"Every time you transmute something," Tristan commented. "It turns out gray."

"Hm?" Ryan asked as he examined the cube with his senses.

"Yeah," Tristan told him. "Everything you transmute has a tendency to turn gray."

"Not everything," Ryan's father said. "Just things where color doesn't actually matter."

For the last several days, the Novar Family Head had been teaching his son and the Novarax Jewel how to transmute items, something which few Jewels could perform. Ryan knew his father had started that just to try and trip Ryan up with a spell, only to become exasperated as both son and Novarax learned it quickly.

Transmutation was not an easy spell to learn, as it required understanding the property of both what the caster was transmuting and of what they were transmuting it into. Tristan lapped up the scientific knowledge with ease, while Ryan was able to pull on his godly abilities to learn and understand what was necessary.

That had surprised him. The first time he attempted to cast a transmutation spell with just knowing what his father had told him of the two materials, he instinctively began to know even more than that. It took him a few hours to realize that it was a god thing.

Realizing that promptly led to him tracking down his father and giving the man as smug a look as he could manage.

"Do I really?" Ryan asked.

"Yes," his father answered.

Ryan accessed his sense of light to examine the cube. He had changed it from white oak to polystyrene, and with his sense of light, he realized that it was the same color he saw by default, before he had adjusted his sense of light enough to make out different colors.

"So this is the color gray?" Ryan held up the cube.

"It is," his father answered. "Tristan's is white, the normal color he would see it as."

"Interesting," Ryan said, then transmuted the block into pure gold. "Is this gray?"

"It is not," his father sighed. "Ryan, I asked you to stop transmuting valuable metals."

"I was just asking," Ryan said, then transmuted it to iron. "How about this?"

"You're transmuting them into their natural colors," his father told him. "The gray occurs when the color is variable. If you're doing a pure metal, it's going to be the color of the pure metal."

"Ah," Ryan said. "Catch."

He tossed the cube to his father, who caught it, and Ryan picked up the plastic sphere sitting on the tray in front of him. After examining it with his senses for a moment, he shaped it into a triangular prism as he transmuted it into glass.

Ryan had a habit of shaping whatever he was transmuting out of boredom, though he made sure he kept it appropriate while Tristan was around.

"What's that?" Tristan asked. "Why'd you make a prism?"

"You've already learned this?" Ryan asked.

"Yeah," Tristan nodded, moving closer to inspect the prism. "Alexa taught me about prisms."

"Tyler had some brought in," Ryan answered. "This matches one of them."

His servant had asked the Novar Family Head, before the man arrived, to bring some as well, to help train Ryan's sense of light. With the refraction, Ryan was able to fine-tune his senses for picking out specific colors, and over the past couple of weeks, had been focusing on identifying more specific colors than just 'red', 'orange', 'yellow', and so on. He was particularly fond of the colors green and blue.

"Oh," Tristan said. "Why?"

"Because of this," Ryan held the prism on the palm of his right hand, then pointed at it with his left index finger.

The pointing wasn't necessary for him, but the teen wanted to show off for the boy. As he pointed, a beam of white light emitted from his fingertip straight into the prism, the light refracting inside. The effect wasn't as great as it would be were the room dark, but the young god still felt the amazement in the boy's head.

"Whoa!" Tristan exclaimed. "That's so awesome! Alexa never told me you could do that with a prism!"

"Because she's not that smart," Ryan told Tristan. "Unlike you. Do you want it?"

He held out the prism as he felt the uncertainty in the boy's mind. Even if the boy were excited to get to leave Volnal with the Novars and continue learning magics under them, the mental conditioning he'd grown up with still ruled at times. Because of that, even accepting a gift from the Novars made him worry.

In the end, however, the boy had grown to trust Ryan and his father over the past two weeks, so the uncertainty was quickly dismissed and he accepted the prism.

"Thanks!"

"You're welcome," Ryan said.

For some reason, he found himself enjoying the presence of the boy. There was a certain joy, he discovered, in having someone admire him and look up to him, in addition to being able to teach someone who would lap up everything there was to learn.

Because of that, Ryan decided that even without a harem of five hundred hot women, he would have plenty of children. Though it might cause a problem if too many Blessed Ones appeared, but he felt confident everything would sort out properly in the end.

Not all of his children would admire him or look up to him, but he'd at least have children, and some of them would. Who wouldn't look up to their father, the god who ruled the world? Idiots, that was who.

"I believe," Ryan put a hand on Tristan's head and ruffled the boy's hair. "That it's time you went back to your own thing, Tristan. Father and I have some other stuff we need to be doing."

"Okay!" Tristan exclaimed, and Ryan pulled his hand away as the boy left the room, carrying the prism with him.

"Time for more interrogation," Ryan stood.

"Indeed," his father stood as well, and the pair made their way to the wing of the mansion used for holding the prisoners.

Not many were left, and they had already gleaned out all of the information they needed. That didn't matter to either of them, as Ryan was using them more for practice than for actually receiving information.

Ryan and his father entered one of the rooms, where a man was strapped to a chair. The young god noted with his senses the man had been stripped to his underwear, which were clean, as evidenced by the lack of traces through his water sense and lack of a smell in the air. Someone had changed it, as everyone soiled themselves during an interrogation. As Ryan himself was the one who caused the man to soil it from his pain, he knew there should have been marks.

He sat on a chair facing the man, his father moving to sit on one off to the side.

"So," Ryan said. "We begin again today. Remember that I already know everything, and this is for me to practice my spells. The more you resist, the more practice I receive."

He felt the anger and hostility in the man's mind. The traitor wanted him dead, even if he felt helpless against the teen.

"Today," Ryan told the Novarax. "We are going to talk about your favorite date. To you, what is the perfect date? Let's start with the setting. Where would you go, on a perfect date?"

With steel determination in his mind, the man simply glared at Ryan. In turn, Ryan observed the changes with his elemental senses, tuning them even further.

"Hm," he said after a minute of silence. "I believe I asked you a question, Novarax. When a Novar asks a question, scum like you is required to answer."

With his power over the air, Ryan split the man's right forearm from wrist to elbow. Having utilized many resets, he managed to learn the best way to do that without causing fatal blood loss.

The man grit his teeth, though Ryan was pleased to note a slight groan, a barely-observable change to the air exiting the man's lungs. He smiled, then healed the injury.

"So," Ryan said. "On a perfect date, where would you go?"

For half an hour, he worked on the man, using his air to create fine, detailed cuts, stopping blood flow to certain regions to create a numbing effect, raised the temperature of a specific spot to burn the man, zapped him with electricity to cause spasms, and more. Still, the man refused to answer, and Ryan was forced to use air magics to push the scent of feces and urine away as the man's body released its hold from the pain.

"You have a high tolerance for pain," Ryan said as he moved his chair forward, until he was within touching distance of the man. "I interrogated you last night with similar results. But you see, the elements aren't my only weapon. I broke a man tougher than you without magic, so I can definitely break you with it."

He heard his father mutter something about that explaining why one of their prisoners suddenly began answering questions during the spring.

"Yes," Ryan laughed. "That was probably me. I did tell you I've interrogated people before. Now, it's time to show you some of what I've learned, Novarax. While Father was busy dealing with the mess you and your cohorts have attempted to create, I played around a little with some of the other prisoners. This is something which might make the guts of a Novarax churn. As for a Novar? Well, we're not heroes in any sense of the word."

Ryan touched the man's right index finger with his left index finger, and then reshaped it, twisting the bones without touching the nerves with his magic. The man howled in pain as his finger became pointed in the wrong direction. With a lack of any breaks, it would be nearly impossible for anyone to heal. A shaper and healing mage would be needed to open his finger up, expose the bones, then reshape them back to how they should be.

At least, if Ryan left it like that. With his ability to sense the bone directly, he had no need to open up the body to see the bones within.

"So," Ryan said. "Are you going to answer my questions now? Or will I continue to wreak havoc upon your body?"

He could feel the man starting to break with his mind, but the traitor still refused to answer, so Ryan began reshaping other bones. By the time he reached the man's little finger, he knew he'd succeeded, and the man began answering his questions when the pain allowed him to.

"Hmph!" Ryan grunted when the man answered everything without fail. "That's no fun. You answered my questions too easily, I didn't get much practice in."

He sighed, then stood, his chair scooting back from the movement.

"I'm going to go do something to relieve my frustration," Ryan told his father. "He answered the questions without resistance at this point, so there's no point in continuing."

Even if he had no issues with torturing someone, he wouldn't keep doing it after they broke just to continue training himself. There was always the possibility of using resets to continue that, but Ryan wanted to cool off a little before doing that, or his frustration at the man breaking in less than an hour would affect how rough he was.

So he made his way outside, to the gardens behind the mansion. He knew Kacy was there, though she wasn't the reason he was visiting the gardens. Ryan sat on a bench near the pond and pulled in his senses, listening to the sounds of the water rippling in the breeze, inhaling the scents of the flowers around him.

It took a feat of earth magic to ensure the flowers grew there because of the environment, but the Novarax did it anyway. It was one of their orders – keep the grounds looking nice for the chance the Novars visited. Even with the coming rebellion, they wanted to maintain appearances until it was no longer possible to. Failure to do that would result in the Novars suspecting them and beginning a thorough investigation.

Not that it mattered anymore. Everyone responsible for the rebellion within the Novarax had been found and the information ripped out of their heads with only minimal torture needed.

As he relaxed, Ryan listened as his servant subtly played with the water in the pond, the only source of practice Tyler received lately due to the various things going on. After a few minutes, Ryan heard someone else approaching, and guessed it was Kacy without checking through his senses or empathy, though he did make sure they were active once she sat.

"Hello," Ryan said as they sat beside him.

"Hello," Kacy said. "My father hasn't finished investigating things yet."

"Okay."

He hoped she left soon. While he was quite horny, he wasn't going to sleep with someone who actually did hold distaste towards him, and he wasn't going to suggest it again. Kacy only cared about protecting her family's company. She would do what was necessary for that and nothing further.

"Are you really experimenting on the Novarax?" She asked.

"The ones who meant to betray us further," he answered. "The Novarax live because we let them. They live for the sole purpose of working for us here. The moment they betray that, they have no purpose. Now, they have one: allowing me to train my magics. It's as simple as that."

Disgust filled her mind again, and he sighed.

"If you really hate me that much," he said. "Then you should find somewhere else to stay – or just leave entirely. Your own family employs torturers, you know."

"They don't experiment on their victims!"

"Are you sure about that?" Ryan asked. "How do they improve their methods? How do they know what does and doesn't work best? That takes experimentation with different methods."

"You-"

"Am the heir to a Family," Ryan interrupted. "Torture is in my blood, it's in my veins. And I don't care for the lives of scum, anyway. In fact, I only care about three lives: my father's, my mother's and Tyler's. That's it, and one of them is already dead, even if I intend on saving them."

He felt the frustration rising in her mind, then heard her stand and stomp off.

"Bitch," he muttered under his breath.

"Sir," Tyler said. "I do not believe that was appropriate."

"Really?" Ryan asked in slight annoyance. "Then what would you have said?"

"Ignorant bitch," his servant responded. "Naive. Stupid. Arrogant."

"I'm arrogant, too," Ryan chuckled.

"You have a different form of arrogance," Tyler told him. "One which comes from your own power. Her arrogance comes solely from her upbringing. She's proven herself to be nowhere near as powerful as you, yet views herself as superior simply because she comes from a Guild and you are of a Family. I take it the marriage will not happen in the final run?"

"Correct," Ryan answered. "She hates me, so I won't sleep with her. Could you arrange for something warm to drink? It's pretty chilly out here, and I think I'll be out here awhile."

He had a lot to think about regarding his run when he reset back to his mother's death. His father had made him realize that much of what he knew of the time would likely need checking in that run. A single change could cause drastic differences, and the wife of the head of the most powerful Family wasn't a small change.

Which meant he needed to decide on if he was going to continue to manipulate events or not over several resets before he returned to the night of his mother's death.