Another drop of blood fell on the root which it absorbed greedily, this was the fourth time YuJu was using his purification skill, aside from the first where he wasted time in confusion he had spent all the other tries shifting between forms, trying to find the right one for his searching method
The last one he tried before he woke up again was a circle that was dotted with holes, it was pretty hard to make and made him nauseous but it seemed to work best
'This time I will surely succeed'
He closed his eyes again and sank into the drop of blood, the second he could feel his surroundings he started to change his form, he stretched himself into a circle, making some parts thicker than the rest on the inside while maintaining the weaker parts stability for now
He took a deep breath mentally to prepare himself for the headache, then he started the agonizing process of ripping those weak parts apart allowing blood to pass through his body giving him a weird feeling of distraught, it was minimal at first but as he tore apart more and more of them the feeling made him more and more uneasy
'It feels like I am being eaten from the inside out'
He was still being eaten from the same surfaces before but the mentality that they were inside him made the whole thing worse
To cope with it he started to feed the parts he ripped into the edges of the holes, making them look like clumps of blood, which was exactly what they were
That put it him more at ease, though the feeling remained he could bear with it, so he started to focus on the functionality of this form
Its shape which was a bloody net was spread wide enough to encompass a large enough area for the search, its holes allowed the blood to go through them while being able to sense each drop well enough to tell any huge differences between it and others
This was enough for now, it satisfied the basic requirements for a normal search allowing him to finally focus on his original task
He focused his senses on the passing drops, each second there were up to twenty drops going through him, meaning he had to inspect all of them and be ready to take action within that one second, a trivial task for someone of his calibre though it would prove to be a hard task for any other human at this point in time
Tens of drops passed by quickly, hundreds of them were inspected, the number soon went over the thousand and he didn't find a single worthy blood drop
'This one!'
Just before his senses were cut off he spotted a gene that radiated a dark misty feeling, it had a deeper red colour that made it stand out from the rest of the stream
He instantly clutched around the drop to start the purification process before he lost this opportunity
"Hugh!..."
He held down the rising acid from his stomach after he woke up forcibly in his body, still feeling holes in his body, making him want to vomit his breakfast
"Damn, I missed it"
He was ejected faster than he could start the process, it frustrated him greatly that he lost this one in a thousand chance, no maybe it was rarer depending on the gene, plus he didn't know if he would meet a different gene once every thousand drops
'Still, I was too hasty'
Indeed he was, although it was a rare gene it could have been a bad one, the only way to guess what it has is by holding it in place and inspecting it, only after ascertaining its use should he use it to purify the blood
Thinking that he could have dodged a bullet he smiled and threw regret to the back of his mind
Right now he was feeling weak from overusing the skill but decided to prick his finger and use the skill once again, he wasn't keen on giving up right when he was about to succeed and using it again didn't prove to be dangerous
He allowed the greedy root to absorb the blood and sank into it for the fifth time
Just as he did before he changed his form the second he could sense his surroundings, this time it was much smoother and he could start searching right away
He checked drop after drop as they passed through him and this time he found a unique one merely three hundred drops later
Once he sensed it he clutched onto it tightly, sinking his mind into it while ignoring the rest of the passing blood
Cold, that's what he felt, a biting cold that made one gradually drift into an eternal sleep
'This bloodline probably adds some sort of ice element into the root, maybe to freeze the blood of his victims after striking them'
It sounded like a cool skill but was actually useless to him, after all this purification set the starting path of his servant, he wanted a gene that had strong potential in the long term and not some short term gains
Leaving the slightly blue drop he relaxed his clutch on it allowing it to go along with the flow and started to search once again
He wasn't disappointed as he was soon met with another different drop, this one was the same colour as the rest of the drops and didn't look out of place at all but it gave him a weird feeling so he had clutched onto it
It was still acting like any other blood drop making him doubt the earlier weird feeling he got, still, he decided sinking his mind into it was better than nothing
'...?!!'
That same feeling of overwhelming senses washed over him, it was different in a sense that it wasn't accurate but the sheer number of these senses achieved the same result, almost knocking him unconscious
His mind retreated out in haste barely making it out without getting ejected from this body
'This is it!'
He could only guess vaguely what this gene did but he was sure of the power it held, that feeling of having multiple bodies that were at the same time a sole being was magnificent, it was hard to control but with time this root could become a great guard for his house, one that covered its entire premises
Without wasting time his net form started to wrap around this drop of blood covering it in a cocoon of blood
The cocoon stared to shrink and expand like the beating of a heart, bringing out a misty red with each beat, the mist didn't waft away and lingered around the cocoon
On the inside one could see the cocoon was absorbing the blood drop slowly, each time it shrank it extracted a very small amount of blood from it, then as it expanded it mixed that blood with itself and turned it into a mist that was sent outside
'So this is why it felt weird'
YuJu's thought as he looked at the squirming blood drop, or rather drops, the original singular shape they took couldn't hold up anymore and it showed its true shape of many blood drops linked with a thin line that was barely visible
He studied this weird gene while he extracted it, the more blood he took the more he was awed by it, those small blood drops didn't turn smaller instead, they turned out to be much smaller blood drops linked with an extremely small line that was invisible at this point, and those drops later turned out to be even smaller drops
By the time he was done he didn't know whether the remaining last drops had been a smaller version or a divided bunch since they were just too small to tell
After the full extraction was done he was merely a minuscule speck of blood, the only thing that protected him from being eaten by the other blood drops was the red mist shrouding him
'Time to end this long purification process'
Only one final step remained, spreading the mist into the blood and covering as many drops into the new gene, the more drops he changed the more of a chance he had for the root to turn into a new being
This step wasn't explained when he had acquired the skill like the rest of the processes, he only knew that he had to let some of the mist seep into the blood, how much was needed and how he went about doing that was up to him
'Since these new blood drops would be mixed with my own then they would probably be targeted like I was, then if a spread them sparsely those cells could be eaten and I would have nothing to go on for the evolution'
He thought hard about it but he could only think for so long with the mist become smaller and smaller every second
'Why should I be scared of them eating it? As long as I activate the evolution fast enough then I would have enough cells to affect the evolution'
A bold and reckless idea, one that was very fitting for this uncertain situation
With his mind made up he started to gather the mist around him, condensing it into an arrowhead, then he shot out like one, cleaving through the drops of blood in the stream, each one that touched him had some mist seep into it, enough to start eating it from the inside and change it eventually, the change should give him enough time to evolve
The mist around him was thinning out rapidly, it shrank more and more till it finally ceased protecting him, allowing the blood to devour him, bringing his consciousness back to his real body
'Damn...'
He fought the rising nausea and hurriedly held his hand above the root, a green light started to emit from it and cascaded down onto the swaying root, seeping into it silently
Yuju's already green eyes started to glow vividly, his iris rotated counterclockwise as countless red streaks flashed within them
The normally swaying root suddenly froze in place, it twitched slightly a little around the base but didn't make any other movement for several seconds
Suddenly it shot out fully from underground exposing its almost human hight, it thrashed about madly, seemingly in pain, its epidermis started to get jaggedy and dry before falling to the ground, some parts even started to decay putting it in a miserable shape
It's changes alerted the other toots who rose up in panic, at the beginning they didn't know what to do but once the root became very decayed they suddenly turned vicious and attacked it mercilessly
YuJu didn't want to sit idly as they punctured it to death but he had to focus on the evolution, but he didn't panic because he knew his back up was on the way
Sure enough, a shadow cleaved two-thirds of the attacking roots in one dash, then lingered around him to protect him
"Rargh!"
Anput barked loudly, announcing her support to the root who she knew was now was her comrade
The root was now fighting off the last third of the attackers defensively, but when it heard the bark it gained great confidence and started to attack wildly without care for injury
Puchi Puchi Puchi
Soft noises of root stabbing root were heard, it didn't look sound menacing but when one looked at the spectacle of red roots stabbing each other, leaking out blood with each wound and letting it cover the ground making the place look like a massacre ground, fear would hold a grip over the observer
Other roots tried to jump into the fight but Anput didn't allow anything over the limit of what her comrade could handle
The reason she didn't kill all of them immediately was to give it the chance of securing its own evolutionary materials on its own
What evolutionary materials? Well, the blood of bloodroots of crouse! What was happening to the bloodroot now was that its cells were eating each other inside its body, YuJu already thought of many possibilities but none of them made sense, the gene he had used was not parasitic or vampiric by origin, then that must mean whatever his evolution skill triggered wasn't the gene he was aiming for
'Guess my plan didn't work'
He was disappointed, the outcome couldn't be changed however, thus he sat there allowing the evolution to continue
His root, after digging into one of the others blood veins, decided that it was time to suck the blood out, it sleek body bloated up a little as the amount of blood directly coming from a blood vein was huge, it easily got filled up in a matter of seconds
The other roots didn't sit widely by and stabbed into it wanting to suck its blood out, but once they sucked a little they instantly retreated and started to writhe about, resisting against the contaminated evolutionary blood
The roots wounds caused by the stabs healed quickly with the continues supplements, sadly it soon sucked its victim dry turning it into an empty his
This much blood didnt satisfy it though as it moved onto another root while fighting back its attackers, too many of them could injure it and too little wouldn't be enough to help it by sucking out some of the viscous blood that was hurting it from the inside
Thankfully they were in a cluster of blood roots, thus there wasn't a lack of them to satisfy his new servant, and he wasn't worried about it not reaching the others as it was growing longer at an alarming speed
With time the root started to grow and adapt to the new blood, still it wasn't as quick as the evolution which was changing its body faster than it could comprehend it, it felt that if it didn't understand these new changes, or provide enough supplement for the evolution then it would fail and maybe die even
Puchi Puchi
Suddenly two roots grow from its bade and attacked others nearby, surprising them and puncturing them fully before sucking the blood out
This surprised YuJu since the evolution wasn't over but it was already using new abilities, it was adapting faster than he expected, then again he was helping it greatly by restricting the speed of the evolution else it would have decayed into a blood smear moments after the change started
He watched on as the root sprouted more and more new roots, each new root could fight several others on its own, the battle that would have lasted quite some time was going to end very soon but YuJu wasn't happy, instead, he looked frustrated as he thought how to move this huge root system all the way back to the mansion once its evolution was over
pαпdα-ňᴏνê|·сóМ 'What a pain...'
He laminated while coming up with a few ideas
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