Bloodbound Codex: I Grow Stronger in Secret

The moment Aurelis finished speaking in that trembling voice about the war and the single man, the expressions of the others immediately changed. Mostleon, Yulia, and Garthax all widened their eyes as they looked toward her. Only the Dragon Emperor remained the same, quietly watching her with the calm expression he had worn ever since arriving.

Aurelis’s hand trembled slightly as she continued looking into the sphere. She wasn’t simply seeing a lone figure standing in the distance. She was seeing something far beyond that, something that even made someone at her level hesitate.

The black figure stood motionless, but the scene surrounding him told a completely different story.

Beneath his feet lay the body of a human he had just killed. That single corpse, however, was only a tiny part of what stretched around him. As Aurelis continued looking farther into the scene, she saw countless corpses covering the battlefield. They extended for hundreds of kilometers in every direction; their bodies scattered across the ground while blood soaked the land beneath them.

The black figure remained standing on top of one of those corpses without moving. In his right hand, he held a long blade. Aurelis recognized its shape immediately. It was a katana, the same type of weapon Alberion carried, and after seeing enough of that weapon throughout her life, she wasn’t surprised by it.

What caught her attention instead was his right arm.

Parts of it glowed with a strange mixture of orange and yellow, the light spreading through markings that looked like tattoos running across his arm. She had never seen anything like them before, and even with the Axon Spirit Eyes, she couldn’t understand what they represented.

Then she slowly shifted her gaze away from the black figure and looked toward the army standing before him.

The moment she understood what she was seeing, her breathing almost stopped.

The army hadn’t already been defeated.

It still numbered more than five hundred thousand.

Yet the battlefield behind the black figure was already covered with enough corpses to suggest that nearly half of the original force had already been slaughtered.

That meant...the man standing alone before that army had been fighting an army that originally numbered around one million people.

Seeing that scene alone would have been enough to leave Aurelis shocked, but her expression changed even further as she continued observing the battlefield.

The army standing before that lone figure wasn’t made up of humans alone. Countless monsters were mixed among them as well, ranging from the lowest ranks to the highest ranks known in Eliomor. Among them, she even saw two Ex-rank monsters standing on the battlefield, while another enormous black monster remained far in the distance, watching everything without moving as though it were the one leading the entire force.

The more she looked at that impossible scene, the stronger her curiosity became.

She immediately decided to look deeper.

The Axon Spirit Eyes weren’t simply meant to see farther than ordinary vision. Their true purpose was perception itself.

Anything.

That single word best described those eyes’ ability.

They allowed Aurelis to perceive anything she directed her focus toward with the ability activated. Matter, Spirit, hidden phenomena, and even the flow of time itself could all be observed through them. Among the four of them, her ability had always been regarded as the most extraordinary for exactly that reason.

However, after reaching this stage of Cultivation, her perception of the future had become restricted by those unknown Laws they had been speaking about. She could no longer freely observe future timelines as she once could. That was also why she had never been able to directly see what would happen to the Human King’s future and instead had to rely upon the Tree of Astraya, which only revealed small fragments of future events through its fallen leaves.

As for how the Tree provided that information to them...that was a completely different matter.

Without wasting another moment, Aurelis pushed the Axon Spirit Eyes even further. She forced her perception through the constant glitches and the black distortion covering the mysterious figure, attempting to uncover what lay beneath them.

The instant she did...

”AHHHHHHHHHH!!”

Her eyes shut themselves by force as a sharp scream escaped her mouth. At the same time, the black sphere slipped from her trembling hand and fell toward the ground.

The moment she screamed, the Dragon Emperor disappeared from where he had been standing.

There wasn’t the slightest movement to follow, one moment he stood several meters away.

The next, he was already behind Aurelis.

His right hand moved in one smooth motion before stopping behind her head as Spirit immediately flowed from his palm into the back of her head.

As that surge of Spirit entered her body, Aurelis felt a cool stream of energy rushing directly toward her eyes.

The Dragon Emperor spoke without changing his expression.

”Deactivate your eyes right now! Those Laws are doing this!”

As soon as she heard those words, Aurelis didn’t ask any questions or hesitate. She immediately deactivated the Axon Spirit Eyes. The moment she did, relief spread through her entire body as the sharp pain in her eyes rapidly faded away.

Standing behind her, the Dragon Emperor slowly lowered his hand before speaking.

”I should have warned you beforehand. This Relic lets you observe the future externally, not through an Ability like your Axon Spirit Eyes. You tried to combine your own Ability with the Relic and force your perception even deeper into a part of the future that is restricted by those Laws.”

Hearing that explanation, Mostleon’s eyes widened even further as his pupils shrank. Yulia and Garthax reacted no differently, none of them could believe what they had just heard.

A Relic...

One capable of showing the future? This was Absurd...beyond absurd.

Until now, Aurelis had been the only person they knew who possessed an Ability capable of glimpsing future events. The idea that a Relic could accomplish something similar was something none of them had ever considered possible.

Even for beings who had reached their level of Cultivation, it was difficult to accept.