House of Blood

The golden dragon-marrow mist did not settle quietly into Valerian’s chest; it tore through his upper torso like swallowed liquid glass.

His lungs burned.

Every breath felt as though he were inhaling hot embers from an ancestral forge. The phantom aura of Icarus Prim Sanguis, distilled into raw, unrefined marrow-energy by the ancient mechanisms of the Ancestral Plain, flooded his damaged mana pathways. It forced its way down his primary meridians, violently scouring away the lingering black-red corrosion of the blood-mist.

Valerian dropped to one knee, the stone of the high plateau biting into his torn trousers.

’Valerian, don’t try to suppress it!’

Wren’s voice vibrated through the core of his soul, sharp and resonant.

’The Patriarch’s intent carried a concentrated strain of the original Blood Dragon lineage. If you try to contain that energy in your surface pathways, it will rupture your mana nodes. Let it sink straight into the dragon marrow!’

”I’m... not suppressing it,” Valerian gritted through clenched, blood-stained teeth.

He gripped his black chitin staff with his single functional hand, driving the pointed tip deeper into the stone to keep his upper body upright.

His exposed crimson-gold eyes flickered erratically, the slitted gold irises contracting to pinpoint threads before expanding to engulf his pupils.

”I’m... channeling it.”

Using the refined non-aura calculation mechanics he had spent years perfecting, Valerian mentally mapped the chaotic surge of incoming energy.

He didn’t force it to obey through raw willpower.

Instead, he constructed an internal network of spatial pressure points inside his own chest—a mental dam system that split the raging flood of golden dragon marrow into four distinct, manageable streams.

CRACK!

The bone structure of his broken left forearm snapped back into place under the forced pressure of the marrow stream.

Valerian gasped, a harsh, guttural sound tearing from his throat as the collapsed radius and ulna realigned with brutal precision.

The shredded sinew and torn muscle fibers reattached themselves, burning with an intense white-hot heat as the golden dragon marrow fused the broken bone fragments back together.

It wasn’t a gentle healing spell.

It was a martial reconstruction, welding his body back into a usable state through sheer kinetic density.

He lifted his left hand.

The fingers were still stained with dark, dried blood, and the skin was pale and raw, but the bone was set.

He flexed his fingers slowly, testing the tension in his tendons.

”Functional,” he muttered.

His voice was cold, steadying itself as the physical agony receded into a dull, thumping ache.

’You’re insane,’ Wren breathed, though a thread of quiet relief ran through her soul-bond.

’Snapping your own bones back into place with raw dragon marrow without using an anesthetic salve... even the high-tier warlords of your clan would hesitate before doing something so barbaric.’

”Hesitation is a luxury for those who don’t know the exact date of their execution,” Valerian replied softly.

He stood.

His spine straightened as he adjusted to the restored strength in his left arm. His dark crimson silk robes still hung around his waist in bloody, battle-worn rags, his body bearing the scars and damage accumulated throughout the Ancestral Plain.

He looked past the destroyed bone throne of his father.

Beyond the plateau, the mountain range ended abruptly, falling off into a vast, silent abyss filled with swirling clouds of dark crimson lightning and deep obsidian fog.

Floating in the center of that endless void, suspended by nothing, was a single colossal structure.

It was a circular temple carved entirely from the obsidian ribcage of a Primordial Blood Beast.

Its massive, arching ribs reached toward the purple sky like the skeletal fingers of a buried god.

At the altar of the temple burned a quiet, motionless flame—a ball of pure abyssal blood-light that radiated no heat, yet caused the space around it to warp and distort in rhythmic, liquid waves.

The Primordial Wellspring.

The heart of the Sanguis Ancestral Plain.

’There it is,’ Wren whispered.

Her ethereal form inside his mind leaned forward, her golden wings trembling slightly with ancient recognition.

’The source of your family’s original power. The condensed marrow of the first Sovereign Dragon.’

”And the final trial,” Valerian added, his crimson-gold eyes narrowing.

Between the plateau where he stood and the floating obsidian temple stretched a narrow, rope-thin bridge forged entirely from interlocking iron chains.

The chains weren’t supported by pillars or spatial anchors.

They swung wildly over the bottomless void, lashed by gusts of dark, razor-sharp wind that carried the howling cries of the plain’s deepest horrors.

Valerian didn’t hesitate.

He took his first step onto the swaying chain.

CLACK!

The iron link groaned beneath his boot.

Instantly, the wind picked up, screaming past his ears like a pack of starving wolves.

The spatial pressure over the abyss was three times heavier than it had been on the mountain peak. It pressed against his shoulders, his chest, and his bare face, attempting to force him off the narrow chain and plunge him into the endless dark below him.

He didn’t use a lightweight movement technique.

He lowered his center of gravity, sinking his weight directly into his hips, aligning every step with the mechanical rhythm of the swinging links.

He moved like a shadow across the void—silent, precise, and completely indifferent to the yawning death below him.

’Valerian,’ Wren spoke up, her tone growing solemn as they drew closer to the obsidian ribcage.

’You know what lies at that altar, don’t you?’

”The true awakening,” he said, his boots clicking onto the solid obsidian floor of the temple.

”The moment where the core either accepts the primordial strain or rejects it and burns the vessel to ash.”

’It isn’t just physical rejection,’ she warned, her voice dropping into a serious register.

’The Primordial Wellspring tests the purity of your intent. It will strip away your non-aura calculations, your cold strategies, and your strategic masks. When you touch that flame, you will stand completely naked before the lineage.’

She paused.

’If your desire for strength is born from pure fear... the Wellspring will consume you.’

Valerian stopped a few paces away from the altar.

The obsidian ribs of the temple towered above him, casting long, menacing shadows across the polished dark floor.

In front of him, the abyssal blood-light hovered above a stone basin filled with dark, liquid marrow.

The liquid didn’t reflect the surroundings.

It reflected nothing.

A pool of absolute, dense darkness that seemed to swallow the light around it.

He looked down at his right hand, still gripping the black chitin staff.

Then he looked at his left hand, fresh skin pale against the dried blood around his previously shattered wrist.

”Fear?” Valerian murmured.

A faint, unbothered smile touched his lips.

It wasn’t the fake, polite smile he used in the citadel.

This was quieter.

More dangerous.

An expression born from the abyss of his own survival.

”I was terrified in my first life, Wren.”

He stepped closer.

”I spent years shivering in the dark, scared of my father, scared of the imperial knights, scared of my own aura-less body.”

He took the final step, standing directly before the basin.

”I didn’t enter this plain to conquer my fear,” Valerian said, his voice echoing softly against the obsidian ribs of the temple.

”I came here to turn it into a weapon.”

He raised his left hand.

Then he plunged it directly into the liquid marrow of the Primordial Wellspring.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The world went instantly, deafeningly silent.

The dark liquid marrow didn’t splash.

The moment his skin made contact with the liquid, the abyssal blood-light above the basin erupted into a towering pillar of black-scarlet fire that shot straight into the heavens, tearing through the purple clouds of the Ancestral Plain.

Valerian’s eyes snapped wide open.

The liquid surged up his left arm like a living predator, flooding his pores, tearing into his veins, and rushing straight toward his heart.

The pain was unlike anything he had experienced in the valley or on the ridge.

It wasn’t the physical tearing of flesh.

It wasn’t the grinding of broken bones.

It was the microscopic rewriting of his bloodline.

His existing Blood Dragon cells were being forcibly dismantled and reconstructed, layer by layer, as the dense abyssal marrow of the Primordial Blood Dragon flooded his body.

’AHHHHHHHHHHH!’

Valerian’s head snapped back.

A raw, piercing scream tore from his throat as the black-scarlet fire consumed his entire frame.

His torn clothes were instantly vaporized, leaving his pale skin exposed to the roaring flames.

Inside his inner sea, the transformation was even more violent.

The golden-red flame of his Blood Dragon Core was swallowed by a massive tsunami of abyssal darkness.

The golden walls of his core fractured.

Then collapsed.

Wren’s ethereal form stood in the middle of the storm, her golden wings wrapped tightly around her chest as she absorbed the shockwaves of the transformation.

’VALERIAN! HOLD YOUR SOUL-ANCHOR! DO NOT LET THE PRIMORDIAL STRAIN ERASE YOUR IDENTITY!’

Through the blinding storm of pain and fire, Valerian’s mind remained unnaturally, terrifyingly clear.

He didn’t fight the burning.

He didn’t try to build non-aura barriers to protect his core.

He allowed the abyssal marrow to break his core, break his pathways, and tear away the final remnants of the seals constraining his bloodline.

’You want my intent?’

Valerian’s consciousness roared through the black-scarlet fire.

’You want to know why I seek this power?!’

In his mind’s eye, the faces of his family appeared.

Not as the monsters the world believed them to be.

But as the broken, desperate warlords who had bled for him on the execution block.

He saw Vespera’s bloodied face.

He saw Morrigan’s cold, protective eyes.

He saw the twins charging into an ocean of imperial steel.

He saw Icarus standing alone in the dark citadel, bearing the weight of a dying clan.

’I am not here for glory!’

Valerian’s consciousness thundered through the Wellspring.

’I am not here to sit on a golden throne!’

’I am the shadow that protects the House of Blood!’

’I am the blade that slays the monsters that hunt my family!’

THUMP-THUMP.

His heart gave a single, terrifying pulse.

The roaring black-scarlet fire surrounding the obsidian temple suddenly inverted.

It rushed backward, collapsing with impossible speed straight into the center of Valerian’s chest.

WOOOOOOSH.

The flames vanished.

The wind stopped.

The bottomless abyss surrounding the floating temple went dead silent.

Valerian stood beside the stone basin, his chest heaving with slow, deep breaths.

His body had been reconstructed by the Primordial Wellspring.

The wounds from the valley were gone.

The broken bones had been reforged.

The torn muscles had been restored.

Even the phantom scars etched into his flesh had disappeared beneath the primordial reconstruction.

But something had been left behind.

Directly over his heart, a complex pitch-black crest had etched itself into his skin.

The Mark of the Unshackled Blood-Sovereign.

It pulsed once.

THUMP.

The black veins of the crest briefly illuminated with crimson light.

Valerian slowly opened his eyes.

There was no longer any gold in his irises.

Both eyes had transformed into absolute, luminous pools of deep liquid crimson—slitted, predatory, and burning with a cold authority that subtly warped the physical space around his face.

The Sovereign’s Guilt Eyes had not disappeared.

They had evolved.

The guilt that once fed their lethality had been absorbed into the foundation of his new bloodline.

What had once been a weapon born from regret had become something far more dangerous.

A Sovereign’s Judgment.

Inside his inner sea, his Blood Dragon Core had completely changed.

It was no longer a golden-red flame.

It had become a dense, rotating orb of pitch-black primordial marrow surrounded by a halo of crimson lightning.

Floating beside it, Wren’s ethereal form had fully restored itself.

Her golden wings now carried dark crimson chitin along their edges, the new markings pulsing in perfect synchronization with Valerian’s transformed core.

’You succeeded...’

Wren whispered, her voice filled with deep, quiet awe as she looked at his newly forged core.

’The Primordial Wellspring has completely rewritten your bloodline.’

She stared at him.

’You are no longer merely an heir of the Prim Sanguis, Valerian.’

Valerian picked up his black chitin staff from the floor.

The moment his fingers wrapped around the weapon, the S-Rank staff didn’t reject his mana.

It hummed.

A deep, resonant vibration traveled through the chitin.

Its dark surface flashed with thin veins of black-crimson light that synchronized perfectly with his heartbeat.

The weapon had accepted him.

Or perhaps more accurately...

It had recognized what he had become.

Valerian turned his crimson gaze toward the edge of the floating temple, looking out over the boundary of the Ancestral Plain.

The trial was over.

The plain was beginning to dissolve, its spectral fog folding in on itself as the domain prepared to return him to the physical world of the Sanguis Citadel.

Valerian reached into his spatial ring.

He pulled out a fresh dark silk blindfold.

For a moment, he stared at it.

The old Valerian would have immediately hidden his eyes.

The new Valerian understood why he was hiding them.

Not because he was ashamed.

Not because he feared his own power.

Because there were things the world did not yet deserve to see.

He tied the blindfold securely across his eyes.

The terrifying crimson radiance disappeared beneath the silk.

His familiar pleasant smile returned to his lips.

But something about it had changed.

It was no longer the smile of a man pretending to be harmless.

It was the smile of someone who knew exactly what lived beneath the mask.

”Let’s go home, Wren.”

His voice was soft.

Calm.

Almost gentle.

”It’s time to show the Patriarch what his weakest son has become.”

The Ancestral Plain began to collapse around him.

And for the first time since his second birth...

Valerian wasn’t returning home as the boy who had survived his past.

He was returning as the bloodline’s answer to it.