Chapter 37: The Bloodline Summon

Chapter 37: Chapter 37: The Bloodline Summon

Kane checked his wrist for the fourth time in an hour.

Jason almost missed it, the motion small, practiced, tucked into the natural rhythm of adjusting a sleeve after a kill. But his Perception caught the flicker of something beneath the fabric each time, a faint pulse of essence responding to whatever Kane was actually glancing at.

’That’s not nerves. He looks like he’s checking a reading against something.’

Kane paused at the next branching corridor, eyes flicking from his wrist to the passage layout and back, the same small calculation repeating itself before he chose a direction that had nothing to do with monster density or scouting reports.

Jason filed it away silently, the same way he’d been filing away everything else about the man since the junction.

’A cultuvation technique from the Veryon clan and now directions that don’t match the mission.’

’None of that’s proof of anything. But it’s a lot of coincidence for one man.’

He didn’t have the strength to confront him, not against a Late Stage Second Level cultivator with two decades of combat experience on him, and even if he had, he had nothing solid enough to justify it.

So he watched instead. Patiently.

’Confrontation without leverage is just a fast way to die.’

---

The pull in his chest hadn’t faded since the last time it flared.

If anything, it had sharpened, a steady, insistent pressure behind his sternum that grew heavier with every step deeper into the maze, tugging him toward a direction none of the others seemed to notice or care about.

Then the next wave hit, not quite as powerful as the last several but they came in large numbers, wyrms pouring out from all sides in a chaotic, overlapping surge that scattered the merged teams across the width of the passage.

Jason fought through the opening exchanges on autopilot, spear and lightning working in familiar rhythm, and somewhere in the noise and confusion, the pull in his chest surged hard enough to actually hurt.

’Now’s my chance.’

He glanced at his team, Reeve anchoring the center, Skyler picking off stragglers at range, Wen’s spells lashing out in controlled arcs, Cassius laughing his way through three wyrms at once like the whole fight personally amused him.

They didn’t need him for this particular wave. Not desperately.

’This is the only opening I’m going to get.’

He made his decision in the space of a single breath, slipping backward through a gap in the chaos, essence drawn inward, Veil settling over his signature like a held breath, and stepped into a side passage nobody else noticed him take.

He didn’t tell them.

Not out of distrust. He simply didn’t know what was calling him, and dragging three people he’d come to care about into an unknown pull tugging at something buried in his own blood felt like exactly the kind of decision that got people killed for reasons they’d never fully understand.

’If this goes wrong, it goes wrong alone. That’s fair.’

---

The passage narrowed the deeper he went, mana thickening around him until it pressed against his skin like a physical weight, and the pull sharpened with every step until it felt less like intuition and more like a hand closing gently around something inside his chest and pulling steadily forward.

Then the corridor opened into a wide, dim cavern, and he stopped dead.

Wyrms.

More than ten of them, coiled together in loose, overlapping piles across the cavern floor, scales dull under the faint glow of crystals in the cavern walls, eyes closed, chests rising and falling in the slow rhythm of genuine slumber.

Even the smallest carried an E-Rank presence. A handful, larger, scattered among the rest, sat clearly above that, they were on the weaker end of D-Rank but D-Rank nonetheless.

’A whole nest. Sleeping. Wonderful.’

He held his breath and let Veil settle deeper, essence signature folding inward until there was next to nothing left for a sleeping predator’s senses to catch.

He picked his way through the cavern one careful step at a time, weight distributed with deliberate control, avoiding loose stone, avoiding contact, avoiding anything that might so much as stir the air wrong.

One wyrm shifted in its sleep as he passed, a low, rumbling breath escaping its throat.

Jason froze completely, spear held motionless, every muscle locked.

It settled again.

He exhaled slowly and kept moving.

By the time he reached the far side of the cavern, sweat had gathered along his spine despite the cool, mana-thick air, and the pull ahead of him had grown sharp enough that it took real effort not to simply run the rest of the way.

---

A wall of collapsed rock blocked the passage beyond, jagged and uneven, clearly the result of some long-ago cave-in rather than anything deliberately built.

He found the gap almost by instinct, a narrow crevice barely wide enough to slip through sideways, and squeezed past it into a chamber that opened up beyond the rubble.

Small. Quiet. Untouched.

No monsters here. No sound beyond his own careful breathing.

And in the center of it, resting on a low outcropping of pale stone, sat the egg.

Fiery red, veined through with faint, glowing lines that pulsed in a slow, steady rhythm, easily the size of his own torso, radiating a heat that had nearly nothing to do with actual temperature.

The pull in his chest roared to life the instant his eyes found it, no longer a gentle tug but something closer to a current dragging him forward whether he wanted to move or not.

’That’s it. That’s what’s been calling me this whole time.’

He crossed the chamber slowly, breath unsteady, some deep, wordless part of him recognizing the thing in front of him on a level his conscious mind couldn’t fully articulate.

He reached out a hand.

Behind him, faint but unmistakable, he heard footsteps entering the passage he’d just come through.

He didn’t turn.

His fingers made contact with the shell.

And the world dissolved into something else entirely.