"How cold can Hell get? If you're asking me that, it seems I didn't educate you properly last time."
—6th Prince of Everfrost, one hour before the Webway Wars Began
---
(Jaime POV)
Jaime was busy studying his improved Status and familiarizing himself with his newfound powers.
Meanwhile, the rest of humanity was losing its collective mind.
With nearly everyone across Earth isolated inside their respective System spaces, people finally had time to process what had happened to their reality.
Naturally, they immediately started trying to contact one another.
What Jaime hadn't noticed, distracted as he was by his evolutions and newly acquired abilities, was that the Regional and Subregional Chats had become absolute chaos.
And most of that chaos was aimed directly at him.
Not just him, either.
The first and third people to reach F-Rank were receiving the same treatment as billions of humans desperately tried to figure out what made the three of them special.
Jaime finally glanced at his communication tab.
**System Channels**
**Regional Chat:** +1080 Unread Messages
**Subregional Chat:** +1080 Unread Messages
**Local Chat:** +1080 Unread Messages
**Party Chat:** No Messages
**Subjects Chat:** No Messages
Jaime stared at it.
Another notification arrived.
Then another.
Then twelve more.
His chat icon had started flashing so many colors that it looked like somebody had stuffed a disco ball directly into his Status screen.
"Nope."
Jaime closed the entire thing.
Humanity could survive without him for a few more hours.
Probably.
For the rest of his second day inside the Subspace, Jaime ignored the increasingly obnoxious chat notifications in favor of figuring out exactly what he had become.
Thankfully, the System hadn't left him completely blind.
Among the basic information it had provided was a book titled:
**Well Dives for Dummies: A Beginner's Guide to Not Dying Immediately**
Jaime had laughed for a solid minute when he first saw it.
Then he read the entire thing.
Twice.
The book didn't reveal much about the deeper mysteries of the Well, but it gave him enough information to understand the basic logic behind the System, ranks, skills, and the strange new reality Earth had entered.
Even so, there were gaps.
Huge ones.
And his bloodline seemed to sit directly inside one of them.
It turned out bloodlines were both simpler and far more complicated than Jaime had originally assumed.
They weren't merely genetic lineages that granted specific traits or abilities.
A true Bloodline changed someone from the soul outward.
That distinction separated them from most other things found on a Status.
Stats physically enhanced the body.
Skills altered, refined, or taught the body how to perform particular supernatural functions. With enough use and repetition, those changes could eventually become engraved into a person's soul.
Bloodlines worked in the opposite direction.
They began with the soul.
Despite the name, a Bloodline was closer to a spiritual inheritance, awakening, or transformation than anything strictly genetic. The soul changed first, and through a process Jaime barely understood, the body was forced to follow.
That came with advantages.
Abilities gained through a Bloodline were usually stronger, more natural, and better suited to the individual possessing them.
The downside was that a Status screen couldn't necessarily explain everything the Bloodline provided.
Someone could awaken an ability without even realizing they possessed it.
Without experimentation, introspection, and a healthy willingness to do stupid shit in the name of science, entire aspects of a Bloodline could remain undiscovered.
For Jaime, that was particularly important.
Because his Bloodline was apparently too powerful for his body.
Even after his Stats had risen, even after the System strengthened him, his physical form still couldn't properly contain what had awakened inside his soul.
Essentially, his soul had outgrown his body.
And his body was scrambling to catch up.
Jaime discovered that fact over the course of a single hour.
His muscles continued subtly shifting beneath his skin. His bones felt denser. His senses sharpened in strange ways.
He could feel himself changing.
Growing.
Evolving.
Muscles developed in places he was fairly certain normal humans didn't even possess.
That was concerning enough.
Then he noticed the new organ.
"The fuck is that?"
Jaime stood in front of a mirror with one hand pressed against his upper abdomen.
He could see it.
Not through the mirror.
Inside himself.
The organ sat slightly above his stomach, currently no larger than a grape.
It pulsed slowly.
Scarlet.
Viridian.
Amethyst.
Three colors flowed across its surface like liquid light, blending together before separating again with every beat.
Jaime stared.
Then blinked.
Then stared harder.
"How the fuck am I doing this?"
He wasn't using Blood Control.
It wasn't one of his listed Talents.
He wasn't consciously activating any Skill whatsoever.
Yet somehow, Jaime could perceive the interior of his own body with enough clarity to watch individual changes occur.
For the next several minutes, he tried everything he could think of.
He closed one eye.
Nothing changed.
Held his breath.
Nothing.
Focused Spirit into his eyes.
Still nothing.
Turned Blood Control off and on.
Nothing.
Eventually, Jaime sighed.
"Alright. Fuck it. Mystery body vision goes in the 'figure this shit out later' pile."
That pile was getting increasingly large.
Once he accepted that he wasn't going to solve every mystery immediately, Jaime moved on to the much more entertaining question.
What could he actually *do?*
Blood Control quickly became his favorite ability.
It wasn't even close.
The Personal Subspace allowed him to create opponents based on things he could properly conceptualize, so Jaime generated copies of enhanced humans ranging from G- to F+.
They weren't real people.
They didn't possess genuine souls.
But for training purposes, they were convincing enough.
His first opponent was roughly his own level.
The simulated fighter lunged.
Jaime thought:
*Stop.*
The man froze.
Jaime frowned.
The simulated fighter's face reddened.
Veins bulged along his forehead.
Then he collapsed.
Dead.
Jaime stared at the body.
"Huh."
A thought dismissed the corpse.
He created another.
This time, instead of stopping the blood, Jaime pulled.
The result was considerably messier.
Every blood vessel in the simulated man's body ruptured simultaneously.
The body hit the ground before Jaime had moved a finger.
"Oh, that's fucked up."
He grinned.
"I like it."
Jaime continued experimenting.
He could increase the weight of someone's blood until their heart became incapable of pumping it.
He could force blood away from the brain.
He could make it clot.
Thin it.
Heat it.
Cool it.
Harden it.
Change its density.
His imagination seemed to be the primary limitation.
That realization led Jaime toward increasingly absurd experiments.
He hardened his own blood into blades.
Then armor.
Then threads thin enough to nearly disappear.
He forced droplets to float around his body like miniature satellites.
He turned blood corrosive enough to eat through metal.
He changed its consistency until it behaved more like gel.
Then glass.
Then something disturbingly close to liquid flame.
Jaime stared at the crimson substance hovering above his palm.
"This shit shouldn't be possible."
Yet it was.
More importantly, his blood didn't behave like normal biological matter anymore.
There was something else inside it.
Something Jaime could feel but couldn't properly define.
Spirituality.
Authority.
Maybe even intent.
His Blood Control didn't merely let him manipulate blood.
It allowed his blood to become something *more*.
That realization made Jaime considerably more cautious.
For every obvious ability, there were probably five others hidden beneath the surface.
And as his Bloodline continued transforming him, Jaime could feel those hidden possibilities growing stronger.
Less human.
That should probably have bothered him.
Instead, Jaime felt his heart beating faster as excitement churned in his chest. Violence was coming.
The First Wave. Full of whatever monsters waited outside.
Whatever new factions, races, and powers Earth had been thrown among.
Jaime knew he should have been afraid.
Part of him was.
But another part—
A growing part—
couldn't fucking wait.
---
The following days passed quickly.
By the third day, Jaime's soul and body finally reached something resembling equilibrium.
The constant physical changes slowed.
The strange new organ above his stomach stabilized.
His Bloodline stopped feeling like it was trying to rebuild him from the inside out.
And then, because apparently his life wasn't complicated enough, his Bloodline dumped a cultivation method directly into his brain.
Jaime sat motionless for almost a full minute afterward.
"You've gotta be fucking kidding me."
He had read cultivation novels.
Lots of them.
Cultivation methods were supposed to come from mysterious jade slips, ancient masters, hidden inheritances, dead gods, or conveniently placed caves.
His apparently came preinstalled.
That discovery made Jaime reconsider just how much his Status wasn't telling him.
From the remainder of Day Three through the end of Day Six, he performed what could only be described as a complete audit of his existence.
Every Skill, Talent, physical change, and instinct.
If he could test it safely, he tested it. If it couldn't be tested safely well...
He was in a space where the System could apparently revive him under certain circumstances.
So Jaime tested most of those too.
The final day was dedicated almost entirely to cultivation.
For twenty hours, Jaime ran the method engraved into his Bloodline.
The difference between fictional cultivation and the real thing became obvious almost immediately.
There was no convenient sensation of mystical energy obediently following imaginary meridians because some protagonist breathed the right way.
It was deeper than that.
His Spirit interacted with his Bloodline.
His Bloodline interacted with his physical body.
His body interacted with the strange energies surrounding him.
Each cycle seemed to make those three aspects of himself fit together more naturally.
His power became smoother.
More efficient.
More instinctive.
Jaime could tell the method contained vastly more information than what he currently understood.
Unfortunately, trying to access the deeper portions felt like somebody had thrown his brain into a blender.
After nearly blacking out the first time, he decided those sections could remain mysterious.
For now.
Eventually, Jaime sat cross-legged atop a floating platform of blood.
The crimson disk hovered several feet above the ground.
He had created it mostly because he could.
That and floating meditation platforms were objectively cooler than sitting on the floor.
Jaime's newest awakened ability occupied his attention.
He still couldn't properly explain what it did.
Some part of him understood.
His King's Instinct supplied vague impressions, but until the ability fully manifested, his mind and body didn't seem capable of properly comprehending it.
So Jaime followed his instincts.
His hands rested in his lap, palms facing upward.
Energy gathered around both.
His left hand ignited with scarlet light.
It was so intense that the floor beneath that side of his body became stained in bloody red illumination.
His right hand remained almost normal.
Almost.
Strange symbols flickered around his fingers.
They vanished and reappeared faster than Jaime could properly focus on them, each accompanied by momentary flashes of amethyst.
Symbols of Power.
That was what he had started calling them.
Not particularly creative.
But accurate enough.
Jaime slowly raised his hands.
Then brought them together.
His Spirit pressed down.
The scarlet energy resisted the amethyst symbols.
The symbols twisted around the blood-colored power.
Jaime gritted his teeth and forced both energies together with sheer will.
"Come on..."
Slowly, the two powers mixed.
Jaime shaped them.
Petals formed.
Then a stem.
A flower blossomed between his palms.
A rose.
Purplish crimson.
Pitch-black symbols covered its petals, each smaller than a grain of rice and shaped like tiny crowns.
The rose radiated something Jaime couldn't describe.
An invitation, a promise, and a challenge all in one.
His instincts told him what came next, and
Jaime opened his hands as the rose vanished into a place he could only vaguely sense.
He waited.
Five seconds.
Ten.
Thirty.
When nothing happened after a minute Jaime frowned.
"Don't tell me I burned all that energy for nothing."
He still had time to recover before his protection ended, but not enough to waste hours repeatedly attempting abilities he didn't understand.
Another few seconds passed.
Jaime sighed.
"Alright, guess—"
Something changed.
His head snapped upward.
He wasn't alone anymore.
A child floated several feet above him.
No.
Jaime narrowed his eyes.
Not a child.
Not human.
A figure shaped vaguely like a little girl hovered in the air, but her body appeared to be composed entirely of shadow.
Not darkness.
Shadow.
The distinction somehow mattered.
Her form absorbed the light around her, leaving little more than a child-sized silhouette.
Two eyes burned within that darkness.
Purple-black.
Like lanterns hanging in an endless night.
Jaime slowly stood.
"The fuck...?"
Before he could gather his thoughts, the spirit lifted one rippling arm.
Resting inside its shadowy grasp was the rose Jaime had created.
Information unlocked inside his mind.
Not words.
Understanding.
Jaime's eyes widened.
His first Familiar Summoning.
And apparently, for someone like him, this was a very fucking big deal.
The beings he contracted wouldn't merely fight beside him.
They would influence him and his entire lineage. Picking the first familiar was supposed to be made after years of thoughtful planning.
The irony of the situation almost made him chuckle. Of course it would take a damn apocalypse for him to take his future seriously.
Jaime stared at the spirit floating before him.
For all his complicated feelings about being called a king, one thing was painfully simple.
If he ever had children—
If he ever truly created the family and empire his abilities seemed to expect from him—
he wasn't going to give his bloodline anything less than the best foundation he could possibly provide.
Especially not in a place like the Well.
That thought made Jaime hesitate while the spirit continued to examine him impassively.
Then, apparently reaching some conclusion of her own, she spoke.
Her voice echoed through the Subspace.
Ageless and soft in a way that made Jaime distinctly aware of his own mortality.
"Young King. You have drawn my attention with your offering."
The spirit raised the rose.
"You have no understanding of the turmoil you caused by offering a Familiar's Bond backed by a Bloodline of such potency and potential."
Jaime stared at her.
Her voice hadn't changed in the slightest.
Somehow, he still got the distinct impression she had just called him a fucking idiot.