Ch228-Cloudy With A Chance Of Armageddon

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Ch228-Cloudy With A Chance Of Armageddon

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Blood holds a special place when it comes to dark magic.

And while many would preach about the versatility, the symbolism, the “artistry,” the variety, and the history, the real reason blood holds a special place in dark magic is because of only one reason.

It’s cheap.

Although cheap might not be the right word for it.

Abundant.

Blood is cheap because of how easy it is to procure.

Most human adults produce a little under 1 liter a day, with some simple magic, that number can easily be bumped up to an unhealthy 4 liters, but that isn’t to say 1 liter is something to laugh at.

A liter a day, is 4 cups worth of blood, every day.

That’s 28 cups a week, 112 cups a month, and 1,344 cups a year.

That is, of course, if you’re sustainably harvesting the blood.

Blood is vital to the living, in fact, it’s one of the few things that keeps the living, the living. You take their blood away, and to no one’s surprise, they die.

It’s an odd way of thinking about it, but the only purpose of the body is to consume enough nutrients and calories to keep the brain alive. Frankly speaking, the brain is the only part that’s impossible to replace.

A person can stay alive without their arms, their legs, or even their heart, as long as the brain gets a steady supply of blood, the details don’t matter.

But, again, all of that isn’t what makes blood so “special.”

And don’t go thinking those arrogant bloodsuckers have anything to do with it, they didn’t invent blood. Just because their diet consists solely of blood, doesn’t mean those pale cunts are responsible for blood being as crucial to dark magic as it is.

No. The reason is much simpler.

And obvious if you’ve ever attempted any kind of dark magic ritual.

See, the thing that’s so special about blood is how easy it is to give. A needle prick on the finger, a small blade across the wrist, a large blade across the throat, and voila, blood.

It’s easy to give, easy to take, and once again, abundant.

You have blood, your parents have blood, your wife, husband, son, daughter, your pet cat has blood, the neighbor’s sheep has blood, the butcher shop is overflowing with blood, they’ve got so much of it, they’re just throwing it away.

Most people won’t even notice some of their blood missing. You might have to get creative with where you stick the syringe, but if you know what you’re doing, they won’t even know what hit them.

Because, once again, blood is cheap.

Now, flesh, on the other hand, yeah, people notice when you steal their flesh very quickly. A man wakes up with a chunk of belly missing, and he understandably kicks up a fuss.

There isn’t even a good place to harvest flesh, the limbs are out, too many nerves and blood vessels, not to mention most people need their muscles, and you really have to know what you’re doing to not fuck it up. The head is out, and that leaves only the torso, and even then, people complain when you tear a strip of their skin off.

And bones?

It is a nightmare to take someone’s bones.

If you think people get pissy about having their thigh meat cut off, just wait until you try getting a rib from them.

And it isn’t as if it’s easier with a corpse.

Human bodies go bad quick.

Unless you’re able to preserve it, a corpse is worthless after… Even if the monsters and insects don’t get to it… 1 week is sort of the point where you stop bothering.

That sort of goes back to the main point, of blood being cheap and easy to procure.

Now, not all starting dark mages are lucky enough to find a fresh corpse, and while there are some rituals where animals can be used, the vast majority require a corpse belonging to an intelligent creature.

Especially the low-tier rituals.

So, you may ask, what is a dark mage to do?

Stab themselves in the heart and hope whatever scrap of human skin bound tome they copied the ritual framework from works?

Chop their leg off and hope the ritual is genuine?

Dip a finger into a pot of boiling acid?

The problem with all of those rituals is that regardless of whether they work or not, you’re permanently crippled. Limbs don’t grow back under normal conditions, especially if dark magic is involved, once you sacrifice a piece of yourself, you are never getting it back.

As a result of the vast majority of aspiring dark mages being, well, cowards, they inadvertently ended up using their blood to practice. This in turn meant that, regardless of the amount of strength the dark mage ended up attaining, they always had a special appreciation for blood.

Sylver did too.

The glass half-full part of him quite honestly couldn’t stop smiling, as he watched the puddles of blood forming in the garden outside. Even if it was all corpse blood, it was still blood. Admittedly, it was oddly sterile, which was strange, but then again, a 3 headed dragon is the one who made it rain.

“Is this everyone?” Sylver asked without looking away from the window.

A piece of him felt utter revulsion at the liquid gore pummeling the various flowers into the ground. The feeling was mostly due to Ria, and the people all around him, but still. It was a bit gross, and he hadn’t even told anyone that the blood was all preserved corpse blood.

Sylver turned away from the blood-covered window as if he was turning his back on a work of art.

He looked down at the soaked in blood people standing slightly below him, and with a single clap of his hands, silenced the panicked murmuring.

“Alright people! Good news first! The liquid raining down on you is neither toxic nor corrosive. If you get some in your eyes or swallow some, do not be concerned, it won’t do anything, and will wash out with some water,” Sylver said, just a bit louder than his normal speaking volume.

The group standing closest to him were the cultivators Sylver had conquered, and Faust had trained. From where Sylver was stranding, the specks of red on their white masks looked almost like painted on rose petals.

The group cowering directly behind them were the farmers, merchants, the people who paid tax, or something, in exchange for being on Faust’s land, along with the guards. Sylver still wasn’t 100% sure what the situation was with them, but they were basically civilians. They had been told to run towards the main sect building, and while a couple had the foresight to cover themselves with a sheet, the vast majority were soaked through in liquid red.

There wasn’t a collective sigh of relief at Sylver’s good news.

Probably because he said, “good news first,” and they were now waiting for the bad news.

“Now the bad news!” Sylver said and confirmed that the lack of reaction was indeed due to him prefacing his earlier statements with “good news first.”

“I don’t know what it does! I would like to think it’s there just to fuck with us, but I’ll be honest with you, I wouldn’t count on it. So, you know… let me know if something happens… In the meantime relax, and get some rest, we have plenty of food and water,” Sylver ended, and once again, no collective sigh of relief.

“That was terrible,” Ria whispered, as Sylver left the small stage that had been made for him out of a couple of tables.

“If I tell the truth now, they’ll believe me later if I need to lie. Right now, everything is fine. It’s raining blood, and apart from the odd person slipping and getting a bruise, everyone is alive and well,” Sylver whispered back.

The previously empty and useless rooms were now in the process of being cleaned and furnished. Sylver could have used his [Necrotic Mutilation] to make the people’s houses blood proof, but it would take a fair bit of time, and more honestly, he didn’t get the feeling the dragon was going to stop at raining blood.

The clouds didn’t appear to be dispersing, if anything, they looked darker and denser than they had 2 hours ago.

Sylver used [Fog Form] to travel through the holes he had made and materialized inside his workshop.

The various tables and chairs had been moved over to the corners and sides of the room, to give the thing in the middle as much space as possible.

It looked like an icicle of dark green congealed blood. With black pulsing veins running up and down the gory, admittedly slightly phallic, pillar.

The magical gore had formed a protective film around the building and was actively moving the congealing blood off the roof and throwing it down towards the ground.

Because of the blood being blood, it had started to congeal after a few minutes, which in turn meant that it had formed small stalagmites on the roof. The structure of the building was fairly solid, the wood they used for construction was as hard as stone, and presumably as strong, but there’s still a limit as to how much the wooden walls would be able to hold.

The congealing blood formed a sort of rim on the edges of the roof, and that then became a “bowl” on the roof, which was gradually gathering blood, and getting heavier and heavier.

Sylver had been too preoccupied with preventing his own house from being crushed under the weight of scabs to pay too much attention to the nearby sects, but he was fairly certain he heard the sound of a tall building toppling over at some point.

The fact that the architectural standard here was to use the roof as an extra floor really bit these people in the ass. Especially the ones that had gardens on their roofs, the soil alone likely soaked up enough blood to come crashing through the ceiling.

Sylver checked the bloody pillar, and after he confirmed that everything was in order, sat down in the corner, and waited for Spring to brew him some tea.

“Can they fix this?” Ria asked, as she came out of Sylver’s robe, and sat down on the nearby table.

There was a slight delay before she started to speak. What Ria really wanted to ask was “it’s raining blood outside, and you’re drinking tea?” but she stopped herself since she already knew the answer, given that that was exactly what Sylver was doing.

“I mean, if it stops raining, the blood with dry up, and should be quite easy to gather and dispose of. The plants will probably die from iron toxicity, or simply drown, depending on how long this goes on. Honestly, the thing everyone should be more worried about is the giant serpent’s head, that is responsible for the rain of blood,” Sylver said, and got to watch as Ria’s face lost any trace of emotion.

She had been slightly annoyed, and upset, earlier, but now she was just confused.

“That’s right… Everyone saw it…” Ria mumbled out.

“I mean, if anyone is insane and stupid enough to live on top of a living dragon, my money is on cultivators… But they’re probably going to evacuate,” Sylver said, as Spring handed him the cup of steaming hot tea.

“Where will they go?” Ria asked.

“My guess is south. They wouldn’t survive the winters up north, I believe there’s an ocean west of here, and everything on the east is the High King’s territory,” Sylver said.

Ria made that ticking noise again.

It sort of sounded like someone was tapping the tip of their knife against a glass window, but just barely audible.

He knew what she wanted to say.

“Aren’t you going to help these people? How can you just leave them to die?” and so on, and so forth, all while Sylver blankly answered that they weren’t his problem or responsibility and that he only came here to find Edmund.

This wasn’t to say he didn’t feel sorry for them.

And Ria could make the argument that he went out of his way to save the dark elves, so why isn’t he doing the same for these people?

Well, for starters, the locals here looked foreign to Sylver and didn’t remind him of Nyx every single time he saw their faces. That alone helped him not care too much.

The second reason was scale. A couple hundred dark elves was one thing, but hundreds of thousands of people? Sylver couldn’t even find a good spot to settle the dark elves, what the fuck was he going to do with a literal nation full of people?

The third reason, and the most important as far as Sylver was concerned, was that he didn’t owe these people anything. They had an emperor; it was his responsibility to handle this kind of bullshit.

Obviously, the cultivators Faust had trained were coming with him, but everyone else would just have to figure things out for themselves.

Sylver was in the middle of sipping his tea when the floor shook so hard that he nearly choked on it.

***

He climbed up through the hatch to the roof, and with a [Necrotic Mutilation] umbrella protecting him from the bloody rain, Sylver looked towards the 4 mountains.

He had expected to see only 3 since the rain would have quickly settled the dust, but all 4 were still there.

Wait…

It was slow enough that he could barely see it, but there was a 5th mountain, slowly rising out of the ground. Because the other 4 were drenched in blood, it took Sylver a moment to realize that the rising mountain wasn’t simply covered in blood but was in fact made of blood.

Sylver silently walked over to the edge of the roof and looked down.

To describe the motion of the blood below as “flowing” implied far too much movement. Just like the mountain, it was slow, subtle, the blood was already being disturbed by the falling rain, if Sylver hadn’t been actively looking for it, he never would have noticed the liquid gradually moving towards the center of the Schlagen mountains.

“Is this good or bad?” Ria asked.

“There is very little that is “good,” about this situation. For future reference Ria, if it ever starts raining blood where you are, leave,” Sylver explained, as he jumped down from the roof, and landed half a meter from the ground.

“Are you alright!” a voice shouted from somewhere in front of Sylver. He looked up and saw Tarragon standing there, with a shiny sphere surrounding him and protecting him from the raining blood.

“Aside from the obvious, yeah!” Sylver shouted back, as he stepped down from his invisible platform, and used [Dead Dominion] to move the blood on the ground away from him.

The same way Tarragon was surrounded by a shiny sphere, so was Sylver, with the only difference being that his sphere was invisible.

And used about one-twentieth of the mana Tarragon used.

Not that anyone was counting.

“Are your people alright?” Tarragon asked, as he and Sylver closed the distance and were close enough to speak at a normal volume. The raining blood could best be described as a drizzle, if you ignored the random screams of terror in the background, it was quite quiet.

“A couple of sprained ankles, but nothing fatal. How are your lot doing?” Sylver asked, and for a split-second Tarragon’s mask of calm composure slipped, and Sylver got a glimpse of the frightened elf underneath.

Even for Eira, blood raining from the sky was rare.

“Is this you?” Tarragon asked.

Sylver couldn’t decide whether to laugh or get angry.

After a moment, he chose to interpret the question as a compliment.

“I appreciate that you think so highly of me, but no. If I had this kind of power, I wouldn’t bother with something this… indirect,” Sylver said.

Something in Tarragon’s eyes just didn’t look right.

He was scared, which is completely understandable given the circumstances, but he was too scared for someone with his level of power.

“No one told you?” Tarragon asked.

It was only now that Sylver noticed that the old elf wasn’t completely stable on his feet, he wasn’t swaying, but he was massaging his fingers the way mages did when they overexerted themselves.

“Told me what?” Sylver asked.

To Tarragon’s utter dismay, instead of being as worried as he was, the news caused Sylver to laugh so hard he slipped on the ground, and nearly fell into the surrounding puddles of blood.

***

Even though Sylver knew being surrounded by blind devotion would end terribly, he couldn’t help but appreciate how nice it was to have people that didn’t question him.

Michael didn’t say a word, and simply pulled his arm back, and punched Sylver’s blood-covered palm.

Sylver’s shoulder made a funny sound as it absorbed the impact, but he’d seen Michael train, and even if he wasn’t using his full strength, at the very least Sylver’s arm should have been blown off.

And yet, Sylver’s arm was perfectly fine.

His fingers weren’t even numb.

Sylver placed his hand on his stomach and spread the blood around the front portion of his torso. He took two steps back from Michael, lifted his hands out of the way, and as he nodded for Michael to hit him, tensed his abs.

Sylver heard a crack as Michael’s fist reached Sylver’s stomach, but to Sylver’s surprise, the crack hadn’t been one of his ribs being broken. Michael’s face went a bit pale, but aside from that, he didn’t react to his ring finger bone cracking.

Tarragon didn’t say a word as he walked over to Michael and healed the boy.

“I’m surprised I didn’t realize it sooner,” Sylver repeated, as he released the blood clutching to his stomach and made the dark red liquid flow towards the nearest window.

“Can you do it?” Tarragon asked.

Sylver pretended to do the math in his head, even though he had done it the moment Tarragon explained everything.

“No,” Sylver said.

It was a lie.

Between his [Dead Dominion], [Necrotic Mutilation], and the backup of Tarragon’s elves, making a hole in a 15-meter thick scab would have been easy.

All the exits from the Schlagen Mountain dome had been sealed shut. With a giant bloody scab, that was immune to all forms of Ki attacks, and very oddly, didn’t react as much as it should have to raw physical strength.

Interestingly enough, the blood/scab was also immune to magic, or at least that was what Tarragon originally thought.

Because, as Sylver had discovered, the blood wasn’t immune to dark magic.

At all.

If anything, manipulating the blood felt easier than it should have been.

Almost as if someone had created this blood with a mage like Sylver in mind.

“How many of these blood barriers can you make?” Tarragon asked, with a vague gesture towards the wall.

“I used a focus to make it, I don’t have anymore,” Sylver lied.

Now that he had one working spell, setting another up wouldn’t even take 10 minutes.

But getting to the sect Tarragon was staying at would take half an hour, not to mention Sylver didn’t want to have to deal with people begging him to protect their sect too.

“Bring your guys here, we have plenty of room. I’m leaving Mora here to guard the place, so all of you should be safe,” Sylver said, as he patted his robe down, and absorbed his layers of [Necrotic Mutilation] armor into his [Bound Bones] storage.

“Where are you going?” Tarragon asked, as Sylver opened the door, and extended a hand out into the rain.

“I need to take care of something,” Sylver said, as the blood directly in front of him stopped falling, and instead clumped together into a big sphere, and gradually became bigger and bigger. He wanted to know how much he could bring with him if he needed to.

Tarragon had the foresight not to ask any question Sylver wouldn’t have answered anyway, and simply left.

***

“Great minds really do think alike,” a voice on Sylver’s left said.

Even though 5 years had passed, Lion sounded exactly the same.

Owl’s protective barrier wasn’t as good as Tarragon’s, all 4 of them were wearing blood-soaked clothing, but they weren’t as wet as they should have been.

“I want to talk to the emperor before you do your thing. And I want a heads up for when you’re ready to tackle the High King. And I want to increase the off-limits radius around Arda from 1,000 kilometers to 6,000,” Sylver said. Silia would be just at the edge of that radius, give or take 100 kilometers.

The pause was brief. Very brief.

Barely a full second, even if it felt to be much longer.

“How long will your talk with the emperor take?” Aurick asked.

His clothing was glued to his body, he didn’t bother with armor, and wore a simple dark blue tunic and trousers. If he wasn’t covered in blood, he would have looked like the world’s most average boy.

Owl, Hound, and Lion on the other hand looked like they were either on their way to war or had just returned from it.

Where Lion’s left leg used to be, there was now a metallic prosthetic, that looked to be malfunctioning due to the magic interfering rain. His form-fitting leather armor was such a dark shade of brown that it might as well have been black.

Owl had his staff behind his back and was holding a glowing rune-covered rock in his left hand and was dressed in light brown robes that oozed magical power.

Hound looked miserable. But not in a self-deprecating way, he had the look of someone who wasn’t used to being upset and was going to make sure everyone around him felt as bad as he did. His armor looked almost shabby, but Sylver could tell every single cut and crease was meant to be there. His right arm was covered in a thin cape and hid his weapon from prying eyes.

“A couple of minutes? I just want to ask him 2 or 3 questions, and to be perfectly honest, I doubt he’ll be able to answer any of them,” Sylver explained, as he felt something brush against the edge of his soul sense.

He didn’t even need to look; it was very hard to confuse witch magic with anything else.

“If you have them, why do you need me?” Sylver asked as he gestured towards the end of the street.

The blood had congealed around the surrounding ground, walls, tables, and chairs. The best way to explain it is to imagine that a meter of snow fell, except instead of fluffy white snow, you had slimy red/black blood. It clung to everything as if it were alive, and even now Sylver could see it subtly shifting towards the center of the Schlagen Mountains.

Abby, and the 12 witches behind her, were all squeaky clean. The rain fell evenly, more or less, and yet not a single drop landed on the 13 women’s clothing.

“He isn’t going to be defenseless. Neither will his guards or the various sect heads that he was meeting with when the rain started,” Abby explained.

She was far enough away that Sylver shouldn’t have been able to hear her, and yet, he heard her loud and clear as if she was standing right next to him.

“Once we’re done, we want you to help us leave. If the blood clots don’t disappear by themselves, I mean,” Aurick added, with a gesture towards Abby and her witches.

Considering a giant ancient dragon was going to tear its way out of the ground, Sylver somehow doubted anyone would need help leaving this place.

“If that’s all, we have a deal,” Sylver said, as he lifted his right hand towards Aurick.

They shook hands and continued on their way toward the emperor.

Aurick didn’t know about the dragon, somehow, or at least that was what he had told Sylver when he “interrogated” him. He knew about the bloodline but didn’t know what exactly the combined bloodline would do.

As they walked, Sylver had some time to think things over. Faust and Anastasia were safe and far away from here, and yet, something didn’t sit right with Sylver.

Sylver’s feeling of unease had subsided after a certain point, but it never completely went away.

Somehow his thoughts landed on that door he had seen inside the dungeon, the one that needed sword hilts to be opened. The one that referred to the dragon as “the serpent of the mountain.”

Sylver got stuck on the part that mentioned bathing in a river, because the word for “river” wasn’t quite right, and it took Sylver far too long to remember where he had read that specific word before.

And once he remembered that he was able to decipher the next portion of the text.

The warrior that sealed the dragon away didn’t bathe in any old river, he bathed in “a river of blood.” Which is just an ancient euphemism for a lot of blood…

Just as Sylver finished the thought, he had to shield his eyes so as not to be blinded. An enormous bolt of lightning had appeared out of nowhere and struck the emperor’s palace.

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