Francis was cultivating on his own. His family had not gotten back to their old house; instead, they had been placed with the other ‘immigrants’. Jacob had justified that by saying that he could not give them preferential treatment after what happened. And he agreed, if not for the terrible discomfort of the mud house. At least, they had gotten some mattresses.

Francis was now at the 5th level of the Mantis realm, but he had not been chosen for the expedition. Instead, Epagogia herself had come to him and told him to cultivate as much as he could.

In these past days, he had barely seen Jacob. The things between them needed more time to heal. They were on the right path, but they still needed time before being totally comfortable with each other.

“Frank!” his father called him up.

“Here we go again,” Francis raised his eyes to the ceiling and got up, going out.

“Can you help me?” his father scratched his own head.

“Problem with the Martial Style?” Francis asked with a smile.

“Yeah, I—”

“It’s fine, dad. Show me,” Francis didn’t mock his father. The man was extremely ashamed of being so bad at something.

While both his mother and Francis himself had taken to cultivation very well, especially his mother with her talent, his father had fallen behind. He was clumsy with cultivation, and he had been stuck at the 2nd level of the Mantis realm even though he had Francis’s same talent.

“Look, when I try to perform this jump,” his father broke into a run and tried to jump and punch forward. The momentum of his blow was clearly poorly timed, and he fell on his face.

It would be comical if his father wasn’t so said about it.

“I don’t think it’s anything big. You are just missing the right timing, dad. From what I can see, you just need to delay the punch a bit more; otherwise, you are not using the momentum for the punch, but the other way around.”

Francis didn’t consider himself particularly gifted; it was just his father's poor understanding that made him look like an expert.

“Thanks Frank,” his father gave him a bashful smile.

“Is mom training?” Francis asked.

“Yeah, she went up the mountain once again,” his father, Julius, said.

“Mh, I’m going to see her,” Francis waved to his father.

…

His mother couldn’t really train around people. She didn’t have complete control over her attacks, and she risked seriously injuring, if not killing, anyone who got in the trajectory of her attacks.

“Frankie!”

His mother was sitting cross-legged in the ground, while all around her were blackened and exploded rocks.

There was a big mountain right behind St. Peter. You could start climbing it as soon as you walked a few hundred meters toward it. It was mostly walkable, without any real need for climbing proper.

“Mom, how’s training going?”

Her mother was a training freak. If you didn’t count Jacob’s personal élite group, she was probably the strongest person in St. Peter.

Maria Rossi was, indeed, at the 7th level of the Mantis realm. And she had a Lightning Affinity, one of the most attack-oriented and dangerous.

“Oh, sweetheart, it’s going very well! Do you want to see what your mom can do with her new Spell? Oh, I love Epagogia so much. Without her, I would still be so clueless about all of this.”

“Sure, mom. Show off,” Francis laughed.

His mom could be very mean, especially when she got super-protective, but he knew she just loved him too much. Francis was an only child, and his mother had poured all her love onto him. Sometimes she would be too hard or expect too much from him, but she still sacrificed whatever he could for his sake.

Even now, Francis knew that his mother was training so hard to protect his child. Epagogia had once told her that it would be fair if Francis got stronger than her, and instead, he protected her.

His mother had flipped at that.

‘I am the parent, and he is the child. I’ll protect my child until the day I die doing that!’

And there was no risk of Francis becoming stronger than his mother anytime soon. She had an incredible talent for Magic at the 8th level. Same for Qi. She had just focused on Magic at the start because she had found it so fascinating. But right now, his mother could probably punch him to sleep without even breaking a sweat.

He had heard from Jacob that a woman, Geneva, was in a similar predicament with her husband. She was strong, and her husband wasn’t.

“Take some steps back, Frankie,” she told him with an excited smile.

His mother loved to show off some new things she had learned.

Francis backed off, and his mother nodded.

She raised her hands to the sky, and Francis smelled the ozone-forming up around up. She slowly lowered her arm toward a rock at least two meters tall in the distance and shouted.

“THUNDERSHOT!”

Francs saw a literal beam of pure electricity come out of his mother's hands and hit the rock with a deafening explosion, disintegrating a good 70% of it.

“Fuck,” Francis swore.

“Hell yeah!” his mother jumped on the spot with a wide smile. “Look at that! See! That rock was at least two meters tall. And now it’s gone! Ah! I want to see Jacob’s aunt trying to do something like that!”

“Mom, come on,” Francis groaned.

That was when the worst of his mother came out of nowhere. The confrontation, the needless competition.

“What? I did not fight any big bad monsters like they always seem to remind others. And I still managed to get to the 7th level of the Mantis realm, didn’t I? How come that Linda is just at the, what, 5th level of the Mantis realm? Pathetic.”

“Epagogia gave you many rare herbs, mom,” Francis told her. “You have indeed been training a lot, but don’t just badmouth Linda. She didn’t do anything to you.”

“You bet. I have a husband and a beautiful child,” she went over to him to ruffle his hair, “she has one nephew.”

His mother went a bit rigid after mentioning Jacob. She had been very shocked by the revelation about his best friend coming back from a terrible future, a strong warrior that had tried his best to save humanity. Not even his mother had yet found the courage to badmouth him. Not that she didn’t want or hadn’t prepared some insults, she was just in awe of the legendary feats Epagogia had recounted to them about Jacob.

Francis suspected that his best friend being so strong was one of the reasons his mom trained so hard.

“Let’s go, mom. It’s almost dinner time, and please go easy on dad. He came again to me asking for help,” Francis told his mother.

“Oh, Julius,” she grimaced with a sad expression. “Don’t worry. Your father always took the best care of me. Even if cultivating is not his best suit, that will never make him less of a man in front of me.”

Francis smiled, wondering if that was the whole truth, but didn’t inquire further. Sometimes ignorance was a blessing.