Bloodbound Codex: I Grow Stronger in Secret

The flicker in the core closest to his right hand grew slightly, and though his eyes were closed he could feel and sense the shift clearly, through his palms something was entering his body...he felt it moving through his spirit veins, which had originally been normal blood veins like any other person’s before he had written the numbers into the Spirit attribute and they had changed permanently, and through them a soft and warm feeling spread steadily from his hands upward into his arms.

The reason for that feeling was straightforward, the Spirit from the core was genuinely flowing inside him, and the way it was happening made the mechanism clearer than any explanation could have, he wasn’t exactly reversing a flow in the way he had imagined it when he first thought of the idea.

Instead He was suppressing the natural outward push of his own Spirit reserves and creating a low-pressure space inside his veins, and that low-pressure space was what pulled the Spirit from the cores inward through his palms rather than him actively dragging it in, the difference being that the low-pressure space did the work rather than any deliberate pulling action on his part.

As that process continued his spirit veins expanded slowly but steadily, the narrow pathways inside them stretching wider as the incoming Spirit passed through and regulated itself throughout his body starting from his hands and moving upward through his arms, into his chest, and spreading from there through the rest of him in steady waves, each wave slightly larger than the one before it.

Then the other four cores flickered as well.

When they did, the amount of Spirit that had been entering him from the single core felt like almost nothing by comparison, it wasn’t simply five times more from all five cores combined, it was ten times more than the single-core absorption had been, the Spirit from all five feeding into him simultaneously and multiplying the flow in a way that made the earlier amount feel like a trickle, a difference that made no straightforward mathematical sense but that he could feel clearly in the sheer volume now pressing through his veins with each wave, the pathways being pushed to their limits far faster than the single core had managed.

By the fifth wave of that combined Spirit entering through his veins, his veins bulged outward visibly and pressure and pain both hit at once.

”Khughhh!” Atlas clenched his teeth hard, the pain running through his whole body and concentrating in the veins, each one stretching so much it felt like the next wave would split them open entirely.

His Spirit attribute was already at 70, his reserves were far larger than they had been even a month ago, but he was forcing his veins to take in far more than they were currently sized for at any one time, which was exactly what was causing the pain, the veins were being stretched past their current capacity and his body was reacting to that the same way it reacted to anything pushed past its limits, with pain and with the survival instinct sending signals to stop and pull his hands away before something actually tore.

His legs started shaking, his hands trembled against the cores, and every signal his body was sending him said to end the process immediately.

He didn’t.

He had been through worse than this in ways that had no training or purpose behind them at all, the slums of Ormolio had handed him worse pain than this without giving him anything back for it, and this pain at least had a clear result waiting on the other side of it, so pulling away now would be plain stupid and he had no intention of doing it.

”Khuaaaagghh!!” The sixth wave hit and Atlas screamed as his head snapped upward, but his focus on the absorption didn’t break, his eyes stayed closed and the inward pull continued running through his palms and into his veins without stopping.

In that state, with the pain still hitting through each wave and the veins still stretching, the last thing Harleks had told him before he left echoed back clearly, ”When you absorb Spirit, try to force the Fundamental Force upon anything in front of you, try to use that understanding from the Book you gained.”

Atlas had not forgotten that advice, he had been waiting for a moment where the absorption was stable enough that he could attempt the second part of it alongside the first, and though the pain complicated things considerably the process had settled into something he could hold without losing it, ’S-Seems like absorption wasn’t supposed to feel like this...how can anyone even try using a Fundamental Force in this state?...but I have no choice, that is exactly what I have to attempt.’

He forced his head back down, clenched his teeth again, and opened his eyes without losing the focus he had maintained since the beginning, at the start he hadn’t been sure he could keep that focus with his eyes open but now he could feel clearly that it wasn’t going to break, something inside him had settled into the process in a way that felt different from the earlier waves, like his body had accepted what was happening and stopped trying to fight it.

His eyes dropped to the floor of the Ruin chamber, there wasn’t much here except the Crucible he had thrown off the pedestal earlier, now lying some distance away on the dark stone floor, and he fixed his attention on a section of the floor directly in front of him as the target for the attempt.

He ran through the understanding he had taken from the Gravity book, specifically the Gravity Multiplication, the technique that concentrated the natural pull of gravity within a specific area rather than spreading it across a domain, it was the most direct and least complex of the things the book had described and the most sensible starting point for a first attempt while the absorption was still running alongside it, and he had already seen what it looked like from Harleks’s demonstration so he had a physical reference for what the result should feel like.

Just as he began forming that intention his Spirit fluctuated, the inward absorption flow stuttering slightly, and he understood immediately why, he had instinctively tried to push Spirit outward as part of forming the technique, which contradicted the absorption still ongoing, the two directions conflicting for that brief moment and destabilising both.

He held his focus and waited for the fluctuation to settle, then recalled the rule the book had made clear, the Spirit didn’t release outward as Spirit when converting to a Fundamental Force, it converted first and then released as the Force itself, which meant the outward push would not be Spirit energy but something different in nature, and that distinction was what allowed both processes to run at the same time without cancelling each other out, the absorption bringing Spirit in while the conversion process transformed it and sent it outward as something else entirely.

As the fluctuation faded he returned his attention to the floor and attempted it again, this time converting the Spirit at the moment of release rather than trying to push it out first and then convert.

The Gravity Multiplication ”Spawned” directly on the floor in front of him.

And immediately something happened that Atlas had not anticipated from reading the book or from experiencing Harleks use it on him, something the book had not described and seeing that applied on something else...he suddenly felt his heart stop for a single beat.

And then —

THUMP.

THUMP.

Atlas’s eyes went wide before...