"Sorry for not returning sooner. I had a lot of things on my mind." That was all Alexis ever said to Ning after returning.
Ning tried to probe for more answers, but Alexis wouldn't give him any. She started acting like nothing had ever happened.
Soon, they got back to training again.
Time passed slowly. Ning continued his training while working in the tower. With his strength and expertise, he was making a small name for himself amongst the civilians.
At the same time, he worked with people from the headquarters to supply glass beads with the Aether liquid solution to distribute all over the world to the various law force at first, then other public locations that might need it.
In exchange, every once in a while, Ning let the tower have some of the liquid.
This way, he started earning quite a large sum of money too.
By the next 32 weeks, he had amassed a small fortune for himself, and also managed to hone all of his skills in Aether to the max.
Since tomorrow was the day he was to leave the Freelands for the Serian empire, he decided to break through once again.
Ning appeared in the middle of the Aether forest and checked the growth of the flowers that were supposed to help heal his body.
'Only 3 more years,' he thought and disappeared once again.
When he reappeared, he was in a different section of the Aether forest.
A rhino-like Aether beast with a body that glowed with purple veins in the night stared directly at Ning who had come out of nowhere.
It huffed in his direction and directly charged at him, thinking he was dangerous.
Ning grabbed the beast by its horn on the nose and threw it back towards a massive tree.
The beast hit the tree and fell to the ground. When it stood up, it no longer dared to attack Ning and just ran away.
Ning walked over to a patch of land and started digging on it with his bare hands. With his Aether Emperor strength, digging even in such hard land became as easy as sifting through sands.
Finally, he reached a metal box, which he dented with his force. He brought it out and crushed the lid open to reveal a massive bottle of at least a liter volume inside of it.
He took the bottle out and popped open the stopper. Then, he drank its content.
Gulp. Gulp. Gulp.
The liquid slid down the wall of the bottle as if it had no adhesive force sticking it to the side of the glass, and Ning drank it all wasting not a single drop of it.
Then, he sat down.
The nearly 32 weeks old bottle that was constantly moved through the entire forest multiple times in a week contained some of the purest Aether liquid Ning had made until now.
A single drop of this liquid was enough to awaken someone to Aether and then send them directly to Aether Master.
A single drop of this liquid was what Ning could gather automatically every day with his skill that cost him trillions of Energy.
Now, he got nearly hundreds of years' worth of energy with a single bottle. He sighed.
'If only there was no cap. This would all be so easy,' he thought.
Ning closed his eyes and focused on absorbing the aether in his stomach. While it would mostly be automatic, there was way too much Aether in his stomach that would just leave his body on its own.
In fact, he even stopped breaking just so he didn't lose any. He ran his absorption technique to the fullest and slowly absorbed it all.
By the time the sun showed up, he had gathered it all and even advanced an Aether rank all the way up to the next level.
He was now an Aether Saint.
Now that he felt his strength, Ning realized that this was what his previous rank was as well.
His other body had also been an Aether Saint, albeit a lot closer to Aether Supreme than he was.
But that would change soon.
Ning put his finger inside the bottle and suddenly, freshwater sprouted from it, filling the bottle.
Then, a chunk of red stone appeared in the center of it, and Ning immediately put back the stopper.
Ning had tried using his Aether to create distilled water, but it was a little hard. Not to mention, he could barely create Alpurite.
Even then, when he dissolved it, he realized that for some reason, since the solution was created using Aether, they wouldn't gather at all.
If Ning only created one of the two ingredients, then the amount of Aether the solution could absorb went down to half.
So, he initially assumed that he would have to make do with the Alpurite in his storage.
However, when he used his system, instead of Aether, to create the ingredients, they worked perfectly.
Perhaps because the impurities were non-existent, it gathered Aether better than any of the other solutions he had made till now.
Ning shook the bottle to dissolve the Alpurite into the distilled water and put it inside a new metal box before burying it into the ground.
He would come in a few days to change its location again. Keeping it at the same location was idiotic as the Aether-less surrounding would only slow down its absorption speed.
The bottle had already started absorbing the Aether in the area and even pulled on Ning's sea of Aether in his body.
However, he had a lot of Aether now to care about it.
Instead, he put his hands forward and focused on a single thing. Home.
A point of gravity appeared in front of him that only pulled a single point in space far away.
Space warped around the point, getting bigger and bigger until it looked like a portal.
Ning smiled and stepped in. When he reappeared, he had arrived back in his room.
He had, for the first time, successfully teleported using Aether.
