Chapter 84: The Second Doctrine III
He uttered the word calmly, and blue-gold flas erupted all around him!
The sacred fire wrapped around his body and sank inward, plunging through flesh and seeking the source of his depletion. The flas burned into his bones and marrow with heat that was not quite heat, churning through the structures that produced his blood with intensity that bordered on violence!
And ridiculously, in the next mont...
Damian felt his body begin to fill up with blood.
Nonsensically.
Impossibly!
As if these flas that ca from a single letter of the Primordial Tongue exponentially multiplied how rapidly he produced blood. His marrows churned with activity that exceeded anything natural, generating crimson cells at rates that should have been impossible, flooding his vessels with life that he had just been draining away.
And because he was continuing to splash rivers of it and controlling it to exit his body while the flas of the Primordial Tongue burned on him, he released even more gushing torrents of blood.
They rapidly beca replenished while he was doing so.
It ant that he was going much faster now.
His actions had caught the eyes of many!
Tribesn stopped their work to stare with expressions of awe and terror. So fell to their knees. Others made signs against evil spirits that their grandmothers had taught them!
Oh, Tokoloshe!
Even Uncle Adam, who had been discussing sothing with Grandmother Essun, ca rushing out to see what the commotion was about.
When he saw the scene, his weathered face turned ashen.
"YOUNG LUGAL!"
Uncle Adam roared out such words and truly woke up the entire tribe.
He was horrified.
He saw his Young Lugal surrounded by blue flas, blood pouring from his body in quantities that should have killed him ten tis over, painting the defensive walls with crimson that glowed with an inner blue light.
It looked like a sacrifice.
It looked like death!
Monts later, even the figure of Serala ca out of her hut.
She had to stop at the door when she saw the unbelievable scene outside.
The young man who had saved her was wreathed in flas that matched the ones she rembered from her healing. He was bleeding freely, voluntarily, coating the walls of this primitive tribe with his own essence while power surged around him in concentrations that made her wing-shaped pupils pulse.
What...was he doing?
What in the na of the Ancestors was he doing?
---
But Damian didn’t focus on any of this.
The sensation that he felt right now was unfathomable.
He had rapidly circled the entire village and covered the entire defensive wall that had been put up. Only the portion where the two sections of wall were supposed to connect remained unpainted, the gap where logs had not yet been placed.
But even so, the entirety of the defensive wall that he now covered in his blood...
He could sense himself throughout it.
And truly, he was throughout this wall!
He still felt his blood drenched within it. Every log. Every gap. Every fiber of wood that had absorbed what he offered. It was all connected to him now through threads of crimson and blue that pulsed with his heartbeat.
At this mont, he breathed heavily with excitent.
He was on the cusp of sothing grand.
He sat down in a ditative position, crossing his legs beneath him and placing his palms upon his knees. The wound on his hand had already sealed, the flesh knitting together as the flas of the Primordial Tongue finished their work.
And he began the process of drawing in Mana.
Into his body.
And really, into his blood.
Into the blood that was no longer just inside him, but spread across an entire wall surrounding the tribe.
The phenonon that followed was shocking.
From the surrounding lands and stones and skies, Mana began to surge like a storm awakening. The ambient power that perated this region, drawn by the concentration near the Roaring Stone Mountain, suddenly had a new destination.
It started flowing toward Damian.
And toward the wall that he had painted with his blood.
The Tribesn who had been watching felt it imdiately. The air grew thick. The ground seed to hum. Even those without any cultivation sense could tell that sothing massive was happening, could feel the pressure of forces beyond their comprehension gathering in their humble village.
Mana beca drawn into the wall itself.
The logs began to glow brighter, their crimson and blue luminescence intensifying as power flooded into the blood that saturated their fibers. The wood creaked and groaned as it absorbed energies that were changing its fundantal nature.
...!
When Damian started this, he felt his brain buzzing.
His consciousness was nowhere near strong enough to have been spread across such a wide region. And for him to then be pulling Mana across all of these spread-out parts of himself simultaneously...
The strain was imnse.
It felt like his mind was being stretched thin, pulled in a hundred directions at once, forced to maintain awareness of things that should have been beyond any individual’s capacity to perceive.
But the mont he felt that strain on his consciousness...
"PERSEVERE!"
He roared out grandly, and in the next mont, a scene unfolded that nobody in the tribe would ever forget.
Blue flas erupted from him.
But they didn’t just erupt from his body.
They erupted within his blood.
The blood that was entrenched deep into the defensive wall.
All around the periter of the Purple Stone Tribe, the logs that had been painted with Damian’s essence suddenly ignited with sacred fire. Blue flas danced across their surfaces, sank into their grain, transford them from the inside out.
Terrifying levels of Mana filled the defensive wall.
And shockingly...
The entire tribe, which had almost been surrounded by this barrier, now found itself enclosed within a wall of blue fire.
The flas burned without heat, illuminating everything with light that was sohow comforting rather than threatening. The Tribesn who had been watching stumbled backward, shielding their eyes, falling to their knees in awe at what they were witnessing.
And within those flas, the logs that composed the wall...
DUM!
They began to pulse.
As if they had a life of their own.
And they truly had Damian’s blood within them. His essence. His connection. At this mont, they shockingly began to transform in ways that wood should never transform.
They grew.
They beca thicker.
They expanded, their fibers multiplying and densifying as Mana flooded through them without restraint. They entrenched themselves deeper into the Lands of Stone, roots that had been severed years ago sohow regenerating and plunging into lands that accepted them as if they had always belonged there.
Even the area that did not have coverage...
The gap where the wall had not yet been completed...
Those in the tribe saw a ridiculous scene of the defensive wall was extending on its own.
But it was really growing.
Lengthening!
The logs at the edges of the gap stretched outward, their ends reaching toward each other like hands seeking to clasp. New growth sprouted from old wood, branches and fibers weaving together to fill the space that had been empty monts before.
The area that was not closed off beca closed off seconds later.
BOOM!
The entire tribe beca enclosed.
The defensive wall surrounded them completely now, a barrier that had not existed in its current form until this very mont. And it was alive. It burned with vibrant Mana that pulsed with Damian’s heartbeat. It had grown thick and high, its logs now closer to small trees in their dinsions.
It was no longer just a wall.
It was an extension of Damian himself.
...!
"Haha..."
Damian couldn’t help but laugh as he looked at this.
His body trembled with exhaustion. His consciousness felt stretched thin. His blood had been drained and replenished and drained again in cycles that should have killed any normal man.
But he had done it.
He had found the pathway toward what he would consider his Second Doctrine!
He would not just cultivate his body internally.
He would spread himself to cultivate and elevate things externally and still keep them part of his power!
The First Doctrine was Primordial Convergence, the simultaneous cultivation of all internal systems.
And the Second Doctrine...
He looked at the walls that now surrounded the tribe, walls that pulsed with his blood and burned with his flas and grew with his Mana.
The Second Doctrine would be the extension of self beyond the boundaries of flesh.
Why contain power within one body when it could spread across the very Lands of Stone?
Why be limited to personal strength when the environnt itself could beco a weapon?
Why stand alone against armies when the ground beneath their feet could rise up to fight alongside him?
He didn’t have a na for it yet.
But he had the beginning.
And in the Lands of Stone, beginnings were everything!
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