1% Lifesteal

Once the disorientation faded, he remembered having a flashlight in his storage ring. He took it out and flicked it on. "Holy fucking…!" he shouted as the light landed on Bloodshed's skeletal face, startling him.

"Master, you are awake," it said, cocking its head.

"Fucking hell, Bloodshed, you scared the everliving shit out of me!" He breathed a sigh of relief.

"I apologize."

He thought he was entirely used to Bloodshed's bizarre appearance. Apparently, that wasn't the case for situations like this.

Freddy took a few seconds to feel around his body, ensuring he was properly healed. Everything seemed to be all right. "Okay…" He took a deep breath and slowly released it, working to calm his nerves. "Calm down…" he told himself, taking another breath and letting his shoulders loosen slightly.

He was alive, and there was no immediate danger. It was time to assess his situation.

First, he should ask Bloodshed what happened. "Bloodshed, can you tell me what…" His words trailed off as he spotted Sophia's shortsword by his side, resting next to the mangled spark of undeath. Bloodshed must have used it to help him stab the spark.

He raised an eyebrow. Just as he was about to dismiss the detail, he realized that his dagger wasn't there. "Oh shit!" he shouted. "Did we lose the dagger?"

"No, Master," it declared. "The dagger's aura was fused into the ring on your finger."

"It… Wait, what!?" Freddy asked. "Wait, wait, wait, hold on, that's… That's not something that just happens!" He breathed out again, working to calm his nerves. "Okay… Yeah… Tell me what happened."

The skeleton appeared hesitant for a long moment. Its head dropped slightly.

This was something Freddy had never seen the skeleton do. "Bloodshed?" he called cautiously.

"While you were unconscious, Master, we were visited by an asura."

Freddy blinked. "A what now?"

Bloodshed slowly raised its empty eye sockets. "A sentient ether construct above an eidolon in power."

Freddy's entire body froze. Those words felt like getting struck by lightning. He didn't even know that things more powerful than that even existed.

But… more importantly…

With a shaky hand, Freddy spun and quickly illuminated the patch of forest around them. Nothing was there. He quickly rushed to turn off the flashlight lest he attract undesired attention.

The realm felt strangely… quiet. The Crimson Twilight was gone, and that feeling of bloodthirst—

"The limb…" he muttered.

Bloodshed nodded. "That limb belonged to the Asura of Bloodthirst. We were the ones to set it free. It visited us to repay the favor."

Freddy's entire body felt numb. The hand holding the flashlight shivered, and his heart beat out of his chest. The horror he felt as he prepared to ask the question nearly made him puke. "And this… asura… where did it go?"

"It opened a passage and went through it."

"Ah…" Freddy pitifully squeaked out. "Opened a passage. Right. Okay. I guess fucking anything goes then." He rubbed his face. "Okay. Asura. Dagger. Favor. I'm starting to piece things together. So… this thing fused the dagger with my ring?"

"Not exactly." Bloodshed said. "It fused the dagger's aura into the ring. Most of the power was lost, but now the effect can apply to everything Master does."

Freddy stared at Bloodshed for a long moment. He blinked. "Ev—Everything?"

Bloodshed nodded.

"Hah… I should do favors for asuras more often. Okay." He slowly got himself back up to his feet and turned the flashlight on again, but turned it down to minimal brightness.

A fog hung over his mind, and the general sense of anxiety made his thoughts rush through his mind too fast to keep up. He didn't even know where to begin. "Sophia!" he suddenly exclaimed, rushing to find her head.

It had tumbled under a bush while the rest of her body was scattered all across the clearing. It was covered in blood with chunks of grass and leaves sticking to it, deathly cold to the touch, and her eyes were rolled back. There were a few minor cuts across her face but nothing to indicate internal damage.

"Fuck this is gross," he muttered as he reluctantly picked her severed head up and… shook it.

He was trying to discern whether anything in the skull was loose, primarily to determine whether she had suffered significant brain damage. He felt nothing unusual—well, not that he'd ever shaken a severed head before, but at least nothing was bouncing around in there. But it was… jiggling. "Ewww, urghhh, I hate this."

His fingers nearly hurt at the touch of her skin. It was like holding a hot potato. He didn't want to be there or do what he was doing. It was gross and made him feel like throwing up, but knowing that she was most likely still alive made him unable to just leave her behind.

Freddy's knowledge of how to save someone from such a state was… non-existent. All he knew about treating others was basic first aid, and even that was a bit shaky.

He went off of what he knew about undeath. Those who found themselves in a state similar to Sophia's usually didn't survive for long. Without circulating blood, there was no functioning immune system, meaning nothing could prevent the fungi or bacteria from slowly eating away at the tissue.

He'd have to do that manually.

For the time being, he cleaned her head, washing it in water he created with his spell. Then he cut her hair off, reasoning that it would be easier to keep it sanitary that way… probably. Her hair was greasy and full of filth, and any source of contamination wasn't welcome.

Once done with that, he rubbed some of the supreme-quality healing cream over her skin. The cream absorbed quickly, improving her skin complexion. He saw the small wounds close up, which was, at the very least, a sign that some of her cells were still alive.

He found the corpse of the scorpion-tailed woman and looked for her ring. She had one on her, but it, to his surprise, was completely empty. It was likely that the woman had used all her resources, which, to be fair, wasn't unreasonable at all, given that the storage space was only a fraction—around an eight—of the size of Freddy's ring. The man he had killed also had an empty ring. It was even smaller.

Still, they were both valuable items. He stashed them, together with Sophia's ring, away in his half-torn pocket, but not before putting Sophia's head inside of the bigger one.

"Okay…" He took a long moment to think his next step through.

Frankly, he felt paralyzed. From the empress to the strange cult to the appearance of an asura, the situation was so complicated that he couldn't possibly even begin to guess what would happen next.

Under these circumstances, he only had one real option—he had to hide.

Although pulling off would be a bit tough, there was a manual way he could keep Sophia's head from rotting.

He had a rough idea of where he was and where he had to go to hide. Rather than use the flashlight and attract attention, he swallowed three of the perception pills and turned the light off.

His nose was already mostly used to it, so he hadn't quite registered it, but the whole realm smelled like rotting carcass. Now that he'd swallowed a high dose of a drug that boosted his perception, he quickly found himself on the floor, heaving and retching with nothing to throw up. And the headache appeared again.

Once he finally adjusted, he slowly got up.

Bloodshed returned to his soul, and he crawled through the woods.

There was nothing alive.

Nothing.

It was filled with such pure, overwhelming silence that he felt every hair on his body stand on end.

Eventually, that silence was interrupted as he heard spirits cackling in the distance. The happenings within the realm must have generated a truly unbelievable amount of ether. Unsurprisingly, the number and power of sentient ether constructs had surged. Thankfully, he didn't cross paths with any of them, and before long, he spotted the faint light of a passage leading to another realm.

It was the same realm he and Sophia had waited in. It was the only one he was even vaguely familiar with, so he figured it was likely the best place to hide.

Once inside, he located a safe corner, climbed into a tree, and sat down.

***

Bloodshed sat within its shell, observing Master's actions as he got comfortable and prepared to sleep atop a high branch.

The encounter with the asura was still vivid in Bloodshed's mind. If Bloodshed's existence wasn't tied to Master's soul, the asura would have killed him. It was a creature with absolute loyalty to its kin—blood constructs—and an eternal thirst for the blood of all living creatures.

If this "sector," as the asura had called it, wasn't too weak for its notice, the result would have been catastrophic for Master's kind.

Bloodshed wondered whether it should tell Master the secrets the asura had shared.

Master was cursed with a fate that would always inevitably drag him into bloodshed. Master's entire world was little more than food for a larger ecosystem. His planet was in an "integration" phase, and the following years would spell a disaster Master's kind was incredibly unlikely to survive through.

A grand war was looming on the horizon.

But it kept its mouth shut. Bloodshed was devoted to its master, but it was no fool. Master—no…

Freddy was weak.

He wasn't mature enough to hear any of this. What purpose was there in telling a pond fish about the vast ocean? No, he had to go through the steps as he put the pieces together himself.

Meanwhile, Bloodshed had other things to tend to.

For a long while, Bloodshed had thought its growth had been severed by merging with Master's soul.

Far from it.

If anything, that had only been the first step to entering the next level of power.

Not by itself, no, but together with Master.

The true purpose of the "spirit abilities," as the humans called them, was much grander than they believed. And not only did Master already have two, but both of them held true ether constructs within.

But he needed one more.

Otherwise, he would never reach a power beyond five stars.

***

Freddy woke up from a restless sleep. He panicked for a moment and nearly fell off his perch on the tree, but he grabbed it in time to stop it from happening.

"I guess I should find food for now," he decided as he slid down the tree.

That ordinary task marked the beginning of his life in the Capragorn realm.

Days passed one after another, although it wasn't like he could count them. Tracking days was impossible in that realm. It was always day—always sunny.

His main source of food was raw nebber flesh. It was unappetizing, probably not very nutritious, and definitely unsafe to eat unprocessed.

At first, his schedule was as simple as could be. Eat, sleep, rest, and wait. Oh, and make sure that Sophia's head didn't rot.

His solution to the problem was to develop Purify—a simple water-affinity spell that purified liquids. It could deal with bacteria and other impurities, but it wasn't a perfect solution.

The issue with using Purify like this was that it purified everything. Blood? More like water. Extracellular fluid? More like water. Cerebrospinal fluid? Yeah, more like water.

Thankfully, that was one of the things that undeath was perfect for dealing with. His ability only cleared the liquids outside of Sophia's undead cells, which ensured that she, at the very least, didn't start growing mushrooms anywhere.

Naturally, that made the head look quite deflated, but she was still alive.

Occasionally, he checked up on the gorel realm. It appeared that Bloodshed had indeed destroyed the sun—it was always night in there now. But even with that fact, he saw no signs of human activity. Or any activity for that matter.

As time passed, his visits to the passage became less and less frequent.

Given all the free time he had, he found himself devoting more and more of it to training. He had to get his mind off his situation somehow.

Over time, he got more daring. Before long, he had his first run-in with a capragorn.

The creature tore his guts out with a single swing, but in turn, it took a flowing strike to its chest, which completely shattered its bony torso and killed it immediately. That was far from his first encounter with the horrifying monsters.

While he couldn't track days, he could track all the times he'd slept. Soon, that number went over ten. Then twenty. Then thirty.

Then fifty.

Nothing came through the gorel realm passage.

And the days of solitude continued to stretch on.

***

Freddy washed his face in the water. Once he finished scrubbing, he let the water settle and checked his reflection. His hair had grown a few inches, now reaching over his ears.

He raised his head and looked up.

He was in the middle of a grove with tall trees around him. Their canopy cast a gentle shade over his back as he gazed across the water.

The large lake—a massive body of water stretching through a good chunk of the realm he was in—was gorgeous.

He got up and walked to the closest tree. With practiced ease, and despite his immense body weight, he climbed up the branches until he reached the makeshift platform he called home.

There, he sat on the ground and took Sophia's bald head out of the storage ring. It looked incredibly pale and shrunken, courtesy of the method he was using to keep her alive.

He placed his fingers on her scalp and channeled Purify. At first, he had nightmares from tending to Sophia's severed head. But as time passed, it became almost meditative. Maybe it was just a cope, but he kept in mind the fact that he was working to preserve her life. There was value in that. No matter how grotesque the process.

Once done, he returned her head to the ring and sat down to meditate.

From his best guess, somewhere between three and four months had passed since he first entered that realm.

With how long he had spent alone, he had plenty of theories about what happened. Maybe the empress had died, and the American Empire was being overwhelmed by the cultists. Maybe the empress had won but had to seal the passage because the asura appeared. Or maybe the asura had actually made a passage out into Nova York, where it promptly killed absolutely everyone because there was nothing powerful enough to stop it on the entire planet.

At any rate, his guesses were only guesses. In reality, he was completely oblivious to the truth.

As he meditated, he worked extra hard to temper his patience.

He was immortal and in absolutely no rush to return to anything. No matter how much time he had to spend living in that realm, it was better than dying.

He had to be honest with himself—the words "better than dying" were slowly starting to lose all meaning. But he was still holding on.

At least the training he was doing was paying off.

His notebook appeared in his hand, and he cracked it open to write down his progress.

GATHERING:

Second star—199% essence capacity

TALENT:

1% Lifesteal: Dynamic-quality healing

SOUL CONSTRUCT:

Scythe: Essence Extraction

TEMPERING TECHNIQUES:

Blood affinity:

Pool of Blood: Stage 1—97% Progress

Crimson Mercury: Stage 1—48% Progress

Water affinity:

Adaptive Water Body: Stage 1—Complete

Thousand Wet Hells: Stage 1—38% Progress

Abyssal Depths: Stage 1—90% Progress

ACTIVE ABILITIES:

Blood affinity:

Gore Knuckles: Stage 1—71% Progress

Water affinity:

Flowing Strike: Stage 1—89% Progress

Hydraulic Flex: Stage 1—67% Progress

Create Water: Stage 1—48% Progress

Purify: Stage 0—99% Progress (Ready to Upgrade)

Pressure Jet: Unfinished ether shell

Perished water affinity:

Perished Water: Stage 0—8% Progress

Ghosts of the Drowned: Stage 0—8% Progress

SPIRIT ABILITIES:

Blood Sacrifice

Leviathan's Fury

UNIQUE CURSED ITEMS:

Blood Ring: -6% essence cost, +5% power for blood-affinity abilities. Can be used to release Bloodshed. Attacks inflict minor bleeding.

As he flipped through the pages, he couldn't help but feel a swelling sense of pride. He had made significant progress. He was still a ways off from reaching the third star. He didn't even have a stage-two ability yet.

But that didn't make his growth any less impressive.

Technically, by peak two-star standards, his abilities were lagging way behind his star development. However, for someone who had been an archhuman for less than two years in total, he was a monster.

After using Ghosts of the Drowned on that cultist, he finally figured out how to progress his perished water–affinity abilities. The two abilities weren't strictly separate—not entirely. They were more like a single ability with two segments. To use Ghosts of the Drowned, he had to be fully submerged in perished water. And once he used it, both of the shells made progress. They grew excruciatingly slowly, however.

Across the board, he had seen excellent growth.

Yet, there was something that was bothering him.

He was never going to forget his fight against that giant man. The scorpion-tailed woman was one thing. He only won that fight because she was desperate.

Against the man, though? He felt like he really should have won that one without the poison. His opponent had been blinded, exhausted, and severely wounded, yet Freddy's lack of skill let the man claw his way out of a desperate situation.

It was way past the time he learned how to fight. But, obviously, he had nobody to teach him here.

Sighing, he climbed down the tree and started his daily exercise.

He took a dose of the beast steroids. Due to how little he could tolerate at once, he wasn't even close to running out, but he'd already gone through over a third of it. And it showed.

His muscles had grown significantly. As a result, he was just a bit slower, but he remained flexible to ensure it didn't affect him too badly.

He hoisted a massive boulder on his back and started running. He had to get rather creative to push himself without proper equipment. But it mostly came down to doing pushups with a boulder on his back, squats with a boulder above his head, pull-ups with a boulder held tightly between his legs, and so on.

He could only use so big a rock without it getting wildly impractical. With time, he had to do more and more reps, and at that point, his training was just a wide range of exotic forms of cardio. But still, he kept it up to, if anything, not lose the habit.

Once done with the physical exercise, he walked deeper into the woods and faced a large tree. He focused for around twenty seconds and slowly formed a thin javelin of blood.

Then, using Hydraulic Flex, he threw it.

He missed the entire tree.

The javelin proceeded to fly into the distance at immense speed, where it slammed into a different tree and tore a chunk out of its side, cracking apart into tiny shards of crimson metal on impact.

Sighing, he focused on making another javelin.

Freddy's lack of skill was only one of three major problems he had as a fighter.

The first of the other two was that his most impactful abilities were essence chuggers. During his fight with the giant, he exhausted over half his reserves before the fight even really got started.

The second problem was that he was slow.

While the first of the two could be fixed by developing more cost-efficient fighting methods, there was no viable way to "fix" the second problem.

His body was big, he relied on Abyssal Depths, and his affinities didn't have the best options for mobility. Unless he gave up on Abyssal Depths and lost a ton of weight, he would always be slow for his rank.

Thankfully, that didn't have to be a problem.

He threw another spear, and this time he hit his target. The weapon embedded deeply into the wood, causing a large crack to run up the tree. He smiled. Just because he couldn't catch up to his target didn't mean that he had no way to slow them down.

By combining three abilities—Blood Javelin, Accelerate Blood Projectile, and Hydraulic Throw—he could develop an incredibly powerful ranged option. Blood Javelin and Accelerate Blood Projectile were relatively cheap in terms of essence cost, and Hydraulic Throw was just a more specialized version of Hydraulic Flex, kind of like Frog Leap.

He hadn't yet created any of the abilities. Blood Javelin would be done first, Accelerate Blood Projectile would be finished second, and Hydraulic Throw would take way longer.

Hydraulic Throw was probably the most important of the three abilities. If he executed it well, using the ability would make his javelins always go exactly where he wanted them. If he fucked it up, he'd have to break the shell and start from scratch.

While working on solving the second problem, he thought about ways to compensate for his absurd essence expenditure.

Most archhumans only had their essence pool and stamina to take into consideration.

Meanwhile, Freddy technically had six different resources at his disposal: essence, physical stamina, his own blood, his enemies' blood, life force, and RETI.

Essence, of course, referred to his pool of essence.

Physical stamina was just how long he could endure intense physical combat.

His blood was a critical resource for his blood affinity, and his enemies' blood was essential for Blood Sacrifice.

For a long while, he wasn't sure how Leviathan's Fury worked, but after dealing with Sophia and her talent, he was confident it consumed life force to trigger. That was also why he couldn't use it when his body was completely mangled.

And finally, there was RETI.

RETI, or rather, his reflux essence tolerance index, was a number that showed how much maximum essence he could expend in a single battle for every affinity he had before it started becoming life-threatening.

His maximum essence was 199%, but that didn't include essence from his satellite or recovered essence from kills. Even though they were plentiful, those two sources also had their limit.

The RETI for water, for example, was 2.56—meaning that he could expend 2.56 times his maximum essence in water abilities; in this case, that meant 2.56 times 199—509%. That was quite a lot of leeway.

However, it wasn't the same for all affinities. Not even close. The RETI for blood was only 1.21, meaning that he could only expend 240% of the total essence on his blood affinity before it became dangerous. Usually, such a number wasn't a problem. Unless an arch had a satellite, expending over 100% of one's total essence in a battle wasn't a common occurrence.

However, there were some affinities with a RETI score lower than 1.

The holy affinity had a RETI of 0.73.

And Freddy's perished water affinity, from what he observed, had a RETI of around 0.52—a meager score. After spending that amount, random wounds would start opening all across his body, and no matter how tough he was, he could do nothing to stop them from appearing. But he could heal them, at least. Still, while he could push it a bit further, that wasn't a good idea. The damage got exponentially worse with every percent over the limit.

To minimize his essence problems, he had to utilize his other resources as much as humanly possible. More low-cost abilities that his satellite could cover, more abilities that used his blood reserves, and better control over his martial arts were significant steps forward, but he was seriously starting to entertain relying on his spirit abilities more often.

Blood Sacrifice was easy enough to justify, but even Leviathan's Fury wasn't as scary as he used to believe. As long as the ability wasn't blocked, he was likely to, at the very least, have the wounds patched back up by the influx of first-aid-quality healing.

He had tried this out a few times against the nebbers, and as expected, he could get away with using the ability semi-casually. He still wanted to avoid it if possible, but it wasn't the self-destruct button he used to believe it was. Well, not after his two-star upgrade to 1% Lifesteal, at least.

He threw another javelin at the tree, and this time, the javelin broke into pieces. Sighing, he stretched a bit and decided to take a break.

"I haven't checked on the passage for a while already…" he mused. "Might as well go take a look."

He prepared a Blood Javelin in advance and even his Gore Knuckles in case he came across a capragorn again. Thankfully, he only spotted some nebbers on his way to the passage, and within twenty minutes, he was at his destination.

Taking his customary peek, he almost turned around out of sheer habit, but he froze as he finally noticed it.

What looked like the glow of flashlights shone above the canopy of the forest.

People had finally arrived.