Born in Blood



Hundreds of different sensations – painful, flaming, ice-cold – washed over Liam's brain. 

He was simply stilled in place, unable to move a muscle while his brain felt like it was on fire while being restructured and simultaneously enhanced. 

At the same time, his eye grew hot like molten steel as its black pupil narrowed to a vertical slit.

Liam didn't scream, not even a grunt. He could just ignore that pain entirely. 

A huge pressure unfolded in the small chamber. Waves of buzzing hums vibrated the air around Liam's figure. He felt his thoughts racing at incredible speeds, clear and comprehensible, detailed and precise.

After a solid thirty seconds, it was over.

Liam felt serene. Usually, fatigue weighed against his mind due to how heavily he used it, but all of that washed away.

He could pristinely hear and sense exactly what the others were doing throughout the entire spire and surrounding space. Nord was cultivating, Nessa was mixing alchemic ingredients, Niveh was lazily lying around Rin's room.

Liam heaved a small, exhilarated sigh, then smiled ear-to-ear.

This. This was why he worked so hard to gain power. That thrill, that unexplainable feeling that fills the greedy void in his chest.

Meanwhile, his vision almost seemed to pierce through the walls. Zooming in, his iris could spot little pieces of foreign bacteria living in between the cracked walls. 

At the same time, there was a strange feeling connected to the King's Eye that Liam couldn't put his finger on. 

It was like another limb with a specific function… except connected to his eye.

Liam fiddled around with it for a good minute, before something finally happened. 

The mental energy surrounding him suddenly flickered with ethereal forms and iridescent colors. It lasted for a split second while Liam had it activated, before it wafted away like a foggy mirage.

'Illusions!'

Liam unclothed his abdomen and inspected the Kitsune tattoo. It silently flowed around his skin, but it looked a bit more vibrant and invigorated than before. 

The Kitsune had illusionistic abilities. 

Although it sounded amazing at first glance… Liam didn't really think that skill would be too useful beside providing gimmicky tricks. 

Against the patriarch of the Royce family, hiding himself with illusions wouldn't do much, would it?

Unless of course, it had some other functions that Liam was not aware of.

Before Liam could take out his parchments and test out the full capabilities of his eyesight, the hair on his skin rose abruptly.

Thick darkness filled the chamber like smoke, drowning out the sounds of thunder smashing against the spire. Despite his new mental capabilities, he couldn't move a single muscle. 

Liam couldn't move. 

For someone who had faced packs of Rank 4 beasts, regularly handled powerful magical beasts, killed strong cultivators and tore out his own eyeballs… fear was a forgotten emotion.

Yet Liam's heart started to pump at twice the speed, thundering in his ears.

An ominous aura like nails scraping against a chalkboard spread tainted the air, along with what sounded like the shrieking of a harrowed wraith, though Liam might have imagined that.

FEAR.

Primordial fear.

Fear had a voice, and it spoke.

"A meeting long overdue. I grew tired of watching."

Liam's skin crawled. 

The voice was beyond guttural, yet held a layer of complexity Liam mortal mind didn't quite grasp. 

"What are you?" Liam asked. To his credit, fear didn't stain his voice.

Silence. 

"A gracious benefactor. You have amused me. Meeting you here was done on a whim, but your reaction is… satisfactory."

Silence again, but the darkness started to recede and slowly pull away.

"We will learn more about each other. Soon, Determined One."

Liam narrowed his gaze. His sight and senses couldn't penetrate the thick veil of umbral shadows at all.

"Who are you?" Liam asked again with furrowed brows.

Just as the last wisp of night receded into the corner of the room, Liam heard a name, breathed like a sigh:

"Raast."

///

Liam was back in his chambers. 

Despite his amazing advancement, he looked aghast, pale and distraught.

Hundreds of instantaneous thoughts shot through his mind at lightning speed, yet despite his newfound intellect, he failed to come to any conclusion as to what just happened. 

It took him an hour to fully relax his senses and still any unstable emotion. 

Tired of watching? Gracious benefactor? Raast?

Liam cursed loudly. 

Just when he thought he was getting a bit stronger, something bites him in the back. 

He just knew that the interaction he just had would claw at the recesses of his mind endlessly.

'Staying here isn't safe anymore. I need to get back to Echoria and understand what this is. Inscriptions and studies can wait.' 

He threw his current priorities at the back of his mind. 

Liam looked around at the pile of forged and inscribed items beside him.

There were at least twenty jagged daggers made from corrupted magical beast bones, claws and teeth. 

Inscriptions covered their surface, and they were one-time use items that would shatter upon a single, but lethal slash. 

Liam guessed that their prowess was in the upper-tier of Rank 1, which was actually well above his level of capability, but Blood Weaving had a good attunement to those materials.

Another pile consisted of shortswords and daggers made from his darkness beasts. 

Inscriptions could exponentially increase the prowess and level of a forged item. 

Currently, Liam's blades were lower-tier items, yet the single successful inscription he had written on one blade bolstered its prowess to the middle-tier.

He stored them quickly and steadied his mental sphere before leaving. 

His control over his newer, denser mental waves wasn't the best. 

Although he didn't think his breakthrough would be hidden for long, he would do his absolute best to delay that as much as possible. 

There was also his iris, which was now a vertical slit similar to the Kitsune's. 

The King's Eye as a whole gained another layer of incandescence, glowing faintly like a rare gem.

After testing it for an hour or two, he left his chamber and made his way to the bottom floor where everyone camped.

They had a bit of shock in their gaze looking at his figure, as everyone felt their skin and mind tingle at once, even Niveh.