By evening, he had managed to walk around the room fifty times without stopping, a significant improvement over the morning's performance, and he could feel the beginnings of real strength starting to return to his atrophied muscles.
Roran brought dinner and stayed to talk about family gossip and city news, providing Aethros with valuable information about the current state of Fallen Phoenix City and the various powers that controlled different aspects of the local economy and politics.
The picture that emerged from Roran's descriptions was not encouraging for the Vex family's prospects.
The Blacksteel family truly was circling like vultures, applying economic pressure through manipulation of trade routes and merchant guild policies while publicly maintaining plausible deniability about their hostile intentions.
Several other families that had been friendly with the Vex in previous generations had quietly distanced themselves, unwilling to be associated with obvious decline and potential collapse.
And rumors suggested that Lord Cassian was considering desperate measures including marriage alliances that would essentially sell family members to more powerful groups in exchange for financial relief and political protection.
After Roran left for the night, Aethros sat in meditation for the first time since reincarnating and turned his attention fully inward to begin the delicate work of assessing his meridians and planning the reconstruction process.
The damage was extensive but followed patterns that he recognized from his studies of phoenix fire injuries in his original life, confirming that whoever had attacked young Hadrian five years ago had possessed at least some knowledge of authentic Celestial Phoenix Sect techniques.
The phoenix fire still lingering in the damaged tissues was extremely dangerous but also represented the key to healing if Aethros could figure out how to transform it from poison into medicine through careful manipulation.
The technique he would need to use was called the Phoenix Rebirth Meridian Reconstruction Method, a forbidden healing art that Aethros had developed late in his original life but never had occasion to use because Supreme Lords rarely suffered injuries severe enough to require such extreme measures.
The method involved deliberately inflaming the phoenix fire already present in the damaged meridians, causing it to burn even hotter and more destructively for a brief period before suddenly reversing its nature and transforming into healing energy that would guide the regrowth of spiritual pathways.
The reversal required perfect timing and absolute control, with failure meaning death or permanent crippling even worse than Hadrian's current state, but success would not only heal the damage but actually strengthen the meridians beyond their original capacity.
Aethros spent hours studying the phoenix fire within his meridians, learning its rhythms and patterns, understanding exactly how it had integrated into his damaged spiritual pathways over five years of festering.
The work was tedious and required concentration that left him mentally exhausted, but by the time he finally allowed himself to sleep, he had a clear plan for beginning the reconstruction process within the next few days once his physical body had recovered enough strength to survive the initial stages.
The journey back to power would be long and painful, but Aethros had never been one to shy away from necessary suffering, and he knew that every step forward was also a step closer to the revenge he had promised himself and the restoration of everything that had been stolen from him three thousand years ago.
The encounter with Helena had left Aethros with much to consider as he lay in his bed that night, staring at the ceiling while his mind worked through the implications of what he had learned about his new family's dynamics and the threats they faced from external enemies.
The Vex family was declining faster than Hadrian's memories had suggested, crushed between the Blacksteel family's economic warfare and their own poor decisions, and Aethros understood that his window for building strength before circumstances forced his hand was smaller than he had initially hoped.
But rushing the meridian reconstruction process would be suicide, and he needed to balance urgency against the reality that one mistake would leave him permanently crippled or dead, neither of which would serve his ultimate goals of revenge and restoration.
Sleep came fitfully, interrupted by dreams that mixed memories from both lives into confusing narratives where Velara's face morphed into Helena's and Malveris's treacherous smile appeared on Lord Cassian's features.
The phoenix fire in his damaged meridians pulsed with each dream sequence, responding to his subconscious emotional state in ways that reminded him of the deep connection between cultivation and mental discipline that he had spent ten thousand years perfecting.
Even in this weakened state, even with crippled meridians and a body that could barely walk across a room without exhaustion, his Supreme Lord soul maintained enough power to influence the spiritual energy around him in subtle ways that would be undetectable to anyone who did not know exactly what to look for.