Chapter 39: Battle-Familiar: the Phantomveil Vine (Part One)

The next day after school, Nathan came to Elderrow again. He didn't exchange a single word with Sebastian—silence as his protest—and Sebastian, reading the room, didn't try to chat him up either.

Once the passage opened, Nathan turned to black light and dove in. This time he didn't take human form; entering the Hourbound Grove, he flew bobbing and drifting straight for his target at speed.

In bloodborn form, Nathan could fly ten-odd meters off the ground—not exactly fast, but way faster than running on human legs. In human form, he had no flight at all.

He made a brief stop along the way to dig up the buried Drunken Saint's Draught, then made a beeline for his destination.

The seventh Sealing Platform lay beneath a dry well.

Using the Shadowless Whip, Nathan turned the vitae whip into a rope and descended along the mouth of the well all the way to the bottom—this dry well was roughly forty or fifty meters deep.

Once his feet touched bottom, pitch black as it was around him, he powered up the combat system, and by the screen's faint glow got a clear look at the bottom of the well—and drew a sharp breath.

The bottom of the well was extremely spacious—nearly half a basketball court, believe it or not—piled everywhere with heaps on heaps of white bones, plus vines flickering in and out of sight, so many they'd even wrapped up a stone platform at the center of the well floor.

Nathan thought, startled: "Just how many years of ripening does this Phantomveil Vine have under its belt? Looks like the Sealing Platform can't hold it at all—that's why the vines have grown outside it."

Nathan secretly congratulated himself on not having gambled. He gripped one of the liquor bottles and, with meticulous care, gave it a fling toward the vines at the well's bottom. The bottle burst against the cavern wall, and Drunken Saint's Draught came pouring out.

A freak sound like teeth grinding suddenly came up from underground, and a matchlessly ferocious force burst through the ground.

That force was ferocious beyond measure—dark, vicious, essence-and-blood-devouring. If Nathan hadn't already turned, one exchange would have cost him dearly. He hurriedly drove the Titan Godslayer Canon and counterattacked with everything, pressing down toward the bottom of the dry well; his bond-power had barely seeped one or two meters underground when he felt another force come slamming up.

Even pouring out every last drop of his vitae, Nathan was still rattled to black-out eyes and numb limbs by those two forces of utterly different natures.

If not for the thought "fail once and you're dead for sure" goading him to hold on at any cost, one exchange would probably have shattered him into full rout.

Nathan himself didn't know how he survived that opening round. Not daring to hold back anything anymore, he threw out every last bottle of Drunken Saint's Draught he had on him.

As bottle after bottle of the draught smashed into the ground, Nathan quickly noticed that the essence-devouring, venomous bond-power—its spiritual essence still surging and roaring—had gone sloppy and chaotic like a drunk, spreading willy-nilly in every direction, completely unable to gather into a single strand. But the other force wasn't affected in the slightest, tangling itself into his bond-power and forcing Nathan to drive the Star-Swallowing Form.

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The Titan Godslayer Canon's bond-power poured underground, and soon great swaths of earth were assimilated; the whole cavern at the well's bottom opened up wider and wider, until the Sealing Platform stood fully revealed. It was built of a stone hard as refined steel, crystalline and snow-white through and through, inscribed with black runes.

The essence-devouring venomous bond-power came from the Phantomveil Vine; the other, mysterious force came from this Sealing Platform.

The quest scroll Nathan had gotten never said how to shatter a Sealing Platform, either. His original plan was to cut it open with the high-frequency electromagnetic blade-force his vacuum blade-wave had evolved into—but the situation changed too fast. With his essence tangled up with the Phantomveil Vine's and the platform's, there was no freeing a hand, so brute force through the Star-Swallowing Form it was.

Between the Drunken Saint's Draught and its sealed state, the first to crack was, surprisingly, the Phantomveil Vine: its vitae soon collapsed into rout, eroded step by step by the Star-Swallowing Form.

Nathan pushed harder. Then he pushed harder again. And then he pushed harder still!

Suddenly he felt as if he'd burst through some barrier onto an open highway—the black-light vitae sliced through like a hot knife through butter, and in a single instant ran through every last vine of the Phantomveil Vine, so smoothly it startled even him.

Through the Phantomveil Vine's branches, Nathan seemed to enter a strange time-space, sun and shade interlaced, illusions sprouting everywhere. If he hadn't already brought the Phantomveil Vine under control, he'd likely have gotten lost in it within three or five blinks—but now, of course, it was a whole different story.

The Phantomveil Vine was still in its "drunk" state; the Drunken Saint's Draught's effect hadn't worn off.

Nathan drove the Titan Godslayer Canon and, following the control method provided on the quest scroll, first subdued the Phantomveil Vine completely, and only then turned to helping the bloodborn vine work off the draught's potency.

Only then did he appreciate how potent the Drunken Saint's Draught was: even with his help, it took three or four hours to refine away the serum saturating the Phantomveil Vine.

Free of the draught's influence, the bloodborn vine's bond-power exploded, surging and roaring.

The bond-power rating the Comet-Gem Mantis scanned out brazenly broke through the seventy-thousand mark, and working with Nathan from inside and out, it jacked the Sealing Platform clean off its seat.

The Sealing Platform, which had been tangling with Nathan's bond-power all along, gradually changed color under the erosion of the two bloodborn powers—strand after strand of black aether rising from its crystalline, gem-like base.

The black aether grew thicker and thicker, slowly turning the Sealing Platform the color of ink gem.

The refined Sealing Platform suddenly leapt upward, shrinking in nothing flat to the size of a game piece, and dropped into Nathan's hand.

With the Sealing Platform's suppression gone, the Phantomveil Vine slowly drilled its way up out of the ground.

Who knew how many years this Phantomveil Vine had grown—even with the space beneath the dry well being fairly roomy, it still couldn't stretch out its full form freely. Very soon countless vines were twisting together in front of Nathan, filling the entire space of the dry well.

With the well too cramped, most of the bloodborn vine's vines flickered half in and half out of sight; some would suddenly vanish and reappear somewhere else, endlessly prowling the seam between life and death.

The World Tree actually ranked above the Phantomveil Vine—but Nathan had only inherited a fraction of the bloodline, and even that fraction was questionable, far from matching this Phantomveil Vine approaching its mature stage.

It was also his first time seeing what "prowling between sun and shade" looked like, and it shook him deeply.

"I don't even know if there is an underworld, but this bloodborn vine is basically a subspace bloodborn beast! It can enter and leave other spaces freely, and even conjure a world that doesn't exist—a world all its own—between sun and shade. That ability is badass as hell. If this Phantomveil Vine hadn't been doused in Drunken Saint's Draught and stuck under a seal, with my level of skill there'd be zero chance of controlling such a high-end plant-type bloodborn creature." Even as he savored the fruits of victory, he was quietly thanking his past self for not being reckless.

Nathan opened the quest scroll; a spirit-wave connected over, and a prompt instantly appeared in his mind: "Seventh Sealing Platform shattered. Quest: Subdue the Phantomveil Vine—complete. Reward available: one war-beast..."