Chapter 14: The Solar Bloodway and the Saturnine Bloodway

Nathan was a little dazed too. He remembered the family upstairs was also a household of three, with a high school girl a few years older than him; they'd barely ever exchanged nods. And now here he was, popped up into this high school girl's bedroom.

Tilting his head back out of the way of the dainty, nimble foot, he was about to phase back down into his own room—when a mischievous impulse suddenly grabbed him, and he blew a puff of vitae at that delicate sole.

The black-light vitae barely had any substance to it, but it carried a bone-chilling cold. The moment that puff landed, the dainty foot snapped back, and the person in bed shot upright with a shriek. The instant she opened her eyes, she saw Nathan—a lone head sticking out of the floor.

The girl couldn't get a breath in; with one final scream she toppled straight backward onto the bed again.

Nathan scratched his head, feeling sheepish and guilty, regretting such a horrifying prank. He hadn't meant to scare anyone—he just hadn't thought it through. A single head sticking out of the floor blowing cold air at somebody's sole: how terrifying was that? Anyone even slightly timid would've wet themselves on the spot; fainting counted as brave.

Nathan sheepishly ducked his head back down, braced both hands on the ceiling, and dropped quietly into his own room. He paced a few circles, still too worked up to settle down, and decided to strike while the iron was hot—another round of the Ennead Crucible, right now!

The twelve ordinal bloodways came in balanced pairs—every solar current answered by a lunar one, hand to hand and foot to foot.

The Ennead Crucible was a discipline built on complementary balance; it didn't go off on any weird side paths. Having trained the Solar Bloodway of the twelve ordinal bloodways, the natural next step was the Saturnine Bloodway—only together did the two find their balance.

Unlike certain fringe disciplines, which not only ignored that equipoise but deliberately chased one extreme—arts that trained only the solar currents, casting the lunar aside, naturally turned their true aether ferociously harsh.

The Saturnine Bloodway ran its own deep, cooling course through him, well off the Solar's blazing lane.

The Mystic-Gold iron thread ran its course, and not one node along the way could bar it; in a mere instant it had opened the Saturnine Bloodway through—even more effortlessly than the Solar Bloodway had gone. With the Solar and Saturnine bloodways both opened, the Mystic-Gold iron thread roamed between the two, seeming a shade mightier for it, and darker, deeper too.

That mass of black light in his lower abdomen had lost its grip on two bloodways and shrank in a little more—but within the black light, countless golden specks now faintly glittered, something that hadn't been there before.

Nathan had no idea whether that change was good or bad. It was his first time practicing, and he didn't dare rush; having opened the two bloodways, he settled his focus and set the Mystic-Gold iron thread washing back and forth through the Solar Bloodway and the Saturnine Bloodway, over and over.

Nathan could feel it: every pass the Mystic-Gold iron thread made, it thickened by a hair and his veins steadied a notch—the gains were huge. The novelty of Art carried the boy clean away, and it wasn't until his mom knocked on his door to wake him that he realized he'd been at it for four or five hours.

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Nathan never did find out when his mom had gotten home from overtime, but she seemed to be in a good mood that morning—she even made him fried eggs specially, watching him eat every bite with a smile before hurrying him off to school.

Passing Elderrow on his way to school—no surprises this time—he ran into Wren again, dolled down to that same unremarkable look as always.

It still felt a little weird to Nathan, but seeing the bloodborn girl remained a comfort—after all, of everyone he knew in this world, only Wren knew he'd awakened a bloodborn bloodline. The two walked to school together and split up not far from the gates. What Nathan didn't know was that their movements had landed in the eyes of a certain someone paying very close attention.

After Nathan passed through the school gates, Leopold waggled his phone, muttering to himself with a certain smugness: "Too bad, kid—you're honestly not worthy of being my rival. Isolde doesn't like you one bit. Even with this evidence, there's no value in trashing you. Still... next time I run into that pretty little thing in the lavender dress, I can use these photos to expose his true face."

Today, the moment Nathan walked into the classroom he saw Isolde—but he didn't get any real chance to talk with her. This time it wasn't that Isolde wouldn't give him the time of day; it was that he had club activities.

Nathan had joined the school basketball team back in eighth grade to lose weight, but thanks to his build he'd always been the team's gofer—his duties were sweeping the court, putting away the equipment, showing the newbies the ropes. He never even made substitute; he'd never played a single game for the team, not even an in-school friendly.

Nathan himself didn't mind. Losing weight had been the whole point anyway; he showed up to every club activity all smiles, volunteering for every chore, and he was actually pretty well liked on the team.

First period, Nathan got excused and headed to the basketball club, though there wasn't much to do all morning.

The reason the coach had called everyone in that morning was that the team had a situation on its hands.

In the second semester of ninth grade, with academics getting intense, lots of club members chose to quit—and the basketball club at Nathan's school was no exception. All four ninth-grade starters had filed their quit paperwork, giving the coach a colossal headache: how was he supposed to set a lineup for the national tournament two months out? He'd had to call the squad in and rework tactics from scratch.

The previous semester, Nathan's school team had hit the jackpot luck-wise, shining through the regional and state qualifiers and seizing one of the region's only two tournament slots.

If the school team could place at the nationals too, the coach who led them there was in line for a serious promotion, maybe even a transfer up the ladder—hence the coach took team activities very, very seriously.

But you can't make bricks without straw. For all the coach's bag of tricks, nothing satisfied him—after all, apart from the eighth-grade starting guard Tobias, the other four starters had all quit, and the bench squad left over couldn't run any fancy sets.

A guy like Nathan, who couldn't even crack the bench, naturally didn't get the call. He just watched, all smiles, as his teammates rotated through like a revolving door—out on the floor, then yanked off by the coach—without a single thought crossing his mind.