The instant Vikram probed the bloodline he had already assimilated, he felt it stir like a restless tide inside his marrow. It was the remnant of an Asura he had slain, something half-feral, half-divine.
Its name surfaced with a weight that pressed against his soul.
The Four-Armed Red Spawn.
A creature barely considered an Asura in its own Realm, a mere scion of a greater lineage.
The true progenitor, the root from which that spawn had splintered, was revealed in a name that bled power.
Varakthra, the Blood Sovereign.
But Vikram's gaze did not linger. He pressed deeper, his will probing past the recognition of names and lineages, into the abyss of ancestry where titles piled upon titles, and monstrous visages warped one into another until his mind threatened to fracture from their immensity.
Until...
He stopped.
Because at the end of all probing, at the furthest limit of what he should have been able to touch, a name pulsed.
[She of Endless Grasp]
And then...
Silence.
Vikram's chest tightened. He forgot how to breathe.
Because now… countless eyes bloomed in the void around him.
They rotated, twitched, and slithered through space like predators circling prey. Eyes of every size, each one embedded in the palm of an unseen hand, peered at him with an emotion he could not parse.
Pity.
Even here, in the blood-warped Realm of Asura, pity followed him. The irony carved a wound deeper than any blade.
But he did not dare relax. Not for a heartbeat. Because he understood. Whoever looked at him now was not something that could be counted, measured, or spoken of.
What he had touched… was something Beyond.
The eyes withdrew, one after another, until the void bent inward. Arms, black, endless, knotted with crimson veins, folded back toward a single throne carved from themselves.
And upon that throne sat a woman. Naked, slouched, utterly indifferent. Her body bore the shape of a woman, yes, but Vikram knew instinctively that this thing had long since abandoned such categories.
His thoughts halted there. He froze. His mind blanked. He could do nothing, think nothing, be nothing.
Then it happened.
That singular gaze fell upon him.
And every pore in his body felt it, her smirk.
The next breath, he was back in the Cauldron. The Black Hole and the Blood Essence no longer raged against one another; they flowed as if their discord had never existed.
The blood essence coursed, and Vikram began to burn with the searing brand of transformation. A tattoo imprinted across his flesh, arms and shoulders crawling with lines that coiled into an Asura of many arms locked in eternal war.
The more he stared, the more his soul recoiled. The tattoo seemed alive, as if each etched limb thirsted for battle. Just looking at it, he felt the whisper of slaughter searing his thoughts.
Then came the voice.
[You have successfully broken through.]
[Your Realm has reached Blood Refining Realm (Early).]
[Congratulations on obtaining the Divine Aspect of Endless Arms.]
"All this charade just to break through a minor Realm," Vikram thought as he exhaled turbid air, the heaviness in his chest easing only slightly.
"Would I even be able to imagine what it would take to break through a Major Realm?"
The question echoed in silence, unanswered, uncaring.
His gaze drifted to his right arm. Distaste clouded his face. He had never liked tattoos, never liked the idea of etching permanence onto his skin. But…
He clenched his fist.
Strength surged through him, raw and primal, as if something alive slumbered inside the flesh of his right arm. The tattoo's eyes stared back at him, each crimson pupil a perfect ruby, gleaming with a sentience that was not entirely his own.
Yet, it was his to command.
And it wasn't just his right arm. His entire body had transformed, refined, hardened. The arm merely bore the brunt of the Asura's inheritance, yet no imbalance lingered. Instead, it felt… natural. As if his body had always been this way, as if his right arm was always meant to hold this weight.
The oddity unsettled him, but he forced it aside. He had crossed the first hurdle. Imagining the wall that awaited him at the Peak of this Realm only made his head ache.
"Leave it. I'll cross that when I get there."
His thoughts strayed, unbidden, to She of Endless Grasp. He dared to say her name aloud in the silence, and the words didn't crush him. A connection had already formed, carved into him through the Divine Aspect. But what that connection meant… he had no idea.
She was no Asura. That much he understood.
Not a creature of flesh and blood. Not even a true biological existence.
She was a Unique Manifestation of Law, clothed in the mockery of form and drenched in sentience by some accident of the cosmos.
Why she appeared that way, why she lingered in such a state, Vikram couldn't know. He only knew that it was because of this quirk of her nature that he had glimpsed her at all, let alone walked away with a gift.
Any true Asura would have torn him apart, body and soul, for daring to probe their bloodline. That he still drew breath was not because of his strength, it was because that kind-hearted Lady had allowed it.
His lips curled at the irony. A blood-soaked entity of arms and slaughter, yet he owed her his life.
"Now, for this Divine Aspect…"
The thought tightened in his mind.
[She of Endless Grasp] held countless Divine Aspects, each an unfathomable shard of her Law. What Vikram carried was a diluted fragment, a mere shadow. Yet even so, it was a Divine Gift, one that no cultivator of his Realm should rightfully possess.