Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

The thoughts moved about in Ryu's head like lightning. It had been a while since he was guided by a master, and he didn't even believe that Fading Star's methods would work on most people, but they just clicked for him.

This was the type of person he had always been. Though, in the past, he had thought that this was just the person he had been forced to be.

When he Awakened in his second life he had completely given up secondary professions. He didn't look at formations, he didn't think about alchemy or anything of the sort, he didn't even paint or play the zither anymore, things that he still hadn't picked up again.

He had once been a master at those things, but it had always been nothing more than a means to an end. He didn't want to be a useless man, or rather... he didn't want to be more useless than he already was.

If he couldn't cultivate, he had to at least be able to do something, be something.

But those dark feelings had shrouded one important fact...

He actually did enjoy those things.

He enjoyed breaking down a pill formula and learning to perfect it. He enjoyed learning about Runes, building Visualizations and creating formations. He enjoyed pouring over mountains of text, only to string together minor little details that almost anyone else could miss.

These things were part of him, they were part of who Ryu Tatsuya was.

A connection seemed to be formed within him. His Bloodlines and Soul were suddenly bridged and he began to see them in the new light.

In the Incomplete Heavenly Path, Ryu had traded for an Omniscient God Treasure known as The Compendium. It was able to absorb any object with Spirituality and form a network of information about the Faith tied to it.

It had played a huge part in helping Ryu to reach this point. Being able to tease apart the different Strings of Karma and give each of his Bloodlines a Bloodline Phenomena was entirely reliant on understanding the underlying Faith that bound them, something that he couldn't have done easily with his eyes bound.

But, The Compendium had its limitations. It was only an Omniscient God Treasure, and Ryu's Bloodline had already caught up with that grade. There was nothing further for it to clarify for him that would help Ryu make any large or sudden changes.

Now, however... its existence was entirely unnecessary.

Ryu could feel his Bloodlines in a way he never had before. He had had to rely on The Compendium and other special circumstances in the past to actually see how much they were battling against one another for supremacy, but right now it felt like his eyes could peer into them on their own.

His eyes were the window to his Soul, and now his Bloodlines and his Soul were inextricably linked to one another...

Or so it felt until the connection suddenly snapped.

Ryu looked around in a bit of a daze, feeling like he had lost a part of himself. He looked up to find that Fading Star was smiling sweetly.

"Everything else can be set to the side, but Ryu, your comprehension abilities are by far the deepest I have ever seen. I would credit your eyes for that but... I have a feeling that that is only part of the story. It feels like your brain is wired in ways most can't understand. I'm truly astonished."

She didn't even get the chance to introduce Bloodmancy to Ryu and he had actually figured it out all on his own from anecdotal pieces of information.

"That feeling you just experienced is the hardest step to take as a Bloodmancer. For most, the concept is too abstract. I began Bloodmancy quite late in my life, only after I became a Dao Lord, and yet it still took me three hours. If I was at your cultivation Realm, it probably would have taken me three days instead."

Fading Star wasn't stingy with her praise, and because she wasn't lying, it didn't feel like she was trying to butter Ryu up either.

"Why is it temporary?" Ryu suddenly asked.

His dreams of his Spiritual Foundation skyrocketing his Bloodlines to mastery seemed to be flying out of the window.

"It's a matter of practice, unfortunately," Fading Star said with a smile, happy that Ryu was interacting with her. "Like I said earlier, the parallels between Necromancy and Bloodmancy are many. It takes quite a lot of practice for a new Necromancer to control a corpse puppet, this is the same but on a much higher level."

Ryu nodded. He remembered when he was first learning to control a corpse puppet, he had lost to that genius of the Loom Clan.

He shook his head. It had been a while since he thought about that Tae woman and her family. It also made him wonder how Granny Miriam's sister was doing.

He had been stuck in that reincarnation cycle for almost a thousand years, a lot would have changed. Maybe he should have checked up on them when he went back...

Even so, it was weird to compare controlling an external corpse versus controlling your own self. Why would the latter be difficult?

Then again, wasn't that what all training was? Controlling yourself?

Plus, this wasn't just a matter of the self either. Like Fading Star had said, this was practically like trying to bridge Heaven and Earth, using the influence of the self to influence strength bestowed by the Heavens.

Humans were the most suited to this, but that didn't mean it was easy either.

"Then after I can maintain the connection for long enough, what do I do?" Ryu asked.

"Ah, this is the best part. There are many branches of Bloodmancy, not much unlike Necromancy. But in your case, you need a very specific balancing ritual. You have too many powerful Bloodlines within you. If you want them to be harmonious...

"You need to make them harmonious.

"You can call this Dominance Bloodmancy."