Bloodbound Codex: I Grow Stronger in Secret

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The moment the Spirit Sphere made contact with the ruin floor, an explosion erupted. The sound was deafening and the shockwave that followed shook the whole ruin from the floor up to wherever its ceiling ended. Dust and debris scattered in every direction.

The ground where the Sphere had landed cracked and split outward from the point of impact like broken stone under a hammer. Atlas himself was caught off guard by how much destruction it was causing. He had used the Spirit Sphere before, but never inside an enclosed ruin space, and the way the force had nowhere to escape made the result far larger than an open area would have produced. He was floating above it, so the explosion couldn’t reach him.

He looked down at the Muxicals getting swept away by the blast. The ones closest to the point of impact had their limbs severed or melted off entirely before they could register what had happened. The ones further back were knocked off their feet and thrown against the walls or the floor by the shockwave alone. They didn’t even get the chance to scream. The whole thing happened faster than any of them could react to.

And while all of them had lunged at him before the Sphere dropped, none of them had been at a height or position where avoiding the explosion was possible even slightly. The attack had covered too much ground for that. One by one they dropped onto the ruin’s now-battered floor.

THUD...THUD...THUD...THUD...

It continued until the last one of them was dead.

Only after Atlas confirmed that every single one of them was down did he let go of the act he had been keeping up. He closed his eyes and dropped the cold and calm expression he had been forcing onto his face through the entire fight.

His spirit reserves had been completely drained.

Using Crowbeast Wings to stay airborne had been a continuous cost on its own. The Spirit Sphere on top of that had taken what remained. The two together had emptied him entirely. He had been forcing himself to stay floating above the ground for two reasons only.

First, he didn’t want to be swept away by his own attack while it was still active below him. Second, he needed to confirm every Muxical was dead before coming down. If even one had survived and he dropped to the ground in this condition, he would have had no spirit left to defend himself, no mobility to escape, and no way to fight back. That would have gotten him killed after surviving the whole fight, which would have been a stupid way to go.

Now that both conditions were met, there was no reason to keep floating.

The Crowbeast Wings faded from his back into him and he fell.

THUD.

His body hit the black ruin floor and a small crater formed beneath him with a sharp crack. His eyes had already snapped shut before he even landed. His spirit reserves being completely empty meant his body had nothing left to cushion the fall or soften the impact through any passive means. The exhaustion he had been holding back through the whole fight came down on him all at once the moment he stopped needing to hold it back.

Even then, the scythe remained in his grip.

While his reserves began refilling on their own and his body lay on the floor, Regenerative Hide activated automatically. It didn’t need Atlas to consciously trigger it at this point. Through enough use and enough situations where his body had needed it immediately, the trait had become something his body initiated on its own whenever the conditions for it were met.

At this moment it worked through whatever internal and external damage had accumulated during the fight, drawing only the minimal amount of spirit necessary from his veins so that the refilling process wasn’t heavily disrupted by the healing cost running at the same time.

As for how spirit reserves refill — cultivators in Eliomor absorbed ambient spirit from the atmosphere around them or rather their bodies automatically did.

The atmosphere always carries spirit in it to a massive extent, though the Cultivators couldn’t freely utilize or use it, and a cultivator whose reserves are empty naturally draws that ambient spirit inward over time. The process is slow compared to active methods, but it is the standard way reserves recover after being fully spent. This rule applied to every cultivator from the lowest ranks all the way up to S-rank without exception. What changes at SS-rank is a separate matter entirely and follows different rules that don’t apply here.

Regenerative Hide continued working alongside the reserve refilling for several minutes. Then it stopped. All injuries, both internal and external, were fully healed. After that point, only the reserve refilling continued without the added drain of healing running at the same time, which meant the refilling pace increased once the healing cost was removed.

Time passed.

...

..

.

After a few hours, Atlas’s hand twitched against the ground.

He slowly pushed himself upright as he felt his strength returning to a usable level. The heaviness that had been sitting through his whole body after the reserves emptied had reduced enough for him to move properly. He looked at the scythe in his left hand. Still in his grip through the entire time he had been on the floor. He hadn’t let go of it even while unconscious, which said something about how deep the habit of holding it had already settled into him since he first picked it up at Veloran’s hut.

Then he looked around at the Muxical bodies spread across the ruin floor. Some had landed close together. Some had been thrown far enough by the explosion that they were near the walls. The floor around them was cracked and scorched in several places from where the Spirit Sphere’s force had spread.

He already knew what came next.

He stood up without waiting and spoke.

”Originate.”

The Codex emerged from his chest as usual. Atlas let the Stylus do its job without directing it. The Stylus moved from body to body on its own, working through each one in sequence and collecting the blood before returning to the Codex’s side. It had done this enough times that the process was familiar and required nothing from Atlas except standing there while it finished.

After it was done, Atlas opened the Trait page and watched the name forming beneath the row of Traits he had already assimilated.

[ Sense Nullification - Rank B ]

He smiled at that.

’Now two completely opposite and ridiculous Traits are sitting together...’

Spirit Instinct allowed him to detect danger before it arrived and mask his own presence so thoroughly that even high rank explorers couldn’t sense him passing by.

Sense Nullification worked from the other direction. It disrupted or nullified the sensing ability of others. The reason he hadn’t been able to detect the Muxicals when he first entered that chamber, the reason Spirit Instinct had seemingly failed him right before the claw hit him, was because the original Muxical carried this Trait and had been using it passively. Two Traits sitting on opposite ends of the same concept, and both of them had no business being ranked as low as the Codex had assigned them.

Suddenly, he remembered he hadn’t checked what the Stylus had collected from the claw monster back in the outer chamber earlier. He had been moving too quickly after that encounter to stop and go through the Codex properly.

He turned the page and arrived at the third page. The Bloodline heading remained exactly as it had been, and beneath it was still the same single entry.

[ Osmo ??? - Rank ??? { Unlocked 1.5% } ]

The percentage had moved. It had been sitting at 1% before. Now it was at 1.5%.

Atlas narrowed his eyes at it.

’So it absorbed the bloodlines from both types of monsters I killed and the percentage moved to 1.5. The name and rank are still locked, but at least the percentage is moving...’

The name and rank remained unreadable. Whatever condition was needed to unlock those parts hadn’t been met yet. He had no way to force that, so he exhaled and moved past it.

He turned back to the Trait page and tapped Sense Nullification with the Sanguis Stylus the same way he always did for assimilation. The process went easier than he expected. There was no strong physical jolt or sharp reaction the way some previous Trait assimilations had produced. He felt only a subtle shift in how his senses registered the space around him, and alongside that, knowledge about the Trait filled into his mind. Not all of it. The knowledge came through incomplete, with gaps that the information alone didn’t cover. But his instincts bridged enough of those gaps that he had a working understanding of what the Trait did and how to apply it. That was enough to start with. The rest would come through use.

He turned to the first page.

It was time to bring all his attributes up to 40. After that the next target was 50, and that climb would happen in the next ruin.

’I will reach 50 in the next ruin. The Bloodline Activation should start there as well. Maybe then I will finally reach S-rank.’

He held onto that thought for a moment, then set it aside.

He grabbed the Sanguis Stylus and wrote.