Bloodline Plant Lord: Rise of the World Sovereign

Ren stepped back into his room, noticing only then how deep the night had gone.

He thought about cultivating — just out of habit — but dropped it fast. Sitting cross-legged to gather energy was the one part of cultivation you could actually buy (pills, chambers, the rich air of his own world); there were a dozen artificial ways to stack energy, and he had access to most of them. His real road forward was laws and materials now, and neither was happening tonight. What he actually needed, after dying twice before dinner, was embarrassingly simple.

Sleep. He hit the pillow and was out before he even finished deciding to be.

— • —

In the morning, washed and fed and feeling almost like a person again, he wrote the list.

Attack techniques — penetration or wide area, element or not, he’d adapt. Defensive techniques — several, and he underlined that part, because yesterday had made the gap in his arsenal extremely educational. Something to lower his presence, so things couldn’t sense him or hear him coming. And then, at the bottom, the last item: a technique that could multiply his power several times over at the cost of his own life.

He didn’t leave it bare. Under it he wrote the reason, plainly: in case of an attack there was no walking away from, he didn’t intend to just die. If it ever came to that, he’d take some of them with him.

He read it once and sent it to the general.

It took less than a minute. He was still setting the card down when the room folded away, and the white gravel of that impossible garden spread out under his feet again.

He’d expected this, mostly — you don’t send a request like that and not get a conversation. What he hadn’t expected was the speed, and he was still thinking that when Halvern arrived down the path, and Ren saw the second new thing.

The general was angry.

”The attack techniques, yes.” Halvern didn’t bother with a greeting. ”The defenses, yes — I’d have chosen them for you myself. The veil, sensible.” He stopped an arm’s length away, and his voice went quiet, which was worse than shouting. ”Now explain the last item, because from where I stand it reads like an eighteen-year-old asking me to hand him a knife for his own throat.”

”It’s exactly what the reason said,” Ren said. ”Insurance. For the day something comes for me that I can’t beat and can’t outrun.”

”That day is the Alliance’s job to prevent. It will not happen—”

”It’s already happened twice on your watch.”

The garden went still. Halvern stood there, an old soldier with a sentence dying in his mouth, saying nothing for a few long seconds because there was nothing to say. They could both count.

Then he let out a slow breath, and the anger went out of him like water out of a cracked pot.

”Okay,” he said. ”Okay. On one condition, and I want it as a promise, not a courtesy. Unless there is no other option — none, do you understand me, no path, no retreat, no help coming — you will never use it. Under any circumstances short of that.”

”I promise,” Ren said, and meant it. ”Unless there’s truly nothing else left, it never comes out.”

’On this plane, anyway.’ The thought stayed exactly where it belonged — behind his teeth. What the general didn’t know about places beyond this plane couldn’t worry him, and there was one place in particular where the promise wouldn’t even need to apply.

Halvern studied him for a long moment, the way old soldiers weigh a man’s word, and then nodded once and reached into his coat.

He’d already prepared everything. Of course he had — the man had probably had the slips in hand before the teleport. He passed Ren a slim bundle of jade slips one at a time: three attack arts, four defensive ones, a presence-veiling method. And then, last, a single slip of darker jade, older than the rest, its surface worn smooth like a river stone.

”I found this in a secret realm, a long time ago,” Halvern said. ”I have never used it. I have spent my whole career hoping I would never need to, and I’ll tell you the same thing I tell myself — hope harder.” He held it out, but didn’t let go when Ren took hold. ”It has no grade, because things like this sit outside the grades entirely. We call them secret techniques. It doesn’t care what stage you are — it would work for a Stage Seven, a Stage Eight, or a Stage Two with enough energy in their body. It only cares what you have to burn.” He released the slip. ”It is one of the strongest things I own, and I am giving it to a teenager. Don’t make me famous for it.”

Ren looked down at the dark jade, then at the general, and did something he did very rarely and never by accident.

He bowed.

He knew the math — he’d known it in this same garden yesterday. The Alliance invested in miracles; he was just a line in a ledger, a bet placed early. But a ledger didn’t argue for ten minutes about a knife, and a bet didn’t say hope harder in that voice. Some of this was policy. The rest was an old man helping him from the heart, and Ren knew the difference when he was looking at it.

”I’ll remember this,” he said, straightening. ”All of it. And someday, when I’m able to — I’ll repay it.”

”Repay it at Sovereign Dawn,” Halvern said, and the garden folded away.

Ren landed back in his own bedroom, alone, holding nine jade slips, and addressed the empty air with feeling.

”You could knock. You could ask. ’Ren, may I?’ Three words.” Nothing answered. He didn’t even have privacy rights in his own bedroom anymore; somewhere across the city, a peak Stage Seven was probably pruning something and feeling zero remorse. He grumbled his way through the door of himself and back into his world, because complaining didn’t need to slow a man down.

— • —

Under the Worldroot, he laid the nine slips out on the grass and went straight for the dark one.

[SCANNING TECHNIQUE...]

[SECRET TECHNIQUE: LAST PYRE.]

[EFFECT: TOTAL COMBUSTION. THE USER’S BODY, ENERGY, SOUL, AND LAWS ARE CONSUMED AS FUEL.]

[OUTPUT: ALL POWER MULTIPLIED. CURRENT MULTIPLIER FOR HOST: 200x. MAXIMUM DURATION: 10 SECONDS.]

[THE COST CANNOT BE REVERSED, HEALED, OR REGENERATED BY ANY MEANS. THE FUEL IS EVERYTHING THE USER IS.]

Last Pyre. Whoever named it hadn’t been trying to make it sound safe. Ren read the panels slowly, and the general’s words settled in next to them — even we can’t regenerate from this. Of course not. Regeneration needed something left to grow from, and this thing’s entire design was to leave nothing. It didn’t borrow power. It was a funeral, spent all at once, on purpose.

A smaller note sat under the main text.

[NOTE: THE MULTIPLIER VARIES BY USER. IT DEPENDS ON WHAT THERE IS TO BURN.]

[THE HOST’S LIFE AND DEATH LAWS RAISE HIS YIELD SUBSTANTIALLY. HENCE: 200x.]

That made a grim kind of sense. Most people burned a body and a pool of energy. He’d be burning two laws along with everything else — more fuel, bigger fire. The technique didn’t care that the fuel was him.

And then the System added one more line, almost casually, and changed everything.

[ADDITIONAL NOTE: UPON OUROBOROS REVIVAL, ALL COSTS ARE RESET. NOTHING IS PERMANENTLY LOST.]

Ren sat up straight.

He read it three times, and then he started to grin, and the grin kept getting wider. Inside a fragment, where death itself had a reset button, the most forbidden technique in the general’s vault stopped being a funeral and became a weapon he could actually fire. Not on this plane — a promise was a promise, and here it would still be the end of him. But in there? In the dying worlds, with revivals in the bank? It was a trump card. A real one.

And it would grow. That was the part that made him almost laugh out loud — the multiplier fed on what he had to burn, which meant every law he deepened, every ton his foundation gained, made the fire bigger. He was holding the one technique in the world that got stronger every single time he did.

Ten seconds at two hundred times. As a lifestyle, suicide. As a last resort in a world with respawns — beautiful.

He reached for the familiar little plus sign beside the technique’s name and pressed OPTIMIZE.

And instead of simply running, the System asked him a question.

[OPTIMIZE: SELECT DIRECTION.]

[1 — INTENSITY: MULTIPLIER 200x → 500x. DURATION 10 → 1 SECOND.]

[2 — ENDURANCE: DURATION 10 → 30 SECONDS. MULTIPLIER 200x → 150x.]

Ren blinked at it. Back when the world had rebuilt him, the panel had mentioned OPTIMIZE was upgraded and declined to say how. Now he knew — it didn’t just sharpen things anymore. It asked him which way to sharpen them. The function had evolved, the same as everything else of his kept doing.

The choice itself took him all of five breaths.

Endurance was the trap. Thirty seconds sounded generous until you asked what he’d be doing with them — this wasn’t a technique you dueled with. It existed for one job: the single moment where something had to die and nothing else he owned could kill it. For that job, one second at five hundred times was enough to land a killing blow, and a killing blow only needs to land once.

”Intensity,” he said. ”Option one.”

[CONFIRMED.]

[OPTIMIZING SECRET TECHNIQUE: LAST PYRE...]

The dark slip rose off the grass and began to glow, and under the Worldroot, Ren Valis settled in to watch the System sharpen the deadliest thing he owned.