[Be Gone] Ch 43 – Bloodline at Ten

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More days pass...

            The Goblin Badlands were now ravaged by vivus. What goblins had survived had fled inland, doubtless to be eaten by other monsters and oni, keeping their Taint around.

            The Bleeding Sands, instead of being bone-white streaked with crimson, were now milk-white, and the hordes of insects, serpents, scorpions, and spiders, tauroid variants of same, oni patrons of same, and the vast Swarms of the same, had all fed the Land. Its future had changed.

            The Chung Marshes, populated with more lizards, snakes, crocs, their tauroid variants, and demons, was now bubbling white. The Mounds of Decay, where the amphibians and fungi creatures dominated, blazed in a vivic mushroom fire.

            The Black Plains hadn’t fully recovered from the wildfire I had unleashed on it before, but this time, the Grass Princes, the most monstrous of the root creatures, as well as the twisted genius loci at the heart of it all, had to face Korbald, just like all the other Bosses had.

            The Hungry Hills that were always trying to kill you blazed and burned, chasing the tribes and hordes that lived there back and forth in agitation as the genius loci lying in wait were waited on themselves a final time. The Seething Hills, where I had recovered that Axe and left behind a major Cursed area, was actually infamous for the number and variety of creatures who lived there, although it was rare for any mortals to actually get that far.

            The Silent Ice, where demons and Elemental things of Air and Cold played with the lives of mortals and drained them with cold, death, and madness, was a huge playground for me, the cold freely making all my magic stronger and the creatures of cold even more horrendously vulnerable to me. I punished them relentlessly for it, too.

            The Festering Woods was an infamous zone of mutates and twisted beasts, particularly bats and carnivores of all kinds. Its associated Screaming Trees was more a jungle zone, the bias there towards simians, snakes, and spiders. The Corpse of Rainbows was the last vegetational zone, populated by many insect types, and gorgeous flowers filling the air with poisons of every variety imaginable.

            That was before we even got to the great ambulatory forest zone with the demonic living trees and all the oni who lived in them. Such a nice place those things dwelled in. The swamp at the center of everything that I had run out of was mostly a legend, although the Tainted called it the Mire of Sin, which made perfect sense.

            I picked the Silent Ice as my location to regain Ten, because why not? I didn’t need an audience, and when the black and gray ice was burning for miles and miles, and Elemental Spirits twisted by Sin were burning to a searing purity that made the place just wonderfully bracing, why not use it?

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            The manafield of this world was still alien to me, definitely not my own. Even with the Spirits being friendly and all, it obviously wasn’t my world, or one that normally wanted to function with my style of magic.

            That was fine. At least this wouldn’t be such a huge show.

            I had the rote, bog standard Human Bloodline, the Arcane one. It was a good Bloodline, make no mistake. The extra spells were useful and variable, and the Sage Variant to it just perfect on how it dovetailed with Wizardry.

            But unlike Traveler had mentioned, I didn’t have anything beyond that. She’d gotten her second Bloodline by slurrying two other Inherited Bloodlines and some minor additional ones together.

            I had none of that. What I DID have... was a Warlock Pact with Heaven, and the Fire and Cold Templates from Druidic Rituals.

            They effectively gave me direct exposure to Celestial, Elemental Fire, and Elemental Cold Bloodlines, without actually being Bloodlines themselves. Thus, as I ticked over Ten for the second time in my life, I truly was wondering what was going to happen.

            No need for Masteries or Skills, as all that stuff was already allocated. The Benefit for Sorc Ten was taking the Feat I had paid for long ago, and could now apply.

            Awaken Second Bloodline.

            Oh, to be in a normal fantasy universe and have multiple Bloodlines to choose from in your ancestry. I reflected that with my exposure to slaughtering dragons and undead, if I really wanted to bend my magic that way, I could probably force a Bloodline in that direction, too. Earth and Force magic was my primary Warcaster specialty, and had to have left its mark on my Aura, too...

            I had no desire to do that, of course. I wanted to see what was going to come to me naturally. This wasn’t an Awakening, per se. It was more like a baptism, seeing what Magic Itself would bestow on me that came from what I already had.

            Magic swirled around me, and began to resonate and flow. I could feel the eye of the Land turning on me again, permitted by the cleansed manafield and the burning Silent Ice, and there was another something watching me, too.

            Up there among the stars. One of the Great Dragons... Void, was it? Their monitor of the spiritual side of things... ki, chi, qi, whatever they called it here. The formlessness from which the Elements took form.

            Whatever. As the Elements danced and I Hummed, my Staff and Rings chiming support, into the Chords of Magic, something started to unlock around me, inside me, dancing in my Matrix and out into the manafield as it gathered upon me, and began to shift and turn.

            A Call rang through the field of magic, and the vivic flames all washed silvered black, still misting white, reflecting the stars above for miles around me on the icy, snowy plain. Magic danced to a beautiful cry that rang in the manafield, and I could feel the Void Dragon swirling above quickly give way to something.

            Feature looked up with me, his visual perceptions overlaying my magical ones.

            It looked like... the constellation of an eagle or something.

            I had no clue what it was, but it beat with the heart of magic. It contained suns and stars, and endless internal voids of night and cold, serene and unpolluted by anything.

            The entire manafield was Singing in salute to it, and I Sang along without thinking, playing the Song of the Spheres on the Sublime Chord to... whatever it was.

            It seemed to look down there, at my lonely little self in a realm of ice, and for a timeless moment, we Sang together of the glory and beauty of magic, of all that it was and could be, and the Rightness of the time and the moment where all this came together.

            I bowed my head, and a cold and clear wind billowed through my mind and soul. It was like nothing I had ever felt before, bringing with it a clarity I’d never experienced, and would probably spend the rest of my life trying to feel again.

            And then it was gone, back to Heavens true and metaphor, where alien eyes quailed to see it in hatred and fear. I was alone on a distant world’s frozen and misting starfield of ice that was no longer silent, and it would likely Sing for many, many years of what had transpired here.

            A star shines upon a new central tine of your Crown, Feature duly informed me, capable of seeing my Crown of Fire, where I could not.

            “Do you have any idea of what that was?” I asked him. As an Eidolon, he literally had knowledge streaming into him from Beyond at times, and so knew things I did not.

            No, he informed me. Quite dangerous. Quite beautiful.

            I popped my Assay on myself. That should auto-name the thing...

            Sorcerer/10, Primary Class (Arcane and Void Phoenix Bloodlines)

            Well, there you had it. A Void Phoenix. No wonder the Dragon got out of the way. A Heavenly counterpart to its Neutral self?

            Primary Bloodline Power: You may freely interchange the Elements of Fire and Cold on all effects that use them. You may instead transform Fire or Cold damage from spells and effects you deal into Healing energy at half-power, or full power against necroic beings.

            Well, that was a damn nice benefit. Certainly trumped the default +2 to Arcane Lore and Spellcraft checks of the Arcane Bloodline.

            Gaining the rest of the Bloodline powers and the Bloodline spells required Mastery Tiers. I clicked over the first one, again having long acquired the needed Karma to do so.

            The Arcane Bloodline’s first Power was the ability to psychokinetically propel objects a few times a day. Really good if you wanted to deliver alchemically thrown stuff accurately, but it rapidly lost usefulness after that.

            I had Swapped it out for Power in the Blood, which gave a +1 dmg/die bonus to all spells with my Bloodline or a Spell Focus in them.

            I had Good Spell Focus, and Sanctified Spell for free with Rep Counts, making all my spells Good. Synergy!

            Void Phoenix Bloodline Mastery/1, flick...

            Enlightened Touch: A number of times a day equal to your Charisma Intelligence modifier, you may learn the exact powers of a magical item you are touching, as per the Identify spell. If the item is Cursed, you must make a contested check to discern that fact, but any other information requires you to actually cast an Identify spell.

            Read Magic and Detect Magic are permanently added to your Cantrips.

            Huh. I... suppose? It would be good if I had to sort through a bunch of stuff quickly and figure out what they did. I wasn’t worried about the contested check for Cursed stuff... and what that statement meant was that I could actually figure out the powers of a Cursed item if I used an Identify spell, which normally you could not do, AND I could handle a Cursed item to find out if it was safe, without its Curse affecting me.

            Not all that bad, really, and as a former Divination spec, I really did like my Divination spells...

            The Cantrips were basically nothing. I had Permanent Wizard Sight already, and Read Magic came with Wizard Levels automatically, anyway. If I were a Pure Sorcerer, they would have been nice extra freebies.

            Well, I’d see what the rest of the powers were, and the new Bloodline Spells, over the next few days. I had twelve Classes to advance to Six inside my Matrix, and working all this new Bloodline stuff in would actually have been a challenge... except the Song of the Void Phoenix had done it all for me, and in the most elegant manner imaginable.

            I looked at the Matrix I’d been stressing my brains out so nastily over, and sort of sighed at how adding the Void Phoenix Bloodline in had balanced out and harmonized things so impossibly well.

            Wow. I hope my Soulshards got to take advantage of this, because this is just too cool.

            Then again, even if they got the rote Celestial Bloodline, they’d be styling, so that was just fine by me.

            I glanced over at the swirl of ki-based power that represented my Shugenja Levels as a thought struck me.

            Was there a Theurgy which could bridge the gap between that and my Matrix?...

            The Shugenja System here was not Level-based. It was a combination of roll and keep, according to Korbald and his people, who had done a LOT of research into it. If you wanted to do something, you rolled a number of metaphorical dice equal to relevant Stat/Attunement/Harmony + Skill/Training/Practice with said Element, and you kept dice equal to your Stat. If you spent Void/ki, you rolled and kept more dice equal to the points spent.

            Pretty simple, on the face of it, but the dice variant were d10’s, which meant the range of possible results was very impressive.

            Oh, and if you rolled a 10, it ‘crit’ and you rolled another d10 to add on, which could also crit, also known as ‘exploding dice’. In real terms, it meant incredible natural harmony with the results and the Spirits helping you out.

            Yes, it could get very swingy-good if the dice were on your side... or inversely, if they were on the side of your opponents!

            It actually wasn’t that hard to figure the system out, even if the natives had never bothered to do so. Statistical analysis and the laws of large numbers are pretty good at figuring out ranges of stuff. Retuning Assay to the local Stat equivalents was a thing, but not that hard to do. All you had to do was basically test people out and see when they broke through a higher average number for something simple, like a Firebolt. There would be a clear difference between 3-keep-2 and 3k3 in results, but they’d probably started with someone just learning how to use a type of magic at 1k1 or 2k2 or something, and just built onto it from there, following the test subjects and their results over time.

            After all, if you are 1k1, there’s only 10+crit possible results you could have, each result designed to be slightly different and so measurable. 2k2 had only 19 possible results + crits, and furthermore they would occur on a bell curve. 3k2 would shift the bell curve towards the higher numbers, but not exceed the former best, and so forth and so on.

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