Ch 191 – Status Page Surprises
As the evening sun sank behind the Alta Mountain range, casting long amber shadows across Floor Ten’s forest, Deacon sat on a log with Esmerelda’s Soul Bottle resting beside him, its gold and green light pulsing softly in the growing dark, her luminescence standing out despite the crackling campfire a few feet away.
Reaching down, he grabbed one of the many dried, four-piece logs he’d split and stacked at his feet earlier, and tossed it into the campfire three feet away.
After doing so, he went back to twiddling his cut-up and wire-burnt fingers in his lap, his eyes drifting back to the flames. At the same time, the forest filled the silence around him with the chirping of insects and the occasional creak of branches settling in the evening wind, unbothered by the nearby creatures who had been drawn in by the warmth of his campfire and were making their presence known in the undergrowth.
Lost entirely in the peaceful ambience of his surroundings, Deacon's thoughts drifted off somewhere distant while his eyes remained fixed on the campfire, the moon rising slowly higher and higher into the sky above the treeline as the evening deepened into proper night around him.
He was only drawn back into the present when a glowing firefly drifted into his camp, hovering in front of his face for a moment before landing on his clasped hands, its small body pulsing with a soft yellow-green light.
Deacon stared at it for a long moment before gently shaking it off and reaching into his Spatial Sling Bag to pull out the Status Page he’d put together a few days prior, flipping it open to where he’d left off on the Updates Tab and reading back through it.
Skill Upgrade: [Basic Archery Mastery (Initiate → Uncommon)]
Skill Gained: [Two-Handed Weapon Mastery (Initiate)]
Skill Upgrade: [Two-Handed Weapon Mastery (Initiate → Uncommon)]
Over the course of his solo training, his Archery Mastery had upgraded to Uncommon, but it still hadn’t evolved past its Basic prefix, which genuinely annoyed him more than he’d expected.
However, he quickly grounded his thoughts, as the reasons it hadn’t evolved were painfully obvious to him: he could have gone beyond the Training Field and into the forest surrounding the Knight Order Dorms to shoot something distant and difficult, which, over the course of repetition or accomplishment, would have pushed the skill into evolving.
As his tired eyes drifted down the page and he found himself wondering, not for the first time, when exactly he'd last slept, because he genuinely couldn't remember it, and the layered bags he could feel beneath his fingertips when he pressed them against the skin below his eyes confirmed what he already suspected, which was that it had been a very long time since he'd actually rested rather than downing Stamina Potion after Stamina Potion to stay awake and keep training.
Continuing down his Updates Tab, Deacon's gaze settled on his notification just below his Skill upgrades:
[Innate Skill Unlocked: Blood Ascension [Tier 1]]
Blood Ascension [Tier 1]: Tier I – Blood Awakening:
Gain the ability to minorly manipulate your own lifeblood and the blood of others nearby, along with the ability to sacrifice your own health to minorly empower your spells.
Current Stage: 1 of 5.
He’d unlocked his Blood Affinity’s innate skill after killing the Antlion Prince in Solomon’s Fourth Temple –more specifically, after ingesting the Antlion Prince’s blood when he’d torn out its throat with his own teeth.
The actual origin of the skill, however, wasn’t related to the Antlion Prince in the slightest, but by whatever ritual had taken place inside the Temple of Huitzilopochtli had granted him his Blood Affinity in the first place.
With the Innate Skill now unlocked, he understood both exactly why it had triggered after killing the Antlion Prince and precisely how he would go about upgrading it, having unlocked it.
To unlock the skill, he’d been required to consume the blood of five Elite-rank or higher beings.
The first had been the Armadillobear, whose heart he’d used for his first Lesser Heart-Fire ritual. The second was the Holy Pontiff, when he’d speared Echoform Reliquary through the man’s chest and hoisted him overhead, droplets of the Pontiff’s blood falling into his open mouth as he silently roared.
The third was the Iron-back Boar he’d killed for his second Lesser Heart-Fire ritual just before he and his friends climbed up the Jagged Spires. The fourth had been the elite wyvern, whose blood had gushed from its body whenever it was fighting. And finally, the fifth Elite rank or higher blood he’d consumed had been the Antlion Prince’s.
And with the knowledge of whose blood he’d consumed, he’d also learned exactly how to upgrade it to the next stage: consume more blood of Elite-rank or higher beings.
Very vampire-esc in his opinion.
Given everything he'd felt about being tied to Huitzilopochtli as a result of that ritual he'd saved Sam from, and the genuinely horrific things both he and Sam had witnessed in that prison/ ritual room within the temple, it wouldn't have been a stretch to say that he'd wanted nothing to do with Huitzilopochtli beyond using the Grimoire for its rituals and the knowledge of them contained within its pages.
But after everything that had happened over the past nearly two months, after losing Sam, Jass, and Esmerelda, unlocking his Blood Affinity innate skill had shifted what he thought about blood rituals.
The more intimately he understood and could manipulate blood, the more useful it would be when the time came to create a body, or perform whatever rituals were required for the vessel Esmerelda’s soul would eventually inhabit.
While he was not found or interested in the idea of a plague ritual or something similar, if there was a ritual in Huitzilopochtli’s Grimoire that would give Esmerelda a body at the cost of a couple of people dying – Esmerelda would have her soul back in her body within an hour.
But unfortunately, there was no mention of such a ritual – not to mention if there was, he currently did not have the skill to perform such a complex-sounding ritual that would require such a number of sacrifices.
Another area of his skillset he would need to improve on.
Even now, sitting by the fire and focusing on the wire burns across his hands as he trained, he could actively move his blood beneath the skin to hasten his natural regeneration in those areas.
Though the level of concentration it currently required made it completely impractical in any kind of combat situation —something he intended to fix with enough practice.
Glancing down at the final update on his Tab, Deacon's eyes settled on his Tier One Racial Trait.
[Tier 1 Racial Trait Revealed: Skin of Jötunheim (Divine)]
Skin of Jötunheim (Divine):
Those born with Jötunn blood inherit the Records of Jötunheim itself—the very Origin of the Jötnar. As these Records course through your skin, they reinforce it, hardening your body against both physical and magical harm. Taken root in your blood, runic echoes emerge across your skin, each reflecting the accomplishments of your ancestors. For it is these very feats they have accomplished that directly empower the resistance of your skin.
Grants: Greatly increased Physical Resistance and Magical Resistance.
The Divine rarity of his Racial Trait had genuinely stunned him when he first read it, though the more he sat with that information, the more it made sense given that he had survived things that by any reasonable measure should have killed him several times over.
Between his body being torn apart by overloading Power Boost, a skill he hadn’t even known he’d created at the time, the punches and cuts he’d taken from the Antlion Prince, the Elite Sand Golem pinning him to the ceiling while living sand tried to root its way into his body, and then, after all of that, digging Bonehead and Jass out of the dome that protected them and prevented him from healing them, he’d pushed his battered, barely standing body to the point where his health had dropped to near zero.
It being a Divine rarity made sense, as it scabbed over his wounds and granted him those resistances were the only reason why he was alive.
Though why exactly that was the case remained a question he couldn't answer, and it opened up others that sat equally unanswered at the back of his mind where they'd been fermenting for weeks.
Was the Divine rarity of his Racial Trait due to his father taking in the blood of the Serpent Guardian of the Jötunar? If so, why couldn't he find the Serpent among any of the runic echoes moving beneath his skin? Who were the warriors whose faces were hidden behind their helmets in those echoes? Who was his mother?
All of those questions sat unanswered and had been sitting unanswered for weeks, because Bjorn had gone completely radio silent after leaving to get Bonehead a proper body, and Deacon hadn't seen or heard from his uncle.
Which left Deacon with nothing but the small library in Bjorn's room to consult, and all that had given him was a confirmation of what his Racial Trait description had already told him directly.
Having finished going through his updates, Deacon swiped back to the main tab to look at his overall Status Page and quietly added his two remaining Free Points into Intelligence, bringing it up to sixty-seven before the page updated itself to reflect the change.
Deacon Surtr Hayes
Race: Jötunn Lv 25
Class: Warrior Lv 25
Health: 2352/2352
Mana: 700/700
Stamina: 1732/1732
Stats:
Vitality: 224 (235)
Strength: 213 (223)
Endurance: 165 (173)
Agility: 93
Intelligence: 67
Wisdom: 70
Willpower: 101
Perception: 65 (68)
Free Points: 0
Racial Traits: Skin of Jötunheim (Divine)
General Skills: Identify (Initiate), Meditation (Initiate)
Class Skills: [One-Handed Weapon Mastery (Uncommon+)], Shield Mastery (Uncommon), Academy of Beginnings Sword Style (Rare), Blistering Flames (Rare), Power Strike (Uncommon), Basic Archery Mastery (Uncommon), Power Boost (Uncommon), Two-Handed Weapon Mastery(Uncommon)
Spell Masteries: Fire [Spark (Initiate), Ignis (Uncommon), Flame Armament (Uncommon), Flame Mine (Rare), Flame Art: Flame Steps (Uncommon)], Water [Water Ball (Initiate), Cleanse (Common)], Earth [Gouge Ground (Common)], Blood: [Blood Sense(Common)], BloodFlame: [Ignis Sanguinis: BloodFlame Armament (Epic)]
Affinity: Fire (High) – Innate skill: Undying Flame, Blood (High) – Innate skill: Blood Ascension [Tier 1]
Achievements: Finder of the Hidden III [+15 All Stats], Saga Walker I [+10 All Stats & 5% to Perception]
Thinking about how he needed to evolve Flame Art: Flame Steps into Fire Steps, something Sam had advised him to look into – a snap of branches being crushed underfoot snapped Deacon’s attention sharply toward the forest trail at his seven o’clock.
Roughly two hundred meters out, Deacon could make out a robed figure moving calmly atop the forest trail.
Tucking his Status Page back into his Spatial Sling Bag, Deacon resumed fiddling with his fingers in silence while he waited, the campfire crackling steadily between him and the empty log across from it as fireflies drifted lazily through the camp around him.
After a few minutes, the robed figure stepped into the edge of the firelight and settled onto the log opposite him before reaching up and pulling back the hood of the robe, and Deacon's brow furrowed as he took in the face looking back at him from across the fire.
"What?" Bonehead said before Deacon could get a single word out. "You think you were the only one allowed to get yourself tatted?"
Deacon let out a short huff through his nose that almost passed for a laugh, the corner of his mouth pulling into something that was barely a smirk as he studied the tattoo now decorating Bonehead's right cheekbone, a strange-looking bident. However, just as he took notice of what the tattoo was, the tattoo shifted seamlessly into half a pomegranate before fading entirely and leaving behind nothing but unblemished bone.
"Still pissy it seems," Bonehead remarked flatly, disgruntled by the pitiful reaction Deacon gave, before his Shadowflame eyes swept around the camp. "Do you have any beer waiting for me?"
"Why did you call me here?" Deacon said, digging straight into the point.
Bonehead narrowed his Shadowflame eyes at him. "This is my way of an intervention of sorts…”
“An intervention?” Deacon repeated in disbelief back at Bonehead. “Why would…? I’m not an alcoholic.”
“It’s a you needing to grow the fuck up intervention," Bonehead corrected him.