Grand Ancestral Bloodlines Chapter 2176

[ … words ]

Ryu dropped a corpse from his hands, another worthless genius falling by the wayside, and yet another he didn’t bother to turn into a Corpse Puppet.

Though the concentration of high-level geniuses was greater here, this wasn’t enough for Ryu to take an interest in a person.

He either needed a powerful Dao Heart to care to turn them into a Summon, or they had to have an interesting enough path to be worthy of becoming a Corpse Puppet. He wanted something that stimulated both his anticipation for the future and his creative juices.

Ironically enough, the higher level these geniuses were, the more rigid the paths they followed. They almost felt like cookie-cutter creations spit out by their Ancestors, one after another, with hardly any variation between them.

In Ryu’s eyes, these were probably the most pathetic sort of geniuses. They had probably received praise all their lives, but they had never done anything worth accomplishing on their own. They just followed the steps of those who came before them.

Honestly speaking, this was actually an incredibly difficult thing to do. It took an extremely powerful lineage to be capable of doing this in the first place.

One of the things that should have been impossible to so easily pass along was comprehension, and yet these powers had managed to do it.

Maybe that also resulted in geniuses that were worthless in Ryu’s eyes, but if you could pump out this sort of “genius” on a large scale, then it could at least build a foundation. Then, so long as you had one or two legitimate powerhouses from every generation…

You would truly be a force to be reckoned with.

Unfortunately, all this made Ryu’s attempts at building his army slow down considerably as he entered this bloated middle region.

This place was probably supposed to be filled with the most danger, and Ryu certainly got into the most fights against those who very clearly overestimated themselves.

I guess taking that route might also be possible. But I don’t know how interested I am in it…

Ryu’s thought was simple. Even if these geniuses were worthless in the grand scheme, the methods used to raise them up might not necessarily be.

If he took one or two in as a Corpse Puppet, then he could reconstruct their foundations based on the methods used to allow them to reach their current heights in the first place.

Like that, he would actually have a legion for every power in existence, giving him the perfect counter option for them all.

Though it sounded like a good idea on paper, to Ryu it could pretty much be summarized in a single word…

Mediocrity.

What was the point? If his army was just stronger than all of those powers, then he wouldn’t need to worry about it at all.

Ryu flicked his wrists, and the blood slid off his fingers like drizzling crimson slicking off a smooth blade. In an instant, it was as though he hadn’t just had his claws knuckle-deep in a young man’s skull.

Where are you all… A sinister light flashed in Ryu’s eyes.

When this trial first began, Ryu had run into Young Mistress Nightly almost immediately. This went to show that his Fate placement was actually quite poor, which made sense. He still needed time to catch up to the amount of Fate these geniuses had been accumulating for a lifetime.

Funny enough, Ryu was actually much younger than most of them. In addition, there was also the elephant of his restricted Fate Star in the room as well.

Because of that, Ryu’s seeding wasn’t very good, so he should have run into more challenges than most to successfully become a dark horse.

He had been looking forward to this, but since Young Mistress Nightly, he hadn’t met another genius of that caliber.

Well, he had met Yeger Sun, but that didn’t count because Yeger very clearly moved off his normal track as well. And Sarriel’s situation spoke for itself.

Something weird was definitely going on.

It made sense for him to miss out on these geniuses while he was messing around and hopping from Fate Barrier to Fate Barrier without thought for progressing forward.

But now that he was seriously moving forward again, he had yet to come across a comparable challenge.

Is it the Title Stele that adjusted things in real time?

Or…

Outside interference, is it? Did I show off a little too much? Now you’re afraid your little princes and princesses will suffer a loss?

Ryu shook his head.

Let’s see just how long you can keep that up for.

Ryu took a step forward, entering another Ruin and clearing it in a matter of minutes. All this time, he still hadn’t forgotten to humiliate the Ruin Master Guild and their so-called rankers all the more.

It was even more impossible for them to hide from the likes of Ryu, and every terrifying loss they took was just yet another blow to their reputation.

Ryu continued to move as though he hadn’t sensed something wrong at all. He slaughtered those he came across, cleared Ruins, collected Quasi-Embryonic Qi, and crossed Fate Barriers.

At the same time, he passively studied his Embryonic Silk Meridians, his thoughts drifting to it from time to time as he deduced new methods of use.

There was even a moment in there where he was pretty sure he found a method even more potent than Hope’s pregnancy pill.

Well, it would make his own seed more potent, that is. If this seed in particular was used to fertilize Hope’s pill, then the results would actually be much more potent as well by extension.

Hm?

Ryu stepped through yet another Fate Barrier and felt yet another clear shift. The greenery was gone, as were the extreme battlefields of hot and cold or various other elements as well.

This land was almost entirely flat. There was no escaping in this place.

And Ryu immediately felt three auras lock onto him the moment he appeared.