Chapter 24: Vitae Oscillation

Nathan crashed down, every scrap of strength in his body seemingly gone. The fight was won, and he still had no idea what had actually happened—all he felt was exhaustion, deep and total.

The astonishment on Sebastian's face had reached cartoon proportions, and he burst out: "You actually got your vitae oscillating? Who knows how many human magi and great bloodborn ache to possess a vitae ripple all their own—but not everyone gets that stroke of fortune. That you managed it in this little time genuinely surprises me."

Nathan dredged up the last thread of his strength, raised a middle finger, and forced out a curse: "Fuck!"

Sebastian gave a light laugh. "The overwhelming majority of human magi and bloodborn get exactly one shot at aether oscillation in their entire lives. The gains you reap from practicing it now are worth more than ten years of training later. Miss this golden opportunity and you'll likely never get a second taste of luck—so throwing a tantrum at me over it right now is flat-out moronic."

Nathan was half believing, half doubting. "What do I do?"

Sebastian laughed heartily. "You've probably never heard of the four-aether division—Fey, Divine, Beast, Fiend. I won't launch into a whole lecture; I'll keep it short and sweet. The ancients held that the energy gained through Art came in countless varieties. But entering the modern age, with science coming into its own, we discovered there's only one kind of aether. Humans, bloodborn, devil spirits, even the hidden magi of the West—all of them hold the exact same energy. It's only because the frequency of that aether differs so drastically that you get those night-and-day differences in properties."

Sebastian headed off Nathan's questions before they could form. "No time for you to digest it. Just remember one thing: within a given band, the higher your practiced aether's frequency, the stronger its power. You're a bloodborn, so forget the other three bands. Just remember—get as close to a hundred thousand hertz as you possibly can, but never exceed that number. Go over it and your vitae turns impure; the quality actually drops below vitae running at a somewhat lower frequency."

Half believing, half doubting, Nathan still followed Sebastian's instructions: powered up the Comet-Gem Mantis and found the interface for scanning his vitae ripple. The Comet-Gem Mantis detected that his vitae ripple came in at a mere six thousand-odd hertz—a long, long way off from a hundred thousand. The boy's stomach dropped, and he hurriedly drove the Titan Godslayer Canon.

Nathan had had no idea how to raise his vitae's oscillation frequency—but the moment he drove the Titan Godslayer Canon, the Star-Swallowing Form began running all on its own. This was his first time ever invoking this form of the Titan Godslayer Canon.

Ever since receiving the Star-Swallowing Form, Nathan had known this formula was the Titan Godslayer Canon's practical application and had to carry endless wondrous uses—but a hundred-plus attempts at practicing it had all gone nowhere. Even Nathan himself never imagined that the Star-Swallowing Form, which he'd drilled so many times with barely a hair of progress, would break through at a moment like this—and break through so naturally, like it was always supposed to happen.

This form of the Titan Godslayer Canon was tyrannical to the extreme: it forcibly spun the black-light vitae into a vortex, condensing inward without pause—every fraction the black-light vitae contracted, the vitae's oscillation climbed another class.

The frequency of the vitae ripple the Comet-Gem Mantis was tracking shot skyward along with it—bursting past the ten-thousand mark in no time, then twenty thousand, thirty thousand, forty thousand...

Until every last wisp of the black-light vitae had been devoured by the vortex born of the Star-Swallowing Form, condensed inward to the absolute limit!

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Nathan's lower belly was like a stellar black hole had been born in it, space collapsing inward nonstop, devouring the essence of his flesh and blood in an endless stream—assimilating his very body, starting from the organs and guts, gradually spreading to bone and blood, his flesh transforming inch by inch, sliver by sliver, into black light.

Nathan had no idea what this change was, whether good or bad. He'd already lost all control of his own vitae, and could only watch as the vitae ripple broke past fifty thousand hertz and then, like a runaway horse with the reins snapped, leaped several times in a row and closed in on the great hundred-thousand-hertz threshold. He had no idea how to respond—couldn't even cry out to Sebastian for help. All he could do was keep his head clear and watch it all happen with his own eyes.

The black-light vitae's great surge dragged the Mystic-Gold iron thread between his brows into its own change.

It stirred faintly, wound itself around the skull at Nathan's brow, and gradually spread, soon tinting his entire skull a faint Mystic-Gold.

Black-light vitae saturated his whole body; muscle, bone, blood, organs—all of it corroded by the black light. Nathan didn't know that he had already become a mass of human-shaped black aether, without half a trace of human form left—if he'd known, he'd have screamed for sure. He was, after all, just a middle school kid; there was no way he could have stood that double blow to body and mind. And yet what was chilling was this: for all the black-light vitae's overwhelming power, it could not force its way into Nathan's skull a single step.

No telling how long passed before Nathan suddenly felt like he could move again. He tried pressing a hand to the ground to push himself up—and instead his "whole body" drifted gently up into the air.

Startled, Nathan thought: "Did I cross a hundred thousand hertz in the end or not? If I went over the line, isn't that really bad?"

Nathan glanced at the light-screen, still faithfully tracking his vitae ripple—and when he saw the number "100,190," his heart sank in disappointment.

At this very moment, Nathan's whole body gave off a deep, abyssal black glow—but this black-light vitae was no longer the old kind. Before, it had hung like smoke, vague and unstable. Now it was charged with an unnameable power, condensed as if solid, its monstrous menace rolling off in waves.

Sebastian was genuinely shocked. Aether oscillation is a thing you stumble on, not one you chase down—only those with deep Art can build up sufficient reserves and trigger the change, though Art geniuses do occasionally manage it in a very short time. But the Umbral Turning demands meeting brutally strict requirements—there was absolutely no way it should be a state a newly awakened bloodborn like Nathan could reach.

He leapt down from the yew-wood house, fixed his stare on Nathan, and churned through option after option down in his gut, wondering what on earth to do.

The vitae ripple's number left Nathan pretty crushed. He raised his hands, about to ask Sebastian something—and watched in horror as one hand, under his own gaze, suddenly dissolved into a mass of black light, the whole arm vaporizing with it.

He looked at his other hand; that one vaporized on the spot too.

He looked down at his body and watched, wide-eyed, as his legs, torso, shoulders, and back all likewise dissolved into masses of black light.

All that remained was a faint Mystic-Gold skull bobbing up and down in the black light, twin flames of Mystic-Gold flickering faintly in the eye sockets, never dying—standing in for the pupils that were gone.

Nathan threw back his head and roared at the sky, full of rage and a grief-stricken, last-stand defiance.