Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Ryu stood there not moving at all for a long while. He checked his talents one by one and they all seemed to have a limitation of some sort. Even when he tried to pull out his Inner World to suppress whatever suppression he was currently under, he couldn't even seem to communicate with it.

Whether it was Elise, her butler, Eska and Isemeine, or even his new Summoning trainee, he couldn't sense them at all.

Ryu closed his eyes.

There was one thing that didn't seem to be affected at all: his Bloodlines.

Everything else, even his qi to a greater extent than he had noticed until now, was suppressed in some form or fashion.

Obviously, this was a clue.

What was the description of the Rotten Sea again? Wasn't it a place that houses the mutated and decomposed bloodlines of all those that had fallen here in the past?

In that case, did this have to do with Bloodlines? But was understanding that even a good thing?

If he took a step back and accepted that this was all about Bloodlines, didn't that mean he was screwed? All of the Bloodlines here were obviously related to the Ninth Plane and the True Nether Plane. What place did he have here as a human with the Bloodlines of several Ancient Beasts?

"Hm..."

Ryu's eyes slowly opened, his hair fluttering. He felt focused and at ease.

Slowly, he began to descend through the Rotten Sea once again.

After he rushed in Selheira's direction, he had suddenly been intercepted by that anglerfish, but this had also made him forget one key and obvious detail.

He had been able to sense her.

If they were really in different worlds, how was that possible?

But then he recalled something else.

When he first stepped into the Nether Plane, he had been able to sense Mae immediately as well. But back on the True Martial World, he had only been able to sense Elena after he entered the Martial Gods' territory.

He remembered feeling that it was weird, that she was both an unfathomably large distance away, and yet he could sense her just the same.

There was really only one explanation for all of this, something that he could feel even more intimately now that he was in this odd world.

The True Nether Plane didn't resolve distance, time or space like the True Martial World did.

The Nether Plane was ultimately a land of reincarnation. The fundamental laws of reality were different here even if it seemed to be built like every other society.

There was an intersectionality between all times and moments in history in this place. There was little to distinguish the past, the present and even the future.

This matter recontextualized what he had learned about Nether Qi.

He had described Nether Qi as breaking things down for the sake of allowing them to grow, almost like how a forest fire could allow better growth in the future.

But he was naive in describing it like that. Or, more accurately, he was trying to fit a round peg into a square hole, forcing Nether Qi to conform to an understanding he had already made for the world.

It wasn't that Nether Qi broke things down for the sake of building them up, it was more accurate to say that Nether Qi was fine with breaking this down and allowing them to exist in a disordered order.

It suddenly clicked for Ryu with a final thought.

If Aika were to have built her Dao on a foundation of Nether Qi rather than Real Qi, it would be maybe as much as ten times more powerful just due to the added compatibility alone.

There were many things that were theoretically possible that never happened in practice, especially on large scales.

There was nothing in the physical laws that said the world had to tend toward chaos, that energy couldn't spontaneously return to a usable form, that a cup of water that had spilled could return to its original state...

But the problem was that on a large enough scale, these things never happened, they had never been observed and they would likely never be observed.

Such things could only be seen on the most quantum of levels, and that was what Aika's Dao was based upon.

But what was the Nether Plane all about if not reversing the irreversible? Returning a life to its most infantile state and allowing the universe to bless them once more?

Wasn't this precisely the spontaneous impossibility that the laws of the world never claimed to be so, but never allowed to be possible regardless?

A disordered order, the perfect sort of chaos that could allow all things to be true at once.

It was a different kind of order, but it was an order nonetheless, entirely distinguishable from chaos.

Everything fell into place for Ryu and he seemed to vaguely understand what was going on in this trial.

His thoughts and feelings about how close or not Selheira was couldn't be trusted because it was likely that they weren't in the same world at all...

At least not in the normal sense.

If Ryu was correct, this world had, indeed, projected them all to the same place, but the way they interacted with this place was different on an individual basis. And what decided that uniqueness should be their bloodline itself.

This was a chance for the others to improve their Bloodlines and become stronger. But obviously, Ryu had no ability to take advantage of this.

He wasn't a Demon King, nor did he have any Demon King Bloodlines. The closest thing he had to being a Demon was Mae's Primordial Yin, and that wasn't going to cut it unless he wanted to redesign his entire body around it.

It could be said that Ryu was quite screwed. This was a trial designed for literally anyone but him, it was no wonder they didn't care to limit who participated or not, what good would it do?

Ryu grinned.

He'd just have to show them.