The next day, two people were in the courtyard early in the morning.
One of them was Liu Ying, who was doing her daily round of training, punching and kicking the air repeatedly to practice her martial arts.
The other person was Bloed.
Bloed was seated on the ground, reading the small booklet he received last night with a focused expression.
The booklet was rather small, enough that it could be read completely in fifteen minutes at most. But Bloed had been reading it for almost two hours.
In fact, he had re-read it ten times already.
With Bloed's photographic memory, such action was pointless. But the fact that he was doing it despite that showed how much he was surprised by the contents of the booklet.
"Is the technique inside that difficult to understand?" Liu Ying asked curiously after a short pause in his training.
Bloed raised his eyes briefly to glance at Liu Ying before going back to read the book again.
"… Not too difficult… It's just that the concept behind this technique is pretty messy… It's as though the person that wrote the booklet was not exactly sure about how the technique worked exactly."
That was the problem Bloed was facing right now.
[King's Aura], as the name indicated, was a technique related to aura or intent. It worked by using your will to suppress the fighting strength of your enemies.
That in itself was not too strange. Bloed knew about the concept of aura; and actually, most practitioners could more-or-less use it. Bloed himself could use aura if he wanted.
In fact, killing intent was a kind of aura.
But until now, Bloed only took aura as a way to express his fighting intent. Its effect in battle was pretty negligible.
King's Aura, however, took the concept of aura or fighting intent one step beyond.
According to the booklet, using King's Aura allowed you to give shape to your fighting will, turning it into a powerful suppressive force against your opponent.
It was very similar to the concept of ��Territory' or 'Domain'. However, King's Aura did not enhance the strength of the user, only suppressed the enemy.
The problem was that the explanations on the booklet about how to achieve that were a bit messy and vague.
For example, when it talked about how to give shape to your aura, it only said that you must focus your will on a point until turning it into something real.
It, however, did not explain anything else.
After reading that, Bloed had an idea about why nobody had practiced this technique in the last one hundred years.
"Let me see it." Liu Ying said, snuggling beside Bloed and reading the booklet together with him.
When she finished reading it, her expression was baffled.
"What kind of technique is it? I don't think it's possible to practice."
Bloed smiled wryly. "It's just a bit complex."
"A bit complex? How are you supposed to make your will real? Bloed, I think the king scammed you."
"… I don't think that someone like the king will try to scam someone like me." Bloed looked at Liu Ying between laughter and tears. "Don't worry, even although it seems a bit complicated, I think I got the gist of it. I'll probably be able to grasp it with a bit of practice."
"Really?" Liu Ying looked at Bloed with an expression of incredulity. "If you say so… You should not force yourself too much, though. It's just a technique. You are already strong enough as you are now."
"Don't worry, I know my limits."
Just as Bloed told Liu Ying, he had already got the gist of the technique and was pretty confident in mastering it.
In fact, half an hour after that, he started to try focusing his will on a point to turn it real.
Unfortunately, he was interrupted by Eve before he could achieve anything worthwhile.
"Did you bring them?" Bloed asked when he saw the golden-haired fox girl in front of him.
"Let's go to your laboratory."
Bloed nodded and followed after Eve, going towards his laboratory.
Several beastmen soldiers were standing in front of his laboratory with five chained people behind them, two of them were humans and three were beastmen.
"Are they the ones?" Bloed asked.
Eve nodded emotionlessly. "Just as you asked, five criminals who are condemned to death."
"They deserve to die, right?"
"... Of these five, one of them is a traitor that killed his lord's family, including five children, another one is a rapist, and the last three belonged to a notorious band of bandits famous for destroying three villages. What do you think?"
Bloed nodded once, indicating he understood.
Yes, the five chained people were the additional reward Eve promised to Bloed.
They were to be used as test subjects.
Lately, Bloed had hit a bottleneck in his research about the body enhancement's virus. No matter how much he tried, he had been unable to progress any further beyond a certain point.
Thus, he decided it was time to take his research one step further.
He decided to test the virus in people.
Bloed could not deny that he felt a bit iffy about experimenting in living people, mainly because he knew that the result of injecting them with the unfinished virus was most likely death. However, he decided to continue with the experiments regardless.
Plus, the people he was going to experiment on were nefarious criminals condemned to death. Bloed did not feel any guilt killing people like them.
Fortunately, Eve did not find his request strange. In fact, Bloed later learned that using this kind of criminal for experiments was not unusual or frowned upon, and many mages did similar things.
Of course, these mages were usually powerful demigods, and if they were caught using innocent people in their experiments, they would be branded as criminals.
"Are these people enough?" Eve asked with a deadpan look. "If you need more, you only need to ask."
"… I will tell you after a few days. Thank you anyway."
"It's alright. This small favor is nothing compared to the help you gave us."
Bloed smiled wryly and nodded. He then asked the soldiers to move the criminals inside his laboratory.
The five criminals were chained with mana suppressing chains, making them of using mana, so Bloed did not need to worry about them escaping or attacking him. Plus, the strongest of them was just a C-Rank practitioner. Even without the chains, Bloed could kill them easily.
When the five criminals entered the laboratory, Bloed could see expressions of fear and terror in their faces. They seemed to know what was going to happen to them.
Some of them even begged him to spare their lives.
After seeing that, Bloed wondered briefly if what he was doing was right. However, he quickly got rid of these thoughts.
He already knew he needed to do this when he decided to start creating the virus. He was not going to get cold feet now.
If he wanted to become stronger, if he wanted to make his mother's dream reality, he needed to do this.
Thus, he took a sample of the virus and injected it into one of the prisoners.
One second later, the laboratory was filled with screams of pain.
...
P4TRE0N: patr-eon.com/aidnovels