Lilliana moved them over to the smaller table near the lamp.
The light there was warmer and more focused, enough to see clearly without making the room feel clinical.
A shallow dish had already been placed on the table, along with a folded cloth and a narrow knife. The sight of it made something in Soren's stomach tighten.
Lilliana stood opposite him, her hands clasped loosely together.
"As you already know," she began, "blood magic uses the blood inside your body in several ways, whether that's for defence, attack, or, in some cases, support. It can be shaped, called out, reinforced, hardened, redirected, or returned. But before any of that matters, you need to understand one of the most basic principles."
She lifted one hand slightly.
"So let me ask you, what do you think the first thing I'm going to teach you is?"
Soren's hand shot up instantly.
That earned a small, helpless smile from her.
"Yes?"
"Thank you, Professor Roseblood," he said, like he was answering a question in class. "Is it how to control blood?"
She let out a faint laugh.
"Ren, please just act normal," she said, still sounding more raw than polished, though the softness in her voice was easier now. "But no. First, I'm going to teach you how to absorb blood back into your body."
She demonstrated by conjuring a small amount of blood with [Hemokinesis], then drawing it smoothly back into herself.
The motion was neat and effortless, almost elegant, the crimson vanishing into her skin as though it had never left.
"First, you'll learn to absorb your own spilt blood. Then blood created through magic… And finally, much later, once you can do those safely, blood from outside sources."
The slight pause before the last part was enough to tell him she was still uneasy, even if she was trying not to show it too openly.
Soren smiled, hoping to lighten that.
"It's okay," he said. "I asked for this. And I've got you watching over me, Lilly, so it'll be fine."
Her expression softened, but the worry didn't disappear.
"Are you sure?" she asked quietly. "It will hurt."
"I'll be fine."
Lilliana looked at him for a moment longer, then stepped closer.
There was a knife in her hand now, slim and sharply made, not ornamental at all.
It looked practical, familiar in the way well-used tools did.
Soren remembered her mentioning that blood magic users sometimes carried blades meant specifically for drawing blood in battle, and the thought sat unpleasantly in his chest.
Then, perhaps because she could feel the tension gathering in him, and perhaps because she needed something to cut through her own unease as well, she held out her hand and spoke, very softly.
"Paw."
Soren stared at her.
It took him a few seconds to realise what she was doing, and when he did, a short, startled breath of laughter escaped him despite everything.
He placed his hand in hers.
"…Woof."
That earned him a quiet, shaky laugh from her, and some of the heaviness in the room eased.
"Good boy," she murmured, stroking his hair once in a gesture that felt halfway between teasing and reassurance.
The joke was stupid, completely out of place, and yet somehow it helped.
Not enough to erase what they were about to do, but enough to make the dread less sharp.
Then Lilliana held out the folded cloth.
"Bite this."
Soren did.
Her hand closed around his wrist, cool and careful, and she turned his palm upward.
When the knife touched his skin, it was with precise, practised control, with no hesitation once she committed to the movement.
The cut came cleanly.
For a split second he only felt pressure.
Then the pain surged through his palm in one hot, bright line.
A muffled sound tore out of him into the cloth.
His body jerked on instinct, and tears sprang into his eyes before he could stop them.
Lilliana tightened her hold just enough to keep his hand steady, checking the cut with the concentration of someone making absolutely certain she hadn't gone too deep or too shallow.
Only after she was satisfied did she tilt his hand over the dish.
The blood began to fall in slow, dark drops.
The room went very quiet again.
The sound of it was soft but impossible to ignore, the steady gathering of his blood in ceramic somehow more unsettling than the cut itself.
Soren's breathing had turned rough around the cloth.
His palm throbbed hard enough to pulse up through his wrist and forearm, a sharp, insistent pain that refused to settle into anything manageable.
Lilliana did not let go until the flow slowed.
By the time it did, the dish was nearly full.
Only then did she release his hand and take the cloth from his mouth.
Soren sucked in air through clenched teeth.
His whole palm burned.
His fingers felt weak and shaky, the kind of weakness that came less from true injury and more from how badly his body wanted to recoil from what had just happened.
"Are you okay?" Lilliana asked.
He forced a smile and nodded.
She was not foolish enough to believe it fully, he could see that in her face, but they had already agreed to this, and she had already decided that if she was going to teach him, she would teach him properly.
"The first step is contact," she said, her voice soft again, "Later, with enough proficiency, you won't need to touch it. But for now, you don't have that kind of control. So first, you need to make contact with the blood, and then you need to imagine it returning to you."
She glanced down at the dish.
"It is abstract, I know. This is just how I was taught."
Soren lowered his shaky hand into the dish and suppressed the urge to flinch.
The blood was warm.
Thicker than water, slicker than he wanted to think about, and far too real in a way that made his stomach twist.
He closed his eyes and drew in a breath, forcing himself to focus.
'Blood flowing into my body.'
He repeated it silently, trying to imagine it.
'Blood flowing back in.'
But the concept refused to settle into anything tangible.
After a while he opened his eyes again.
"Uh… how exactly do you imagine blood flowing into your body?"
Lilliana looked faintly embarrassed.
"Oh. Uhm…"
She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear.
"The way I learned was by imagining drinking it."
Soren blinked.
Then he nodded.
"That does make it easier."
He closed his eyes again.
'Imagine drinking it.'
That at least gave the idea a shape.
He tried for several more minutes, but nothing happened.
The blood stayed where it was.
His hand stayed unpleasantly warm and sticky in the dish.
His palm still hurt.
The only thing that changed was that he was gradually becoming more aware of the metallic smell in the air.
Eventually he opened his eyes again.
"Can I just drink it?"
Lilliana stared at him.
She looked torn between laughing and scolding him.
"What race are you again?" she asked.
"…Human?"
"Do you want to drink blood?"
"Not particularly."
"Then keep trying."
Soren narrowed his eyes at her.
That had very obviously not been a proper answer.
Still, he sighed and tried again.
More time passed, but nothing happened.
Then, after another long stretch of silence, he opened his eyes once more.
"Can I just drink it?"
This time, Lilliana didn't answer immediately.
She shifted a little, then looked away, then back at him again.
The hesitation was obvious enough that Soren noticed it at once.
"You… can," she admitted eventually.
"Thanks."
He reached for the dish.
Just before it touched his lips, he heard it.
A swallow.
Not subtle at all.
Not imagined.
A real, audible swallow from directly across the table.
Soren paused and looked up.
Lilliana had gone red.
Not mildly embarrassed, not just a little pink around the ears, but genuinely flushed, her fingers curled against her skirt and her gaze fixed very firmly on the bowl in his hands.
They stared at each other for a few seconds.
Then, with the air of someone already regretting the entire situation, she blurted out a sentence.
"This is why I didn't want you to do that in front of me."
Soren blinked.
"Why?"
That only seemed to make her more flustered.
"I'm a dhampir," she said, as though that answered everything.
"…Yes?"
"And that is your blood."
He stared at her for half a second longer before understanding finally clicked into place.
"Oh."
"Yes, oh," she muttered, bringing one hand up to her forehead. "I can smell it, Ren."
That shut him up.
The embarrassment on her face was not theatrical.
If anything, it felt more awkward precisely because she was not trying to make a spectacle of it.
She just looked deeply, sincerely mortified that she had had to say it aloud.
Soren looked down at the dish in his hand, then back at her.
"Why didn't you just ask?"
The moment the words left his mouth, Lilliana went even redder.
She stared at him as if that had somehow been the worst possible thing he could have said.
Then, under her breath, she repeated his words a few times, almost incredulously.
"Just ask…?"
When she came back to herself, she looked away.
"It's fine," she said, in the slightly pained tone of someone trying to force dignity back into the situation. "You need to learn."
Soren still did not fully understand what the problem was, not after everything else she had already shared with him tonight, but he let it go.
He raised the dish and took a cautious sip.
The taste was revolting.
Metallic, thick, salty in a way that felt wrong all the way down.
It made his stomach recoil instantly.
He forced himself to swallow, then took more because he had already committed to this and stopping halfway would only make the entire thing worse.
By the time he lowered the dish again after drinking more than half of it, his face had twisted in open disgust.
"Ugh…"
He had to set it down and breathe for a second before wiping his mouth.
"As expected, it tastes like shit," he muttered.
A system message flashed into view.
.
[Congratulations, [Blood Magic: Blood Absorption] has been acquired!]
.
Soren stared at it.
Then at the bowl.
"…It really was that easy."
When he looked back at Lilliana, her face was still red.
Worse than that, she was now biting lightly at the side of her thumb, trying and failing not to look at him in a way that made the reason painfully obvious.
He hesitated for only a moment.
"Do you want some?"
He decided to ask again because at this point, pretending not to notice would only make it stranger.
For a moment, Lilliana didn't respond.
She sat there very still, eyes fixed on him, then on the half-empty dish, then back on him again.
Her throat moved once.
The flush across her face had not faded at all. If anything, it had deepened, spreading across her cheeks and up to the tips of her ears, and there was something tense in the way she held herself, like she was caught between embarrassment, restraint, and a much more immediate instinct that was rapidly losing patience with both.
"Is that okay?" she asked quietly.
Her voice came out softer than before, rough still, but different now.
Not trembling with tears this time, but with a kind of strained caution that made it obvious she was asking for real, not just out of politeness.
Soren nodded.
The change in her happened at once.
Her eyes shifted first, the green disappearing beneath a sudden wash of crimson that matched his own too closely to be anything but jarring.
It was not a dramatic, monstrous transformation, nothing grotesque or feral, but the sight of it still made something in him tighten.
It was intimate in a way he had not been prepared for, the abrupt unveiling of something instinctive and deeply non-human.
Then she moved.
————「❤︎」————