Dimensional Descent

“You had a breakthrough?” Leonel asked.

Aina blushed down to her collarbone. She had tried to be subtle about it, but Leonel had still seen through her instantly. What happened to all that nonsense she read about husbands being dopes? How’d she get stuck with the husband that picked up on every little detail? Here, women were complaining that their haircuts weren’t noticed, and now she had Sherlock Holmes over here picking up on her slightest emotions.

She reached out and pinched Leonel’s waist, causing him to jump with fright. He couldn’t help but be speechless. What had he done this time?

“Get me the blood already,” she said in a huff before vanishing in a twirl of blood.

‘Oh? What an interesting movement technique. She turned her entire body into blood… but it looks like she destroyed herself first… how… masochistic…’

Aina didn’t even seem to register the pain at all, but Leonel couldn’t help but cringe for his wife. In order to activate that sort of technique, she would have needed to grind her flesh and bone into a liquefied mist. Of course, it all happened in an instant… but an instant to warriors of their caliber and an instant to normal humans were two different concepts.

With Aina’s thinking speed, especially since she was the one actually controlling the technique, she should have felt every single little second of it. And yet, she did it without hesitation to escape in such a needless situation.

On the one hand, that made him realize just how mentally tough his wife was. But on the other, he couldn’t help but feel for her. She had definitely gone through a lot on her own and in ways that he couldn’t see.

He still remembered how she had once had a habit of curling herself up into a ball in bed and fracturing her own bones again and again. There was no way that she hadn’t sensed that pain, and it seemed that all of that had helped her reach this state. Blood Sovereigns clearly had a strength that relied on their powerful masochistic tendencies, and Leonel couldn’t help but wonder if Aina’s own masochistic tendencies came from her Force, much like he had been controlled by his own for so long…

Then it clicked for him.

Is that why she was so embarrassed?

Leonel laughed and shook his head.

His path was one where he broke free of the constraints of his Force and the foundation given to him by his birth, his parents, his blood. However, Aina’s path was the opposite of this.

Aina had always relied on her affinities, she had always honed just a small number of abilities, doing everything she could to reach perfection in them. In fact, she had even been the one granted the technique from the Gathering of Kingdoms Stele to continue following down the path of real humans, keeping her soul fused with her body. Leonel, on the other hand, had put in a lot of work to separate from his Forces and their influences. It was only in this way that he had been able to progress and also break away from the influence of the Demoness. He had even separated his soul from his body unlike Aina.

For Aina to have such a breakthrough while seeping into her own masochistic tendencies was amusing, though Leonel could see why she would be embarrassed about it.

Leonel chuckled, rubbing his hands together. What a great boon this was. With this, he could definitely take that final step and put more than a thumb in. For once, the world was actually helping him out a little bit.

“Anastasia! Prepare the blood!”

…

Aina needed a great amount of blood to finish her breakthrough, but she had yet to take that final step. Neither of them had been too obsessive about it because they also realized that Aina wasn’t quite ready yet.

However, Leonel had still been gathering up a large amount of blood just for her. And thanks to a certain Nomad God, he had finally been able to take that final step and gather the rest of what he needed. Of course, he also had a practical ocean’s worth of blood thanks to Shan’Rae as well. After all, he was in control of her soul, not her body. Her body itself still had more blood in it than he could imagine. The body of a Void Race member was truly a treasure. It wasn’t just their skin that was a universe of its own, but their insides as well. Their Nodal Pathways might as well have been starry star paths, roads of infinite length and even more shocking depths.

Their blood vessels were even more exaggerated. Their bodies alone could be considered a Lineage Factor in and of themselves, and it would likely be fair to consider them like this as well.

However, just Shan’Rae alone wasn’t enough for what Aina needed. Which was why they were lucky to have the corpses of so many dead Void Race members to take advantage of at the same time.

Leonel appeared before Aina with his arms crossed about his chest. His playful expression vanished and he looked ahead with the utmost seriousness.

By now, she had already vanished into layer after layer of bloody roses. By this point, the blood rose was so large that it covered at least a quarter of the surface of the ocean. If this thing was in the outside world, it could be seen from thousands of kilometers away with ease, so large that even after days of walking toward it, it would feel like you hadn’t made any progress at all.

It was already shocking enough that Aina could even control this amount of blood in the first place, but to control it so perfectly, smoothly, and even to the point that the waters of the ocean had become perfectly still… It was a level of control that was on another level.

And she had yet to make her breakthrough.