The mansion had settled into relative quiet by the time Noctis returned his attention to the Genesis Interface. The conversations surrounding the Demon Academy, the outer sects, the surviving Holy Gods, and the immediate political situation had given him enough to consider for the moment, while his companions had already begun settling into the residence taken from Kaeltharion. Nothing outside required his intervention, which finally gave him the opportunity to examine the second major section of Genesis without dividing his attention between it and the people around him.
The Blood Grid had already established its purpose clearly. It organized the abilities and inherited systems Noctis possessed, separating active skills, passive abilities, doctrines, bloodline functions, and the information contained within Blood Memory according to how they operated. Genesis Core approached his existence from a different direction. Rather than cataloging powers he could activate or abilities that had developed through his bloodline, it recorded the foundations through which cultivation could formally develop.
Qi, body, and soul existed as distinct aspects within that structure. Noctis already possessed extraordinary power in all three, particularly after reaching godhood, but Genesis Core did not equate existing strength with cultivated progression. His current body had been rebuilt beyond the limitations of his former vampire physiology, his soul had advanced alongside that transformation, and the power circulating through his foundation had reached a level capable of contending directly with divine beings. None of those developments meant he had followed a formal cultivation method to reach them.
Noctis understood the distinction without needing Genesis to explain cultivation to him. A body could become overwhelmingly powerful through evolution, inheritance, bloodline development, divine transformation, or repeated strengthening without ever practicing a body cultivation scripture. The same was true of a soul that had grown through accumulated existence, transformation, or external enhancement, and internal power could reach extraordinary levels without having been refined through a recognized Qi cultivation method. Genesis Core therefore treated what Noctis already possessed as an existing foundation rather than pretending that every advancement in his history belonged to a cultivation system he had never actually practiced.
That distinction worked in his favor because it meant cultivating now would not require replacing what he had become. The Genesis Bloodline, his divine body, his soul, the power produced by his current foundation, and the systems already contained within Genesis could continue existing exactly as they did. A cultivation method selected through Genesis Core would develop on top of those foundations, giving him another means of advancement rather than forcing him to rebuild himself according to the assumptions of a conventional cultivator.
Genesis Core also maintained a meaningful difference between knowing a method, selecting one, and actually initiating it. Noctis had read extensively within the Demon Academy vaults and understood the structures of numerous cultivation methods he had never practiced. Genesis recognized that knowledge, but recognition alone did not grant cultivated progress. Knowing every circulation route within a scripture did not mean his energy had ever traveled through those routes, and understanding the theoretical purpose of a method did not mean his foundation had been shaped by it.
That was particularly relevant to the method Noctis had already selected.
Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture
Qi Cultivation Method
Status: Selected — Uninitiated
The status reflected the situation precisely. Noctis had already determined that the Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture suited him better than the alternatives he had examined, but selection alone did not allow him to begin circulating it. The scripture possessed a formal initiation process that had to be completed before the first genuine cultivation cycle could occur.
Its compatibility with Noctis came from more than the obvious association with blood. The Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture treated blood essence and life essence as cultivation resources while maintaining a structure separate from the abilities Noctis already possessed. It overlapped naturally with a path built around blood, death, biological vitality, and the transformation of defeated enemies into useful resources, but it did not duplicate Devour or Blood Memory.
Devour consumed usable power, cores, and compatible materials that could strengthen Noctis directly. Blood Memory dealt with information retained through blood, giving him access to knowledge, memories, and other recoverable information connected to what he absorbed. The Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture served neither purpose because it was a cultivation method whose resource cycle happened to depend upon blood-derived materials. Killing something would not cause his cultivation to increase automatically, and the death of an enemy would not be converted into experience or immediate advancement.
Actual cultivation would still be required.
The difference lay in what the scripture eventually allowed him to cultivate with.
That separation prevented several systems from collapsing into one another and preserved the usefulness of each. Devour could continue consuming valuable cores or materials. Blood Memory could continue preserving knowledge. The Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture would eventually give Noctis a formal Qi cultivation path supported by resources condensed from blood essence and life essence, but only after the initiation process created the foundation required for its first circulation.
Noctis examined the body and soul categories only long enough to confirm that neither currently contained a selected primary method. His existing body and soul were already formidable enough that choosing something merely to fill an empty category would have been pointless. A cultivation method would become part of his long-term foundation, so Noctis preferred understanding the consequences of one method before layering several additional systems over it simply because Genesis Core made the option available.
The Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture alone gave him enough to consider.
Its initiation centered upon the creation of an Initiation Blood Crystal, a vessel that could not be substituted with an ordinary Blood Crystal or fabricated entirely from resources taken from another being. The first vessel had to originate directly from the cultivator because its purpose was not merely to store blood essence. It had to establish the cultivator's own identity as the dominant foundation before anything external was incorporated into it.
The first required material was Noctis's own blood essence. The scripture did not define that as ordinary blood removed from the body and left unchanged. Actual living blood had to be drawn from his circulation and refined until the deeper essence within it became concentrated from the more ordinary physical components. That refined portion retained vitality, biological identity, bloodline imprint, and the deeper qualities that marked the blood as belonging specifically to Noctis.
The second requirement was considerably more invasive because the Initiation Blood Crystal needed an actual fragment of his core as its nucleus. Core energy could not be substituted, and neither a projection nor a temporary construct would satisfy the requirement. A physical portion of the foundation itself had to be separated and permanently incorporated into the vessel around which the refined blood essence would crystallize.
Noctis understood the purpose of that requirement once he considered what the completed vessel was expected to contain. The Initiation Blood Crystal would eventually receive viable blood essence from one million slain living beings whose biological foundations could differ dramatically from one another. If the crystal began as nothing more than an empty external container, then the materials entering it would define the vessel far more strongly than the cultivator using it. Noctis's own blood essence established his biological foundation throughout the crystal, while the core fragment established a connection deeper than blood alone.
Everything entering afterward would therefore become part of a vessel that had already been made unmistakably his.
Forming the crystal represented only the beginning of the initiation. The completed vessel then had to incorporate blood essence from one million slain living beings before the first circulation of the Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture could be unlocked. The requirement began only after the Initiation Blood Crystal existed, which meant none of Noctis's previous kills could be counted retroactively. Those deaths had occurred without an initiation vessel capable of receiving and registering the required blood essence, regardless of how many enemies Noctis had killed or what other resources he had previously extracted from them.
The million-source requirement was numerical, but the scripture also distinguished number from the amount and quality of essence obtained from each individual. A valid source represented one slain living being whose blood still contained enough viable essence for the Initiation Blood Crystal to identify and incorporate that being's living foundation. A human could provide one source, as could a demon, monster, beast, holy being, god, or another compatible living organism. Greater power might produce vastly denser and more valuable blood essence, but it would not transform one individual into multiple sources.
A god would therefore remain one source toward the million even if the essence obtained from that god enriched the crystal far more than the blood essence of an ordinary mortal. Conversely, accumulating one million weak creatures might satisfy the numerical requirement while producing a very different foundation from one million beings possessing stronger and more varied biological qualities. The source count measured the number of distinct living foundations incorporated into the crystal, while the essence itself carried the differences in quality, density, and value.
The same rule prevented Noctis from repeatedly extracting progress from one corpse. Once an individual had been incorporated and registered by the Initiation Blood Crystal, additional viable essence from that same body could strengthen or enrich what had already been taken but could not increase the source count again. The scripture cared about distinct living origins, not the number of separate extractions performed upon one dead organism.
A diversity requirement existed alongside the numerical threshold, though Genesis did not reduce that requirement to another artificial quota. There was no demand that a fixed percentage come from humans, another percentage from demons, or any predetermined distribution among species. The completed Initiation Blood Crystal simply had to contain sufficiently broad biological variety across races, species, lineages, and living foundations rather than reaching one million by absorbing nearly identical creatures.
That requirement made sense to Noctis. A cultivation foundation created from one million repetitions of essentially the same biological pattern would possess far less breadth than one built from numerous forms of life. The method therefore rewarded variety without forcing the cultivator into a rigid numerical checklist beyond the total source requirement itself.
Noctis also did not need to deliver the killing blow personally. The Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture required access to viable blood essence from a being that had been alive before death, not personal ownership over the death itself. An enemy killed by Nocthyrael, Rengar, Bahamut, the fallen angels, the transformed clergy, allied demons, another army, or even an unrelated faction could still become a source if Noctis reached the remains before the necessary essence deteriorated or was destroyed.
That condition made battlefield access more important than kill ownership.
Freshly dead bodies were generally suitable because the deeper blood essence had not yet degraded beyond recognition. Older corpses could become useless if enough time passed, while methods that annihilated, purified, consumed, or completely destroyed the biological material could remove the very essence the Initiation Blood Crystal required. A battlefield containing one hundred thousand corpses therefore did not guarantee one hundred thousand usable sources if a significant portion of those bodies had been reduced to nothing or damaged beyond extraction.
The rules created limitations, but they also gave Noctis considerable flexibility. He did not need to personally hunt and kill one million individuals, and the sources did not need to come from one species, faction, world, or campaign. The requirement could accumulate across unrelated conflicts so long as the Initiation Blood Crystal remained available to receive viable blood essence when those opportunities appeared.
The status remained unchanged while Noctis examined those conditions because none of them mattered until the vessel itself existed.
Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture
Status: Selected — Uninitiated
The million sources required opportunity and time. Forming the Initiation Blood Crystal required only that Noctis accept the cost described by the scripture, so there was little reason to postpone that part once he understood exactly what the method demanded.
He began with his own blood.
Actual living blood had to be drawn from his circulation before the deeper essence could be separated, and Noctis kept the extraction controlled rather than creating a larger wound than necessary. Once enough blood had been made available, the Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture began refining it according to its own method, drawing the deeper useful qualities away from the physical components that were not needed for the crystal.
The blood essence did not appear as some preexisting mass waiting inside him. It emerged gradually through refinement as the scripture concentrated vitality, biological identity, bloodline imprint, and the deeper living qualities carried within his blood. The remaining physical components were not simply erased, and Noctis allowed his body to reclaim and reuse what the scripture did not incorporate rather than wasting material unnecessarily.
As the refinement progressed, the useful portion became smaller and denser. The ordinary red deepened toward an almost black crimson while faint luminosity remained visible within the concentrated fluid, giving the essence an appearance far more compressed than the living blood from which it had been produced. The amount of blood required was considerably greater than the final volume of essence because only part of what circulated through his veins qualified as the deeper material the scripture required.
The loss was noticeable even to Noctis.
Ordinary blood could be replaced rapidly, but blood essence represented something deeper than simple physical volume. His current body possessed more than enough vitality to restore what had been lost, yet the recovery occurred more slowly because the body had to reproduce the qualities that had been concentrated rather than merely replace liquid.
The discomfort remained manageable and did not interfere with his ability to continue.
The core fragment was different.
Noctis examined the requirement again before acting, not because he expected it to change but because deliberately damaging a foundational structure deserved more precision than an ordinary sacrifice of energy. His core had become integral to his present existence after reaching godhood, and separating part of it could not be treated like draining a reservoir that would refill once more energy became available.
He selected the smallest fragment that still satisfied the requirement, approximately the size of a grain of rice. The amount was insignificant compared with the total scale of the core, but physical size had little relationship to the pain of separating something that had never been designed to detach from the surrounding structure.
His regeneration reacted as soon as the separation began.
The core recognized the forming damage and attempted to preserve itself, rebuilding the connections Noctis disrupted and resisting the removal through the same regenerative functions that normally protected him from lasting injury. Continuing against that resistance would have prolonged the process and created a less precise break, so Noctis suppressed regeneration around the chosen fragment and prevented his body from repairing the very damage he was deliberately creating.
The separation became cleaner once regeneration stopped interfering, but the pain increased sharply because nothing remained to soften the damage as the fragment was pulled away from the surrounding foundation. Noctis maintained control over the process, yet his body reacted independently of his mental composure. The muscles through his torso tightened, his breathing lost its normal rhythm, and his jaw clenched as the internal connections began giving way one after another.
The severity surprised him because it had been a long time since his current body had experienced pain capable of demanding so much of his attention. External wounds, even severe ones, usually disappeared beneath durability and regeneration before discomfort could become important. This injury originated within the foundation itself, and there was no defensive layer between the damage and the structure being damaged because Noctis was deliberately creating the injury from inside his own core.
He continued carefully rather than trying to overpower the resistance through speed. The concentrated blood essence remained prepared nearby while Noctis focused on keeping the separation limited to the chosen portion, since damaging additional structure merely to finish sooner would have been pointless. His fingers tightened involuntarily as the last connections remained, and maintaining an even breath became increasingly difficult as the fragment approached complete separation.
When the final connection gave way, the pain forced a stronger reaction than anything earlier in the process. Noctis bent forward briefly as his breathing broke, his vision blurred enough that the room became indistinct, and his hands trembled while his body adjusted to the sudden absence within the core. The response passed quickly compared with the injuries he had survived throughout his existence, but its intensity made the difference between ordinary damage and foundational damage unmistakable.
Noctis waited until his vision cleared and his breathing returned to something more controlled before examining the fragment itself. It remained approximately the size he had intended, with a dark crimson surface approaching black and muted inner luminosity still visible through the condensed structure. The small fragment carried no dramatic appearance relative to the pain required to obtain it, which only reinforced how little physical size meant when the material had been torn directly from the core.
Regeneration resumed around the damaged region after the separation was complete, but the response confirmed that the original fragment would not simply be pulled back into place. The core began reconstructing the missing architecture from what remained, reproducing its own pattern gradually rather than reclaiming the material that had already been removed. Once incorporated into the Initiation Blood Crystal, the fragment would remain there permanently while Noctis's body rebuilt an equivalent replacement.
That distinction mattered because the sacrifice was genuine even though the injury was recoverable.
Noctis proceeded with the formation before allowing the lingering pain to become a reason for unnecessary delay. The core fragment became the central nucleus, while the concentrated blood essence gathered around it and began condensing under the structure of the Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture. The fluid did not harden instantaneously. It thickened gradually around the nucleus as increasingly dense layers formed and compressed until the liquid qualities gave way to a crystalline structure.
The finished Initiation Blood Crystal was approximately the length of the last joint of Noctis's thumb. Its shape was elongated and naturally irregular rather than perfectly geometric, with multiple uneven facets reflecting the faint internal light moving through it. Most of the crystal appeared almost black crimson, while the thinner edges remained translucent enough for deeper red coloration to show through.
The darker fragment of Noctis's core remained visible within the center, and fine crimson channels had formed outward through the crystal around it. Those channels branched irregularly toward the outer structure and carried a faint periodic pulse that moved through them without changing the crystal's overall shape. The resulting vessel looked organic enough to reflect the blood essence used to create it while remaining solid enough to function as something more than condensed blood.
Noctis transferred the completed Initiation Blood Crystal into Blood Space and confirmed its status through Genesis Core.
Bloodgrave Ascension Scripture
Status: Selected — Uninitiated
Initiation Blood Crystal: Formed
Blood Essence Sources: 0 / 1,000,000
Diversity Requirement: Incomplete
First Bloodgrave Circulation: Locked
The crystal remained stable, which left Noctis free to consider the cost of creating it rather than continuing to monitor the formation itself.
His body had already begun replacing the ordinary blood used during refinement, while the deeper blood essence recovered at a slower rate because restoring it required more than simply reproducing physical volume. Neither loss presented a serious problem. His vitality remained overwhelming, and the amount sacrificed for the crystal represented a temporary reduction rather than a lasting weakness.
The missing portion of the core required more care.
The injury remained small relative to the whole structure, so Noctis could still move power through the rest of his foundation without threatening its overall stability. The problem appeared when more energy was forced through the incomplete region because the architecture responsible for carrying that power had not finished rebuilding itself. Increasing the available energy could not replace missing structure any more than adding pressure to a damaged channel could reconstruct the material absent from its wall.
Noctis allowed a modest increase in output to test the practical limitation and immediately felt the damaged section respond. The pain sharpened as additional power moved around the recovering area, confirming that the newly reconstructing structure could not yet tolerate the same stress as the intact portions of his core. He reduced the output rather than continuing because the test had already provided the information he needed.
Normal function remained possible.
He could move, defend himself, and use a meaningful portion of his abilities without difficulty, but sustained heavy output or a serious god-level battle would place unnecessary strain on the recovering structure. Attempting to force maximum power through it merely to prove that the rest of his strength remained available would offer no advantage and could disrupt the reconstruction enough to prolong the injury.
The limitation therefore represented a temporary reduction in practical condition rather than a loss of godhood or a collapse of his foundation. Noctis remained vastly stronger than he had been before ascending, and the overwhelming majority of his core remained intact. He simply could not use the upper limits of that power responsibly until the damaged architecture rebuilt itself.
That was the real cost imposed by the initiation.