with aether channels and [Chaos] at the same time.
