Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Ryu had long forgotten how long he had been grappling with Bloodlines.

When everything began, he thought he was a talent to rule all talents, untouchable and unblemished. And in the beginning, this was very much true.

The unfortunate truth, though, was that this was only the case if he used Sacrum as his one and only metric of success.

The more he learned about the world, the more he realized that the fact he had been born with four such Bloodlines in his body was akin to a curse rather than a gift, and finding a method of pulling out their best potential was nigh impossible.

And once again, that curse was rearing its ugly head.

The first moment Ryu felt that his Beyond Perfect Extreme Spiritual Foundation was about to work its magic on his Bloodlines, he didn't actually feel elation... In fact, he felt dread.

Part of the reason his Bloodlines were so weak in the first place was because they had purposely muted aspects of themselves so that they could co-exist. If his Spiritual Foundation suddenly brought them to their Realm of perfection, he would actually just explode from the inside out and his journey would end right here and now.

However, Ryu hadn't just thought of this. He knew that this would happen. So why had he allowed it...?

It was because he felt there was a chance here, one that if he grasped properly, he might be able to rid himself of his Bloodline woes once and for all.

The trouble was that... if he did this, his path to Reincarnation would be severed forever.

There was a reason the Three Incorporeal Souls and Seven Corporeal Spirits were severed. The former was what disappeared after your death, allowing you to enter the path of rebirth and start life anew in a new world with fresh memories and a different purpose in life...

The latter, however... those were the core of this life, and they would stay behind and rot, never to come to exist again.

Ryu actually didn't know if he had lived other lives or not. Like most people, he had no memory of them. But just the idea that he might have didn't actually fill him with comfort... if anything, it made him greatly uncomfortable.

If he really had lived other lives, it meant that he had eventually fallen much like everyone else did. Maybe he reached the peak, maybe he didn't, but in the ultimate sense, he had crumbled to ash just like any other being.

Ryu had never really thought about living forever. His goal was never immortality, it was just to stand so high up that everyone else could only be below him.

But as he learned about existences like the Phoenix Sky God... he realized that maybe, by definition, his perishing meant that he never had reached any true peak.

His scope had been too narrow, too shallow.

If he wanted to reach the peak...

How could he die?

He had to be like the Phoenix Sky God, eternal and unblemished. He had to be like the Zu Clan Ancestor, able to wield time as though it was just a toy on his palm.

And it was because of that thought that Ryu didn't hesitate for even a moment. He didn't need to. He had already lived another life... he would make this one his last, whether to success or to failure.

His Three Incorporeal Souls opened up and began to pour into his body, latching onto his Seven Corporeal Souls and beginning to fuse with them as well.

Soon, there was no difference between the Corporeal and Incorporeal at all. Should he die, they would all vanish into the ether, never to be resurrected again.

And then, Ryu dug deep, allowing his Dominance Bloodmancy to thrum and his Spiritual Foundation began to dig into his very blood marrow.

He would change everything, starting right here.

The Fire Dragon.

The Lightning Qilin.

The Emperor Phoenix.

The Ice Phoenix.

The Dark Phoenix.

They were five creatures that were all legends, untouchable and holy. It was hard to see a path to thread through them all, and Ryu realized that... he couldn't.

What was holding him back all this time was the strands of Karma that represented the original paths of these beasts, but he couldn't allow himself to get caught up in them again.

If he wanted to use them, he could only take what was useful to him and discard the rest...

Take Form and Conquer the Heavens.

Take Form and Burn the Heavens.

Take Form and Command the Heavens.

Take Form and Forge the Heavens.

Ryu sat down and entered a deep state of meditation, weaving together his thoughts and will into one, and forging something new.

He had had a painting brewing in his mind for a long time, a thought that he had mostly ignored.

Others thought that his Bloodlines had no connection between them, but honestly... he didn't think so.

A cycle began to form in his mind, one that represented perfect harmony... The Lightning Qilin was his Heavens... The Fire Dragon was his Earth... and the Phoenixes were the cycle and balance of karma in between, wielding the levers of Life, Death and Reincarnation...

However, it was one thing to have such an idea or balance in mind, but it was another matter entirely to actually parse apart what it truly meant.

Within Ryu's body... Space and Time became his brush, and his Inner World became his canvas.

With slow, deliberate strokes, he began to draw across the air. Every time he did so, worlds collapsed, trees and vegetation crumbled, and reality was spliced apart, unable to form back up.

The world was entirely under his control, and the more strokes of his brush he used, the worse the situation seemed to become.

It didn't look like he was creating much of anything. If anything, he was destroying it all one step at a time.

And yet, he sat there in complete stilling, the world quaking around him.