Chapter 456: Flesh And Blood

The change started in my hands. I could feel it before I could see it, and I almost groaned in relief as a coolness began spreading through my palms where a moment ago there had only been fire. Then I looked down, and the red lines running up my wrists had begun to fade, until the veins under my skin were the colour of old wine threaded with silver.

The pain did not stop. It just became more bearable, and more familiar. I had felt this same pain many times before, whenever I transformed into something new.

I lay against the skull and let it happen, and I tried very hard not to think about what I was becoming. From the moment I agreed to use the Loop the way the Hollow Avatar wanted it used, as a whetstone for decisions no sane man should have to make twice, I had made my peace with wherever those decisions took me.

That was when I felt the Law.

∞

I should have expected it. After all, Dorrik’s sword had been married to the Law of Sharpness before I ever turned it into a pen, and the Law had been sitting inside that metal the whole time, waiting. A god’s weapon, granted by the System, made of the god’s own blood, would not be only blood.

Blood is the first weapon. Blood is the last weapon.

I had felt that truth in the battle with this god, and now it was inside my veins, a pressure moving through me at the speed of my own heartbeat, and it had no master.

The Law in the blade had belonged to Raktanāgeya, and now that the god was dead, what was left was a fragment of the Law, loose in me, going round and round my body looking for something to hold it.

And something answered.

∞

The first Law I acquired was the Law of Flesh, and that was not by design. My body was being torn apart by the sheer amount of Celestial Essence being poured into me, and I had five unattuned law fragments inside my body that merged with my Titan’s Marrow and Endurance, which gave birth to the Law of Flesh and Adamantium Titan.

One thing worth noting was that I could not even control the Law of Flesh. If not for the System’s notifications, and the fact that I could feel it working inside me any time I was injured, I would not have been aware that my body held such a strange and potent Law.

Now, as the fragment of the god’s Law moved through my body... it stirred.

I do not know how to describe what happened next, but I will try. What was on my mind at that moment was that I had unconsciously stumbled onto something that would never have happened if I had been afraid to let the blood in.

I may not have known much about the Law of Flesh, but I knew that it held my body’s shape, and anything that broke the integrity of that shape was corrected. In fact, when it healed me, it was not necessarily healing me, just correcting an error.

So I could say that the Law of Flesh was rigid, and blood, on the other hand, flows. It could exist inside the rigid framework of the flesh, and they were always meant to work together. Inside me, the Law of Flesh reached for the fragment of the Law of Blood, and the fragment reached back.

∞

My heart began to ache, and this truth came to me as the Laws reached out to each other. Where was the region in my body where flesh and blood met? That was obviously my heart, and whatever merger was happening, it was taking place inside my heart.

I could feel the Law of Blood carrying its own weight, like a heartbeat. The same thing was happening with the Law of Flesh, and each of them had its own beat, and now the two beats began to drift towards each other.

They came closer and closer, and my breath shortened as they did, and for a moment near the end they were so close that it felt like my chest was being struck twice in the same instant.

Then they met, and there was only one beat, and it was very loud.

Boom... Boom... Boom...

Every wound I had left sealed at once, all of them together, in one beat of my heart. The second beat went into my bones. I felt the marrow I had emptied to hold my titan form all night stir in its hollows, and it did not refill all at once, but it was recovering much faster than before.

The third beat went somewhere I did not expect. It went down into me. My body pulled towards itself, and there was a moment, a very short moment, when I felt my soul lean after it. Then it passed, and my soul was where it had always been, humming in the dark of me. But I noticed. I would have been a fool not to notice.

I had been inside the body of a god, and I knew the centre of their power seemed to lie inside their flesh, but for a mage like me, my centre was always my soul.

At that moment, for an instant, it was almost as if the centre of my power was about to shift. What would that mean for me if it happened?

My Status Screen was burning, and I let it burn for a while before I read it.

[Law of Flesh: resonance detected.]

[Law of Blood (fragment): unbound.]

[Binding...]

[Law of Blood (fragment): bound to Natal Weapon.]

[Law of Flesh ⟷ Law of Blood: resonance established.]

[Natal Weapon: Unformed]

[It will take the shape of its bearer.]

I read the last line and sighed. Given what the shape of its bearer currently was, it was not the most reassuring thing the System had ever said to me.

∞

I sat up, and it was easy. By then all my aches and pains were gone, and I had never felt better in my life, well, except for the hunger.

It was not in my stomach. I had not eaten since before Serrath, and my stomach was empty, but that was a different kind of emptiness, and I could not describe it until my eyes fell on the grey heaps of ash that had been the god’s flesh. For a heartbeat, something in my veins leaned towards them, but there was nothing left in the ash to take, and the hunger dulled without leaving me... my body wanted blood, and there was none near me.

I wondered if this was going to be a problem in the future, but for now it seemed that this hunger was not debilitating, and mostly my mind was focused on that moment when my soul was nearly drawn into my flesh.

This worried me, because the Loop was tied to my soul, and I did not know what unknown changes there would be if my soul changed its state. For a while now, my flesh had been getting far stronger than my soul, and I think that I needed to balance this out before it tipped even further.