Aza'zel's gray coat fluttered as he slowly came to a stop before the thick blood membrane. He turned around, confronting the horde of Abominations, and slowly lifted his hood, proceeding to lower the blindfold cloth from his eyes to his neck.
Thin eyebrows creased ever-so-slightly, and his eyelashes flickered about as he opened his eyes.
A bloody crimson, much like the low moon of the Lower Abyss, reflected in his serene eyes. The once hollow eyes were now an ocean of red, still lacking the presence of pupils.
Nonetheless, Aza'zel desired to adjust his perception to his new pair of eyes in the throes of battle, under the stimulus of threats and danger.
Feeling a sting in his eyes, Aza'zel blinked a couple of times and squinted, narrowing the range of feedback from his spiritual waves. The limits of his vision slowly extended as his eyelids lifted, from a dozen meters to a couple hundred.
Multiple colors bounced back and forth as he attempted to synchronize his ocular vision to that of his spiritual perception, gradually accommodating colors and motion into his eyes.
This process went on for but a few seconds, and once Aza'zel's eyes gained a hint of focus, albeit accompanied by bits of pain, a horde of grotesquely shaped humanoid creatures greeted his first outlook on this vast world.
"Let's start from zero," Aza'zel said, withdrawing his bloodline energy to the limit whilst his spiritual energy, tainted by a hint of darkness, swelled and permeated through his body in finite waves.
His aura dwindled considerably, the bloody pulse of his source crystal dimming in contrast to the intertwined pulses of gray and black. With a swift motion of his arms, he disrobed from the gray coat and tossed it aside, a revealing patched linen shirt and matching cotton pants.
The martial forms from the first volume replayed in his mind, and with a light tap of his foot, Aza'zel rushed into the formation of Abominations with a wholesome, reckless abandon.
Neither Soulguider nor Exsanguinator was brought up as Aza'zel felt worried… worried he might misdistribute his energy and ruin the plans he built for his foundation. A three-dimensional evolution path was almost unheard of, and he couldn't take chances with leaving glaring gaps in his cultivation of the bloodline energy, the spiritual energy, and the ephemeral darkness he temporarily dubbed as abyssal energy.
Aza'zel was oblivious to the minuscule hints of black miasma seeping into his body as the abyssal energy circulated in tandem with the spiritual energy, seeming to take the evil miasma of the Evil Ground as sustenance, much like how the spiritual energy derived from the churning clouds of countless souls in Aza'zel's inner world.
Sharp claws and glaring fangs bounced off Aza'zels' punches and kicks. An open target was his back to the occasional ferocious abuse as deep cuts accumulated on his skin, easily tearing through whatever figments of resistance his source energy mounted in defense.
Slowly, ripples of emotions manifested in the clear, crimson eyes. These ripples were by no means metaphorical, as peering deep enough allowed one to witness the shifting faces of millions, struggling in the roiling waves of blood and madness.
Echoes of vengeance, evil, and a promise of violence sufficient to drive one insane weighed down on Aza'zel the more pain he suffered and the more cruel his retaliations became.
It took moments, but he was already breaking forms and disregarding the patterns of the martial technique. A jolt of pain woke Aza'zel from these fantasies as the abyssal energy tore into the spiritual energy, throwing off its monopoly over Aza'zel's thoughts just as his clarity of mind was about to be jeopardized.
Darkness condensed into an elliptical pupil, like a crevice in the deep and boundless bloody oceans that were his eyes, disturbing the near-perfect melding of evil. It was like a mirror reflection of the state in Aza'zel's inner world where a pitch-black throne suppressed both the land and the sky.
Clarity returned to the young boy's mind, together with waves of pain that he was numb to in his state of temporary insanity.
Aza'zel lifted his head and through his bloody, disheveled hair, a swarm of Abominations was swarming his way to the point where the later batches tore into their predecessors impatiently.
Inhaling deeply, Aza'zel shook off the numbness in his arms and stretched, his bones crackling and muscles throbbing. Without an ounce of hesitation, the young boy dove into the horde of Abominations once again.
And so, evil blood pearls twinkled, piling into a river on the floors of the dungeon…
In the first level of the abyss, Tu leaned lazily against an adjacent wall as she blew off a strand of hair that dangled from her bangs, swiftly tucking away the same strand behind her white ear while grumbling.
"It had been half a day since I ran into any Abominations," she whispered, lifting her hand as wisps of black miasma revolved intimately around her fingers, pulling at her hand in the direction of the deeper levels.
"I can't go further than the first level yet," Tu whispered to the life-like miasma, proceeding to touch the source crystal on her chest. "I'm too weak to risk it recklessly in the second level."
The swirl of miasma shuddered, seemingly coming to understand the girl's worries.
A moment later, Tu watched with incredulity as invisible ripples spread from the wisp of black miasma, followed by swarms of miasma creeping from the ground and walls all around as they drilled into her source crystal.
Her entire body shuddered and with the source crystal as a conduit, she felt boundless energy seep into her body while a vacant region surfaced in the source crystal, slowly transforming it from a one-color grade to a two-color grade under her disbelieving gaze.
Finding it laborious to breathe, Tu succumbed to exhaustion as she slid down to crouch on the floor, now more than ever glad about the mysterious disappearance of the Abominations.
With the foundation constructed from his bloodline energy, Aza'zel didn't find it difficult to stimulate more of his genes to construct genetic codes that slowly brought about new genetic sequences, overlapping with the previous ones.
More than once he felt his entire body elevate in state, tweaked and optimized.
The increments of power brought about by the change were little, but as they accumulated more and more, the three-dimensional power structure gradually fell into balance. This state of balance between the bloodline energy, spiritual energy, and abyssal energy brought unseen transformations to Aza'zel.
Pale and cold was his skin as previous injuries and clusters of congealed blood scraped off his body. His short, messy hair grew at a visible rate, brushing past his shoulders that were slowly growing broader in tandem with the increasing height of his stature.
His physique had already experienced an upgrade from the bloodline-oriented evolution of his genes in the past, but the profound two-fold evolution seemed to make up for the shortcomings and hidden ailments from the past.
It was unknown how many Abominations Aza'zel killed with his bare hands, but before he knew it, he was already performing the entirety of the thirty-six forms from the first volume of the martial technique to execute his maneuvers.
As he punched through the last Abomination and ripped out the evil blood pearl stationed at its abdomen, a dense ripple of source energy pulsed out from his body, repelling the stains of blood and rags of linen that once covered his upper body… His foundation was formally consolidated.