In a moment, Wei Zhiruo was back in the real world.

Her eyelashes fluttered a few times, reorienting her dilated pupils to get them used to the outside darkness. Her breath realigned, and she broke into a shiver. It took her quite some time to stop meditating – if she was to estimate the time using her own experience from the past, to her it appeared somewhere in between the early hours of morning, or around four o’clock. Naturally, when she glanced at the shore, it was already vacant. No weeping maiden stood there crying; all there was left was some rustling, slithering grass patch. What a lonely sight. 

She let her eyes rest for a while, without doing much and then picked up the oars. Although the urgency was clearly reflected in her speed of rowing the boat, she still didn’t forget to search out for that sad companion of the past night.

Thinking that she might as well reassure herself where that girl might have gone, she decided to search for her. “Just a quick look to see whether she is safe or not. She didn’t look in the right state of mind.” Wei Zhiruo whispered.

It wasn’t that she was impervious to her growing interest in a complete stranger. What emotions defined this peculiar interest, she asked herself — was this sympathy talking? No. As for that she was pretty sure it wasn’t that. Wei Zhiruo was just faintly reminded of someone else she had known. In that girl's laughter filled cries, and dead eyes she caught a glimpse of a familiar something she had seen before. That brought a flood of past memories, and they felt fresh– like a prickly, sour smell of lemon.

Actually, madness was nothing foreign to her; she had seen many people break down and fall apart in her past life. Beguiled souls, desperately searching for a relief for their endless pain…  

However, the madness of that gravity was, indeed, peculiar.  

That night, her aunt had supported something similar in her eyes: dead yet alive and forbearing, only because she didn’t want to appear disgraced by crumbling apart in front of her – a beloved thirteen-years-old niece whom she had always treated like a daughter and nurtured with her own hands. Or maybe she didn’t want to break apart in front of a remnant of her past?

While Wei Zhiruo herself never tasted what a mother’s love felt like, she had plenty of opportunity to feel what it should be like. To be cherished and loved. Her aunt was her family and she had loved her more than anyone else.

That night, she realized that her aunt also had other’s whom she loved equally or more than her– her death wasn’t unexpected. That was also the night she had bid farewell to everything in her past, cut a deep wound on her heart and drifted away to never settle down again – because the last chain holding her feet to the earth had given up on her.  

Wei Zhiruo remembered quite well. It was the same night; the night of clan annihilation. And that woman had not only lost two of her only sons and a loving husband, her entire family had been killed and almost all of her relatives and friends were dead. That woman had been a spectator of the end of her beloved land and butchering of her own people and past.

But when she lurched towards death, she laughed while she cried and cried in between laughter, as she stood tall holding a sword in her hand – facing an endless tide of oncoming enemy force. 

That was the last she’d glimpsed of her; riding over clouds under her feet, flying over in the dirty yellow skies, as she slashed and cut into the black mist of men and beasts of her enemies, waves after waves of the opposite army fell trembling under her spells, crushing down, killed under her sword. She died with an arrow pierced through her breast.

Maybe, she was even supporting a smile when she died? Wei Zhiruo never found out, as she was busy fleeing for life.  

Unsurprisingly, the faint similarity had made her wonder. What could’ve that little girl experienced to have such maddened eyes? It was indeed an intriguing mystery.

She pondered and rowed.

Wei Zhiruo used her Spiritual Consciousness. First, to pan out a bird’s eye view of the whole mansion. Instantly, she spotted that girl. Strangely enough, she was still on her way to reach somewhere. The ‘beauty’ still had that lingering morose air surrounding her and her pace was still as fearlessly slow and forbearing of outside chill as a walking dead.

A bird broke into a melodious song somewhere, snatching Wei Zhiruo’s attention. She rowed and heard, and felt the heaviness leaving herself in waves, realizing how some memories still captured her mind so deeply. “It still hurts to think – it’s been so long though.”

She sighed.

Wei Zhiruo followed ‘the beauty’s’ tired steps; saw her as she toppled and crumbled down. She kept watching, as she fell over the ground, and weakly knelt down on her knees or laid down like a corpse with no energy to stand up again, or when she gathered enough strength to crawl forward to only fall back again – she saw all of that happening and repeating; another person's arduous journey unfolded in front of her eyes as she rowed.

The girl somehow crawled back to her courtyard and a worried old woman instantly lunged at her, as if she had just been waiting for her. 

With the most alarmed eyes and manners, still holding her mistress to herself, supporting and carrying her back into the chambers and with worried sighs and enquiries interspersed at each step, she kept asking – “Where have you been, young lady? We got tired looking for you, and then the curfew came upon us – no one of us dared to go outside to seek you out in such circumstances. We felt you might have your reasons to go out so late, but look at you – what happened?! What horrible things did someone do to you, my lady? Is it the Second Mistress again? Should I alert the Old mistress -? We must do that, and I…I would have already called for help but others said, they saw you walking away with young lady Cheng! I shouldn't have believed them! Cui’er was all about calling the Old mistress if you didn’t come back by the morning – but we should have tried harder! By god, I should have tried harder searching for you–! I... I, who knows pretty well that you are not someone who goes around without informing people close to you…Look at you, you look horrible! It's all my fault for being so careless!”

“No! Don’t…wake grandmother! I’m alright -”

The rest of the dialogue was left between the mistress and her servant as Wei Zhiruo reverted back her attention from that corner.

She wasn't interested in eavesdropping.

Early morning light started touching down the horizon, and birds’ songs and their flight became common, interspersed pauses.

“I will reach the shore in a couple minutes. Try and do everything and don’t fall into the second phase yet, alright Marr? It would look odd, if someone spotted us writhing in pain over the water surface, that is, if we don’t end up drowning first. Mind you – I don’t want either of that happening to me.” Wei Zhiruo offhandedly reminded her blood-seed. 

[I know, I know.] Marr reassured her in her mind. [Whatever you say goes!]

Wei Zhiruo connected her mind with Marr’s and saw him skimming through texts inside the “Central House of Knowledge” floating inside her Spiritual Sea. His roots though, were furiously entangling with her human organs, taking over the Outer body.

Without even asking she knew instantly what he was up to. He must be searching for some way to alleviate the pain of body transformation that occurred in the Second phase of Awakening. She had already started feeling it, as Marr's piercing and digging his roots into flesh and organs was not a process without pain. But it was still in the range of tolerable.

“You don’t have to mind too much. It’s not like we don’t have experience. At least we are not going blindly into this Awakening – it's already our second time.” She tried reassuring Marr.

Wei Zhiruo herself wasn’t optimistic that he would get anything out of those old texts, but refrained from outright stopping him.

There were hardly any actual ‘clan secret’ books left, not to mention actual bloodline inheritance had only been partially revealed to them. Marr could use some bloodline techniques, but they were too few to let her survive off of them.

What was left of previous clan inheritance was just a few history and anecdotal books – all the techniques she used were found desperately in the Middle world after searching for years, and they all were based on the presence of Mana in her surroundings. Although she had also learned rune-forging and Blood-magic which could be used without Mana, they all required appropriate mediums and could hardly help her in her transformation.

Wei Zhiruo counted everything she had learned, but couldn’t find anything suitable. Marr suddenly spotting a secret method to lessen pain during ‘Awakening’ was really…too far-fetched to her.

Wei Zhiruo shrugged off some outside chill, and looked forward.

When the whole physical body, its organs and entrails started transforming together, and went through earth shattering changes to become a distinctly different kind of organism altogether, it wasn’t going to be an easy shift on any count. She was ready to bear the pain that accompanied this process. The numb pain that filled her at this moment as she felt those roots digging through her was just the first step –it was going to become a more and more exhilarating sort of anguish.

It wasn’t always like this, though. In the past, her kind never had to experience such tumultuous, unbearably painful transformations.

She recalled. Awakening had a long history inside her clan, almost going back millennia. But this process itself wasn’t old enough.

Considering that the First ancestor was born from the primordial chaos with other Gods and deities, and that he wasn’t even born in the same universe as them — it was common clan knowledge that the Sangtchi clan had migrated from a different universe and settled in the Cuiping world –the time to undergo all that could hardly be estimated in human numbers.

Wei Zhiruo remembered quite clearly. The genealogy stated that the first ancestors who came to the ‘known universe’, of which both the Middle World and the Cuiping world were a part of, were: the ‘Fifth Elder Yissem of Samthci’ and his wife whose name wasn’t recorded, and ‘Seventh Elder Obaen of Urus’ and his wife, Uriel of Areme. All the bloodclan in her universe traced their heritage back to these two couples. However, it was only the name Samthci that got corrupted and stuck around, which became the common clan’s name for all bloodkin, regardless of their descent. 

“Maybe,” Wei Zhiruo said, “when I broke the vow tying the clan's link with Cuiping world, I was also breaking away from the recognition that land had given to an alien race like us? The link to that universe itself? Or why else am I now in a completely different universe? Thinking like that, it isn’t implausible… I died chanting the Oath breaking song and was rejected and thrown away into another universe in the end.”

[I bet its something like that. That would explain why your ancestors emphasized so much…on this oath tying your clan to that world. They selflessly dedicated years and years of their lives supporting the development of an alien civilization, and in return, you say, they got nothing out of it…? That is quite difficult to believe and really, too much dedication. I am more ready to believe that they might have negotiated a symbiotic relationship with that world.]

“So, when the oath broke – I too lost the last link tying me to that universe. Would we have died instantly if I wasn’t sucked inside this body? Crushed to pieces?” That made her obviously question whether or not she had now completely gained a ‘native’s’ identity? 

[Hard to say. But this could explain that strange…depressing feeling I felt arriving in this new world.]

Wei Zhiruo shrugged off these unrooted thoughts and many more that started filling her up.

“What would it be like to live in ancient times?” Wei Zhiruo distractedly asked instead, as she took a turn around a reed-bed, and rowed. “To not have to suffer the pain of Awakening and to be able to roam the universe since childhood - doesn’t both of these prospect’s sound like the most fabulous dreams? They had it so much better in the past."    

"Umm..."

In the ancient times, a bloodkin was born a bloodkin, not Awakened from a human offspring. This shift only happened after the bloodline diluted too much, making it impossible to bear a full-blooded progeny inside a weaker womb.

Clansmen evolved, or rather degenerated, owing to thousands of years of intermarriages with other races — most of which were marriages to humans. It was only natural that the blood would get diluted, with more human offspring getting born as time passed. 

Soon enough, the women of the clan no longer bore new bloodkin. And while everyone was lamenting that they had lost the last trace of ‘acceptance’ from their bloodline completely– the first Awakening took place. A child Awakened his latent bloodline. 

Later, this process became the only way the bloodline was carried on, and preserved. While her clan became classified into three classes – the full blood, half-blood, and the humans. However, it was only the descendants from the direct line of descent, who could support the royal seal and sit over the throne.

Wei Zhiruo herself saw this whole process as a natural decline. With each passing generation diluting the bloodline further and further, a bloodline like hers was too hard to preserve in the changing times. Awakening, that process alone could hardly do anything to revert the grave situation. She was a great proof of changing realities —as the only full-blooded bloodkin in almost a century, she was nothing short of a unicorn in a changed world!   

Awakening itself though was not too complicated. 

In the first phase, the bloodline awakens. The blood-seed sprouts inside the Spiritual Sea holding the soul – the place which she usually called the Sea of Consciousness – and blood-seed's root winds around the soul, wrapping and growing over it, feeding on its ‘life-essence’. Blood-seeds themselves could also manifest outside the body after this process. There were several records in the clan written about strange beasts and plants the blood-seed had manifested into. Most notable of them was the dragon companion of Uriel of Areme, who could swallow down planets if he was angered or crossed.

Wei Zhiruo’s blood seed was peculiar because its original form had always been a red liquid, very similar to some kind of red blood. It never manifested into a beast shape or the like, but later learned to mimic a cat’s body for ease of doing some things. He always said that it was because he had failed to Awaken full bloodline inheritance that he looked like this– maybe this was the reason for his ‘unformed’ form. But she herself always felt that hard to believe. Her instincts told her that he should have looked like that – familiar and amorphous.