The stars shone yellow today.

Kai looked at them in pale awe. From constellations to constellations, even the brightest blue star looked sickly blurry. Only one star was beaming red, almost outdoing even the distant moon in brightness.

Like the eye of some demon, that red star glared back at him.

Kai looked away.

They had been waiting to see her for a long time. So, the moment he saw a wisp of silvery mist coming out of the ground and then going back in, he smiled. There was a wooden stick in his hand, using which he kept tapping the ground with a predetermined rhythm.

Soon Selene found them and lunged at him.

Kai couldn't have afforded to go for her in the port's region, so he had pointed one direction to her to come to after the task was over. The tapping took care of the rest. He wondered what tale Selene would have in store for him.

I hope whatever Meg’s doing behind my back is a reason enough for the System to allow me to kill her, Kai thought, as Selene solidified in her material form.

His thoughts solidified along with her.

When Kai held her, he found her trembling, burning with fever, and her left eye swollen, bleeding with red and yellow pus-like blood. She coiled herself into his embrace as if something was chasing her, some natural predator who hadn't existed before, but now did.

"What happened to her?" Petyr asked, standing in the shadows of the trees.

Kai frowned.

There was only one way to find out, but he wasn't sure if he wanted to know, either.

It would be stupid to deny that Selene, as she was now, was stronger than him. If it wasn't for his Glitch, there was nothing on Kai that could have matched her existence, let alone having her as a pet. So the thing that could shake her to this degree, what it would do to him, this thought lingered at the back of his mind like a warning from his ancestors.

He would have heeded that warning if it wasn't for Kai's nature.

It was Power he desired, and it had never come to him without a cost.

-Tell me,- Kai commanded.

Selene raised her hood, flicking out her forked tongue. Though she was shaking, defiance rose within her, hearing Kai's command and his murderous voice.

Then she told him, one by one, all the things she had heard, hiding in that room.

First the flutters of hundreds of wings, and then the crawling of even more insects. No life she had sensed in them, and as she mentioned this, Kai frowned.

-No life in hundreds of birds and even more insects,- Kai repeated. It didn't take long for him to realize what was going on. A Master Ability. This alone was reason enough to kill Meg. Did he need to hear more?

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If it was before, then he would have never related this phenomenon to a Master Ability. Now, after having an Elite Ability of his own, he could make an educated guess, depending on the scale of Ability getting used by someone.

Kai looked at Petyr and growled out his conclusion word by word, the muscles of his throat bulging out in defiance.

By the time he was finished, Kai was panting. -I still need time to regain my vocals.-

"Good thing we took a precaution of 1000 meters," Petyr said, smiling. "Your instincts were right, my lord. As always."

-Then she took out a box,- Selene hissed, rubbing her left eye over Kai's shirt.

-Don't do it!- Kai snapped, taking out a cloth and cleaning the space around her eye. -What was in the box?-

-I don't know,- Selene hissed, almost gritting her fangs as if she regretted not having eyes. -Powerful things, and some ordinary things. She took out a candle from it. Then… then she cut herself. I tasted blood. Lots of it.-

Blood…

Kai’s face gained a heavy frown as he heard the word. When coupled with the other things Selene just told him, another word popped up into his head.

Rituals!

Kai felt an odd premonition.

Blood Prophecy was a ritual, and so were the many things that he had heard about after coming to the Primordial Tower. Where is this going? Kai thought apprehensively. Something's too wrong with what's happening.

-She then used her blood to draw a shape on the floor.-

-Shape?- Kai hissed. -What shape? Can you draw it?-

-No. But I can help master draw it.- Selene hissed, almost taking pride in her Earth Vibration Sense.

Kai tore out a piece of paper from the notes Meg had given him.

Taking out the pen from the random assortments he carried in his MRB, Kai nudged Selene to go on and do her thing. The blind Ghost Serpent coiled herself around his right forearm, pressing the underside of her head against the backside of his palm.

-You draw, master. I will sense the vibrations to tell you how to proceed.-

This turned out to be more difficult than Selene had made it sound. 2 hours, 3 hours, and then midnight came and went, as both Kai and Selene kept drawing that odd shape.

Finally, well past midnight, into the hour of the wolf, a tired hiss from the serpent told Kai that this was the shape.

A Shape was what Kai called it, for the lack of a better word.

Looking at it rose such disgust from the depths of his heart that he wanted to tear that paper into hundreds of tiny pieces. What was it? A character, a glyph, or a hideous geometrical convulsion of distorted lines?

Then a fact originated in Kai's mind, like knowledge from the ancient times passed down as an instinct.

It was just a Sign, drawn in the wrong color.

Kai's eyes blurred as he looked at it.

All things seemed to dim around him, their shapes warping into terrifying and repulsive bends. He couldn't say what he was looking at. If it was a sign, how could it have such a disgusting appearance?

When Kai thought of describing it to himself, he failed miserably.

[Image]

One moment, it looked like a number 3, with distorted lines. In the very next moment, it felt like a question mark sitting over a tilted P. Kai was sure he saw something curled in the middle of this Sign.

An illusion of a thousand-tentacled monster.

The queer thing was that Kai didn't remember how he had drawn it at all, despite the hours of slow and meticulous drawing it on the paper. A strange thought struck him, then. What would happen if he could master this Sign? he wondered. Is there some hidden Power in it?

"You know what's happening, right?" Petyr asked, looming over the paper in front of him. "You know what will follow it."

Kai closed his eyes, fury rising to his face like hot iron.

He knew. He knew what was coming and the thing that would follow this Sign. His last week had gone in thinking where had he got the paper, and the unknown words his future self had chanted in Blood Prophecy.

Never had he imagined that it was he who would write those words.