Chapter 26: Bloodborn Power Rating

Having re-condensed his body and recovered the look of a human teenager, Nathan wasn't exactly thrilled—he just closed his eyes again.

The outside was only wrapping. The heart of practicing the Fleshcraft Rite was rebuilding the body's inner architecture. Organs, muscles, bones—those were one thing. But the slightest slip in the bloodways and nodes would hobble every future Art.

Five hours passed before Nathan opened his eyes again. He set his foot lightly on the ground, and the whole courtyard gave a soft shudder—drawing an involuntary smile out of him, though it dimmed just as fast.

His "new" body was indistinguishable from the original. Take it to the fanciest hospital, run it through the most advanced machines, and nothing about it would read as different from any ordinary person's. But Nathan just knew—something had been branded into the innermost depths of his body, and it was real.

Sebastian leaned against the window of the yew-wood house, applauding softly, complicated feelings written all over his face. "Congratulations! A transformation this near-perfect is rare even among bloodborn with centuries under their belts. That you pulled it off—genuinely not easy."

Nathan looked his body over carefully, his face empty of grief or joy, and answered with no expression at all: "Perfect or not, it's still a bloodborn's."

Sebastian laughed despite himself and tossed him a set of clothes. "When you get the chance to condense your Decan bloodways, go learn a method for forging a Starborne battle garment! Otherwise it's a pain in the neck changing clothes after every fight."

Nathan didn't even ask Sebastian what condensing Decan bloodways meant. All his attention was pinned on his "new" body—and besides the changes to it, one other thing held even more of his attention.

Nathan powered up the Comet-Gem Mantis, gave the war-beast a command, and the emerald light-screen popped out, quickly listing his stats.

Sebastian's mood was pretty foul, but he could still manage a smile—right up until the readout on the screen floored him completely, and he blurted: "A bond-power rating of six thousand two hundred ninety-two?! ... How is that possible? Is this blasted war-beast's system glitching?"

Nathan was mildly surprised. "Battle beast systems can glitch? Can that system bug be patched?"

Sebastian shook his head and didn't pursue the topic with Nathan any further. He snapped his fingers, a pale-blue light-screen appeared in front of him too, linked up to the Comet-Gem Mantis, and his hands went to work, flickering like butterfly wings, running through a set of operations.

Sebastian's expression started off fairly relaxed, but barely ten-odd minutes in, his face went ugly, and the look he gave Nathan shifted subtly—tinged now with real wariness!

Something stirred in Nathan's chest, and he asked: "What could still shock me more than turning into an actual bloodborn? If something's off, give it to me straight! Did I botch the transformation? Got only a few years left to live?"

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Sebastian slapped his own forehead—he'd never imagined Nathan would jump to that conclusion, and he was a little lost for words. "Your situation's plenty weird, but there is absolutely no lifespan problem."

Inside, the Order of the Deathless acolyte was thinking: No problem? Everything's almost too good!

Aether oscillation is by no means a freebie. Look across the Four Hosts and the Concord, even the Eighteen Towers and the Hidden Order lineages—at least thirty percent of bloodborn and human magi die of old age without ever getting their arcane or vitae to oscillate.

Only by completing vitae resonance can you form your own unique vitae ripple—and owning a vitae ripple all your own is what the vast majority of bloodborn dream about, because it represents the opportunity to push your strength another level up.

Managing to make your vitae oscillate and form a ripple within a few years of awakening your bloodline or starting Art already marks you as a first-rate genius!

Nathan had been awakened barely a month and change, and he'd already pulled off vitae resonance—a one-in-ten-thousand exception. Ordinary "genius" no longer covered it; he was a genius among geniuses.

Nathan had awakened the rare World Tree sub-tier bloodline and scored a top-tier windfall like the Starfall Dew, so completing vitae resonance this early was startling but still within genius territory—Sebastian could just barely stomach it.

But completing the Umbral Turning at the same time as aether oscillation? That flew in the face of everything the bloodborn world and the human Art world knew!

Ancient bloodborn took human form first, then began formal Art. Modern bloodborn, once awakened, can practice directly off the power of their bloodlines—but there's one massive bottleneck: only after accumulating enough power and triggering the bloodline's atavistic reversion—the Umbral Turning—does the full road of Art open up.

Ninety-nine percent of bloodborn only dare attempt the Umbral Turning after centuries of Art, and the process itself takes years at minimum. Anyone who turns within a hundred years of awakening is among the most gifted of the gifted—and in three hundred years there have been only eight such cases... Nathan was no longer a one-in-ten-thousand exception; he'd outright graduated to the once-in-a-century class!

But even Nathan's Umbral Turning shook Sebastian less than the bond-power rating data.

One point of bond-power rating equals what a bloodborn of dead-average talent, dead-average effort, and dead-average methods gains from a single year of Art. A rating north of six thousand was the equivalent of an old bloodborn with six thousand years of Art!

Sebastian thought hard: By these numbers, the kid's practically brushing up against Blood Lord-tier—and once he sheds his skin into a Blood Lord, he'd be a match for the Starborne magi of the Eighteen Towers! How is any of this possible?

Not a flicker crossed Nathan's face, while Sebastian's thoughts spun in circles—and both of them sank deep into thought.

Over this past month-plus, Nathan had done plenty of cramming with Sebastian and Wren on every kind of bloodborn-world common knowledge, so he knew exactly what these numbers meant—and like Sebastian, he could hardly believe them.

After his near-total Umbral Turning, Nathan was back at full strength; even his wounds had mostly healed. He muttered to himself: "They say perfectly refining one blob of Starfall Dew is worth sixty years of Art. I swallowed two or three hundred blobs of the stuff—that's got to be thousands of years of power, one way or another! I always figured that was wishful thinking, that there was no way I actually had bond-power that strong—otherwise why would the war-beast's converted vitae only clock in around seven hundred? Turns out... it wasn't wrong at all. My bond-power rating was over the war-beast's conversion cap!"

Sebastian blinked and looked up at Nathan—only to see the boy driving the Comet-Gem Mantis with dead-serious focus, the image of the bloodborn insect condensed from vitae and combat will vivid as a living thing, even the seven skull-like silver spots on its back surfacing into view—and a faint knot pulled tight in his chest...