Novel Full Chapter 1636 Refusal
The deep-cavern command room held its breath.
Six dwarves on the stones in front of him, foreheads down. His women in a loose half-ring at his back. The Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line warm and full at his finger, a thousand liters of dwarven blood folded into a flask-stone the size of a knuckle.
Quinlan exhaled once.
<Alright, I’m done here. Thanks.>
Nyxara’s voice came back from her perch on Mimi’s tree as a low purr.
<Any time~>
She let go. <I’m curious…>
The system reached for him.
[Ding!]
[Class Unlock Condition: Blood Mage]
[Requirement 1: Drink the blood of a level 70+ entity. Complete.]
[Requirement 2: Obtain a blood storage artifact and fill it to the brim with the blood of your slain enemies. 1000 / 1000. Complete.]
[All requirements met. Initiating class integration…]
The ring on his finger pulsed.
A low, deep beat traveled outward from it through [Synchra]’s glove and into the bones of his hand. Crimson light woke at the seam where the stone met the band, and the band drank a fraction of the reservoir back into him in a thin red thread that ran up his forearm and vanished beneath his pauldron. In the same heartbeat, the blood Quinlan had carried inside himself, the searing demonic mouthful he had torn from Nyxara’s neck on the day he had conquered her, answered.
The two crimsons reached for each other.
The one in the ring climbed in a slow spiral up the inside of his arm. The one in his marrow rose to meet it through his chest. They found each other at the hollow above his heart, and a single bright pulse of red light bloomed inside [Synchra]’s breastplate and lit the rune-glass shards still settling in the corners of the deep-cavern command room.
The dwarves on the floor saw the glow before they saw anything else.
The grandmaster’s forehead came up and his eyes widened.
Behind Quinlan, the air changed.
‘Something is strange…! This isn’t how normal class unlocks look for Quin!’
Every woman in the half-ring at his back felt it through the master-slave bond at the same instant. Smiles dropped. Stances shifted.
Vex stepped forward, arm raised. Blossom’s ears were flat and eyes wide on her master as she followed.
But then Serika and Lucille reached for them at the same time, accompanied by a small firm shake of two heads at once: Don’t disturb him.
Vex bit her lower lip and stayed where she was, sword in her grip and going nowhere.
Blossom’s ears drooped flat against her hair. The dogkin made a small worried sound at the back of her throat and did not take her eyes off Master.
Sera’s hand pressed against her own sternum without her noticing it had moved.
None of them knew what was happening to their man, and every one of them stood ready to step into whatever it became.
Quinlan felt them at his back without looking.
[System Notice: Class Designation: Blood Mage. Integration commencing.]
The crimson light at his chest reached for the slot the system had opened above his class stack.
The slot closed against it.
A long silence ran through the command room. Then through the system. Then through Quinlan’s bones.
[…recalculating.]
[Anomaly detected.]
The Soul Records’ procedural voice seemed uncertain.
Quinlan’s gaze narrowed inside his helm.
‘Huh?’
Then the Abyssal Genesis Physique woke all the way up.
It was not a flare this time. The flares had been at the dome, at the apex, in the courtyard, every time he had asked the primordial biology underneath his class stack to stabilize a channel. Those had been calls, and the physique had answered them. This was the physique answering on its own, without being asked.
It rolled over inside him.
Slow and enormous, the rolling of a primordial system that wakes up remembering a mortal class is being stitched into its skin and decides, very calmly, that it would rather not.
The crimson at the hollow above his heart went darker.
Then darker.
The bright red of mortal blood deepened into the kind of red that is almost black at the edges, the color a wound takes when the air has not reached it. The pulse climbing through his arm thickened. The glow at [Synchra]’s breastplate dimmed into a deeper shade and stopped reaching outward through the seams. The light had gone inward.
Inside him, the two crimsons that had met at his heart began to lose their separation.
The blood in the ring was mortal: dwarven, level-capped, drawn from the same level system as the rest of the continent. The blood in his marrow was not. The searing mouthful he had torn from Nyxara’s neck was primordial, the genuine substance of a Demon Primordial of Lust, ancient beyond mortal comprehension. The template had assumed two mortal sources. It had received one mortal and one primordial, on the finger and inside the marrow of a host who was himself an immortal existence.
The mismatch was the lever the physique needed.
The Abyssal Genesis Physique pressed against the integration like a tide closing over a sandcastle, recognized the primordial signature in his marrow as kin to itself, and used it as the foothold to make its claim.
The shade behind Quinlan’s sternum had passed through wine, through arterial dark, through the black at the back of a closed eye, and settled somewhere beyond all of those, in the place where primordial biology kept its own palette.
The system tried to file it.
[…]
[…]
[Anomaly: class designation cannot bind.]
[Anomaly: foreign class architecture detected.]
[Anomaly: subject’s biological signature is overriding the integration protocol.]
‘What?’
[…integration aborted.]
[…class designation withdrawn.]
Quinlan suddenly felt like crying and strangling his own physique at once. What was his own body doing?
The word that had been writing itself in the slot above Quinlan’s class stack came apart in slow glyphs.
The first three letters of ‘Mage’ dissolved.
Then the article. Then the noun behind it.
The Soul Records moved to retract the empty slot.
The Abyssal Genesis Physique caught it.
A black-crimson hand of pure primordial intent, larger than the cavern, larger than the fortress, larger than anything the dwarves on the floor would ever conceive of, closed around the receding slot from inside Quinlan’s body and refused to let it go.
The system pulled.
The physique pulled harder.
Like its master, the Abyssal Genesis Physique did not believe in walking out of a reward that had been earned empty-handed. The blood had been drunk. The reservoir had been filled. A reward was owed, and the physique was going to be paid. It had simply decided that the offered class was beneath what its host deserved.
The slot stopped receding and then the black-crimson hand dragged the empty slot back into Quinlan’s chest, planted it at the hollow above his heart, and started writing on it.
The blood in the ring, the blood in his marrow, and the physique that had absorbed both of them poured into the slot together. The script that began appearing in the language of the Soul Records was not language the Soul Records had authored.
Behind Quinlan’s armor, the lines had finished reaching across his breastplate and had begun to climb up the column of his throat, slow and dark and patient.
…
Back in the Primordial Dimension, the Sanctuary where the vampire primordials were slumbering had been quiet for epochs.