Today, Aaron learned something important.

Theory knowledge meant absolutely nothing compared to actually doing the thing.

The way Bella had explained the aether concept, with all her careful wording and layered details, he had braced himself for something on par with rocket science. He had mentally prepared to drag every last functioning brain cell into service for what was coming. Complex spiritual energy with its own separate pathways, resonance techniques, instructions carried through invisible channels — it had sounded like the kind of thing that would take weeks to even begin understanding.

But when it came down to it?

All he needed was a decent imagination and some basic control over his mana.

That was it.

He wasn’t going to pretend he had reached anything close to Bella’s level of mastery — the woman had turned her wings into an entire outfit, for goodness’ sake. He wasn’t anywhere near that kind of fluidity. But he was fairly convinced she had oversold the difficulty just a little. Either that, or he was more naturally suited to this than either of them had expected.

After a few tries, guided by Bella’s calm and level instructions, his wings finally responded. They twitched first, then moved with more intention, beginning to flap slowly before gradually picking up some rhythm. The movement generated just enough lift that his feet left the floor. He hovered in place, a few inches off the ground, and looked around himself with wide eyes.

It was a small thing, objectively. He was barely airborne. But something about it felt enormous.

Claire and Eva were watching him with undisguised wonder, the kind of expression where the eyes go a little bright and the mouth wants to smile but isn’t quite sure yet. They held back from saying anything — Bella’s presence still sat heavy in the room, and neither of them had fully recovered from the earlier demonstration. They stayed quiet, but their faces said plenty.

"I thought I told you to order it to fold further, not flap, Aaron," Bella remarked from her spot in the air, entirely unbothered, as if she were commenting on someone using the wrong fork at dinner.

"My apologies, empress. It seems I might have misheard it."

His voice had that particular quality of someone who was not sorry in the slightest. The excitement underneath it was obvious. He felt the way he imagined Tony Stark must have felt the first time he fired up that original, cobbled-together suit in a cave — that specific brand of giddy that comes from realizing something you built with your own hands actually works.

He wanted to go higher. Immediately. He wanted to find out how high he could actually get, whether the speed would increase with altitude, whether the sensation changed the further up you went. The sky felt like an open question and he wanted to start answering it.

Maybe space was possible?

The thought sparked another question. He looked over at Bella. "Empress, you said that this wing isn’t really a physical muscle of flesh and blood, so does it mean I will not get tired even if I fly continuously?"

Bella’s expression shifted slightly. She rubbed her chin, and for just a moment she looked like she was genuinely working through the answer rather than pulling it from a ready shelf. "Right, you’re still a mortal that needs to be mindful about energy usage. So as for the wing, it’s not infinite, but if you keep flying you should be able to keep going for a decently long amount of time."

Aaron parsed her phrasing. A decently long amount of time, coming from a primordial who measured existence on a completely different scale, almost certainly translated to something that would feel close to unlimited from where he stood. He filed that away with quiet satisfaction.

"What if I don’t keep flying?"

"Well, it depends." Bella shrugged. "Aether is an energy that exists all around us but not so at the same time. It’s one of the building blocks of the universe, however it behaves much differently than mana. When you’re in motion you pull the aether around you, but when you’re stationary, the aether escapes from your body. That’s the main theory, at least."

Aaron blinked.

He blinked again.

The words weren’t complicated on their own. She wasn’t speaking in riddles or using obscure terminology. But the way she assembled them created this strange effect where understanding kept forming and then dissolving before it could fully settle. He got the shape of what she was saying but couldn’t quite grip it.

He thought briefly — and unkindly — that if Bella were a school teacher, she would be the most universally dreaded one in the building. The kind whose lessons made you feel simultaneously talked down to and completely lost.

Then her face flashed into his mind and he immediately revised that assessment. She would be the teacher everyone showed up for, filling every seat and sitting quietly for once in their miserable academic lives, only to walk out of class having learned absolutely nothing. Beloved and useless in equal measure.

He shook the thought off and pulled out what was actually useful from what she had said. When he was in motion, the aether in the surrounding environment was drawn toward him. When he was still, it flowed back out. His body was like a container that only stayed full while it was being moved.

Which raised a fairly obvious follow-up question.

Did that mean he needed a runway? Some kind of build-up phase before takeoff, the way a plane needs to reach speed before it can generate lift? A long running start to fill his aether reserves before his wings were actually capable of getting him off the ground?

Bella answered before he could fully form the words.

"You’re both right and wrong. You’re right that you need to build up the aether within your body, but you’re wrong that you will need to take a goofy runway run to ’take off’."

He asked her to keep going.

"You like simple explanations, so I will tell you how I would tell this to a 5 year old child." She sighed lightly. "Think of it as a 1 hour timer, and every time you perform a decent action, that timer resets. So unless you’re laying down on the bed the whole day like a worthless incel NEET, you’re good."

Aaron stared at her.

He blinked once. Then twice. A few more times after that for good measure.

Incel. NEET. From the mouth of a primordial empress who was currently inhabiting the body of a small plant-race girl and standing on invisible air.

Who, exactly, had been teaching her these words? He had genuine questions about that. He wanted a name.

But that wasn’t the point right now.

The point was that as long as he was living any kind of normal, active life — moving around, training, doing basically anything that wasn’t lying completely motionless for hours — the aether in his body would stay topped up and his wings would be ready when he needed them. Simple enough.

He let himself drift back down to the floor. His feet touched the ground and he stood there for a moment with a wide grin on his face that he made no attempt to hide. The hover had been small. A few inches, a few seconds, nothing impressive by any real measure. But the feeling had been something else entirely. Like the ground had no claim on him anymore. Like gravity was a rule he had just been informed he could sometimes ignore.

He wanted more of that. A lot more.

But that was for later. The actual goal right now was getting his wings hidden.

He brought his focus back around and got to work.

He reached inward, finding his mana and using it to nudge the aether — to excite it, as Bella had put it — letting it flow along those new unseen pathways that ran parallel to his regular veins. Once the connection felt live, he built an image in his head. A backpack. Clear and specific, the kind you’d actually travel with. He held it there and pushed the image outward, through the mana, into the aether, and from the aether into the wings themselves.

The wings received it. They began to move with a strange, mechanical grace — splitting apart, each wing dividing into five equal sections that then began folding inward and overlapping one another, reducing in stages until the total mass had been pressed down into something roughly the size and shape of a travel bag.

The crystal surface shifted as it went, contracting and reshaping, responsive to the instructions in a way that was almost unsettling to watch.

It was mesmerizing. Which turned out to be the problem.

Aaron got distracted watching his own wings work. His focus wobbled. The image in his head lost its clean edges, the details went soft, and the mana carrying the instructions started transmitting noise along with the signal. His mild ADHD chose this particular moment to remind him it was still very much present and accounted for.

The result was a backpack that was, generously speaking, not going to win any design awards. It was the right size. The shape was approximately correct in the loosest sense of the word. But it was crooked and uneven in ways that would attract attention for entirely the wrong reasons.

Still. Bag-sized. That was what he needed.

He sent a quick instruction to his nanotech orb. The nanotechs responded without hesitation, spreading out and flowing over the misshapen wing-bag like a second skin. Unlike Aaron, the technology had no ADHD and no distractions. It read his intended image precisely and reproduced it without error — smooth lines, clean proportions, the kind of backpack that looked like it had been bought from an actual store.

The original mess was completely hidden underneath. From the outside, it looked perfectly normal.

"Well, lads, since y’all are done and I don’t need to worry about my vessel, I am leaving." Bella announced, her tone easy and unbothered, as if she were ending a casual lunch rather than departing from a borrowed body. She turned to Eva and her expression shifted into something warmer.

"You have a good potential in healing. I will give you a small gift if you manage to grow my vessel to the normal human size. Potions and holy mana, that’s what you need to grow the body up. Later."