"My dear Xiang. If you are seeing this, then it's the night before your seventeenth birthday, and I'm not there with you. I'm sorry. You probably have a thousand questions, but there's no time for most of them. So listen carefully."
Xiang opened his mouth, then closed it again. The old man in the hologram didn't pause. He didn't wait for an answer.
It was a recording.
"But... how?" Xiang whispered.
His Great-Grandfather had vanished before Xiang's Aether pulse awakening. Before anyone knew that Xiang would turn out to be "bloodlineless." So how could he have known what would happen tonight?
"When you were ten years old, your bloodline tried to awaken on its own. Three years too early. Your body wasn't ready, and it almost burned you from the inside. You probably don't remember much. You had a fever for nine days."
Xiang remembered.
He remembered the heat, the sweat soaking his sheets, and his mother sitting next to his bed the whole night, holding a cold towel to his forehead. She had cried. Back then, she still cried for him.
Xiang clenched his fists.
"I sealed it with everything I had," the old man continued. "For two years, I tried to understand what I had sealed, and I failed. Me. Hah!" He let out a dry laugh and scratched his white beard. "So believe me when I say this. I don't know what you are. But I know what you are not. It is not Blue Fire. It's something much older."
"The seal will break at midnight on your seventeenth birthday. By then, your body should have reached the peak of the 4th stage of the body forging Realm. If it hasn't..."
The old man coughed awkwardly.
"...well, the awakening will drag your body there by force. That will hurt. A lot. Sorry about that too."
Xiang slowly looked down at the status window that was still floating next to the hologram.
[995Ae/1000Ae]
"Five," Xiang said. "I'm five Aether short."
"...FUCK."
"This bracelet," the hologram went on, completely ignoring Xiang's suffering, "is something I found on my travels to another planet. It was always pretty useful to know where my cultivation stood. But where I'm going now, I can't take any mortal items with me. So it's yours."
Xiang froze.
Another planet?
Humanity could barely keep its own cities standing behind walls. Nobody traveled to other planets. Nobody even talked about it. It was something out of old movies from before the cultivation era.
"What does he mean by mortal item..." Xiang mumbled.
"I hope it helps you understand your bloodline better than I ever could. Oh, and one more thing!" The old man raised a finger, his eyes lighting up like a child showing off a new toy. "When you reach the peak of the 10th stage of the body forging Realm, the bracelet will give you a cultivation technique. I chose it for you myself. What you achieve with it will depend on you."
Then his face softened.
"Xiang. I know what they will do to you when your awakening shows nothing. I know your father. I couldn't stop it, not without staying, and I can't stay. Don't hate yourself for what they do. That shame belongs to them, not to you."
Something hot ran down Xiang's cheeks.
He didn't notice when he started crying. He only noticed that he couldn't stop. Years of swallowing everything down, of telling himself he didn't need anyone, broke apart at the sound of a single voice. The one person who had never looked at him like he was a mistake.
"You know I love you," the old man said quietly. "So this is my official goodbye. I'm sorry I'm a coward and doing it through a recording. If you ever decide to follow me, you need to reach the Inner Core realm first. Then find your favorite book, the one you always read in my study. It will show you the path to me..."
He paused and grinned.
"...at least if I'm still alive by then. Good luck, Xiang. Make this old man proud."
"WAIT! Great-Grandfather, wait!"
Xiang reached out with his hand, but it went straight through the light.
The hologram flickered once and vanished.
The room was dark again. Just like the day he disappeared.
For a long time, Xiang just sat there on his bed. Then he wiped his face with his sleeve and laughed weakly.
"You could've at least told me what it is, old man..."
The clock on the wall switched from 23:59 to 00:00.
"DING"
A cold voice that only he could hear came from the bracelet.
"DING Seal dissolved. Bloodline awakening detected."
The first wave hit him before he could even breathe.
It started in his chest and spread through his whole body in a second. Every bone felt like it was being heated in a furnace. Every muscle felt like it was being ripped apart and stitched back together, again and again.
With shaking hands, Xiang grabbed the two low-grade Pain reduction elixirs from his nightstand. He tore the caps off with his teeth and drank both at the same time.
It helped. For about three seconds.
"FUUUUCKING HEEELLLLL!!!"
Xiang bit into his pillow to stop himself from screaming any louder. His body arched on the bed as if someone had put a live wire into his spine.
Then he felt it.
Aether.
Normally, gathering Aether was like scooping water with his hands. Slow, careful, and most of it slipped through his fingers. But now it was different. It felt as if a dam had broken somewhere deep inside him. The Aether in the air, in the walls, even in the leftover beast meat in his fridge, all of it was rushing towards him.
He wasn't gathering it.
He was pulling it in.
[996Ae/1000Ae]
[998Ae/1000Ae]
[1000Ae/1000Ae]
The numbers stopped. The pain didn't.
His body was still cracking and breaking, as if the awakening had only used the 4th stage as a warm-up. Somewhere between the pain and the darkness, Xiang heard something. A slow, heavy beat. Like a heartbeat.
But it wasn't his.
Then everything went black.
...
When Xiang opened his eyes again, the clock showed 01:12.
He was lying in a puddle of sticky black sludge that covered his whole body and the entire bed. The smell was so terrible that his eyes started watering again, this time for a completely different reason.
"Ugh... I smell like a beast's ass..."
But something was different. His body felt light. Too light. As if he had carried a backpack full of stones his entire life and someone had just taken it off.
"Status."
———————————————
Name: Mu Xiang
Age: 17
Life span: 120 years
Bloodline: Origin (Grade: ???) [Click for details]
Status: Exhausted [User should rest and consume food]
Realm: 4th stage in body forging Realm [1000Ae/1000Ae] (Peak)
Strength: 5.4
Speed: 5.5
Agility: 5.3
Endurance: 5.6
[BLOODLINE ABILITIES]
~ Absorb [Beginner]
[SKILLS]
~ Basic Bull fist [Intermediate]
~ Basic Steps skill [Intermediate]
[Cultivation Techniques]
~ Cold-blooded Dragon Body technique [Advanced]
———————————————
Xiang read it three times.
His stats had jumped more in one night than in the last half year combined. But that wasn't what made his hands shake.
"Life span... 120 years?"
Thirty years. The awakening had given him thirty years. Even people at the 10th stage of body forging rarely got past 100.
He clicked on his bloodline.
[Origin Bloodline]
[Grade: ???]
[Awakening progress: 1%]
[No records found.]
"One percent?!"
If one percent felt like this, what would a hundred feel like? Xiang decided not to think about it. Instead, he clicked on the new ability.
[Absorb – Beginner]
[Everything that lives once came from the Origin. Absorb allows it to return.]
Xiang stared at the line for a long time.
"...What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"BANG BANG BANG"
Xiang almost fell off the bed.
"OI BRAT! ARE YOU DYING IN THERE OR WHAT?!"
Brother Jay.
Xiang panicked. He was covered in black sludge from head to toe, his room smelled like a sewer, and the hologram was still floating in the air. He swiped the status window away, pulled his sleeve over the bracelet, and opened the door just a crack.
Brother Jay stood in the hallway with his shirt on backwards and a baseball bat in one hand. When the smell hit him, he took a full step back.
"...The hell happened to you?"
"I... stubbed my toe."
"For an hour?"
"It was a really bad toe."
Brother Jay stared at him. Xiang stared back.
Then Jay sighed, reached into his back pocket, and threw something at him. Xiang caught it on reflex. It was a small, slightly squished chocolate bar.
"It's past midnight. Happy birthday, you weird brat."
Xiang blinked. "You... remembered?"
"Of course I remembered. You told me like five times." Jay turned around and waved without looking back. "And take a damn shower! You smell worse than the beast that tried to eat you!"
Xiang closed the door and leaned against it.
He looked at the squished chocolate bar in his hand. Then at his bracelet. Then at the black sludge dripping onto the floor.
And for the first time since his Great-Grandfather vanished, Xiang went to sleep looking forward to waking up.