Chapter 90: Pathfinder
As Zephyr tried to open his eyes slowly, he was immediately flooded with a torrent of stimuli from the outside world. Everything was bright. The sounds were too loud. Hunger. Thirst. Pain. The weight of gravity on his body. He could consciously feel every single limb of his body. He had weight again. Everything was hitting him all at once. A cacophony of stimuli that he was struggling to process. He felt like an outsider in his own body. Coupled with the sluggishness he felt due to his extreme mental fatigue, he instantly slumped on the bed where his body was sat. Unconscious.
.
.
The next time he cracked his eyes open, he found himself staring right at the face of his teacher— Jon.
His heavily lidded eyes that struggled to fully part open, scanned the room just as his teacher observed him.
Zephyr was still in his room inside his quarters at Jon’s compound. But now there was medical equipment around the room and a couple of healing artifacts on the desk too. His eyes eventually settled back on Jon who was still watching him blankly.
"You’re really not normal at all..." he muttered in thought, looking at Zephyr like a puzzle. "You’ve been asleep for only nine hours, and yet you’re already awake." He shook his head, leaning forward in his seat by Zephyr’s bed. "That’s not normal by any standard at all. And it can’t be explained away by simply saying you’re an ’Exalted’." He continued, more to himself than to Zephyr. "Even if you’re a special kind of Exalted— perhaps you’re of a special bloodline or you have a unique physique, it still can’t be explained fully by that."
Zephyr kept silent, turning his head away from Jon with a sigh. He tried leaning up, pushing his weary body into a sitting position. It was still hard, since his body was not fully recovered. But whatever Jon had fed him while he was unconscious gave him enough energy to adapt better to his body again. It wasn’t like the sensory overload that he had felt earlier when he came back to the real world.
He quickly leaned his back against the bed rest, sorting out his thoughts as Jon watched him with interest.
"I tried comprehending a word." Zephyr said.