"Now, it’s finally time to reach 50 in all attributes and activate the Bloodline..."

Atlas spoke with certainty and calmness, though his voice came out slightly rough after everything that had happened so far that day.

He had seen those two monster bodies instead of the two assassins he now knew by name — Levin and Feras, names he had picked up from their own conversation while they were ’hidden’ and following him earlier. He concluded they had used some kind of ability to switch positions, the same kind of ability they had used twice already to appear and vanish in front of him during the fight.

After working that out, he had gone directly into the ruin.

He was angry. The chance to kill a Human had been right in front of him and it had slipped away at the last second. So he went through the outer chambers of the ruin with Spirit Instinct and Sense Nullification both active and killed every monster he came across without checking what type it was first. The pace of it left nothing standing long enough to react. The moment a monster turned its head toward the entrance, the head was already off.

Atlas used the scythe for each kill, though he noticed his handling of the weapon was still rough. He had spent most of his time fighting barehanded and the scythe was not something he had drilled with properly yet.

After each kill he pulled out the Codex, let the stylus take the blood, checked the Trait that came up, and moved on. That pattern repeated across three separate chambers.

Three chambers was unusual for this ruin compared to the last one. The previous Abyss-Rank ruin had only two outer chambers before the boss room. Ruins at the same rank didn’t always follow the same structure — the layout, number of chambers, and type of enemies inside varied from ruin to ruin even when the overall difficulty rating matched. The last one had been filled mostly with B-rank monsters with no real boss at the end. This one had three outer chambers and an A-rank boss waiting in the fourth and deepest one.

Atlas reached that chamber and killed the boss without making any noise beforehand.

He had wanted to properly test the scythe for a while now. He had been relying on his bare hands through most of his fights so far and this was the first real chance to use the weapon the way it was meant to be used.

The boss itself was large. Its body structure stood over nine feet tall, muscle stacked across a frame built for close combat. Atlas approached it invisibly through Sense Nullification, waited until he was directly in front of it without it sensing anything, then jumped and brought the scythe around in a horizontal swing aimed at the neck.

Shhhhkkk.

THUD.

The boss dropped.

Atlas didn’t bother checking the Trait right away. He was still too angry from the fight outside to care much in that moment. It was only after the Codex displayed the Trait that he paid attention, and what he noticed afterward was that the cut through the boss’s neck had been far too clean for something at A-rank. The scythe had gone through with almost no resistance.

He exhaled and put that observation aside for later.

His focus shifted back to the first page of the Codex. He set the scythe down beside him, took the stylus, and finally wrote all four attributes up to 50 at once.

Strength: 50 [ LOCKED ]

Stamina: 50 [ LOCKED ]

Agility: 50 [ LOCKED ]

Spirit: 50 [ LOCKED ]

The moment all four numbers were written, something moved through him. Not pain, instead a surge of strength running through every vein and every fiber of muscle at once, like wildfire spreading under his skin. He looked down at his bare feet and saw the veins beneath the skin bulging slightly from the sheer amount of force moving through them.

His attention shifted next to his breathing. It came out cleaner and clearer than before. Even in the dark, stale air of the ruin’s deepest chamber, the air felt sharp and clear going in and out of his lungs.

Then came the lightness in his body. At 40 his body had already felt lighter than it should for someone his size. Now, at 50, that lightness had nearly doubled. He stretched his right hand out, let the stylus float free from it, and closed and opened his palm twice. The lightness was still increasing as he did it, like the change hadn’t fully settled yet.

After that came Spirit.

The energy inside his Spirit veins expanded outward and the flow through each vein sped up noticeably. From the scale of that expansion alone Atlas could tell his Spirit reserve had roughly doubled compared to where it had been at 40. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

Doubled. That put him past A-rank by a significant margin, though he had no real frame of reference for what S-rank actually felt like in comparison, so for a moment he wondered if he might be approaching it. That assumption was not something he could confirm one way or another, and he had no way of knowing how far off it actually was.

He set that thought aside and turned back to the Codex.

The Bloodline page had changed. The note beneath it now read differently.

[ Note: User must press the Bloodline name with the Sanguis Stylus to activate it. ]

Above that:

[ Osmo ??? - Rank ??? ]

Atlas didn’t hesitate. He picked up the stylus and pressed it lightly against the name.

The moment the tip touched the page, the Codex glitched. The same kind of glitch that had happened when his Strength first jumped to 9 without warning.

Then his body locked.

He couldn’t move. He tried to turn his head and couldn’t. His entire body felt sealed shut from the inside, like every joint and muscle had stopped responding to him at the same time.

’What is happening?’

He tried again. Nothing moved.

His eyes dropped to the Codex page in front of him, the only thing he could still see clearly.

’It’s doing something that I don’t understand again? Why would it lock me down like this? And it feels like the lock is coming from inside me, not from outside.’

There was no pain anywhere in his body. Just a process running through him, changing something from the inside. His muscles felt like they were burning for a moment, then the burning shifted into cold just as suddenly.

Atlas could only stare at the Codex page where the name was carving itself in, the same way his attribute numbers had carved themselves in earlier.

He could feel something happening across his whole body even though he couldn’t see it directly. If he had been able to move his eyes down toward his hands and feet, he would have seen the skin there shifting toward a shade of white — not pure white, but something closer to a shadowy, muted white that didn’t look like normal skin discoloration.

The burning and cold sensation continued after that. Minutes passed. Then hours.

It was only after a full three hours that the sensation finally started fading and Atlas felt control over his body return.

The moment he could move again, new text had appeared beneath the Bloodline name.

[ Osmo ??? - Rank A - Activated ]

[ Inherent Inscription: Rei-Kokuin { 零刻印 } — Zero Inscription ]

Atlas’s mouth parted. Shock first, then confusion, and underneath both of those something that felt strangely familiar, like he was looking at something he should recognize but couldn’t place.

He spoke without deciding to.

"零刻印."

The moment the sound left his mouth he froze completely.

He had spoken in Kanji!!

His eyes went wide with disbelief and confusion at what had just come out of his own mouth.