Chapter 48: The Adamantine Body (Part One)

Fighting for his life in the Hourbound Grove had only earned Nathan 2,300 starlings; had he come into this "fortune" back then, he'd surely have felt like he'd struck it rich. But not long ago he'd signed a fat contract with the Raging Gale and picked up a 400,000-starling advance—richer now than even Sebastian, the Order of the Deathless acolyte, had been—so the money barely registered.

Nathan's mood was heavy!

These spoils were worth plenty, but they were also a burden—one that might well invite disaster down the line.

After all, Sebastian was the Order of the Deathless acolyte. Whatever he'd done to Nathan, killing the man guaranteed enormous trouble.

A ninth grader he might be, but Nathan was no child. He knew that with a thousand reasons on his side, the Order of the Deathless behind Sebastian would never hear his explanation, and nobody would care that Sebastian had threatened him first. So he planned to tell no one about it.

If anyone ever asked, his story would be: Sebastian took the Phantomveil Vine and vanished without a trace.

Cover it up for as long as it stayed covered—how long that could actually last, he simply refused to think about.

When the thing came due, no effort of his could stop it. Powerless being powerless, he'd just let it run its course.

Nathan was sorely tempted to let the black beetles eat Sebastian's corpse—done is done—but in the end he couldn't bring himself to cross that line. He spent one starling instead, carried the body into the Hourbound Grove, found a secluded spot, and buried it. Rest in peace, such as it was.

To him, Sebastian had been a bloodborn beast on the prowl—ready to "eat" him at any moment, to ruin his family, to leave him dead and forgotten. A man who'd worked him like a dog, ordered him around like a servant, with zero regard for his dignity or survival—who'd trampled his bottom line for sport and squeezed him with his mother's life.

With the shadow that had weighed on him all this time suddenly gone, Nathan's spirits actually ran fairly light.

After burying Sebastian, Nathan sealed away, item by item, the personal things he'd left in the yew-wood house.

Sebastian had gone in hard for the finer things and stocked plenty of luxury goods.

Tossing them out, or burying them in the Hourbound Grove, would only look more suspicious. Some of the bulkier stuff—the fridge, TV, game console, full speaker set, linen sofa, rugs—had nowhere to go, so he simply left them be.

With all the cleanup done, Nathan cracked a cola and sat flat on the ground, totally undignified, panting hard. The physical drain from the battle with Sebastian had mostly recovered; his body wasn't tired. His mind was another story.

"Once I fix Mom's Ironweave Grub, this whole business is behind me, right? Finally back to a normal life. If I'd known being a bloodborn was this much hassle and this much danger, screw ever becoming one."

Support the creativity of authors by visiting NovelPhoenix for this novel and more.

Since awakening his bloodline and turning bloodborn, Nathan hadn't enjoyed a single perk—just one danger after another—and his identification with demonhood had sunk to rock bottom. But he knew it was just talk. Bloodline awakening was completely irreversible, and having completed vitae resonance, he could never be human again.

All Sebastian's foundation-wrecking had achieved was a change of energy property—vitae converting to arcane. It hadn't made him human.

Even if Nathan wrecked his own bloodline foundation, he wouldn't revert to human—he'd merely be able to practice arcane. The cost: every lineage inheritance he'd awakened would be suppressed. Too steep a price. And unlike Sebastian, he had no ascendant-path order waiting to take him in.

Nathan finished the cola alone, in silence, and was suddenly struck by deep loneliness.

He'd started out an ordinary middle schooler—with small secrets, sure, like liking Isolde—but never before this moment had he realized how many things he had that couldn't be said to anyone. Not even the people closest to him.

The boy gave the can in his hand a light squeeze and casually kneaded it into a metal ball—his strength had grown astonishing; feats utterly beyond ordinary people came to him with ease.

Tossing the metal ball into the trash, Nathan sighed: "Agh! Enough depressing stuff. Let me think about next week's national tournament instead! I've skipped club a bunch of times lately—coach seems pretty furious."

Thinking of the tournament about to start, the corners of Nathan's mouth finally bent into an easy smile. He had no expectations of the basketball itself—but the coach had promised: get the team into the top ten, and the athletic scholarship to Greyhaven Preparatory Academy was his. Which decided whether he and Isolde would attend the same high school.

Isolde had only agreed that if he got into Greyhaven Preparatory Academy too, she'd let him keep pursuing her—but at the very least... it stood for hope!

Nathan brooded a while longer. He had no interest in entering the Hourbound Grove again today, so he took out the three war-beasts Sebastian had left behind. Trouble though they might bring, he still meant to subdue all three for his own use.

What will come will come!

If disaster really did come—then he'd fight it out! But even fighting to the death takes capital, right?

The Hundred-Refined Ironweave Grub wasn't some venomous bloodborn insect, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Ironweave Grub—it was a metal-attribute bloodborn insect. Un-deployed, it was a palm-sized metallic bloodborn silkworm, pretty vicious-looking, covered head to tail in flashy new-money gold.

The bloodborn insect wriggled in Nathan's palm, constantly rearing its head up as if searching for a master. The Mystic-Gold skeleton had blasted it apart, and it was damaged all over—but the metallic bloodborn silkworm's life force was brutally strong, and it was already on the mend.

After playing with it for a bit, Nathan drove the Star-Swallowing Form, and a mass of black light shrouded the Hundred-Refined Ironweave Grub on his palm. His very reason for daring to keep the three war-beasts was that the Star-Swallowing Form could assimilate them.

Badly damaged as it was, the Hundred-Refined Ironweave Grub had no power to resist. Wrapped in the black-light vitae, the metallic bloodborn silkworm kept arching its body, letting out shrill, mournful cries, straining to break free—but it couldn't stop the black-light vitae's inch-by-inch erosion.

In barely ten-odd minutes its whole body had turned dark gold, its spiritual essence dimming.

Assimilated by the Star-Swallowing Form and fed the black-light vitae, the Hundred-Refined Ironweave Grub repaired itself at practically visible speed, soon restored to wholeness.

This metallic bloodborn silkworm had real intelligence—several tiers above the Comet-Gem Mantis. One brief exchange, and the Hundred-Refined Ironweave Grub broke apart into thirty-six pieces, attached themselves around his body, and assembled into a suit of metal armor; at the same time, a virtual light-screen popped up in front of Nathan, every functional zone plain at a glance.

This war-beast had been engineered specifically to pair with a newly developed ascendant-path martial art: the Adamantine Body.