After the nest was reduced to ash, they began the long climb up the statue.
The stone warrior was even larger up close. What had seemed monumental from below now felt almost impossible to scale. The armor plates were big enough to serve as platforms, and cracks in the ancient stone gave them places to grip.
By the time they reached the statue's massive shoulder, everyone was exhausted.
But they had made it.
And surprisingly, they had made it ahead of schedule.
By nearly two full days.
That meant two entire days of relative safety before they had to continue toward the next leg of their journey.
Alucard definitely wasn't complaining.
Two days meant two uninterrupted nights of experimentation.
Two nights to finally master that damned sigil.
And maybe practice his aim a little more on the side.
—
He patiently waited for the Dark Tide to set in before volunteering for watch again.
But this time, he had more than practice in mind.
He stared down at his hand.
Ever since placing the modified sigil on it, something had felt… off.
It twitched occasionally.
Subtly.
Unpredictably.
He could remove it. Slice off the skin and let it regenerate.
But that would erase the anomaly.
And anomalies were valuable.
He needed to understand what this meant.
He began walking toward Nephis.
Then stopped.
Turned around.
Bad idea.
Nephis was far too important to risk damaging whatever fragile "friendship" they had built over idle curiosity. If the sigil reacted strangely to her radiance…
No.
He would test it.
Just not recklessly.
So instead, he walked toward the statue's neck and sat down, summoning the Blood Arrow into his hand.
Over the past few months of studying sacrificial sorcery, he had learned something fundamental:
Everything was connected.
Every rune had logic.
Every flow of essence had purpose.
If something failed, the problem usually wasn't where you thought it was.
Now, for the life of him, he couldn't figure out why the harvesting array was teleporting blood elsewhere.
So he changed his approach.
Instead of focusing on the malfunction, he analyzed the entire sigil from the ground up.
What made it work?
What bound it together?
Why did each segment exist?
He understood what it did.
But he didn't understand why it worked.
And that meant he couldn't truly recreate it.
At best, he could copy it.
Which would produce a normal arrow infused with sacrificial sorcery—but not a true Memory.
It wouldn't unsummon.
It wouldn't repair itself in his Soul Sea.
It would simply be… an arrow that drained blood.
Not useless.
But far from ideal.
And unfortunately—
The arrow's strength depended entirely on the blood used to forge it.
He did possess some Ascended blood within Gluttony.
Even a small amount of Transcendent blood scavenged from a particularly fortunate corpse.
But he refused to waste something that valuable on experimentation.
So Awakened blood would have to do.
Actually—
No.
Dormant blood would do.
Because if this failed, he wasn't sacrificing anything important.
He turned inward.
"Gluttony. Summon the most pathetic blood you have."
The answer came instantly.
A sluggish, thin stream manifested in his palm.
It belonged to a human who had attempted to ambush him months ago.
The man had died quickly.
Seemingly his Flaw involved some chronic sickness. Even Gluttony had found the blood distasteful.
The only reason Alucard had never used it was because mixing it with higher quality blood would contaminate the whole reserve.
Now?
It finally had a purpose.
He shaped it into an arrow.
It was fragile.
Slightly translucent.
And disturbingly wobbly.
"Alright," he muttered. "Let's begin."
—
The first attempt failed.
The second combusted.
The third collapsed in on itself.
By the twentieth attempt, he was grinding his teeth.
By the fortieth, he stopped counting.
By the seventy-second—
After an entire sleepless night—
It worked.
The arrow held.
The sigil activated.
The draining effect responded correctly.
It functioned exactly like the original Blood Arrow.
Alucard stared at it with manic triumph.
He immediately stood up and marched toward Kai.
"KAI. KAI. KAI. LOOOOOOK!"
If this had been anyone else, it would have sounded like a child proudly showing off an arts-and-crafts project.
Unfortunately—
It was Alucard.
So what Kai experienced was slightly different.
From Kai's perspective:
He was peacefully asleep.
Then he heard screaming.
He opened his eyes—
To see a man covered head-to-toe in blood. Burn scars crawling across his skin. His short silver hair now completely dyed red.
And that man was smiling.
Wildly.
"I want you to test my new arrow."
Then a cold, dark projectile was shoved inches from his face.
Kai screamed.
At the top of his lungs.
He shoved Alucard away and immediately launched himself into the air, flying backward in sheer survival instinct.
That was the sight the rest of the cohort woke up to.
And to make matters worse—
It was still early enough that the Dark Tide had not fully receded.
They couldn't even properly retaliate either since he was the strongest there.
So instead—
They chose psychological warfare.
Effie took one look at the arrow.
Then another.
Then said, with devastating calm:
"Hey… why does your arrow have erectile dysfunction?"
Silence.
Alucard slowly looked down.
The arrow was bent.
Not slightly.
Significantly.
It wobbled when he held it up.
All his pride.
All seventy-two attempts.
Reduced to that.
He walked to the edge of the shoulder and sat facing the statue's neck, arms crossed, radiating the aura of a damaged ego.
(Canonically the strongest person there.One of the smartest people there too btw.)
Kai eventually floated down awkwardly.
"I can still try firing it—"
"I don't need your pity."
Alucard dismissed him without turning around.
Then he went back to work.
—
He tried again.
This time using Ascended blood.
The result?
Still bent.
So it wasn't the blood.
The problem was him.
More specifically—
He couldn't perfectly replicate the sigil.
He couldn't perceive every minute detail while copying it.
Tiny deviations accumulated.
And in something as complex as the Blood Arrow, tiny deviations were catastrophic.
It was the most intricate sigil he had ever studied.
Every line mattered.
Every angle.
Every microscopic binding rune.
Simplifying it broke it.
Removing even one minor anchor point destabilized the entire structure.
In frustration, he activated the Sin of Envy.
Thankfully, they were far enough from the Crimson Coral that the sensory overload didn't hit him.
Still—
Using Envy again after a week without it felt strange.
Like regaining sight after temporary blindness.
Overwhelming.
Sharp.
He adjusted quickly.
And began analyzing the sigil not as a structure—
But as intent.
Layer by layer.
Flow by flow.
And then—
He noticed something.
Something completely wrong.
The sigil inside the Blood Arrow did not follow the same logic as the sacrificial sorcery Feltan had taught him.
It was seemingly structured the same way.
Deep inside, though, it was so vastly different.
It felt profoundly wrong for Alucard to even gaze upon the inner workings of this sigil—as though he were committing a grave, irredeemable sin. The very act carried the weight of something ancient and forbidden, a violation so absolute that no forgiveness could ever wash it away.
He instinctively jerked his head, glancing over his shoulder into the shadowed emptiness behind him. Nothing was there… only the faint, stale echo of his own uneven breathing.
Still, he forced himself to keep looking, to try to decipher what kind of sorcery this even was.
It felt immeasurably older than anything Feltan had ever taught him. This was something primordial, something that had seemingly existed long before the first human cities rose.
And it was vile. Disgusting in a way that went beyond mere revulsion, as if the sigil itself were coated in a metaphysical rot that clung to the mind and soul. Every twisting line and pulsing glyph seemed to ooze quiet malice, whispering of sacrifices that had never seen daylight and no mortal should have seen it either.
Alucard's eyes narrowed to slits, the crimson glow in them flickering uncertainly.
"…What the hell is this?"
He had just noticed something even stranger.