Chapter 77: Heartblood Assimilation, The Second Fragment

Saile reached up and unclasped the silver elven choker.

He slipped the artifact into his storage ring. Wearing the illusion relic during a biological mutation of this scale would melt the metal directly into his windpipe. The disguise had to drop.

The fake yellow spark died. The freezing, suffocating void of his EX-Rank aura

flooded the cavernous armory. Dark iron weapons resting on ancient stone racks

began to vibrate. They rattled against their mounts, recognizing the awakening power.

"Brace yourself," Naicul warned. The ancient God’s voice held no sarcasm. It

carried a grim, clinical anticipation. "Your human anatomy is a fragile cup. We are about to pour an ocean into it."

Saile stepped up to the stone pedestal.

The crystallized drop of heartblood pulsed. It did not look like a dead jewel. It looked warm, slick, and undeniably alive. Faint arcs of black lightning crawled over the stone, hissing quietly in the dead air.

Saile wrapped his bare fingers around the crystal.

"System," Saile commanded. "Devour."

The reaction was a violent dissolution.

The hard crystal lost its solid form. It melted into a viscous, boiling black liquid. It did not drip. The dark fluid sank directly through the pores of Saile’s palm, boring straight into his bloodstream.

Saile’s right hand went entirely numb.

Then, the biological rejection began.

It was a blinding, paralyzing shock. Saile’s mortal immune system recognized the divine blood as a catastrophic infection. His human body violently, aggressively tried to expel the invader.

Saile collapsed. His knees hit the obsidian tiles hard enough to crack the stone. His jaws clamped together with such force that a molar shattered near the back of his mouth. He tasted warm copper.

He looked at his right arm.

The veins beneath his pale skin turned pitch black. The darkness crept rapidly up his wrist, branching out like jagged, diseased roots. The pressure inside his circulatory system spiked.

His capillaries burst.

Thick, dark blood leaked from Saile’s eyes, running down his cheeks like tears. It spilled from his nose and pooled in his ears.

"Hold on!" Naicul ordered, the God’s voice straining against the agony.

Saile could not answer. A ragged, inhuman scream tore through his throat.

His pores ruptured. Boiling black blood wept from his skin, dripping onto the floor. The fluid was highly corrosive, carrying the raw, destructive radiation of the Fallen God. Wherever the blood hit the ground, the solid obsidian sizzled and melted into glowing red slag.

Saile writhed in a growing crater of his own boiling fluids.

The skin on his right arm blistered. The flesh scorched, turning a sickly, ashen gray before peeling back like burned paper. The muscle tissue dissolved, exposing his dense, white Diamond-Tier bone to the open air.

He coughed violently, hacking up a thick clump of necrotic, dead lung tissue. His human organs were literally melting from the inside out.

[System Alert: Catastrophic Cellular Rejection.]

[Biological Vessel Failure.]

[Host Death Imminent.]

The golden screens flashed a harsh, bleeding red.

The pain stripped away Saile’s sanity. His vision tunneled into gray static. His lungs stopped drawing air.

His heart seized.

A literal, physical pause interrupted his life. The organ froze in his chest, completely paralyzed by the overwhelming influx of divine radiation.

For three agonizing seconds, Saile was clinically dead on the armory floor.

As his human consciousness faded into the dark, foreign memories violently hijacked his dying brain.

He saw a sprawling empire built of black stone and silver glass. He felt the cold, hard weight of a towering obsidian throne beneath him. He smelled the scent of blooming night-lilies in a grand cathedral.

He saw a man with flawless golden hair and bright, smiling eyes. Pope Naissac.

Then, he felt the sharp, freezing bite of a dagger slipping between his ribs. The betrayal was vivid. The heartbreak, the suffocating grief, the millennia of festering, venomous rage—it all poured directly into Saile’s dying mind.

He felt the blade twist.

Then, the screaming stopped.

[System Override Initiated.]

[Sync Rate artificially spiking.]

Saile’s broken, bleeding body twitched in the pool of molten rock.

His right eye remained dull, brown, and lifeless. His left eye snapped open. It burned with a piercing, brilliant silver light.

Naicul Elav took the wheel.

The Fallen God did not gasp for air. He did not writhe in pain. He planted his left boot in the boiling blood and calmly stood up.

Naicul looked down at the ruined physical vessel. The right arm was practically flayed. Sizzling muscle hung in useless, charred strips from the exposed radius and ulna. The chest cavity groaned, the heart sitting dead behind the ribs.

Naicul felt the excruciating agony tearing through the nervous system. He simply

ignored it with cold, absolute apathy.

"You do not have permission to die, kid," Naicul whispered.

The voice utilizing Saile’s vocal cords was deep, layered, and utterly devoid of human warmth.

Naicul raised the boy’s left hand. He seized the chaotic, destructive dark magic raging inside the bloodstream. He did not try to heal the dying human tissue. He used the black lightning like surgical thread, forcibly ripping the dead flesh away and stitching the divine blood directly into the bone marrow.

He wove his own ancient soul into Saile’s DNA.

The violent reconstruction echoed through the empty hall. Bones cracked and reforged, growing thicker. Muscle fibers snapped and restitched themselves, binding the human anatomy to the divine code.

Naicul drove a pulse of pure kinetic force directly into the dead heart.

The organ jump-started. It beat with a deafening, dual cadence. A steady, human

thud followed immediately by a deeper, echoing vibration. The biological fusion

stabilized.

[Sync Rate Increased by 15%.]

[Current Sync Rate: 33%.]

Thirty-three percent. A third of the boy’s mind, a third of his genetic code, officially belonged to the Fallen God.

The shredded skin on the right arm rapidly knitted itself back together. The pale flesh grew over the reinforced muscle, hiding the black, pulsing veins beneath a flawless exterior.

Naicul rolled the right shoulder, testing the articulation. The joint popped smoothly.

The silver light slowly drained from the left eye.

Naicul relinquished control, retreating into the deep shadows of their shared consciousness. He returned Saile to the driver’s seat.

Saile inhaled a sudden, sharp breath.

He collapsed onto his hands and knees, shivering violently. The searing pain was

gone, replaced by a cold, intoxicating clarity. He stared at his own hands, panting hard.

He was kneeling in a crater of cooled obsidian slag. The floor around him was

destroyed, but his body felt entirely whole.

Golden screens rippled in the dark, returning to their usual calm hue.

[Assimilation Complete.]

[EX-Rank Multiplier Active.]

[Calculating Stored Energy...]

The raw, unfiltered divine energy from the heartblood mixed with the ocean of unspent experience points Saile had farmed from the Cave Crawlers and the desert war. The Endless Devourer capitalized on the newly expanded physical vessel, rushing to fill the void within his core.

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

A chilling rush of power flooded his lungs. The sheer density of his mana pool expanded exponentially, pushing against the very fabric of the air around him.

[Host has reached Level 66.]

Saile pressed his palms against the dark stone and pushed himself up.

He did not feel human.

The exhaustion that had weighed down his limbs mere moments ago was eradicated. His body felt lighter, yet vastly denser. When he closed his right hand into a fist, the ambient mana in the armory instinctively bowed to him, swirling around his boots in submissive currents.

He looked at his status window. His C-Grade Holy Regeneration, the skill he had stolen from the executed Paladins, flickered. The system highlighted the text, the letters vibrating as the mutated EX-Rank core actively rejected the lesser magic.

"The holy skill is burning away," Saile noted. His voice sounded deeper, carrying a faint, echoing resonance that hadn’t been there before.

"It is a cheap parlor trick," Naicul scoffed.

The God’s voice was no longer a distant whisper in the back of his head. With the Sync Rate sitting at a terrifying thirty-three percent, Naicul sounded like he was standing right beside Saile in the room.

"You do not need stolen light to heal anymore," Naicul continued. "You possess

my blood."

Saile stood up straight. He looked at the empty stone pedestal.

The physical toll had nearly severed his sanity, and the spike in the Sync Rate pushed him dangerously close to the point of no return. A third of his soul was gone. But the terrifying power thrumming in his veins confirmed the risk.

He was Level 66. He was four levels away from the Demigod Tier.

The mechanical Guardian still knelt in the hallway outside the vault, standing watch over the unconscious Saintess. The academy above them remained oblivious to the monster growing in their basement.

Saile rolled his shoulders, feeling the smooth, effortless glide of his newly forged muscle fibers. He needed to know exactly what kind of anatomy he had just inherited.

A final, brilliant golden screen flashed directly in front of his eyes.

[System Evaluation Finalizing...]

[Preparing Biological Skill Unlock.]

Saile stared at the floating text. He waited for the Endless Devourer to catalog the true reward of the heartblood. The evolution was not over.