Thea had seen her father do a slew of crazy things in her life, and she thought she would have been immune to it by now.
But as of this moment... she was seeing her father in a way that she had never seen him before.
Three figures appeared in the place where Abaddon was once seated.
One was a massive demon over fourteen feet tall with the lower half of a bull-like monster and a body comprised of purple magma.
He seemed to be having a very hard time in this environment as his breathing was extremely ragged.
Beside him was a dragon that had shank down to a around eight feet in height.
The creature had the lower half of a serpent, with a scaly and muscular torso with five frightening heads.
He seemed to have no real difficulty bathing in the spiritual energy, but that was to be expected from a true dragon of the highest calibre.
But Thea's main focus was on the final aspect that she was seeing in front of her, one of which she and her family had only seen in memories.
"Kyaaa!! Father, your cheeks are so chunky! Let me rub em!"
"G-Get away from me, Thea! I don't have time for you to- Agh, God why!?"
The final aspect was a chubby young human with thick glasses and a short haircut.
At only 5'9, he was utterly incapable of keeping his daughter away from him as she joyfully mashed her face against his.
"They're so squishy!"
"Yes I know, all of my bullies used to tell me that in high school, now can you let me go!?"
"No way! Mothers are going to be so jealous when I tell them I got to see you like this!"
"Don't tell them about this shit! I invoke the law of father-daughter privilege that requires you to take this to the grave!"
"Denied~"
"Fuck!"
It seemed like Thea was never going to relinquish Carter from her grasp, until he received help from an outside source.
A somehow familiar and unfamiliar pair of arms wrapped around Thea's waist and pulled her away from him gently.
Looking up, Thea found a person whom she barely recognized.
He was also a young man, with long blood red hair and two red reptilian eyes. His body was lean and sculpted, while being completely free of wounds, tattoos, or markings.
The two proud horns on his head confirmed his identity as a dragon, and one of noble lineage at that.
Thea hadn't seen any pictures of her father before he adopted her, so she was only barely able to recognize him.
"Father looks so young..."
Exedra thought she might react this way when he changed to this form, but he still felt some kind of way about her insinuating he was old.
"My soul may be old, but my physical body is not that much older than yours you know?"
"You are still an old man at heart."
"You brat."
Exedra playfully bit her cheek and elicited a fit of giggles from her.
"I'm sorry... WHAT IN THE BLAZES IS GOING ON!?"
Carter, Exedra, and Thea all looked at Sabine who seemed not to comprehend this absurd situation.
Luckily, two of the aspects were quickly able to provide an explanation.
"You said the composition of my body and soul was breaking down." Carter reminded.
"So I split it myself before that could happen." Added Exedra.
"You... what..? For what purpose!?" Sabine cried.
Carter pushed up his glasses onto his face as he explained his line of thinking to the confused nature spirit.
"I had something like an epiphany. Usually, my powers allow me to flawlessly add and mix new things into my body once I eat them, but I don't think I'll be able to do that this time around. Spiritual energy is present in my body, but it's only a tiny amount and it's really impure.
So I thought I would start all over from the beginning and properly blend it into the three core parts of my being, so that when I am reformed I will be in total harmony. And... I may have just discovered the answer to becoming a spirit dragon as well...!"
"And that is?"
Exedra knew where Carter's mind was heading, and he rubbed the area between his temples out of sheer exhaustion. "Please... don't make him say it."
"Don't make him say what??"
Looking very proud of himself, Carter pushed up his glasses as he ignored all of Exedra's requests for him to stop.
"Cultivation."
"And he said it anyway." Exedra muttered with a sigh.
"You are the most unbecoming aspect of us..." Abaddon added annoyedly.
Carter looked at the two counterparts of himself and flipped them both off. "Hell's wrong with you two?! What's the problem with my idea?!"
"You only suggested cultivation because you want to do NEET shit." taunted Exedra.
"And?!"
"You already have literal superpowers."
"And now I want to do murim things too, so let me be fucking happy!"
"That I share a body with you is the disgrace of my being...." Abaddon said wearily.
"Your insults don't hurt me too much because you look like you're about to die in like a few minutes." Carter said with a shrug.
Sabine finally had to sit down due to the overwhelming absurdity of this situation.
Honestly... one man splitting into three completely different iterations of himself was too much for her to process.
She just decided that she would not ask anymore questions and then pray that when she opened her eyes again all three would be gone.
"What's cultivation and why do you think it'll help?" Thea asked.
"I'm so glad you asked, my d-"
Exedra quickly clasped a clawed hand over Carter's mouth in an attempt to stop him from giving an unnecessarily dorky explanation and losing their child's respect.
"This one's idea isn't without merit... cultivation is a story trope from our old world that focuses on absorbing a dense energy to rebuild one's body and attain immortality."
"So how does that help here??"
"We could let the spiritual energy in this place flood our being... It would wash away the impurities within our own body and soul, and we could fully assimilate the energy into our reformed self... so much so that it would transform us entirely. We could indeed become a spirit dragon."
Thea's purple eyes lit up like stars in the sky as she tried to contain her excitement.
"That's great!! But why does it seem like you're having doubts about this plan??"
As a response, both Carter and Exedra pointed at the hulking demon who still seemed to have difficulty breathing.
The demonic nature of Abaddon was in direct conflict with the spiritual energy in the air.
He had managed to stave off destruction so far by breathing slowly and circulating his own impure spiritual energy throughout his body as a means of protection, but it was a temporary fix at best.
"To cultivate means that he would have to willingly take in pure spiritual energy into his body" Exedra began. "But that would likely mean that..."
"This motherfucker is gonna go boom." Carter finished.
Abaddon growled as he stood up from the ground.
Despite how lousy he felt, he couldn't just stand by and allow his other two aspects to mock him as some weak creature.
"How... dare you..! To suggest that I am the part of us that holds us back when I am the best of us! Where would we be without my might?! My powers!? My intelli-""
Carter: "It's hard to take you serious when I can feel our vitality slipping off your body like panties in a whore house."
"YOU INGRATE!!"
POW!
With a swipe of his tail, Abaddon sent Carter flying like a kite with it's strings cut.
The young man landed in a patch of bushes a few feet away, clutching his stomach in pain.
"You big black bitch!" he cried.
The purple flames on Abaddon's body started to flicker and pick up in intensity as he stepped forward menacingly.
It seemed like the two aspects were going to break out in a fight, (Albeit a one-sided one) until Thea ran out between the two of them and held out her hands in a protective manner.
"Father, please don't fight with yourself!"
""He started it!""
"I don't understand what's going on anymore..." Sabine said exhaustedly.
"I'm actually rather entertained though?" Charlotte was sitting cross legged on the ground with dirt in her hair and watching the show.
It had been so long since anything interesting happened in these lands, so she was truly having the time of her life.
Exedra stood between Carter and Abaddon and shook his head pitifully.
"The two of you are embarrassing us in front of our daughter. And there is no need for us to fight amongst ourselves anyway."
Exedra helped up Carter and brought him in front of their demonic aspect.
"He taxes me irreparably..." Abaddon muttered.
"Yes, but as of right now his idea is the only solution to our current dilemma. It is truly not a bad plan."
"Did you just agree that I was taxing?" Questioned Carter.
Exedra ignored him and instead kept focusing on the obstacle with his demonic aspect.
Without a way to keep Abaddon's body stable as his spiritual energy was cleansed, and prevent it from destroying his body, this entire plan would be meaningless in the end.
"Father... is there a way I can help?"
Thea approached her fathers thoughtfully with her eyes filled with hope.
Exedra hated to tell his daughter no at any point in time but it seemed like he would have no other choice.
And then, like a light had flicked on in his brain, he realized that he had inadvertently brought the solution along with him all along.
"Actually... yes you can, my daughter."
"Really?! How??"
Patting her on the shoulder, he turned towards Sabine and Charlotte who were seated on the ground a few feet away.
"Can the two of you show us to the place that has the densest spiritual energy?"
"Sure!"
"Why the hell not. I don't understand what's going on anymore anyways."
The two spirits led the unlikely group through their domain without any real complaints.
Charlotte asked a few questions along the way to sate her seemingly bottomless curiosity but Sabine seemed like she just wanted to get this all over with.
Honestly, she was 99% sure that whatever scheme they were all planning was about to go horribly wrong.
Elemental spirits and living creatures were entirely different on every fundamental level.
They were beings formed from the very laws of nature itself, comprised of pure spiritual energy.
Should Abaddon try to cross that threshold from physical to spiritual, she believed that he would only end up killing himself due to his greed.
While she no longer believed him to be entirely evil, she could say for certain that it was best that the power of the spiritual realm did not go to an outsider.
The secrets and power lying in here could absolutely not be trusted in the hands of those in the outside realm.
It was the entire reason that the elves were supposed to be protecting this place after all.
'You need only blame yourself for this, abyssal one. Treading where you do not belong will always have terrible consequences.'
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