Born in Blood-Chapter 555: Ravenous Heart

Time went by uncounted.

As usual, when Liam began inscribing, everything else zoomed out of focus. It was just him and the empty parchments, waiting to be filled with his creativity.

The body method Liam had in mind was relatively simple in theory, but was unbelievably difficult in practice. In short, he planned to rip a page out of the vampires’ books.

Ever since his blood had arrived at the fourth Rank, Liam’s heart had transformed into a greater form of the organ. Veins and vessels had expanded, allowing for easier transport of blood throughout his entire body.

In a way, his heart was an imitation of what the Nexus of a vampire could do!

After all, the only reason Liam had blood manipulation was because he had devoured so many Nexus’ back in Korsa.

Of course, it didn’t mean his heart had transformed into a Nexus. Far from it. It was still an organ – albeit vastly enhanced – not a center of power.

But from this, Liam gained the idea of his Rank 5 body.

...Why not transform his heart into a Nexus?

Not literally, of course. He could not transform it into a center of power, even if he wanted to.

Instead, he could transform it into a proper vessel. Something to store blood, allow it to condense and concentrate. This would be a foundation for the rest of the method.

To make his blood the nourishing source of his future methods, though, was the difficult part.

’I have to disconnect my link with ’Ora’.’

’Disconnecting’ his link with ’Ora’, meant that Liam would never, ever be able to use it again.

Only for his body, of course. If Liam would succeed in his goal, then such a small caveat was benign compared to what he would gain.

His core would still welcome the energy source, though it would no longer heal, strengthen or empower his body as a result.

Once this disconnection was a success, he would substitute the energy source from ’Ora’, to his own blood.

Doing this literally required Liam to study the essence of ’Ora’ for months on end, and was the most time consuming part of all of it.

’Ora’ was very simple at a moment’s glance... but if one looked behind the curtains, thousands of little moving parts worked in synchrony to produce a mesmerizing source of energy. freewebnσvel.cøm

Through a series of tests, trial and error, experiments and unorthodox methods of analysis, Liam understood the gist of how ’Ora’ worked.

In short, imagine if the body was a battery.

To power this battery, one needed positive and negative charges of electricity, a conductor, and an intricate circuit to make sure everything worked in order.

’Ora’ was the electricity, the conductor, and the intricate circuit all at once!

And this was not even close to the boundless applications of the essence.

Liam grinned broadly.

His blood could compensate for all three of those, too!

Firstly, the negative and positive were not actually restricted to one thing.

In fact, all it required was two opposite forces, one negative and positive, a push and a pull, which created a fragile ’balance’.

To produce this effect, Liam simply used his white blood cells as a negative charge, and his red blood cells as a positive.

It took a little tweaking, since his white blood cells were not naturally negative. All he had to do was build the concept around the cells, not the other way around.

Testing out the theory, Liam found that the result worked as he expected — equilibrium had been reached!

Blood was — as Liam was frustrated to admit — not a conductor. It was a liquid, and its conduction was not controlled, but very spread out and loose.

...However, his heart could very well take the role of a conductor, simply because it was such a versatile organ. It helped that it was solid, too.

On its own, this set-up would not be an intricate circuit... but by assigning the role of a conductor to the heart, and the positive and negative forces to blood, linking the two together was sufficient to call a circuit.

One problem had created a solution to two other problems!

Then came yet another issue.

At first, Liam was worried about the implications this had on his physique.

His Ashuran strength was already weakened when he completed his Triumvirate body... would this make it worse?

What if it erased his Ashuran strength entirely, or possibly altered his lineage? That was an outcome Liam honestly had trouble coming to terms with.

Another problem was the technique’s progression method. How would Liam advance?

This was perhaps the easiest obstacle to solve.

Devouring.

Liam already consumed powerful creatures to gain strength. Incorporating that into his body tempering method was a no-brainer.

Nevertheless, he continued working away at the product, ironing out smaller details until the method slowly developed itself.

After getting rid of the smaller hitches... he had ended up with 90% of the technique done.

It worked like this.

Consuming blood would directly be stored in Liam’s heart, which had become a Compressor, purifying and concentrating the gathered ichor on its own.

Eventually, this would reach its peak threshold, upon which it would activate a transformative process, equally dividing the purified blood throughout his body and propelling him into the next Rank.

This also meant something else.

Liam’s body and blood were no longer going to be separate entities.

This new body would unify the two forces!

This meant that both would share the same Rank.

’Sad it doesn’t have a unique ability compared to all my other methods.’

Liam shrugged, smiling proudly.

’Oh well. This is well worth beyond any ability.’

A few more months later, Liam had finished the technique.

***

A year and six months had passed.

The large parchment paper in Liam’s hands was covered top to bottom with beautiful writings.

If one looked past the fact that the characters were made from blood, any inscription master would call it a wonder.

’Right. I have to give it a name.’

Liam grew pensive.

’Greedy Body? No... what a lousy name. Crimson Nexus? No... I might get copyrighted by the vampires. This is your greatest technique yet, idiot. Name it something nice and edgy.’

He sighed.

’Ravenous Heart.’

’Eh. Good enough.’