Age of Adepts

Greem propped up his chin with his hand. He silently lamented as he took a good look at Billis.

Bloodline adepts were at a tremendous advantage in the first half of an adept’s journey. They were more powerful in combat and did not have to so rigorously gather and obtain arcane knowledge as the other adepts had to. Among adepts of the same grade, bloodline adepts had the advantages of both body-refining adepts and elementium adepts, without any of their weaknesses. They were always formidable combatants.

However, should they run into their bloodline limit, they would face down a problem with no solution!

The nature of bloodline adepts was to draw upon and achieve the terrifying power of powerful ancient creatures by repeatedly refining their bloodline. Though there were many adepts with various bloodlines out there, not every creature in existence could continue evolving and improving without limit.

Most bloodline adepts could only try their best to approach the fearsome might of ancient magical creatures, often falling short due to pollution and impurities in their bloodline.

With tens of thousands of years between them, the adepts of the present could only manifest a portion of their origin creature’s ability. The bloodline of a person who was able to reach Fourth or Fifth Grade with the bloodline of a Sixth Grade ancient creature would be considered extremely pure already.

There were only two ways if the adept wanted to fully obtain that ancient magical creature’s power and reach its peak of Sixth Grade. They could either travel the worlds in search of pureblood descendants of that magical creature, or they could hide in their magical laboratories, spending day after day attempting to refine their bloodline and genetic makeup further.

There were no other options for improving further!

Changing one’s bloodline? Sure, but that would only pose a more significant problem. If you attempted to replace your bloodline with a superior one, the backlash and corruption between the two different bloodlines would be a massive issue that you would have to resolve as quickly as possible.

Past records of the World of Adepts showed that the first bloodline replacement would not have affected an adept’s origin power too severely. However, the difficulty of bloodline replacement would increase exponentially from the second time onwards. The backlash was so severe that it would even damage the soul origin.

Moreover, even in the present era, the adepts had yet to discover a ‘perfect’ method of bloodline replacement. Every time an adept conducted a bloodline replacement, the remnants of the old bloodline would always cause severe ‘pollution’ in the new one. That would affect the absorption of the new bloodline with the host’s body and soul.

The more often bloodline replacement was done, the more ‘pollutants’ would be left behind.

Should the accumulated factors of instability exceed the physical limits of the body, the body itself would collapse and disintegrate.

It was precisely the immense difficulty of bloodline replacement that pushed so many adepts towards the compromise of bloodline modification instead. Instead of entirely replacing their bloodline, they would extract powerful abilities from certain desired bloodlines and weave it into their own in a patchwork fashion. In doing so, they created a sort of ‘mixed’ bloodline.

Such bloodline modifications did indeed have lower risks and difficulty, but they also resulted in more severe bloodline pollution!

Ambitious individuals determined to rise to greater heights would never employ such a method to improve themselves. After all, a corrupted bloodline would make advancement much more difficult. If the corruption exceeded a certain degree, the consequences would be severe. Losing the chance to advance was only the least of it. The most severe cases of corruption often turned the adepts into inhuman monsters, unable to communicate and socialize with other adepts.

The number of bloodline adepts was rising steadily within the Crimson Clan with every passing day.

Their grades were still low, and there was still a long way before any of them even came into contact with their bloodline limits. None of them currently faced any pressing issues. However, bloodline adepts of higher grades would probably be staring this problem in the face. These were people like Billis and Mary.

If the clan could not come up with an effective solution to this issue, these high-grade adepts were likely to leave and break away from the clan. They would find ways to join the three major adept organizations for the sake of their future advancement.

After all, the three major adept organizations might just have the solution to a problem that an individual adept clan could not solve.

Thus, when Billis brought up this topic, Greem finally realized how much the Crimson Clan’s research on bloodline was lagging. They lacked in both materials and knowledge.

If this situation were allowed to persist, the trouble that the bloodline limit posed to the clan’s power would become increasingly evident as more and more clan adepts advance to higher grades.

It was time to establish a bloodline research office. Some projects related to bloodline also had to be put into motion as soon as possible, and Greem had to find ways to expand the clan’s bloodline material inventory.

After pacifying Billis with a few words, Greem collected a large amount of insect blood, carapace, and muscle fiber from his body. In the end, when Greem brought up the idea of helping him think of a way to resolve the bloodline limit, Billis even gritted his teeth and offered up a drop of origin blood from the Queen Bug itself.

If it hadn’t been because Billis truly couldn’t resolve his bloodline limit, it would be impossible to obtain such samples and data, even if Billis were killed. After all, Billis was a powerful intermediate-grade adept in his own right now. Exposing his most private data and secrets to another adept was an extraordinarily bold and risky move.

If Greem had any ill-intent towards him, he would be able to gain total control over him with all the materials he had collected.

After sending Billis away, Greem brooded in silence for a moment. Finally, he gave the Chip a new mission.

“Chip, prepare to construct the clan’s bloodline database given the data and information that we currently possess.”

[Beep. Mission accepted. Data library being constructed and completed.]

After a long, noisy sequence of searching and organizing data, a preliminary version of the bloodline database’s table of contents projected into Greem’s mind.

[Beep. Data library constructed. Currently, the data library has gathered, organized, and completed documentation on the following unique branches of bloodline systems: Dragon Bloodline, Vampire Bloodline, Starbeast Bloodline, Mechanical Adept Bloodline, Mutated Insect Bloodline, Giant Serpent Bloodline, Elf Bloodline, Orc Bloodline, Holy Light Bloodline, Sporelok Bloodline......]

Greem slowly looked through this preliminary version of the data library and couldn’t help but be surprised.

He always found ways of collecting and organizing knowledge on the arcane, on magical creatures, and on native resources, in every region and plane he traveled to. Somehow, in the past two hundred years, he had come into contact and documented so many unique bloodlines.

The Chip even labeled the degree of completion for the information collected on each unique bloodline.

Whenever a bloodline information’s degree of completion reached 100%, it would mean that that bloodline no longer held any secrets for Greem. With sufficient materials and experimental subjects, Greem would be able to conduct bloodline modifications and modulations on that bloodline easily.

In some extreme cases, Greem might even be able to create some ‘artificial bloodlines’!

These artificial bloodlines might be artificially constructed, but with the fine and detailed operations of the Chip, the host of the artificial bloodline would still have power and ability equal to the actual bloodline. The only drawback would be the intensity of the operation itself. The process would cause the host of the artificial bloodline to experience a ‘small’ loss in lifespan and future potential.

However, for most low-grade adepts, a little loss in their life force was nothing, as long as they could obtain greater innate abilities and more power in combat!

Greem fell into silence when he looked at the catalog of bloodlines.

Of all the unique bloodlines, only the holy light bloodline and the elf bloodline had a higher degree of completion.

Greem estimated that this was related to the grade of holy knights and elves he had slaughtered and gathered.

Take the holy light bloodline, for example. Greem had killed dozens of Third Grade Gold Knights in the Henvic Plane while robbing the grave and remains of a Fourth Grade Holy Knight. He had managed to gather the essential data on all levels of holy knights, from First to Fourth Grade.

If he had the opportunity to adequately research the remains of the Fourth Grade holy knight in his storage ring, he should have no problem reaching 100% completion for the information on the holy light bloodline.

Meanwhile, the elf bloodline’s high degree of completion was purely due to his wild slaughter in Lance!

For the sake of helping Alice obtain the pseudo-artifact, Staff of Divination, Greem and his party had slaughtered tens of thousands of elves, spanning every single profession of their race. If it weren’t due to his lack of information on Fourth Grade elves, the elf bloodline completion rate would also be shockingly high.

Apart from these two bloodlines, his data library’s completion of the giant serpent bloodline and the vampire bloodline was also nearly at 50%.

Greem had killed two serpentine adepts as of now and had obtained the valuable serpentine bloodline recreation potions and the bloodline purification potions. It was due to this that the serpentine bloodline’s completion rate was so high.

Meanwhile, the vampire bloodline was largely complete due to Mary.

After all these years with Mary, Greem had plenty of research on vampires of First to Third Grade. Yet, that had only barely been enough to achieve 50% completion on the data library.

Mary was now a pureblood vampire. Given the current circumstances, advancing to Fourth Grade shouldn’t be difficult for her. However, she had no idea what her path after Fourth Grade looked like. Without Greem’s help, it would be nearly impossible for Mary to find her own way, given her talent as an adept and a vampire!

Moreover, Greem himself had now turned into a bloodline adept. His bloodline was a very rare and valuable one– the starbeast bloodline.

The advantage of this bloodline was its unique Chaos Physique, which allowed Greem to directly absorb a portion of chaotic magic energy for his own use. Moreover, in the records of the World of Adepts, starbeasts were powerful chaos creatures that could reach up to Eighth Grade.

Even if the starbeast bloodline that Greem had assimilated were slightly inferior, he would not face the bloodline limit until he reached Seventh Grade.

As such, Greem now walked two paths: that of a bloodline adept, and that of an elementium adept.

The path of a bloodline adept would provide him with a sturdy body and formidable bloodline abilities. In contrast, the path of an elementium adept allowed him to possess unparalleled elementium might.

Both of these paths were worth a lifetime of investment and cultivation for an adept. Now that Greem wanted to walk down both tracks, the number of rare resources he would have to expend and the knowledge he would have to gather would be, at the very minimum, twice that of his peers.

This tremendous amount of resources and knowledge required would be enough to cause a headache for most adepts!