Dark cracks spread across his arms, as his talent, Devouring Paragon activated one more. Though this time something strange was happening, instead of extracting and refining the energy from The Flameberry Butterfly, it was separating bloodline essence itself.
Slowly but surely, tiny microscopic drops of golden blood accumulated in front of him, forming a tiny ball the size of a popcorn kernel.
"So this is how the Monarch Butterfly's Bloodline Essence looks like." Even in his previous life, the only Monarch Butterfly he had ever encountered rivaled his own strength. They were called the Rulers of Poison, Mist and Miasma as well as the Best Healers because they could synthesize any poison or elixir if they had the ingredients for them.
He slowly extended his finger touching the blood droplet, as his body suddenly under went humongous pressure.
The pressure hit like a collapsing mountain.
Daniel's teeth clenched as his knees nearly buckled beneath him. Every meridian in his body screamed in protest, his mana pathways constricting as though something vast and ancient was being forced through channels far too narrow to contain it.
The golden droplet had vanished the moment his finger made contact — absorbed instantly, not into his skin, but deeper. Into something beneath skin and bone and mana. Into whatever nameless place Devouring Paragon called home.
"Daniel." Lucas was at his side in an instant, hand gripping his shoulder. "What happened? What did you do?"
He couldn't answer immediately. His jaw was locked. His vision had narrowed to a single burning point of gold somewhere behind his eyes.
The Flameberry Butterfly had gone utterly still beside him. Her scarlet eyes were fixed on his arms, where the dark cracks of Devouring Paragon still spider-webbed across his skin. Her gaze was sharp, reading, calculating — and then something shifted in her expression. Something that moved beyond surprise into a territory that looked, for just a moment, disturbingly close to awe.
"That talent," she said slowly. "What is it."
Daniel didn't answer her either.
Because right now, every fragment of his awareness had been pulled inward.
---
Inside his origin vein, something extraordinary was happening.
The first origin vein resembled a constellation map suspended in darkness — a long, gossamer thread of luminous energy with stars positioned along its length. Six of those stars burned with steady light, each one a milestone already claimed, already conquered. The seventh star sat dark at the end of the thread, cold and waiting as it had been since his sixth breakthrough a week ago.
Now it was no longer cold.
The golden essence moved through him like a river that had been waiting for permission. It didn't overwhelm nor did it crash. It moved with a kind of ancient, unhurried certainty, threading itself through his mana pathways with a precision that felt almost deliberate — as though it knew exactly where it was going and had simply been waiting for him to get out of its way.
The Monarch Butterfly bloodline, even in this microscopic quantity, carried within it the memory of every evolution its lineage had ever survived. Daniel could feel it distantly, the way one feels heat through a wall — not burning, just present.
The synthesis of poisons and antidotes and elixirs layered within each other like sediment, thousands of years of refinement compressed into something smaller than a grain of rice. And all of it was moving toward the seventh star.
The darkness around that final point on the constellation began to crack. Not violently — not the way the butterfly's wings had cracked under the pressure of a failed evolution. This was different. This was the cracking of a shell from the inside. Something hatching.
The golden energy struck the seventh star like a sunrise.
Light exploded through his internal landscape.
From the outside, Lucas watched Daniel's entire body arc with tension before suddenly — completely — relaxing. The dark cracks across his arms faded. The strained lines around his eyes smoothed. And then, slowly, his aura shifted.
It was subtle at first. A slight deepening, like the moment before dawn when the sky hasn't brightened yet but you can somehow feel that it's about to. Then it became undeniable. The pressure radiating from Daniel expanded outward in a clean, even pulse that stirred the ash on the crater floor and pushed the surrounding flames back by half a metre.
Seventh Stage of the Novice Rank.
Lucas exhaled slowly. "..Unbelievable."
Daniel opened his eyes.
The gold was gone from his irises — if it had ever truly been there, or if Lucas had simply imagined it. What remained was the same calm, dark gaze as always, though something behind it sat differently now. Heavier. More settled. Like a blade that had just been properly balanced for the first time.
He looked down at his arms. The skin was clean. He flexed his fingers once, feeling the new pathways adjusting to the additional capacity, mana moving through his seventh star with the easy familiarity of something that had always been there and had simply been sleeping.
Then he turned to the butterfly.
She was already staring at him. Had not stopped staring at him since the moment the golden essence disappeared into his skin. Her scarlet eyes held something he hadn't seen in them before during their short acquaintance. Not respect, exactly. Not yet. But the particular kind of stillness that precedes respect in proud creatures — the moment when they realise they can no longer dismiss something entirely.
"You absorbed it," she said. Her voice was flat in the way that voices become flat when they are working very hard to remain controlled. "You absorbed my bloodline essence."
"A small part of it," Daniel said. He didn't flinch from her gaze. "I owe you an explanation."
"You owe me considerably more than an explanation."
"Then I'll start with the explanation and we can negotiate the rest." He settled back, resting his arms across his knees, and met her eyes directly. "My talent — the one you saw activating. It's called Devouring Paragon. Normally, when I use it, it extracts ambient energy or refines foreign mana. I've used it in combat to strip the refinement from enemy techniques or absorbs energy from corpses."
"This was the first time it separated bloodline essence from a living being directly. I didn't intend for it to go that far. I want to be clear about that."
The butterfly's eyes narrowed. "Intending and doing are different things."
"They are," he agreed. "And I take responsibility for the difference." He held her gaze without wavering. "But I also need you to understand what actually happened, because it isn't what you may be thinking."
"What I am thinking," she said, very quietly, "is that a human Novice Rank somehow extracted a fragment of Monarch bloodline essence from my body while pretending to stabilise my core, and then absorbed it for his own advancement. What I am thinking is that our agreement lasted approximately four minutes before you violated the spirit of it comprehensively."
The words landed without cruelty but with the full weight of what they were.
Daniel didn't deflect them.
"If that's what happened, then our agreement is void and I won't stop you from leaving. But hear me out first." He reached out slowly and carefully — not touching her, simply extending his palm upward between them, an offering of openness rather than contact.
"The essence isn't gone, it was the only way for me to be able to stabilize your core. The essence will slowly regenerate as your bloodline produces it in bulk every single second. I just emptied out your reserves for now."
He watched her face carefully.
A pause.
The butterfly closed her eyes. Whatever she found when she turned her awareness inward kept her still for nearly thirty full seconds. When her eyes opened again, the controlled flatness in her voice had shifted into something more complicated.
"The collapse has slowed," she said.
"Yes."
"The fracture lines along the secondary meridians are no longer propagating."
"My actions has given your body a template for how to expel the excess essence. Though i won't recommend that you do that for now because you will destroy all your meridians." Daniel lowered his hand. "It will take time. Weeks, possibly. But the window is no longer closing."
The butterfly looked at him for a very long moment.
"You have," she said finally, with immense and clearly effortful restraint, "an extraordinarily inconvenient talent."
"I've been told."
"And you genuinely did not intend for it to extract the essence for your own self."
It wasn't entirely a question but it wasn't entirely not one either.
The Flameberry Butterfly exhaled slowly through her nose.
"Our agreement stands," she said at last. The words came out as though she was placing something heavy and precious back down on a table after nearly dropping it. "But Daniel."
He met her eyes.
"If your talent ever reaches into me again without warning," she said, "no condition in our agreement will protect you from my displeasure."
Lucas, from somewhere behind them both, made a sound that was very deliberately not a laugh.
"Understood," Daniel said.
And for the first time since the crater had fallen quiet around them, the faintest thing — not quite a smile, barely even a curve at the corner of her mandible — crossed the Flameberry Butterfly's expression and disappeared again almost before it had arrived.