I sent the kid off with a packed lunch and showed him the best routes to avoid the heat, and watched. I kept an eye on him as he ran, watching as he trailed off into the rising sun. There was a seed of confidence in him now. It was nothing big, but it was there. And I’d seen enough people live to know that it could make a difference down the line, whether that difference was limited to his own life or the greater world was something that only time could tell.

"So, what do we do about you?" I asked as I turned to look at the frozen assassin. He was wearing all white, and his clothes stuck around him like a second wrinkled skin. If it wasn’t for the color of the clothes, it would have been hard to know where the clothing began and the skin stopped, and the way the robe fluttered and clung to his body made it almost seem like he had wings.

"Kill me," the man spat. His voice was dry and coarse. "I will not be humiliated. I will not kneel."

"Well, you couldn’t kneel if you wanted to, but I get what you’re saying," I replied.

"Who hired you to go after that kid?"

The assassin squinted whatever folds he had for eyes, an angry refusal on his face. That was usually how these assassin clans were, willing to die to protect their customers. It was strange, considering how often they killed innocent people for their own benefit, you would think the last thing these types of people would have is honor. But it was there, the assassination group would need to function as a whole, and to keep every agent of theirs from selling out, they would take certain cult-like measures. The group before the individual, death before dishonored, no snitching, stuff like that.

I walked up to the man’s face and looked down. Biology was a varying thing in the multiverse. There were life forms consisting of entirely different base forms of matter and existing in universes with different physical laws, but then there were also things like this, different alterations of human biology.

"Mhm. Let’s see some sort of sound receptors instead of eyes you have in between those folds that have extended out from your ears," I said, studying the man thoroughly.

"You guys have replaced your eyes with ears. And this clothing is interesting too, leathery white folds that cling to your skin in this desert heat isn’t reasonable clothing for an assassin, is it?"

The man didn’t respond.

"And ah, would you smell the stench around you? Absolutely putrid."

I made a small cut and a thin red line appeared on the man’s right cheek. My index finger reached to catch the small drop of blood that escaped him. A small red circular drop hung about my finger.

"Definitely not pure human," I commented.

My captive made an unsettled expression on his face, a strange mixture of amazement and fear, but I didn’t bother with him anymore.

I took the drop and put it in my mouth.

"Mhm, ohh what is this? Fish demon?" I said, thinking for a moment.

"No. Bat demon. That’s what this is. Bat demon. It tastes strange though."

I walked up to the man and wafted his stench into my nose.

"Ahh, dead bat demon! That’s what this is. No wonder you’re a little messed up. You not only have a demonic bloodline, but it’s also from a being who bathes itself within the laws of darkness and sound."

The assassin squirmed in a weird, lizard-like way, and I felt light resistance to my hold on him. The man moved, not in the natural muscle-based way but in the unnatural, something boiling under my skin way. His facial features twisted and turned and his fingers turned into a nasty purplish color.

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I used my divine senses conservatively. They were much more capable than all my other senses, but also that much more boring. You couldn’t really be surprised when you had near omniscience within a few hundred thousand miles.

But this time, I was curious.

And so, I peered into the man’s mind, body, and soul. There was a lot there, clan functions and politics as well as general information about the state of the region. The boy’s name was Fo Lin. There was also private information, childhood joys, crushes, training, and a whole bunch of other stuff roiling in the man’s mind.

A part of me, the old-fashioned mortal from Earth part, felt disgusted at the act of reading a man’s entire life. I had always thought that mind reading was the most violating of all superpowers, right behind mind control. But it was really hard to care about basic human decency when you were dealing with a cold and ruthless assassin.

I moved onto his soul and found nothing there either. His body was where things got interesting. On a cellular level, it looked like he was undergoing a strange metamorphosis, his body moving and molding to a new shape.

But if you looked at his qi, he was clearly dying.

I took a moment to think, should I save him? Did he deserve to be saved? Probably not, but I was a little curious.

I extended two fingers and drove them deep into his heart. The boy coughed and wretched and whatever conscious part of him was still aware tried to defend himself.

"Relax," I said. "I’m fixing you."

That didn’t seem to comfort him much. My fingers gripped onto a metaphysical string of qi. It was centered mostly around his heart and deep inside his bones. The best bloodlines forged themselves amazingly with the human, mixing and mashing until one couldn’t truly be separate from the other, this wasn’t one of those.

"Interesting," I chuckled.

The bloodline was cursed. It wasn’t a clean curse, more a sloppy trap meant to activate whenever someone mentioned the true nature of the bloodline. But it was complex enough that no one within the region would recognize it for what it was.

The way it worked was simple. If the bloodline was acknowledged by an opponent, the bloodline carrier would be driven to either kill them or the bloodline would start overproducing, running rampant, and spreading through the rest of the body. By the end of it, the user would have turned into a bat-like monster capable of fighting at the fifth rank.

Overall, it was a fairly well-made defense and would have stopped most of the people in this region from ever finding out about the secret of the bloodline and from trying to extract it.

It would never survive in the greater continent, but it worked well enough in this little place. My fingers grabbed onto something and I pulled.

The man let out a shrill scream of hell and terror as his body started to boil ever more with protrusions pushing out at certain parts. I intervened before he could explode, stitching all the messed-up parts back together into one cohesive person. The man dropped into a quivering mess, lying quietly on the desert floor.

"Everyone just wants to pass out all the time don’t they?" I mumbled.

I couldn’t be bothered this time. I smacked him.

"Hello, Fo? Wake up!" I yelled right next to his ear.

The bastard yelped up in surprise. He raised up his hands in defense and opened his mouth to blast sound qi in my direction. I covered his mouth, making the attack collapse in his throat.

"Don’t yell at your elders," I commented, using sixth rank aura to push him down.

He backed away, eyes wide in horror. The blood left his lips in a dramatic fashion and the man clutched his throat.

"Of the Immortal Rank?" He sputtered.

"Yes yes, of the immortal rank, now I’m about to leave but I’ve basically patched you up and back to normal and-"

"AAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!" The man screamed, his hands moving from his throat to his head.

"Oh yeah, I gave you eyes now. Your brain might have a tough time adjusting to that but you’ll be fine in a few hours. Anyways, I wouldn’t go back to your clan, they would kill you in an instant if they saw what I had done to your bloodline. Also, I didn’t get rid of the bloodline curse, I just altered it. If you hurt any innocent people, you’ll die. Understand?"

"Of the Immortal Rank?" The boy whimpered.

"Well, you can work it all out when you’re not in agonizing pain. I’m sure you’ve committed what I’ve said to memory. Have a good life and may I never see you again."

I had done enough for the man. I had saved him from his own sect, but I couldn’t be bothered to save him for the desert. He could work that part out on his own.

"You might want to get going though. The sun’s coming up real soon and the oasis can only last about a couple more days."

I didn’t bother wishing the man any luck.