Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Riven woke up on the floor of the room, next to the hole he’d fallen through, to see the large pool of blood beneath him was almost entirely drained. It left a long drop down, hundreds of feet, into a chasm where the body of the creature that’d attacked him was half submerged in what little of the blood remained. Where that blood had gone, Riven had no clue, but it’d simply vanished to reveal nothing but a holding pit for the monster without any real areas of interest otherwise. Perhaps he’d drained it in his sleep?

That in itself brought a lot of questions. He’d grown fangs, regenerated over and over again at extreme rates—albeit using the blood pool to do so—and had lost his mind numerous times. He’d been told he was “underfed” and required the blood of mortals, yet this blood pool had seemed to satiate that hunger and calm his mind. The implications of all this were less than good.Finnd new chapters at novelhall.com

He groaned, being utterly exhausted, and pushed himself up while blinking rapidly to clear his head. Curiously enough, his clothes and belongings were all right beside him...undamaged. His wounds were all long gone, having mysteriously healed without any flaw or imperfection. He lifted the hand that’d been stripped of flesh and flexed it, feeling it out to make sure there wasn’t any lingering damage. He felt his knee where his lower leg had been severed cleanly and felt around his abdomen, where his guts had been ripped out. He was satisfied with the results.

He felt slightly different, but not by much. More than anything, he could feel that his soul structure had changed. It was similar to the way his pillars had attached themselves to the soul core, but now as he looked inward, he was able to tell his soul had a dual core on top of the original. The one he was familiar with, that ball of brilliant white light with his Unholy Foundational Pillar and Blood subpillar attached to it. Then there was...another, partial orb. This one was pitch-black instead of white, was slightly smaller, and orbited Riven’s original core at a slow, monotonous pace. It wasn’t entirely solid, though, and pulsed in between a ghostly ethereal black to a more solid void black—no doubt because it was still under construction. He could feel a gnawing sensation of hunger from the core. The same one that’d supercharged his body when he’d seen the visage of a maw.

Thinking about it, Riven curiously extended a tendril of mana toward the unfinished core of original sin. It immediately and thoroughly rebuked his attempt, letting him know that he wouldn’t be able to utilize this newfound power until whatever it was doing was completed.

Hopefully that’d be sooner rather than later, judging by the monstrosity this untapped power had utterly demolished.

Riven shakily started putting his clothes back on. He packed up his things—well, what was left that hadn’t been tossed away in the battle—and was thankful that the majority was still present. Glancing up toward the hole in the ceiling, he scratched his head and frowned.

The comfortable-looking bed with moth-eaten pillows and velvet covers looked quite nice given his current state. An oddly shaped bell-curve lantern sat on a short nightstand nearby, alongside two thick books, and a rectangular wooden chest was at the foot of the bed. Huffing and getting up off the ground, he started back at square one.

He walked over to the chest and flipped the clasp, then began to pry it open. It held fast at first, but he managed to grunt and heave enough that it gave way...when there was an audible click from inside.

He immediately dodged left and dropped the lid as a bolt shot past his ear—missing him by half an inch and landing to embed itself in the wall behind him.

He shook his head to clear his head of that last thought. He was lucky to stumble across something like this. The idea of having found additional magic so soon, and knowing these things were likely very valuable to sell even if he couldn’t use them... It was a huge boon.

The key factor here was that these were actually ability scrolls—what Athela had said were incredibly expensive and very hard to make. They could imbue him with knowledge far faster than needing to learn out of a tome himself, but they were almost impossible to come by for those who didn’t pay a hefty price, from what the spider had told him. Not only that, but he’d gotten incredibly lucky that one of them was usable with a subpillar he already had—Blood. He couldn’t use the two Chi-type abilities, but he could definitely save them for later and give them to someone else if he ever got out of here, and if he didn’t end up selling them.

He set the other two scrolls down to pick up the one that applied to his class. The scroll sparkled in his grip, and the warming sensation he got while holding the other two magnified with the touch of the scroll for Blood Lance.

He could safely say he just hit the jackpot.

Shutting the door and peering out into the ballroom through where the doorknob had been one more time, he didn’t even bother inspecting the other stuff yet and got to work mentally willing the first of the scrolls he’d picked up to activate.

[You have the proper pillar orientation to utilize this scroll. This is a one-time-use item and will be destroyed upon use. Do you wish to use the spell scroll: Blood Lance? Yes? No?]

He nodded. “Yes.”

[Are you sure? Yes? No?]

Again, he selected Yes.

[You have learned the Tier 2 spell Blood Lance.]

Not a second later, the spell scroll in his hand began to shimmer along the red lettering—and his mind immediately went haywire. Knowledge began to burn its way into his brain as his eyes lit up white—and he began to scream.

It was not nearly as pleasant as the first time acquiring abilities, when he’d learned them the hard way, that was a certain fact.