Frostbound [LitRPG Apocalypse]-Chapter 226 - Frostborn Bloodlines

Abigail

"It still feels weird with all of us leaving," Abigail said while tying the straps of her saddle bag shut. She wasn't the best rider but she could at least do it. If they went without and traveled on foot the journey would take even longer.

"This will be the first time either Chris or myself won't be here," Jon said from the horse beside her. "It feels... odd."

"We get to explore! We get to explore!" Two tiny voices cheered from behind them.

It was a tough call, but she finally caved in. Everything she knew said not to bring them, but she couldn't bring herself to say no. Anna's face was criminal when she begged them to come. Josh was already tearing up before they even had the chance to say anything.

Abigail knew that caging them up would only make the urge grow greater. If they stifled them here they, Anna especially, would find other ways to get around it.

Both Jon and her were fending off her attempts to learn how to fight already. If they said no again...

She couldn't bring herself to do it.

It was only a slight change of plans but not all that different. Jon was supposed to stay behind and watch them but now he was coming along to do the same. He had wanted to go originally but they couldn't have both of them away for so long.

Not only did she not want to dish her kids off on someone else for that long, but she wasn't comfortable with both of them being away for so long.

Having Jon along helped ease her worry. She could hold her own and had been training day and night to do just that, and they would have others with them in case they were attacked on the road, but he was the main reason her worries about being attacked subsided.

She also agreed because The Twins was vetted and decided safe. Austin's ravings that the man in charge was honorable also went a long way when she made her decision. Plus, they needed to see the world. Being cooped up and hidden away wasn't good for them.

Anna only had a few more years until she gained a Class and it already felt like it was too soon.

Jon noticed her rising worry falsely thinking it was because of something else. "Everything will be fine. Rachel will do fine. She stepped up and did a good job after Chris was incapacitated from what I heard."

While he was right and she was worried about that, it wasn't the topic she was just thinking about currently.

Abigail wanted to put her mother in charge, but she randomly decided she was coming along with them. There wasn't an area of high Wind mana like there was stone for Jon so her sudden inclusion was strange but Abigail wasn't able to talk her mother out of it.

That being the case, Rachel became next in line to run things. Gabriel decidedly said no and while Rachel did the same at first, delegating the job to her mom, there was no one else to take up the mantle.

Her being the strongest also helped.

Brayden was too focused on building and Vinny on crafting. Alice, Allison, Mitchell, and Carrie were still down there from helping fight the insects. Sam was uninterested and so was Ashley as both were still working through the last of the injured.

Her Grandmother had long ago checked out from anything involving managing the City. She'd mostly just hung around the cemetery, as depressing as that sounded.

Hal could do it but he was focused on keeping an eye on the surroundings and training up the newest Guard Company. Chris had finally managed to convince him to take charge officially.

There were now two Orders as they were calling themselves. Hal's was full of Scouts and Trackers and wasn't meant to be a direct fighting force but it still counted. She'd considered Elliot, but she wasn't ready to hand over so much responsibility just yet.

Plus, he was still organizing his own Order similar to Hal and he had his hands full with that.

Inhale

Exhale

She was getting tense again thinking about things that weren't necessary.

"Are you ready, honey?" Jon said while sliding atop his horse.

"As I'll ever be."

It was more like if she didn't leave now, she would rush back to take care of one last thing.

Chris

The cold continued to be brutal but I turned my mind to other pursuits rather than lamenting how frigid it was constantly. The novelty of feeling the sensation again had worn off. Quickly.

I didn't dread it or hate the feeling as others seemed to, but it was still mighty uncomfortable this far North. I wasn't sure of the exact temperature but any thermometer would claim it was butt-ass cold.

To distract myself, I focused on one of the two tasks I was here for in the first place. I was here to start my Mana Cultivation, but I was also here for another reason.

To purify and strengthen my Bloodline as much as possible. So many things had taken my attention that I hadn't done anything with it since gaining it.

Both tasks needed insane amounts of pure Arctic or Cold mana which made doing them anywhere except for where I headed nearly impossible. It could have been done. I could have made or constructed something that accumulated enough of the required mana but it wouldn't have worked out nearly as well.

The stuff up here was like straight jet fuel into my veins and anything I could have come up with wouldn't have come close. A minute or two up here would equate to hours, if not days of work down there.

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Other than making the process much easier, it would also make the final result better for Mana Cultivation. This was one of the few times when that was even a possibility.

Laws didn't have that option. If two people gained a Law using the same concept, the Laws would be the same. If another person used the Hardness of Ice and Cold causing the increase in density to gain an Ice Law, they would match my own when I first gained mine.

Same with my Body of Wood. If someone went through the same process, staying conscious the entire time, they would receive the same Body as me. Anchors couldn't be quantified in such a way so it made comparison difficult.

This was the first time that there were strict qualities to what I was about to do and it would dictate how far I would be able to go on this path.

A bad first start would make everything all that much harder.

Conversely, a good first start would make everything that much easier.

I wanted to put my best foot forward and that meant getting to a place that would make the process that much easier. Which meant I had to keep trudging through the cold and snow.

Purifying my Bloodline took my mind off the boring task of putting one foot in front of another. I'd been walking or running ahead for so long that the process was mind-numbing and the change was welcome.

Like I had seen Rachel doing in Vincent's forge, I pulled in the Arctic mana around me while letting the less pure mana as a result back out.

The process was relatively simple but extremely time-consuming. Rachel working with the mana coming off the Spirit Fire was nothing compared to the torrent of pure Arctic mana I was using now.

She was at a disadvantage there, as there wasn't anywhere close that would help her speed the process up like the rest of us. There was a blip on the map we had that was a bright glowing red, but it was a ways away. Southeast, past where Toronto used to sit.

I wouldn't be surprised if she asked to leave to visit just that spot when I returned.

The process she was attempting would only go so fast with the resources we had, and a Spirit Fire could only take her so far.

Purifying and Strengthening of a Bloodline could be done in any order, it didn't matter which you started with first but I started with Purifying. It made more sense to do that first before you strengthened it in my head.

You melted out all the impurities in the metal before you began to forge with it. That was just common sense.

I wasn't sure if it was just my mental representation of what I was doing, or if reality was how I pictured it, but I imagined my Bloodline like a sphere of liquid.

I had been able to feel it and call on it ever since I first imbibed it, and it sat in my core dormant ever since besides when I called on it. What I called my 'core' was just how I referred to the place that housed the fundamental pieces of who I was.

My Anchor was there, my Bloodline was there. My Laws and something else I still wasn't quite sure what it was.

With Cores being an actual thing that people will soon have, I should probably start calling it something else.

Are they in my soul?

We knew that souls were real but they were impossible to get hard evidence on. It made sense in my head. A soul was where the person's identity was held so it made sense for the things closely related to who a person was to be stored in their soul.

It doesn't matter though.

My Bloodline was a sphere of a deep purple with hints of blue. The same color of the Bloodline essence I had drank so long ago.

It had grown slightly since I first gained it, natural use and being in a wintery environment, but only slightly.

A beast would naturally refine their Bloodline while being in an environment beneficial to them automatically and Humans had the same, if lesser, ability it seemed.

Now I was taking a more active role in the process.

I imagined it like forcing water through a sieve. Controlling the surrounding pure Arctic mana as past I could, I sent it streaming through my body to reach deeper and into where my Bloodline was held.

Then I... 'forced' it through the liquid drawing it out the other side.

It was hard to describe as my mental projection of how I saw things wasn't exactly what was happening. The process was heavily feeling based which made it even harder to put into words.

There wasn't much information on the process as we were told it was instinctual to beasts which meant there was no need to write the process out. The ones who did write it out were other humans but we hadn't opted to buy any of those.

Information was expensive and we had to pick and choose where we wanted to know more. Bloodlines, said to be instinctual, weren't high on that list.

Which meant I had no fucking idea what I was doing. I wasn't even certain I was doing it right, but something was happening.

The mana I drew in was more pure than the mana flowing out, which also carried something else with it I couldn't make out. I imagined it was the 'bad' parts I was 'purifying' but I had no clue what they were.

There were also changes in the drop of liquid after the process was over. Some of the dullness was chipped away and there was a subtle inner glow that was now visible.

I took that to mean I was doing something right.

An inner glow had to be good, right?

The process didn't feel wrong and it wasn't painful, so I continued doing it while I walked. I noticed eventually that as the drop grew brighter, it also decreased in size.

Which made sense in hindsight. Something inside the drop was being carried out with the less pure mana which should've made the decrease in volume obvious.

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The beasts might not have written the process down, but they sure as shit codified it. We didn't even have to buy the information on that as it was freely given in one of the classes about Bloodlines to begin with.

The various enlightened bestial races were... particular about Bloodlines.

Their culture put a high value on them which made the stratified societies they built naturally separate out into various 'levels' or 'stages' based on one's Bloodline.

Type was the most important. The species it came from dictated nearly everything about a Bloodline. The lowliest of prey mice would never hold a candle to even faint Dragon blood.

Debates were had on which species' Bloodline was superior, but each one had different uses which made it hard to crown the 'best'. Some were better at one thing or another.

Other than Type, there was Tier.

There was a distinct Tier difference between a True Dragon Bloodline and a lesser Wyvern or Drake Bloodline. They were all of the same 'lineage' but there was an obvious difference in power between them.

The Highest Tier a Bloodline could reach played a major role in how highly valued its Type was. The ceiling of how high it could go determined its value in the eyes of their society.

Those two categorized and placed value on the various Bloodlines, but they even went a step further than that.

The Strength and Purity of a specific Bloodline had its own classifications. So even members of the same species and holders of the same Bloodline could compare against one another.

Strength was determined by how long they could use it, or the size of the drop in my mental projections case. How I viewed it was probably how most viewed it as number of drops was how it was measured.

I wasn't sure if my singular drop would eventually grow into a second one or when it would be considered that I had two drops, but that wasn't a concern of mine.

Purity was determined by a percentage and was the only one that was immediately obvious. I likened it to the amount of glow.

Most of the reasons Bloodlines were classified so... thoroughly didn't apply to us. Beasts used it as a show of strength and a way to know their place in society but mainly used it while determining mates.

As I would not be 'mating' with any of them, it was mostly just for clarity's sake.

A human could even go without gaining a Bloodline and still be powerful so it wasn't a deciding factor for us. Bloodlines certainly helped, but they weren't the end all be all like they were for the Beasts.

The last tidbit about bloodlines that we were told was how to evolve them.

When a Bloodline reached maximum purity and was strengthened as much as possible, an evolution could be triggered that would elevate a Bloodline to the next 'tier', if there was one.

Wyrm would evolve to Drake, Drake to Wyvern, Wyvern to Lesser Dragon, and Lesser Dragon to True Dragon.

In my case, my Bloodlines 'lineage' was Frost-Touched, Frostborn, Jotun, Lesser Frost Giant, then Frost Giant. There was supposedly something above Frost Giant, but I wasn't sure what.

It seemed like it ended naturally at Frost Giant.

Starting with a higher-tiered Bloodline at Frostborn saved me all the time of purifying and strengthening through the first tier.

I wasn't sure how far my current body would take me before I maxed out, but I was eager to find out.