“Dragon Fall City. Dragon Blooded. Scourge bones. A mountain with bones. The blood used to turn and make Scourge…” Yuriko muttered as she walked towards the tunnel. Her mind was a bit dazed after her enlightenment. “Who knew it was also the Radiant energy that was messing with my head?”

She shivered.

Yuriko vaguely recalled her past self. Just before the Atavism Ritual, she’d been a bit more…distant? Controlled? Focused? Yeah, she was focused on her goals to the detriment of everything else, wasn’t she?

Right now, she was just living life and wandering almost aimlessly. The clue she found regarding Kato’s possible survival and location had lit up her passion, but it had not been the same since the end of the Rumiga War. Defeating the Chaos Duke after nearly five years of battle and adventure, of which she spent the majority training and battling for her life.

It had been the monotony of life in Faron’s Crossing that drove her to accept the mission that would have brought her back to Kogasi and Bella planes. And she wondered if it was her wanderlust that affected the Chaos Storm that brought them to Bresia. The Chaos Sea changed according to the observer’s perception. That was the very basis of Chaos travel.

Then, there were the lost shards that Damien wanted. She couldn’t see their effect in the dreamscape, but she would be a fool to think that they had no effect on the events surrounding her. She had absorbed one of them, after all, and there was the intrinsic need to absorb everything else.

Just as there was the instinct within her that told her she would perish if she tried it at her Anima level. She supposed that was one of Damien’s warnings. She’d gotten over the fact that the perverted old man had been grooming her to become his replacement body, mostly because he actually sacrificed his existence—or the one that had latched onto her Anima through the Atavism Ritual anyway—to save her and everything she cared about. That probably meant that every other shard she was after contained a fragment of his consciousness. And those would not care for her at all.

Hmmm, perhaps it was motivation to advance as soon as she could, but she knew that rising in Anima strength was a marathon, at least for the upper levels. Consolidating everything made progressing beyond the next stage easier, she knew, and she didn’t have a complete picture of what she needed to get to Manifestation.

Her Anima reach, purity, physique, Ennoias and Colligia, and her Mien had to reach a certain point. The last one, her Mien, was something unique to her, she thought, but she didn’t know the orthodox Ancient’s Way. Exaltation was the path of perfection, and the path of self-determination. It shared most of the Way, but branched out depending on the Ancient. The Mien was what made her unique, she supposed, and thankfully, she already had a clear grasp of it.

Intent and Will, were the new parts she had to train, and she only had a rough way to measure progress. The number of sunblades when compared to her reach in paces that she could wield at once was how she measured Intent. She didn’t know what the threshold was, however, but she had only improved incrementally. The arithmetic was further blurred by the fact that she had to bear the weight of Damien’s memories, but at least that helped hone her Will.

She had no reliable way to measure her Will. It was a resource used for defense, she thought, and could be better measured when she was in the Chaos Sea. Or maybe if she dwelt in the other layers of reality? A measure of how stable she could make it, perhaps? She only knew that she could improve it by holding herself to a strict discipline. Maybe…

And there was one other thing, which was Manifestation itself. The ability to infuse an Animus construct, or anything really, with her Intent and Will, effectively making a semi-independent entity that was still somewhat connected to her. She had an inkling just a while back, when she fought against the blob. When it severed part of her Anima, she could still feel the connection to that part, at least before it got devoured.

Did she have to mutilate herself to learn it? Or was it really mutilation? She grew her reach by an astounding pace everyday for the past weeks. She could afford to sever a little bit to practice, right? She had to learn it to advance, no matter how well the other bits measured up, if she couldn’t do that, then she couldn’t advance.

“This is the work of years anyway.” Yuriko muttered. Fluffington sniffed her nape and licked it, making her twitch in surprise. She reached over and patted his head and he lolled his tongue happily.

They went into the tunnel and she hummed. She needed to speed up or it’d take her the rest of the day to get out. The tracks were fresh though, so she hoped the captives managed to get out. There was still that armoured man out there, though she suspected he had been than blob, transformed by the yellow blood. She couldn’t confirm it, however.

She started jogging though she only devoted a little bit of her focus into it. She used the rest of her strands of consciousness to ruminate. She couldn’t meditate while moving, but perhaps this was just as good. She had stopped her morning runs after she left Rumiga, though she sometimes took a jog around Niria Academy. It put her in a different state of mind, so it was suitable to look at things from another angle.

Radiant energy was the basis of her edge. Without it, she would be far less powerful, and she probably would not have survived her adventures. It might have been the one to prod her though, coupled with her Davar wanderlust. The heightened sensations, and the innate confidence bordering on arrogance… that had come from Damien too, but perhaps it was shaped by Radiant energy. Perhaps it was not only his memories that made her rash.

So how could she temper its effects? She also had the feeling that it was impossible to avoid, and that she had embedded that very aspect into her mind, body, and Anima. She couldn’t take it away, nor did she even want to. So she could only ameliorate it. What pulled out of that spiral, anyway?

Her Mien? Her mind and experiences?

If so, then she must mature in both aspects before she could even dare to advance her Radiant Colligia into a Reperta. Another reason that it could take years to advance. As it were, she had taken less than three years to advance from Actualisation to Transformation. Damien’s memories didn’t contain the minimum threshold, but she also knew that many Ancients never progressed beyond it. The ratio was similar to the Imperial Path, she thought. There were about three hundred Knights to a single Knight Captain.

Ah, not the ratio was skewed farther. A thousand Actualised Ancients to a Transformation Stage Ancient. And would there be a thousand Transformation Stage Ancients to a single Manifestation Stage?

“Wow,” she muttered. Ancients didn’t age, so why didn’t they continue to progress? Perhaps that Conclave of Authority that Gwendith and Heron encountered could tell her why. There was a group of them here in Dragon Fall City, right? She hadn’t intended to seek them out, thinking that they seemed a bit too self-righteous, but the information they could share might be useful.

Notwithstanding what they did to Tiger Lao anyway. Yuriko frowned and thought to herself that she should take the little girl, Matsumi, as a student of sorts, to see if she could progress as an Ancient. The girl was barely into the Novice Stage after all.

The tunnel she was running in shuddered. She froze then ran ahead, fearing a cave in, or something equally sordid. Digging through the tunnel would be difficult considering she’d have to use her Anima. Unless she used a spell? Shape Earth and Shape Stone were staples, after all.

She had crossed a league and when she rounded a corner, she stopped. A hundred paces ahead, the tunnel was closed. It looked like the walls, ceiling, and floor were pinched together rather than a collapse. She approached the closure, poked it with a finger and hissed when it tried to pull her Anima. Since it was in its condensed form, it was unsuccessful, but it was annoying anyway.

She slammed her fist into the thing, and she heart it shudder. Dust fell from above, and the wall cracked a tiny bit.

“There should be side tunnels.” She muttered, remembering the twisty, narrow, person sized passages she first dig into. The ambient light in the tunnels wasn’t all that good. She basically used the ambient energies and her Radiance to see in the darkness, but like the rest of Dragon Fall, the mountain had thin ambient energies. She kept her perception aura close to her body, ready to retract as needed. But when she came close to the wall, she snorted. There were small entrances every ten or so paces along the wall.

She ducked inside, and found that it was a narrow passage, barely five paces wide and three tall, that ran along the big one for about a hundred paces before moving away. She moved towards where she thought the way back towards Dragon Fall was, and briefly contemplated punching through the walls and making her own tunnel. She was still several leagues into the mountain though.

 “Grrr…” Fluffers growled in warning as a bump on the wall protruded out, then opened up like a blooming flower.

Blart…burp.

Several disgusting blobs came out, each one the colour of pus, and about a pace across. Yuriko stepped back, only for Fluffers to grow again. Another pustule opened up half a dozen paces behind them, and in front, a dozen blobs had already gathered.

Then, the things stretched upwards and formed a vaguely humanoid shape. The head was featureless, but as she watched, the mouth extended forward like a canine snout. The arms were tipped with several five inch long claws. The snouts split open to reveal small, even, and sharp teeth, ones meant for grabbing, not cutting.

Not all of the blobs developed the same way. One didn’t even have hands and its arms extended into long, mantis-like limbs.

They all turned towards her, and Yuriko clicked her tongue even as she drew her straight sword, reinforced it with dense Anima, and slashed. The blob closest to her was cut in twain from the hip to the shoulder. It collapsed, but…it flowed back together. Yuriko kicked it away, and the thing was just viscous enough that it flew off instead of splattering.

The ones behind her jumped, but they were slow. She simply shifted around their lines of attack, slashing with the sword, punching or slapping with her free hand, and kicking or stomping as needed.

Within a few seconds, both sets of enemies were but smears on the wall. But a moment later, the valve on the walls spat out another dozen blobs. Even worse, she could see that up ahead, more of the things were spitting out more blobs. It was the same behind her.

She wiped out the ones in front of her almost immediately, but the number of foes continued to increase. She ran ahead, cutting and slicing, not taking the time to finish them off. She formed sunblades to aid her, but the things absorbed the Radiant energy and destabilised the Animus construct. It killed them, sure, but the sunblades could only hit two of them before fizzing out.

In a matter of minutes, there were more blob things than could fit the corridor, and they started climbing over each other to get to her.

Despite everything, Yuriko smiled. At the very least, she could vent her frustrations here.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep