Chapter 60- Knowledge about second level(2)

Chapter 60: 60- Knowledge about second level(2)

"Blood at Low, bones at Medium, twenty-four meridians at High, thirty-six at Peak," Sol repeated slowly, thinking of the system messages he had been getting since they ate the serpent core.

"Wait. Earlier you mentioned nobles drinking tree-sap when they cross over. We don’t have any silver-wood trees out here."

"You need Level 2 cores for the raw energy, and Noble Sap harvested from inner-city silver-wood trees to act as a stabilizer," Valera said.

"The sap is graded by purity, from twenty percent gutter-grade up to ninety percent royal reserve. Without high-purity sap to coat your veins and marrow while your blood turns silver, the raw energy of the cores tears your internal organs apart during the transition. Unless you have a body tough enough to survive the metamorphosis dry."

"Which is why you’re worried," Sol said.

"I’m not worried about the sap, my Pure Moon bloodline doesn’t reject lunar energy, so I only need low-grade sap or a strong heater to cross over," Valera said softly.

"I’m worried about what comes with the Silver Blood. Every time a cultivator breaks into a new major realm, there’s a chance they unlock a new skill. For normal cultivators, it’s rare. For a Legacy bloodline like House Fyrn, it’s guaranteed."

She lifted her hand two centimeters off his chest and let that thin, seamless layer of clear blue crystal creep over her knuckles again.

"My father had it, and my older brother unlocked the first stage of it the week before we were killed," Valera whispered, staring at the ice clinging to her skin.

"It’s an evolving Legacy skill called Frost Maiden. The moment I step into Low-Stage Level 2 and get my Silver Blood, my body will forge a living suit of pure, zero-taint frost armor directly over my skin. Later, once I temper my Silver Bones and open the thirty-six meridians, the skill evolves, it lets me pull solid blades and spears of pure Fyrn ice straight out of the armor."

"Living armor that grows its own weapons," Sol said.

"Sounds like bad news for Cassian Vane."

"It’s bad news for you if I unlock it while you’re still at Level 1!" Valera snapped, dropping the ice from her knuckles and pressing her bare palm hard against his breastbone.

"Sol, listen to me! A new Legacy skill doesn’t come with an off-switch the day you wake it up. When my brother broke into Low-Stage and got his Silver Blood, he drank eighty-percent purity sap, and he still couldn’t turn the Frost Maiden armor all the way off for a month until his blood fully settled! Everything he touched froze solid. His bedsheets shattered when he rolled over at night."

Sol went quiet, listening to the wind scraping salt dust across the outside of the dome.

"If I become a Master while you’re still sitting at seventy percent of Flesh and Bone," Valera continued, her voice dropping low and tight, "how are you supposed to hold my hands to filter cores when my skin is encased in Level 2 Frost Maiden armor? How are we supposed to sleep under the same furs without my Silver Blood stopping your heart in the middle of the night? And later, when I have to carve open all thirty-six Silver Meridians without high-purity Fyrn sap... if your furnace isn’t also at Level 2 to match my cold stage-for-stage, that armor won’t stay on the outside of my skin, Sol. It’ll freeze my meridians shut and grow inward."

Sol stared at her through the linen wrap around his eyes, watching the stubborn, fierce spike of her heartbeat in her throat.

"So when I hit ninety-nine percent," Valera said flatly, pulling her hand off his chest and reaching for her shirt, "I stop eating cores. Every shard and every core we kill goes straight into your mouth until you hit ninety-nine percent too. You figure out how to build your Solar Blood and your Solar Bones at the exact same time I wake up the Frost Maiden, or I wait at the door."

Six months ago, in the cistern under Purgatory, she had told herself that he was just a transaction, a convenient slum furnace to keep her alive until she got her strength back.

Now she was refusing to step into the Master realm and claim her family’s greatest weapon until a blind slum butcher could walk through the door beside her.

A small, crooked grin pulled at the corner of Sol’s face.

He reached out with his right hand, caught her around the back of her neck under her white braid, and pulled her sideways until she tipped over onto his chest on the furs.

"Hey, watch the ribs!" Valera complained, bracing her elbows on his shoulders, though she didn’t try to roll off him.

"Your ribs healed a week ago," Sol said, keeping one arm loosely locked around her waist while his chest heat soaked up through her thin linen shirt, melting the tiny snowflakes clinging to her collar.

"And you don’t need to wait at the door for me, Val. We’re fifty kilometers from Gomorrah. By the time we walk into that pit and find out what kind of sap or ore I need to cross into Level 2 without blowing my arteries out, I’ll catch up to you."

Valera rested her chin on her folded forearms on his chest, looking up at the dark strip of cloth covering his eyes.

She reached up with one finger, hooked the bottom edge of the damp linen blindfold, and pushed it up onto his forehead so she could see the two warm, steady embers of his eyes looking back at her in the dim cave.

"You better," she murmured, dropping her head down into the crook of his neck and closing her eyes as the exhaustion of four days of non-stop cultivation finally caught up with them.

"Because I am not dragging a dead man across the Salt Flats on that sled."

Two days later, the white salt colored zone ended.

The ground didn’t turn green, nothing grew out here but over the course of five kilometers, the flat hexagonal salt crust gave way to jagged hills of rust-red iron ore, heaps of black coal-slag from a century of strip-mining, and deep, muddy gullies choked with discarded wire and broken concrete slabs.

And twenty kilometers ahead of them, rising straight up from the earth to swallow the gray sky, was a pillar of oily black smoke ten kilometers wide.