Grand Ancestral Bloodlines
chapter-1861

1861 Didn't Know

Lu'card was stunned by the sudden change, but his fury immediately overrode any surprise he might have felt. Well… that and the pressure that came soon afterward.

All he saw was an array of red eyes, spreading apart along blackened feathers. Flashes of fear, horror, and inescapable destruction assaulted his mind as a black falcon with eight eyes appeared before him.

But Ryu's command had already come.

Lu'card spun in the air as though he had eyes in the back of his head… because he truly did.

In a battle amongst Sovereigns, Ryu had already noticed that they were able to hide themselves from Spiritual Sense and even distort what you could see. Because the laws could be so easily broken and controlled by Sovereigns, the only way to counter them hiding from your senses was to likewise break and control the laws in the region…

Unless you had [Third Perspective].

Lu'card's wings flapped like folds of space, and his body was wrapped in a gorgeous silver light before he blinked and vanished, appearing high in the skies with a paw pulsing with black energy.

[Blackhole].

The falcon barely had time to dodge out of the way of the Dragon Claw. But when it thought it had survived, a spike of pain hit it, and it spiraled out of the air. Only now did it realize that one of its wings had been torn to pieces.

With a rush and a boom, Lu'card was suddenly pincered from all sides. A jaguar Sovereign, a peacock Sovereign, and a tortoise Sovereign appeared at once.

The tortoise Sovereign's body thrummed with might, and a powerful gravitational force descended from above, looking to crush Lu'card.

But Ryu seemed to have seen through it ahead of time. None of the abilities of these Sovereigns could escape his eyes.

Lu'card countered with [Horizon] once again, and then Ryu's gaze pulsed.

[Death Acupoint].

PCHU!

Lu'card casually swiped out a claw in a particular direction, and the forehead of the peacock was pierced through.

All this time, only the tail of the peacock could be seen, making it difficult to tell where its true body was. Even Ryu's [Third Perspective] couldn't see through it because it seemed like the peacock was in a different space entirely.

However, the moment Ryu cast [Death Acupoint] on the peacock, he saw through its death knell with a single thought. It could hide from his senses… but could it hide from Karma?

Lu'card cast [Blackhole] once more, but this time, dozens of spinning cyclones of spatial storms appeared in the skies, forming a complex array.

To Lu'card's shock, the blackholes seemed to have formed an even more powerful effect than his mirror world, resulting in a maze of space that even the Sovereigns had a hard time seeing through.

The jaguar beast struck, but its attack flashed and vanished, twisting through space and suddenly appearing before the tortoise. The tortoise had been so focused on Lu'card and Ryu that it didn't even sense this coming until it was too late…

…

The entire battle felt like a fever dream for Lu'card. He had a hard time believing that what he was experiencing was real.

Ryu continuously used his abilities in ways that he had never thought of, and when Lu'card thought of replicating them… he realized that he couldn't.

It wasn't a matter of skill, but just that calculating such a thing in the middle of battle was impossible. Or… it should have been impossible.

Somehow, Ryu had a thinking speed that put Sovereigns to shame.

No… Lu'card discarded that thought once again. It wasn't thinking speed.

Lu'card was still sure that his thinking speed was far superior to Ryu's, or else he wouldn't be able to react to his commands in battle and then execute them so flawlessly. No matter how great Ryu's thinking speed was, Lu'card had to be faster just for this reason alone. Not just his thinking speed, but his reaction speed as well.

But the issue was that, although he didn't want to admit it… he wasn't as smart as Ryu was.

No matter how fast your thinking speed was, what did it matter if you didn't have the flexibility of mind and the intelligence to capitalize on it?

Thinking speed was just a fancier way of saying that a person had more time. But even if you gave a layman a hundred times the time to complete a task as compared to a super genius… would it matter?

There would be a point where the layman reached a bottleneck while the super genius could burst past it even with the limited time available.

What made Ryu so impressive was that he could complete calculations others couldn't even think of in so short of a time.

And what was even clearer was that Ryu's Spatial affinity was at least as good as his, but what made him even more frightening was that he had a hidden affinity that seemed to make his understanding of space far more flexible and…

Scary.

That was the only word that Lu'card could use to describe it. He had never seen space bend and react like that, and it could be said that without understanding what that second affinity was, even with all the thinking speed in the world he would never be able to replicate what Ryu had done.

…

The last beast fell, and Lu'card stood high in the skies, looking down on them. He was in shock.

He was still a Dao Lord, and he felt that he should have the right to face off against the Dao Sovereigns of this world… but only one at a time.

Yet, by following Ryu's orders, he had been able to kill six of them. It was ridiculous.

It had to be remembered that it was especially difficult to face more than one Sky God of the same level in battle even if they were far less talented. The means of Sky Gods couldn't be underestimated.

But somehow, this had felt too easy…

Ryu stood on Lu'card's back, pale-faced. He didn't seem to notice his own state, absent-mindedly staring into the distance as though he hadn't done anything that was too big of a deal.

Now that he had three souls capable of independent thought, his ingenuity was on another level. However, he felt that his speed of thought was actually slower because he often hesitated about which path to take.

In the middle of their battle, he had just started picking randomly between all three of "him," but the result was still always the same.

Victory.

All of his souls shared his brain, so their intelligence was just the same, and because of that, all of their methods were sharp and difficult to find fault in.

But the fact that there were so many correct paths was its own problem. How could he possibly ever choose the right path, then?

"Are you not going to say anything?" Lu'card's voice interrupted Ryu's thought.

Ryu smiled. "What is there to say?"

"What happened to you? Did someone snip your balls?"

Ryu's expression became weird. "I thought Dragons were supposed to be dignified. But the more I interact with you all, the more I feel you're just each more roguish than the last."

"What is your second affinity?"

Ryu's eyes narrowed when Lu'card suddenly changed the subject.

"Why are you asking?"

"Because there's something weird about your spatial qi. It feels inexplicably more flexible, and without your calculations, I wouldn't be able to control space like I did just now."

"Is that so…"

A flash of enlightenment hit Ryu.

Space and time… they were like two sides of the same coin. He had even read some posit that time was just another dimension, the fourth that gave the first three of space meaning.

The fact that time could give space a flexibility that it wouldn't otherwise have would make sense, but he hadn't thought about it before because the spatial affinity he had now had always been tied to time. So he wasn't like Lu'card who had experience with manipulating space alone.

"It's time," Ryu replied without much care.

However, he didn't expect to feel Lu'card's soul tremble fiercely when he heard this. Although his reaction on the surface seemed calm, Ryu was still too attached to him for this to be hidden.

"Are you… sure?" Lu'card asked.

Ryu raised an eyebrow. "Of course I am. What kind of stupid question is that?"

"Don't patronize me, dammit. It doesn't seem like you even understand what that means."

"What is there to understand? It's just a Soul Nature."

"It's a Soul Nature?!"

Affinity was one thing; a Soul Nature was a completely different beast entirely.

Beasts didn't have souls in the normal sense, but they still had their Spirit Roots. Spirit Roots had their own Natures as well, colloquially known as affinities, and formally known as Spirit Natures or Spirit Essences.

"Not even the ounce of dignity of a Dragon," Ryu shook his head and sighed as though he was lamenting the state of Lu'card.

Lu'card didn't respond. It seemed that Ryu truly didn't know.