World Seal, Ch 12: Bloodline (Patreon)

Some hours later, Sam appeared on a distant mountain peak. It was the one where he’d relocated Asenya’s workshop.

He’d sealed his grandparents into a guest room and then left his parents in charge of the hundreds of other Hasterns. They had the help of the Sky Guards and some of the Legions of Ice, but he didn’t envy the work ahead of them as they tried to explain how the world really worked.

He’d moved all the rest of the Hasterns to the relic too, but it would probably be to their advantage. The relic had more to offer than even Tower Reach.

It was also closer to Flaws, and the beautiful and desolate environment of the Western Reaches would help to drive home the truth of the world. There was also the light of his astral forge on the peak, and all of the ancient magics here.

For the most part, it should be good for them.

Hopefully, his grandparents would come around and stop being such arrogant idiots, but it was hard to say. He held out more hope for Jesai than Aldric. She had mostly stayed out of the conflict with Aldric and she hadn’t tried to support him much. Perhaps she was the more reasonable one.

Either way, it would be rough for both of them.

Their understanding of the World Core and the true principles of Aster Fall were limited, but they were better off than most of the Level 399s, since they had seen some truths in the Fragments of World Authority.

They might come around once they realized what they should actually be fighting.

But if they wanted off Aster Fall, they’d have to make up with Jeric first. It would be hard for them to lower their heads. That was their real punishment.

They would need to ask the grandson they’d rejected for something that would determine their entire future.

It was a nice reversal of their roles from when Jeric had come to them so long ago.

After that, if they still weren’t able to change or tried to attack him again, he’d find a way to deal with them permanently. He’d probably throw them into the Void where some beasts would take care of it. The chance of them surviving this region of the Deep Wild on their own was infinitely close to zero.

If he killed them personally, his father would always see that when he looked at him, and he didn’t want that to happen, but if they continued to threaten the foundation of Aster Fall, he’d deal with it.

As for his grandfather trying to kill him, it bothered him less than he’d expected. He was aware that Aldric saw him as a force of nature like a World Spirit or some other agent of the World Law that he was trying to rebel against.

That was why he’d been so quick to attack.

He didn’t forgive him, but since it was easy to deal with, he wasn’t worked up about it either. It made for a good lesson for the rest of the world.

He couldn’t help but wonder if the same thing would have happened if he told them who he was.

After a moment, however, he pushed the thought aside. He’d never known them growing up and his connection with them was as thin as a thread.

Most importantly, he’d gotten this workshop out of it.

It was ironic that it had been under his nose all of this time. If he’d explored Tower Reach before, he might have sensed it.

Destroying their house at Tower Reach was the first time he’d shown his avatars to the world. He could have hidden them, but he decided not to. He wanted the word to spread and make people more cautious.

That way, the Level 399s would know that he could show up anywhere and do more than one thing at once. They should also be wondering how strong his real self was.

A bit of nervousness would help keep them in line during the Conclave.

Sometimes, you have to send a message, not just to those who have crossed the line, but to warn everyone else. The best way to do that is to do something they won’t forget easily and that’s brutal enough to make them hope it doesn’t happen to them.

From a ruthless perspective, he should have killed Aldric in some memorable manner, but he’d have to settle for humiliation. That meant making sure everyone knew he’d been forced to set aside his dignity and beg his grandson for forgiveness.

Sam spent a few moments arranging the rumors to send out about it, each of them more exaggerated than the last, and then he gave them all to one of his other avatars to start spreading.

It would drag Aldric’s reputation and the Hastern name through the mud, but the man deserved it. It would also give the younger members of the family a swift kick.

Once it was done, he pushed the thoughts out of his head and began studying the design of the workshop, which was much more interesting.

Asenya’s work was intricate and powerful, elegantly integrated into the dimensional space around Aster Fall. He could tell that the workshop was an entire subdimension of its own, one that was more stable than normal.

Seeing how it was connected to the main dimension gave him some insights into how she had created the World Seal by layering energy. For that alone, this discovery was worthwhile.

On top of that, her work was one of the few things he could take as an example for his own enchantments. He was already getting some ideas for how to redesign his spatial cloak.

He could already tell that one of the most valuable things from this workshop was the dimensional law Asenya had infused into it. That was what had given rise to the silver sphere from the wards.

Right now, that was one of the things he needed the most.

With his Fourth Star evolution on the horizon, he had to comprehend a Law of the Void, and meditating on this law as an example would help him along the way.

The energy in the workshop was at the Fifth Evolution, but since Asenya was the caretaker of the World Core and the origin of the World Seal, her energy was in balance with Aster Fall. It wouldn’t disrupt the Seal.

His own was fairly close, thanks to his astral energy and that his first class was designed by her, but hers was perfect. That was also why this workshop had been so hard to find.

It was difficult to sense a single drop of water in an ocean.

There were two major things on his mind as he looked at the workshop: one was the exact process Aldric used to create classes, as well as what assistance Asenya had left behind for that.

The other was the modified races of his grandparents, especially his grandmother’s. Aldric had mentioned it like it was something very special, and he had a feeling that the answer was in here.

After a little while, he finished studying the outer structure. He raised his hand, rotating it in a half circle. In response, the entrance to the workshop spiraled open as a blue portal.

Without hesitating, he stepped forward.

A wave of silvery-blue light washed over him, and then he was inside.

A field of golden grasses stretched away into the distance, illuminated by a warm and sourceless golden glow. White clouds drifted across a blue sky, but there were no shadows anywhere, nor any sun above.

The workshop looked nothing like he’d expected. It was a completely separate miniature world. His aura spread outward as he sensed the outline of the place.

It took him a moment, since it was a subtle thing, but he eventually found the edges folded back into a perfect sphere that was approximately a hundred miles across. That was small for a subdimension, but still large enough to contain a lot of things.

Here and there, he found objects that must have been left behind by Aldric or Jesai, but he quickly discovered there was a barrier a few hundred feet away from the entrance, one that it seemed they’d never been able to cross.

It was a dim golden line that marked out a perfect circle around the entrance, separating this landing area from the rest of the workshop.

The area inside the barrier was still fairly large, and there were a number of work tables, bookshelves, crystalline ores, piles of rare materials, and other things scattered around, as well as a series of mana diagrams floating in the air that detailed the path of meridians throughout a body.

Those had probably belonged to Aldric. They looked like stylized diagrams for designing a class and aligning it with the body’s meridians. Different processes were outlined in gold for mana and blue for aura.

The thing that really drew his attention, however, was a column of rainbow crystal, which was set off near the barrier. There were two grooves on the top that looked like a match for the Fragments of World Authority.

That had to be where Aldric and Jesai found them.

From that and the emptiness of this area, Asenya must have cleaned up before she left. That meant she hadn’t been in a hurry. Perhaps she’d left it like this for an inheritor to find.

Either way, this entrance was not her real work area, but he could explore the rest in a little bit. First, he wanted to see everything that was here.

He walked over and laid his hand on the pillar, sensing the enchantments inside.

Instantly, instructions on how to use the Fragments of World Authority filled his mind, as well as the type of information they could help with.

His guess had been right that they helped with class evolutions and creating abilities. They also detailed some of the best ways to gain Traits and to ask the World Core for assistance.

There was no mention of the complete World Key that Asenya had tried to create, nor of any other fragments. By the time she’d left these here, perhaps the project had already failed.

He pulled out the fragments from his spatial pouch and scanned through them. When he sent a test query about developing a class, an example of a class structure similar to the ones Aldric had in the clearing sprang into his mind, but it was much more basic.

“Interesting,” he said to himself as he tucked them away again. He had a good idea of how they worked now, as well as the type of information his grandparents had gotten from them.

The fragments were a link to the World Core’s memory, at least the outer layers where general information was kept. A question could be answered immediately if the knowledge was available. It was a very useful tool for a researcher.

All types of runes, languages, diagrams, basic knowledge and more were included there, as well as some of the history of Aster Fall, but it wasn’t able to access anything that the World Core kept in more sensitive areas.

It was a lot, but at the same time, it showed him how much his grandparents had done on their own. The fragments had given them some answers and core principles, but it looked like the creation of the Tower Magus and other classes really were mostly their work.

They’d received critical help, but the bulk of the effort was theirs.

That left the question of his grandmother’s race, and as he looked around, his attention was drawn to a table on the right that was slightly apart from the rest on the grass. Of all the other objects in this entrance zone, it was the second-most interesting after the pillar.

On the top of the table, there were three crystal vials that held some sort of liquid. They were surrounded by a containment enchantment that gleamed with silvery-blue light. It was clearly something Asenya had created.

The containment was meant to slow the passage of time, not to prevent someone from touching the vials, but it was still powerful enough that two of the vials hadn’t been touched. Only the third was close enough to the edge.

He walked over to the table and brushed his hand across the surface, and within a few moments, Asenya’s enchantment fell under his control. She’d given him a key to her old works with the High Artificer title, and it worked here too.

Of the three vials, one was full of a dense silver liquid that radiated essence, the second was an emerald touched with a faint blue, and the third was sky blue. A sense of wonder and crisis filled him as he looked at them side by side.

It was obvious what they were. The power radiating from each of them was as clear as day.

The silver one was the blood of an Astral Titan, a nearly perfect match for his own. The emerald one was Asenya’s blood. It still radiated with a sense of her aura. But the third one...

He picked up the vial, holding it carefully in his hand. It was made of a translucent cut crystal that was enchanted with tiny runes along the facets, and it was so clear that it hid nothing of the blood inside.

There was so much energy contained inside the sky blue blood that it felt like his skin was prickling, even through the surface of the vial. It radiated with a potent Outsider essence, stronger than anything he’d ever felt...except for once.

When he’d been teleported away from Aster Fall and transformed into an Outsider. He still remembered that sense of searing heat and overwhelming power that changed his race, as well as the impression of the essence. It had mixed with astral chaos back then, but there was no doubt about what was in front of him.

This was the blood of the Demon of Shattered Skies.

She had been one of the three Sixth Evolution leaders of the Outsiders during the First War, and the only one of them to die.

Asenya must have gathered the blood during the war. She was clearly comparing the essence in it with Titan blood and her own, probably to understand the differences. She was a mix of Outsider and Astral herself, a combination of the two realms.

On Verdant, the home world she’d created for her descendants, she’d also left some Outsiders in a subdimension, while using the Wild Tree to purify their essence and make it compatible with this galaxy.

This could only be another part of her research.

But what made his hand shake from the force of realization flowing through him, was that this vial was half empty.

His grandmother’s race came to his mind, with its description of Human (Modified), as well as his grandfather’s description of researching bloodlines. He’d said that Jesai’s was the one that had unlocked Battlefield Reclaimer.

No...not Jesai’s, but the bloodline of Shattered Skies.

The Outsiders were an essence race, just like Asenya and the Astral Titans. They had the innate ability to manipulate essence and aura. His entire understanding of his family was falling apart as he looked at the half-empty vial.

Everything was also coming together.

Somehow, his grandmother had fused her bloodline with Shattered Skies.

Probably the World Core had stepped in to balance the negative effects, and possibly to keep her human. That had to have taken a massive amount of Marks to pay off, but the Core would have done it. It was the only thing that would have let her stay in regular society and not be an exile, given how many people had analyze abilities.

His own situation had been similar, except he’d been marked as an Outsider with an origin from Aster Fall, and his presence had been tolerated until he threatened the Seal. His grandmother had probably known better than to do that until she earned back the core’s approval.

The World Core wasn’t innately against Outsiders or essence. Its opposition to them was a result of the First War and their threat to the World Seal. They’d lived here harmoniously once, when the world was a meeting place for traffic through the Nexus.

But this blood meant that his family, at least all of the descendants of Jesai, had a direct connection to the Demon of Shattered Skies.

Many things suddenly made sense.

Her descendants didn’t have a modified race like she did, but some of that affinity and talent must have been passed on.

He was proof of it.

A question he’d had at the back of his mind for a long time was suddenly answered, the origin of some of his abilities. It made sense why his race had changed so quickly when he encountered a remnant of Shattered Skies.

It wasn’t just due to the spark of astral chaos, although that had been the catalyst.

His class, Battlefield Reclaimer, had been given to him for the same reason. Somewhere in his bloodline, there had been a trace of essence and aura, the things necessary to unlock it. He just hadn’t been able to reach them.

The Outsider interference in the World Core that assigned his class was what had pushed it to happen, but the possibility for it had always been there.

His Elemental Manipulation ability that was so similar to Shattered Skies also made sense. It was part of the Outsider’s traditional Path of the Elements, which descended from her. He’d thought he’d had that option because of encountering her remnant essence, but now it was clear that there were two reasons.

His own bloodline as well as hers, and the link between them.

It meant that his father and grandfather were the same...both of them must have some innate ability, no matter how small, related to essence and the elements. That was why they had also been offered Battlefield Reclaimer.

In fact, all of the Hasterns’ famous magical affinity and talent might have the same origin. A Sixth Evolution being was a primal force of nature, and to have a bloodline connection to them came with powerful benefits.

He had been shocked when he saw Asenya’s workshop in Tower Reach, but this was magnitudes greater. Waves of unsettled emotion crashed through his mind and his aura surged like a sea as it roared through the confines of the subdimension.

The clouds were thrown in every direction, the earth shook, and the grasses of the plains shuddered as hurricane winds pressed them flat in one direction and then the other.

Finally, he got control of himself and let out a breath, forcing himself to calm down. His aura subsided and the subdimension returned to stillness. The clouds returned to their paths and the grasses straightened again, springing back to their original place.

It seemed like it was a day for family secrets.

But at the end of the day, it didn’t change things.

He was still an Astral Titan now, his race changed by the Moonlight Relic’s infusion of astral energy and the Path of Stars, and his family was just as human as they’d ever been...albeit with a trace of foreign essence.

Sixth Evolution beings were the closest thing to gods that the galaxy had ever seen. The benefits were greater than the downsides. Asenya herself was a good example of what could be done when the two races were combined.

She was the purest expression of Aster Fall, the old hope for unity and the new one for rebirth.

He reached out and picked up Asenya’s vial of blood as a smile creased his lips. He had plenty of aura signatures and enchantments from her, but this was the first time he’d had a drop of her blood.

It would help to find her.