Chapter 1148 – The Power of Blood

“You seem distracted,” Nature’s Attendant spoke as Jake knelt down and slowly infused the magic circle with his energy.

“Just a lot of jumbled thoughts rattling my mind these days,” Jake confessed with a sigh as he continued his energy infusion.

This time around, the god has asked Jake to do the infusion slowly and steadily, something Jake had no complaints about. This brief break from his own mind was also welcome, as it allowed him to shift his perspective slightly and not have his head filled with thoughts of blood and concepts all the time.

Even so, Jake couldn’t entirely dispel these thoughts, as the powerful aura of life in the environment made him think about it, and he unconsciously took deep breaths to stimulate Palate at least a little.

“Something you’d care to share?” Nature’s Attendant asked. “This old man is considered rather knowledge by most people’s standards.”

“I guess it can’t hurt,” Jake sighed as he voiced some of his concerns. He talked about how he had been mulling over how to upgrade Blood of the Malefic Viper and his attempts to understand better how life magic worked in the first place. Additionally, he found healing magic sometimes confusing due to its freedom from system restraints.

Nature’s Attendant listened patiently to Jake’s ramblings, staying unjudgmental throughout. Jake knew that the old man likely saw all of Jake’s problems as utterly insignificant and low level, Jake akin to a toddler complaining that multiplication was hard to a doctor in mathematics.

At the end of his rant, the old man just kept smiling as he looked out over the field of flowers. “I can’t speak about the Path of the Malefic Viper as it’s not mine, but I can talk a bit about life. To me, life is the second-most beautiful affinity right after nature itself, but for nature to flourish, there must naturally be life. The same is true for you. For there to be blood, there has to be life.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jake muttered and sighed again. “That’s simple enough. Someone has to be alive to have blood, so-“

“Not necessarily,” Nature’s Attendant interrupted. “The Risen have blood despite not being alive. Many undead do. When an elemental transforms itself into a humanoid form, it also naturally has blood and can thus bleed. However, this blood has nothing to do with life. There is no Vitality within such a being… yet it does represent their basis of existence. Their spilled blood is a sign that their “life” is waning.”

Nature’s Attendant swept his hand outwards toward the field of flowers, directing his gaze to them. “Plants cannot bleed either, yet they are all full of life. Full of Vitality. Your thinking that blood represents life isn’t inaccurate, as in your case it does, but it isn’t a universal truth.”

“Is there any universal truth?” Jake asked.

“If I had to pinpoint one… blood represents change,” Nature’s Attendant said in his usual calm voice.

“Change?” Jake asked, not really seeing how that one made sense in a grander context. Sure, someone bleeding a lot would be changed from alive to dead, but blood as a concept?

“Blood is a physical thing. In most contexts, it’s a vehicle to carry vital energy from your soul to your body, allowing it to restore itself. It stores life to nourish the living. However, it’s only that. A vessel. When a Risen bleeds, spirit points and not health points are what seep out. When an elemental in humanoid form bleeds, mana is spilled.”

Jake nodded along, faintly aware of those things already. However, the more he thought about it, the weirder it was that the Risen and fully mana-based creatures even had blood in the first place. For a while, he had guessed it was done just as part of the process of mimicking a humanoid. That just because humans, elves, beastkin, and other enlightened all had blood, so did a monster taking humanoid form, even if said monster didn’t even have a Vitality stat.

However, that explanation was, in truth, a rather unconvincing one. Monsters were highly concerned with efficiency and designed their humanoid forms to still allow for combat. That being the case, including something superficial like blood was wholly unnecessary, as it wasn’t even anything aesthetic… unless it wasn’t superficial at all.

That’s when Jake asked himself another question: why had he assumed that blood was only made to carry vital energy? Sure, that was the most common form of fundamental energy it carried, but what if blood was just a magnificent vessel to carry all forms of energy? Perhaps even the best vessel out there.

Jake looked up at Nature’s Attendant and uttered his realization: “Blood and life… have nothing fundamentally to do with one another, do they?”

“Fundamentally? No… even if blood more often than not carries life, it exists without it,” Nature’s Attendant smiled. “If blood equalled life, vampires would be quite proficient in the affinity, but instead, they master the blood affinity instead. An entirely separate one that deals with the true fundamental aspect of blood.”

“It’s a natural energy-carrier,” Jake continued. “A liquid that has a theoretically limitless affinity to hold energy, as the amount that can be contained within a single drop is wholly dependent on who bled the blood in the first place.”

“Is that all it is?”

“Probably not… but for now, I think this is good enough,” Jake muttered, as he had a lot to think about.

“Sometimes, it’s good to know when enough is enough,” Nature’s Attendant nodded approvingly. “A notion that also applies to supplying energy to formations.”

That’s when Jake realized he was getting dangerously close to knocking himself out again as the two devilish sprouts were still hungrily munching down on his energies. The two of them had grown even more since last, and were now about the length of a foot. The two also remained somewhat antagonistic toward one another, but their relationship had evolved more into one of rivals than outright enemies.

“Yeah, probably good to call it a day here,” Jake said as he stopped supplying energy, much to the disappointment of the poor sprouts. “I have a lot of experiments to get to.”

“Do remember proper rest,” Nature’s Attendant said in a lecturing tone. Raising his hand, he gave Jake a smile. “Till next time.”

With a wave of his hand, Jake was teleported away and appeared back in his palace once more, now armed with new inspiration. He could barely wait and went as far as to chug a potion to restore some mana, as he rushed down toward his alchemy lab.

Once there, Jake took out a bucket and placed it on a table. Without any hesitation, he used a katar to cut himself and began filling the bucket with blood. He didn’t infuse it with energy or turn it toxic, but just bled his own basic human blood.

As he bled it out, Jake also analyzed it closely. The first thing he noticed was how quickly the vital energy within the blood began to disperse once it was outside his body. After only a few minutes, the vast majority of the vital energy would be gone, leaving the blood behind as nothing more than a nasty-looking liquid that a lot of people had phobias about.

Jake waited patiently for all the vital energy to disappear from the blood until he was left with nothing more than mundane blood. From there, Jake tried placing a finger down into the liquid and closed his eyes as he tried infusing his mana into it. He easily did so as soon enough the blood within the bucket was filled with mana… which only made Jake frown.

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It’s wrong.

The blood had indeed absorbed the mana, but it felt similar to how water could also absorb his mana. In fact, when he took out another bucket and filled it with purified water, he could infuse just about as much mana into that as he could his blood before it would begin to disperse naturally.

Looking at the blood more closely, Jake felt that it no longer even felt like blood. Not proper blood anyway. He wasn’t sure what was wrong, but one thing was certain: the mana stored inside of it wasn’t stored properly.