Days fed into weeks, which quickly turned into months. Every day, Jugram experimented with his quirk, but it wasn't long before there wasn't much else to learn. Instead, he spent more and more time with Blood Manipulation, gradually adjusting to his grandfather's quirk. It didn't help much, even when absorbing the experiences his grandfather had gained throughout his entire life alongside the quirk itself.
Despite the general acceptance of quirk use in the village and surrounding areas, blood manipulation had never been of much use to his grandfather. The most he had done was enhance his body and stop wounds from bleeding. Those experiences were good guides on how to use the quirk at a basic level, but Jugram knew that he could push the power much further.
He had seen enough media that included some form of blood manipulation that dozens of ideas were floating around his head about possible uses of the quirk. However, he quickly reached the barrier between imagining techniques and manifesting them into reality. It also didn't help that he was limited in a few key ways.
Firstly, he could only borrow his grandfather's quirk for an hour or two daily. While the old man may posture and make excuses all he liked, Jugram knew that he didn't like the feeling of being without his quirk. It was unfortunate for training purposes, but it also acted as somewhat of a solution to the second problem with blood manipulation.
Namely, there just isn't enough blood in the human body to mess around with freely. This was one of the reasons his grandfather had never trained the ability to any significant degree. Unlike the quirk Blood Control held by Vlad King, blood manipulation has no innate protections against blood loss in the user.
After two or three techniques that required removing blood from his body, Jugram found himself extremely faint and on the verge of collapse. Once he reached this state and returned the quirk to his grandfather, it took the remained of the day and a whole night of rest to recover adequately to use the quirk again the next day.
One workaround for this limitation was using blood manipulation internally as an enhancement, but compared to strength-enhancing quirks, the boost was never that significant.
Jugram figured that to elevate the quirk to a position where it would be consistently practical would require either a quirk that allows him to regenerate or store his blood somehow. The former would be preferable, but teleportation and regeneration quirks are among the rarest in the world. While a storage quirk would probably be less of a hassle to locate, that didn't mean it would be easy.
The problem with Exchange, when compared to All for One, is the fact that his quirk requires consent and a trade to take place instead of outright taking the ability. Most people are deeply attached to their quirk unless it somehow hinders them or causes them to be shunned by society. Without money or other quirks to barter with, gaining any additional quirks would be hard.
Jugram pondered all this while idly rotating a blood ball above his hand, sitting on a stump near his hideout. He worked to keep the orb turning even with his attention focused primarily on his thoughts. The crimson sphere undulated softly, looking like some sort of deep-sea entity as he controlled it.
With a thought, the orb compressed down as much as he could force it to. Then, he clasped his hands around the orb, pointing his hand toward a nearby post that he had Yuto drive into the ground with his enhanced strength.
"Piercing Blood," Jugram whispered.
The concentrated stream of blood shot out, but not in the way he had hoped. There was not enough pressure behind the attack, so it didn't even make it to the post, much less punch through it.
The blood froze in midair as he commanded it to stop. Then, in a small crimson tide, the blood rushed back to his palm. After a moment, there was a new orb hovering above his palm. With an effort of will, the orb dissolved, and the blood streamed down to spread over his fist. Yet, even when commanded, the blood could not seep back into his body to replenish his internal reserve through the cut it had come from.
'It would make training one million times easier if I could learn how to let the blood return to my bloodstream.' Jugram thought with a sigh. Typically, it would be a terrible idea to inject blood that had been out in the open back into your body. However, blood manipulation allowed its user to purify and repair their blood cells, making it feasible.
Despite the seemingly uncomplicated way to reuse blood, whenever he tried to push the blood back in through the wound he had opened to release it, the process always failed. He only ended up with an external coating of blood that he could harden and shape at will but not force back into his body.
Just as Jugram was considering what to do next, he heard the sound of branches snapping nearby. He turned, coating both hands with blood, then hardening them instinctually. He quickly hid this fact as he saw that it was only Yuto. The boy was walking toward him with a queasy look and two sloshing buckets in either hand. Each bucket was taller than him and completely full, which made the scene look comical, but Yuto's strength was no joke.
All thoughts of comedy quickly left Jugram's head as he sensed what was in the buckets before he saw or smelled its contents. He raised his hand and watched a crimson river rise from the two buckets, intertwining in the air to form a large mass that was probably enough to fill a bathtub. The sick look on Yuto's face only worsened as he placed the buckets nearby, pulling out two tarps afterward and tossing them next to the buckets.
"Yo..your Grandfather asked my...my family," He began, gagging as he watched the swirling mass of dark blood, "He asked us to send over some blood for you to practice with."
"Thanks, Yuto," Jugram called cheerily, but the other boy was already dashing away, making retching sounds.
With a chuckle, Jugram turned back to his new prize. Instinctually he could tell that it was the blood of cows, but he was more interested to know that he could control it in the first place. He had been unsure about manipulating blood besides his own. From his Grandfather's brief experiments over half a century ago, the old man concluded that he couldn't control another living being's blood.
'The key must be that manipulating blood after a creature or person has died is fair game.' he thought with a nod.
Before anything else, he waved, splitting the blood into small streams filling the two buckets. It would be a shame to lose all that blood from a simple lapse of mental focus. This much blood could last him days or even weeks if he cared for it properly. No longer would he have to deal with going nearly anemic every time he practiced blood manipulation.
As time passed and the sky started to darken, Jugram put himself into practice. He focused on condensing the blood as much as possible and fine control to try and facilitate the development of techniques that he knew he could achieve with just a little bit more control and power.
Stream after stream of blood launched toward the post, only to get called back as it inevitably fell short. Yet, being able to launch so many attacks in short succession showed him what he had been missing from previous attempts that would have taken months to learn if he could only launch a few attacks per day.
By the time it was approaching complete darkness, with the sun fully submerged below the horizon, he had finally managed to launch an attack that grazed the post and even chipped off a small piece of wood. Filled with elation, it was no wonder that Jugram missed the figure standing at the edge of the dark clearing that was his training field. It stood in the deepest shadows of the yard, watching the young boy practice.
The figure's eyes flashed at the thick stench of animal blood in the clearing. So it waited and watched as the young boy dumped the blood he had not spilled on failed attempts to keep it from hitting the ground back into the buckets before covering them with a tarp.
"Damn, I'm going to be so late." the boy said, rushing back through the woods, unaware of the silent shadow stalking him.
At one point, the shadow came so close that its breath could almost be felt on the young boy's neck, who was none the wiser, but it pulled back at the lights from the small town shone through the trees before the boy, and a man's voice called out to scold the boy.
Reluctantly, the shadow pulled back, and the boy walked out of the dark forest, narrowly avoiding death without even realizing it. Striking in the dead of night would be better anyway. Even while struggling under the weight of a screaming mind, the shadow knew that much, to be sure.