Born in Blood

550  Red Line n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

When Liam woke up, he felt horrible.

Aching, tired and mentally drained.

Blood stains and gunk dirtied the once clean crevice.

It wasn't the first time he had fallen unconscious during Primordial Forging's renewal.

Since his blood had become so potent and heavy, his mental sphere strained under its weight.

4 and a half months had passed in the blink of an eye. To Liam, though, it felt like a week.

Burning away traces of his stay, Liam took out his odachi.

He separated them from their unified state, and all three swords — the Dusks, Black Blade and Breaker — sat on the floor.

'What do I start with?'

Unlike before where Liam had the liberty of making rapid changes over quick periods of time… now, it was a different story.

Once Liam made a change, he could only make another after one year.

…What did this mean?

Liam could only make one special item, one special change, per year.

Why?

Simply put, if the Primordial Forging method was a body, the Magical Beast Will was its heart.

When Liam removed this, all the nerves and veins had to be stripped away, too.

These little nerves and veins are what made the unorthodox technique even feasible… and it was also what made it so rigid.

To substitute for this, Liam used his own blood, which he would then mix with his mental energy to produce a Will of his own.

In a way, this meant that Primordial Forging had become somewhat similar to Blood Weaving!

The result was this: due to how arduous and taxing this method was, Liam could, by his own estimates, forge something new once per year.

Of course, this didn't apply to one-time use items, like the Parasite Worm and Abyssal Needles, since they didn't require as much effort.

Nevertheless, no gain was without some loss.

This was acceptable, though it would make him stingy on how he was to spend his one chance to forge something unique.

Ideas rushed through his mind.

But he could only choose one.

'It's between the Black Blade and the Dusks,' Liam thought. 'The Breaker is largely situational… I can't put my money on it.'

The Breaker worked off of sheer power, and if Liam didn't have a Rank 5 body, he could not maximize its true potential.

As such, he favored the Dusks.

The main reason was because they worked so well with Resonance, and that it was two blades instead of one.

The Black Blade consumed two petals.

The Breaker consumed four.

And the Dusks consumed one each.

Before making his final decision, Liam decided something else.

'I'll settle this after I visit Gorock,' Liam decided. 'Wouldn't hurt. Besides, if a fight breaks out, I can test what blades would do best against his swarm.'

Leaving the crevice, the first thing Liam noticed was that his two guards were horribly injured.

Corpses of weak, lower ranking species of Fishmen littered the ground beside them.

"Well done, friends," Liam patted his Meathead guards on the back, then rammed a hand through their brains, killing them instantly.

They returned to his Pearl.

Then, Liam set off towards Gorock's residence.

***

Covered with umbral shadows hiding his presence, Liam's eyes shone with a dark light as hovered some distance away from an obscure stone mansion situated at the very edge of a sharp underwater cliff. The palace was a fortress… yet no soldiers were present to act as guard. Torches that burnt with red flames lit its front gate — which was not open to visitors. The red waters were thick with the taste and stench of blood. Here and there, shipwrecks and massive bones created iconic-looking landmarks, and the Quadrant as a whole looked like a mass graveyard. Most unique of all, were the swarms of piranhas that circled the stone mansion.

The word demonic suited them well. A single piranha was the size of an adult's torso… but for a Zenith, size wasn't the most important aspect. Each one of these little demons had a jaw so large, it was ear-to-ear, filled with protruding, hook-like teeth. With rough, deformed skin colored with dark red hues, it even had a damn exoskeleton. Some even had bits of flesh in between their deformed gums.

'Damn they're ugly.' Liam's eye shifted from the swarms, to what the cliff overlooked. The Red Line. The Unholy Lamprey's domain.

True to its name, it was a huge red line that stretched from east to west. The liquid inside it was a murky, thick, dark shade of blood, refusing to mix with whatever Quadrant it bordered. The Red Line looked like a massive wall that stretched as far as the sky itself… yet it was not solid by any means. By all means, it was not near him. Yet, as Liam glanced at it, an ominous presence made it seem like he was being gazed back at. Watched.

Liam shook away the feeling. Everyone felt that way. It was a primordial instinct.

Even if they weren't actually being watched, just being around a spider's nest or a viper's burrow, one would sense an urge to turn away and not stick around.

This was that, amplified by a hundred. Shifting his focus back to the stone castle, Liam hummed to himself. 'How do I get him out of there without a fight breaking out?'

If possible, Liam genuinely wanted this to be a visit. If they could share a talk with one another with no harm, then what the heck? It was a win-win, ideal situation.

If.

'Meh, worth a shot.' Liam used his White Matter and summoned a Meathead, enveloped it with his shadows, then carved something in its chest, before sending it to the mansion's main gate via the Sea of Darkness. Then, he severed the connection between the Meathead and his shadow, allowing it to swim further away at the cost of losing control over it. 'Off you go, little buddy. Don't get eaten.'

And so it went, gliding through the ground as a nondescript puddle of darkness.