The pain in Theo's ass exploded when he slid down his boulder and fell down to his ass. It was only with greatest effort that he managed to push his hips up at the very last moment, ending up on his knees rather than straining his hurting butt even more.
Theo hung his head low, his shoulder-long hair dropping down and obscuring what little light the night stars and the moon could bring to his eyes.
"Damn it!"
A guttural whine escaped from his mouth, a howl of feelings he long repressed.
'I thought I got over it already. I knew this day would come too!'
Theo gritted his teeth, his fingers squeezing down against his palms as his hands closed into fists.
'And yet…!'
In a bout of powerless fury, Theo brought his hand down and struck the ground, cracking open both the cobblestone leading up to this small cultivation alcove and the skin over his knuckles.
Theo's greatest fault lay in being late.
Being late to be born into his family, that is.
In theory, he was a royal, a man bearing bluest of bloodlines, more privledged than most could ever hope to get. By all means, his life should be a breeze.
If not for the eleven siblings that were born before him!
Obviously, in a world where might made right, being born later shouldn't matter much…
But Theo's family, while still royal of descent, has long since recorded their golden age into the annals of history. And while their decline has yet to reach the point where Theo would have to worry about his sustenance…
Again, in a world where might made right, that wasn't enough.
Theo's oldest siblings enjoyed all the benefits of splitting the resources their parents could provide between much smaller number of parties. Even the fifth and sixth of Theo's siblings could enjoy all the resources they realistically needed to cultivate…
But by the time Theo stepped into the age where he could realistically start cultivating, his older siblings has long since advanced to higher ranks. And with much greater responsibilities, they could also demand much greater rewards. A perfectly fair exchange… but one that left much lesser of a share for Theo and the rest of the young folks of the royal family to share between themselves.
In the eyes of a common person, Theo lived the life of everybody's dreams.
He received just enough support to reach the rank of a core disciple in some secondary sect. As a political hostage, he lived a life of comfort, peace and stability, his only task to ensure the marquis in the charge of the sect stayed loyal.
But contrary to a common person or even a low-rank noble, Theo's challenges didn't account for any of that.
With his medicore talent not making things any easier, Theo thus settled in this life of medicority, his main task to keep his head low enough to keep his older siblings from ever perceiving him as a player on the game of influence and inheritance they played ever since before Theo even came to be.
Now, however, this peaceful rot of wasting away out of everyone's sight came to an end when the reality of the world came knocking. And ever since Theo received the letter according to which his father, the king, has approved the marriage of Celeste to that piece of rotten shit Olen…
"Screw it all…"
Just the thought of those letters was enough for Theo to raise his fists in the rising fury… only to powerlessly smack them down against the cobblestone of the alcove's path.
It wasn't that he never tried.
He did. And he really thought he could overcome the adversity of his birth and become strong enough to craft his own fate… Only to end up in this rubbish sect nonetheless, cursed to forever remain shackled by the sect's patriarch's limits and the diplomatic deal between the crown and the sect that disallowed Theo from ever challenging it.
It was a hard cap on how far Theo could ever go, even if he somehow managed to defy fate and his circumstances. A cap that couldn't be broken less Theo wanted to be exiled from his royal house and become a true nobody, a fitting punishement for the crime of breaking faith with their vassal by breaking the crown agreement.
And up to today, Theo simply gritted his teeth and accepted his fate. And what did he get for all his sacriface, all that he endured?
The news that the lone bright point of his life, the relationship he had with Celeste, the daughter of the second most powerful duke in the kingdom - his childhood friend - was about to become but a bittersweet memory, with her marriage to that Olen bastard acting like just another seal binding the powerful duke into servitude to the crown of Theo's father.
There was only way for Theo to stop such marriage. It was to become strong enough to challenge Olen for his social position, effectively entering the race for the position of a crown heir as the weakest of the game's contenders.
Olen, however, the fourth son and the sixth child overall had the luck to receive all the resources he could've ever asked for, reaching the fourth stage of cultivation by sixteen and now challenging the limits of seventh stage, openly declaring he would reach it before turning twenty-seven next month.
Theo, on the other hand, was forever doomed to remain at fifth stage at best, with still quite a lot of work before he could actually make this last step and actually reach it.
In other words, while challenging Olen was already practically impossible, dealing with what would come next?
Theo would never survive the wrath of his siblings, especially when marrying Celeste in Olen's place would pain one hell of a massive target on his back.
In other words, just like it always was, Theo was doomed to just grit his teeth and endure, powerless to stop even this last shine of his life getting spoiled by Olen's filthy hands and doomed to wither and waste away in his oppresive company.
The worst part of it all, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. And any attempt to lash out against this unfairness of the world would only doom him to a fate much worse than what he was already subjected to.
'This really fucking sucks.'
With this thought, Theo breathed out all the air out of his lungs in, momentairly falling in love with the idea of just… not breathing anymore.
'After enduring for all the ninety years of this accursed life, what is even the point of gritting my teeth and then enduring some more?'
Crack!
As if to punish him for those self-serving and self-dooming thoughts, something inside Theo broke. Like a delicate film that masterfully hid away what The should always be aware off. A sensation akin to suddenly finding out you had a third hand that you just… never could bother to move before, unaware of its presence.
A feeling that then instantly turned into an explosion of pain, brain-spilling headache.
A torture of having the insides of his head turned into outside, poked all around with a sharp, burning stick and then haphazardly thrown back into one piece and returned to its rightful spot on the inside of Theo's skull.
'What the…'
Unable to even take the smallest of breaths, Theo fell face-first into the cobblestones, the pain too paralyzing for him to even try to shield his face during the fall.
Pac.
Falling powerlessly down, Theo could only grit his teeth as, just like he always did before, he endured.
It was a pain immense enough to make Theo feel and seriously consider the possibility of him just… dying outright. Especially with how this pain didn't even affect his body, appearing to stem fully from some kind of anomaly inside of his cultivation…?!
"AAAAAGH!"
An ear-splitting howl broke free from behind Theo's closed lips, smashing through his throat as a hint of low, primal growl enriched the scream.
Then, it all ended, as if the entire event was but a fae's prank, a mental illusion aimed to torment while leaving no lasting damage.
Only this ordeal did bring about a lasting change. Because now… Theo could remember.
And yet, even though the path to the impossible suddenly appeared before his eyes, he somehow overcame the overwhelming exhaustion and raised his palms to his eyes, carefully inspecting the flow of mana within his flesh.
Every inch of Theo's robes was now soaked with his sweat while his face froze with some incredulous expression locked on it.
"While it's nice to see it worked out in the end…" Theo then muttered, as if using his voice to test if the world around him was actually real or but a visual projection by yours truly's mind.
He then gulped his saliva down his throat, all the jambled memories of his twin-past casted aside to the very back of his head.
Right now, Celeste, cultivation, mage's tower or Cornelious… They were all meaningless, unimportant in the face of the discovery Theo made as he rushed to confirm the lack of the disability that shackled him his entire life.
It was gone. His new memories alone were proof enough of that.
But what shocked him so much was something else. An attribute to cultivation, a magic method Theo never encountered or even heard about back in his original life, that changed everything.
Because what this cultivation really did, was push the mana through one's body in such a specific way that, as a result…
It forced Theo's mana-gate to grow just a little bit wider… directly affecting the aspect of his talent that directly related to the absolute limit of power he could ever reach!
A limit that he now found a way to fully remove.
//Chapter is still a subject to stylistic rewrite/edit//