Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Ryu's rampage raged on and he didn't even realize what was happening to him. It wasn't because he had lost his mind or that his Bloodlines had altered his thoughts, it was rather that this was simply the side effect of having such a small part of his mind left to his control. Just the activation of his Bloodline Phenomena had resulted in his mind being completely focused on the signals it was sending him and how to act.

He had no idea how much time passed, but when the fusion with the Diamond Protector Spirit finally came to a stop and he could finally use his Spiritual Sense once again, he spread them out just in time to find his Phenomena slowly fading away one by one.

Ryu's eyes opened in slight shock, but before he could even understand that view, what he saw around him left him speechless.

He looked down at his hands to find them marred by flesh and blood. The space beneath his nails was clumped with skin and bone he had ripped apart and his body was completely drenched.

It wasn't like Ryu was a saint, so he didn't really care about how many he had killed. The main problem was that he didn't remember enough of it, and the moment he regained his lucidity, all that strength had vanished.

Well, a part of it had. The main reason he was able to kill so many wasn't just because of his Bloodline Phenomena, but mostly because of the Diamond Protector Spirit. It was just so much more powerful than the Golden Protector Spirits that even absorbing a small smidgen of it had made it so that his strength output was far beyond everyone else.

In fact, the longer he fought, and the more he assimilated with it, the greater strength he absorbed and the more helpless the battle had become for everyone else.

Of course, realizing that it was helpless, many had run, and most of them had escaped. They could just consider themselves lucky that Ryu didn't have a Spatial Bloodline, or else there was simply no way they could have succeeded. He would have definitely killed everyone.

The reality was that with his mind occupied the way it had been, he couldn't use his Soul Nature properly, and this was doubly so since most of his battle instincts had been controlled by his Bloodlines just now.

Ryu took a breath. What a joke.

He hated his Bloodlines, not for their poor strength, but because of the chains that weighed them down and their cowardice at the worst of situations. But it was also because of them and relying on these very "chains" that he had survived this situation with relative ease.

"I can't have forgotten everything, I can sense it.'

If Ryu didn't have the Origin Flame, he might truly be out of luck. But he was confident in himself. Even if his Origin Flame had been mostly occupied by the assimilation, just a small gap should be enough for him to grasp the bits and pieces of what happened and pull them together into a cohesive story.

The first thing Ryu understood was why it was that he was in this situation in the first place. The Diamond Protector Spirit was indeed meant to be absorbed by many people, and the reason for that was because the vastness of the information was beyond what someone beneath the Sky God Realms could consume. Even a False Sky God would struggle a bit, albeit just a small bit, no more than a light jog of a few miles.

The Origin Flame could easily process all of that information, but the difficulty and the limitation lay in his own body.

When he usually used the Origin Flame to remember things, it was one at a time and it could pluck from a large selection before sorting it for him and handing it over. However, in this situation, the reverse was happening. It was taking in a large selection from an outside source and then piling it into his mind. He almost never had to use the Origin Flame like this.

The treasure was powerful, and it allowed him to do things that would otherwise be impossible, but the bottleneck would always be himself.

The bad news was that he limited this treasure. But the good news was that it would always grow with him and it would never become less useful.

That was acceptable, and what Ryu was more focused on was just how he had entered that state, and surprisingly, it wasn't difficult to figure out at all. The combination of his Dao and the Origin Flame, plus the insights that he had just assimilated with, made it all too easy.

Once again, it was his Seven Corporeal Souls.

Ryu never really thought about it before, but what did the Rage Flame truly represent? How was it possible for a flame to get stronger just because of your emotion? Was emotion more physical than he thought? What was he missing?

But then it clicked. The Seven Corporeal Souls, they didn't just symbolize his inner organs, but didn't they also represent various emotions and emotional states as well?

There was Fear, Aggression, Affection, Mood, Joy and Pleasure, Desire, and finally, Melancholy.

But when were things ever so simple? This was just one translation and the true manifestation of these words represented something much higher.

For example, what was "Mood" and how was it different from just about everything else? And what was the difference between Joy and Pleasure versus Desire?

There was something deeper here and it was something that Ryu had neglected...

What about Aggression? If he thought through the possible translations he could get anything from a fearsome will to protect, to insecurity and retaliation, and then finally there was...

Rage.

In that state, when he had suppressed everything else and began to feel frustration and unwillingness, he had tapped into something extremely primal, something beasts could do naturally and yet he couldn't do as easily as a human.

Ryu understood then that the clue to controlling his Bloodlines and his Bloodlines Phenomena actually resided in his Seven Corporeal Souls.