Asking for financial support because i'd like to keep both writing and having electricity.
If you'd like to read up to 20 chapters ahead, you can support me on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/cw/Thanarit
Thank you for all your support. it really keeps the story going.
Not into subscriptions? No worries! If you'd still like to support my work, you can leave a one-time tip on Ko-fi.
Thank you so much, and may good fortune find you.
☕ https://ko-fi.com/thanarit
Something was pulling at him.
Ren became aware of it gradually. His mana was going somewhere. The draw was continuous rather than sudden, spread across no single point of expenditure, running steadily since the transformation activated.
He checked the rate.
Haa.
He looked at the Knight form in the glass cabinet door and did the math.
So maintaining the Apostle's form drew from him directly. The transformation was not self-sustaining. It ran on his mana as long as it held, which meant it had a ceiling.
He filed this under things that were important to know before deploying anyone.
He also filed: if multiple Apostles were active simultaneously, the draw would compound. He did not yet know the rate. Testing required.
Also: thank fucking god.
He had pictured, briefly, a future in which every one of his Abominations was permanently in their Apostle state, a collection of lunatics who had all found their dominant sin and were now bouncing off the walls of the forty-fourth floor with full conviction about what it meant to express it. The mana cost made that impossible. The transformation was a deployment tool, not a permanent condition.
He could handle that.
He opened the system scan.
The notification that came back made him look at it twice.
『 ABOMINATION STATUS 』
Name: Bone Saw Designation: No. 3 Rank: ~~Mythical~~ → Legendary Status: Active : Blessed Madness (Resolved)
Ren looked at this for a moment.
"What," he said.
The Blessed Madness amplifies attributes and authorities up to tenfold, the System said. He was already Mythical rank at the high end of the classification. Tenfold puts him through the floor of Legendary.
"Through the floor of Legendary," Ren repeated.
You could also say it puts him through the ceiling of Mythical. The direction depends on your perspective.
"He was already strong enough to threaten Malvick Siven."
Now he is considerably more threatening.
Ren opened the skill menu.
Bone Saw's signature ability, the one branded into him at the moment of his naming, had undergone a mutation. The updated entry sat in the menu with the new tier attached.
『 SKILL MUTATION DETECTED 』
Skill: The First Sin: Blood of Eternal Wrath Previous Tier: Mythical Current Tier: Legendary (Law-Touching) Authority: The First Sin of Wrath
"Blood is the first language of life. Wrath is its final truth."
ACTIVATION Upon activation, the Apostle invokes the Authority of Wrath, transforming the surrounding battlefield into a domain where violence is no longer a choice, but an absolute law.
Within this domain, the concept of blood itself is rewritten. Every living creature has their blood converted into the Blood of Eternal Wrath. The blood begins to boil. Not from heat, not from magic. From the Authority of Wrath itself.
The intensity of the boiling is determined by the wrath dwelling within one's heart. Hatred. Resentment. Humiliation. Vengeance. Pride. The desire to kill. Every negative emotion capable of giving birth to violence becomes fuel.
CRIMSON GENESIS The Authority does not recognize the distinction between living and non-living. Anything lacking blood is forcibly granted it. Stone begins to bleed. Steel develops crimson veins. Constructs, puppets, and corpses are forced to produce blood. Once blood exists, it falls beneath the dominion of Wrath.
ENDLESS WAR The Blood of Eternal Wrath demands conflict. Violence is the only thing capable of temporarily suppressing the agony. Should an individual abandon battle while wrath still exists within them, their own blood becomes their executioner. Their veins ignite. Their organs cook. Their bones glow crimson. Within the domain, there is no retreat. Only battle.
CRIMSON SACRAMENT Every drop of blood spilled upon the battlefield becomes an offering claimed by the Authority. Blood absorbed by the earth. Blood staining weapons. Blood scattered through the air. Nothing is wasted. Every drop continuously nourishes the Apostle.
The Apostle's Strength / Speed / Durability / Regeneration / Vitality / Killing Intent / Authority Output increase without a fixed upper limit.
The longer the battle continues… the stronger the Apostle becomes.
⚠ WARNING: Prolonged ally exposure risks permanent mental degradation.
He reached the end.
He sat with it.
The skill was a double-edged sword in the most literal possible sense. It forced every combatant on the battlefield, ally and enemy alike, into continuous violence or death by their own blood. The domain penalized retreat with fatal internal combustion. It amplified hostility, bloodlust, and hatred in everyone present, steadily collapsing rational thought and mercy in a widening radius.
If you were an enemy inside the domain, you died fighting or you died retreating.
If you were an ally inside the domain, you fought harder than you had ever fought and came out changed. A short exposure changed you somewhat. The warning about prolonged exposure was not something Ren intended to test on his own people without appropriate precautions.
And the longer the domain ran, the stronger Bone Saw became, fed by every drop spilled by every combatant in every exchange, with no ceiling on the accumulation.
If Bone Saw just stood at the edge of his domain and waited, Ren thought, while the enemies' wrath drove them to fight each other and kill each other and feed the Sacrament with every death, he would become stronger with each passing minute without taking a single hit himself.
Theoretically. The Endless War clause applied to everyone inside the domain, including Bone Saw. His own blood would boil. His own wrath would demand satisfaction. But Bone Saw was the Apostle, not a target of the domain. His blood boiling was a feature, not a threat. The fatal consequence of stopping applied to those the domain was used against. For Bone Saw himself, stopping was painful but survivable. Passive accumulation was structurally possible.
It was just never going to happen.
In practice, he would be in the center of it, laughing, personally hitting everything within reach, feeding the Sacrament by being the most enthusiastic participant in the violence he had created.
But the mechanism was there. If used correctly, with someone else doing the restraining, the skill was structurally capable of producing an Apostle who became a living calamity just by maintaining the domain long enough.
What a stupidly crazy skill.
Disgustingly powerful.
He closed the skill menu.
"All right," he said. "Enough."
He snapped his fingers.
The Knight form came apart without drama. The robes dissolved first, then the ruff, then the crown, the thorn structure collapsing into nothing between one moment and the next. The mask returned to the plain white oval. The coat settled back into its standard configuration. The tentacles folded into their usual rest.
Ren stood in the quiet clinic in his normal form.
His normal form.
He looked at his hands. Void-black skin. Ten fingers, functional, no visible surgical instruments currently deployed. He looked up at the instrument cabinet. The plain white oval looked back.
He had expected to feel smaller returning to this form, reduced, stripped of the architectural weight the transformation carried.
Instead he felt comfortable.
I never expected to feel better in this form, he thought, and held the thought for a moment before filing it.
The mask. The coat. The void-black skin and the ten tentacles folded at his sides. This was his body. He had been in it long enough that he had stopped counting from the one before it.
He was comfortable here.
That was new information.
In the corner of the clinic, Bone Saw returned to his standard state. The blazing red in the eye sockets cooled to the usual steady points. The vibrating energy that had been coming off the obsidian armor settled and stilled. He stood without moving, holding the axe at his side.
He was very quiet.
"How does it feel," Ren said.
Bone Saw was quiet for a moment.
"Father," he said. "I mean this respectfully. Please do not use that skill too frequently."
"Go on," Ren said.
"It felt like my brain was thrown into boiling lava."
He paused.
"And now that I have my sanity back, I feel very disoriented. The world is the correct temperature. Everything is the correct speed. But I keep expecting things to be on fire."
He paused again.
"Disconcerting."
"Noted," Ren said.
Bone Saw stood there, the red points in the sockets tracking slowly around the room, recalibrating.
"Father," he said.
"Yes."
"I said some things."
"You did."
"Did Father find them. Useful."
"Some of them," Ren said. "You also headbutted my wall three times."
"I know." He looked at the wall. At the cracks. "I remember all of it. That is the disconcerting part. I remember exactly what I was thinking and I cannot explain why I thought it was a good idea."
"That's the Apostle state," Ren said. "Violence as its own logic."
"Yes." A pause. "Father, I still want to do those things to Malvick Siven."
"I know."
"I just want to do them while thinking slightly more clearly."
"That's what I'm here for," Ren said.
Bone Saw stood with this for a moment.
"Yes, Father."
Ren turned and looked at the cracks in the wall.
The largest one was twenty-five centimeters long, branching at the top where the second headbutt had landed. The plaster around it looked like it had a question for whoever built this wall.
He was going to have to explain that to someone.
He added it to a mental list of things that were tomorrow's problem, filed it next to the System's mana cost data and the implications of Bone Saw at Legendary rank, and turned off the clinic light.
The red glow from the grafting room stayed, low and steady.
He walked toward the residential corridor.
Bone Saw went back to the closet.