"This place is warm, peaceful, and safer than ever."
As Nafız fell through the gray void, various thoughts in her mind drifted like clouds passing before an ancient sky. She couldn't open her eyes, nor did she make any movement indicating she wanted to. She continued her journey with these sensations for a while longer, but when a voice from an unknown source shook the entire space, she snapped her eyes open.
"This kid came at a very bad time!"
Nafız felt like she recognized the voice; she only needed to hear it once more, and she didn't have to wait long for that.
"This thing is quite scrawny; it'll definitely be weak!"
No mistake, it was her aunt's voice. It was the aunt who lived on the floor below in the family apartment they shared back then. From the moment Nafız first heard the voice of the woman she had always disliked, she saw all her feelings reverse dramatically.
Comfort and peace vanished, replaced by anxiety, the feeling of being a burden, and a sense of inadequacy that gnawed at her insides like crazy. As her brow furrowed, sweat from the roots of her hair trickled down to her cheeks.
"I told you, look, it still hasn't walked!"
"It won't be able to talk, you'll be waiting a long time!"
"First grade will be over by the time it learns to read!"
"Can't a person at least get a five in PE class?"
"This kid is a nobody, look at its peers!"
These and hundreds of similar words poured from the mouths of people she knew and reached her ears, but the last one was the straw that broke the camel's back.
"I told you this kid was a jinx; look, my young brother is gone!"
After all those voices, these words drove Nafız, who was shedding bloody tears, into a frenzy.
"What the hell is going on? Enough, enough, enough!"
Three consecutive roars were heard within the vortex; the voices that had collapsed upon Nafız like charging horsemen from every direction were suddenly cut short.
"You never shut up from my birth until my death; what the fuck was your problem with me?"
There was no answer; a wind circulating as a whisper brushed past the face of Nafız, who appeared as a young girl.
"I was so curious about the answer to that, but it doesn't matter anymore. What I couldn't find as a human, I found as an orc!"
"You defined your own helplessness, inadequacy, and inferiority complex through me. You realized I was superior to you and tried to bewitch me with your words to drag me down to your level, but it's all over."
"Maybe I failed to achieve this as a human, and I let your accusations stick to me and pull me down, but it's over now. As someone who has proven herself to herself every second since the moment I was born into my second world, not a single word you say holds any meaning in my eyes anymore."
"I know very well what a magnificent human I used to be, and I respect the life I lost!"
The moment the last word left her mouth, a sound resembling thunder echoed in the void, followed by a riot of colors. A bundle of energy in the form of belts in white, red, blue, green, yellow, orange, and pink enveloped her, washing her from the inside out and lifting her up.
The path she had drifted down in the gray void, she now began to ascend accompanied by the colors, independent of time and space. She could feel the massive smile forming on her face; her cheeks were aching, perhaps for the first time, because of such a happy event.
While the Blood God was in this state, within the Blood Arena, a hulking youth was laughing as he looked at the two people standing against him, but this smile evoked only one emotion in those who saw it: fear.
"Kneel!"
The duo, taking a stance with a medium-height young man in front and a freckle-faced girl immediately to his right, began to tremble after this command. The young girl quickly moved behind her friend, and the onlookers witnessed her trembling stop.
As for the young man in front, his knees almost buckled; he was living his last moments before collapsing to the ground, but the expected did not happen. The man with long black hair, grabbing the bow on his back, drew back an arrow that suddenly appeared from purple mist and fired it at his target.
Although it bore the same color as the cross-shaped attacks the audience had witnessed before, the energy it emitted was in a different class. The arrow-shaped attack appeared before Jashua in short order; in response, the young Count simply stepped aside, his feet not moving even a millimeter.
"I see!"
Following the single word that escaped his mouth, he continued by fixing his gaze on his two enemies with the look of someone who has seen something they know very well.
"Double Lily Combination, one energy specialist and one ranged attack specialist. Do you think so little of me?"
As Jashua burst into laughter, his opponent moved to fire the second arrow at him. He was very fast; a second later the arrow would have left the bow, but his vision was obscured by red liquids hitting his face sharply.
"Javiera!"
Wiping his face with the hand that had formed the vanished energy arrow, the young man quickly turned around; judging by his roar, the sight he would see here was not going to please him.
"You bastard!"
Jashua met these words, which struck his face harshly, with his usual arrogant stance; among the words he had heard from his enemies to this day, these could even be considered to possess a childish innocence.
The only reason the man using the bow remained standing against Jashua's command to kneel was that his friend behind him was controlling the energy movement in his body. To do this, she had to place both hands on his back and transfer energy to her ally's body through her palms.
Now, however, those arms were decorated with needles as long as a normal human's fingers; the young girl could barely maintain control over her body.
"What did you think, that you'd be untouchable if you hid behind your friend?"
The young Count said these words while looking at the Ten Lilies group watching the struggle from the third tier, rubbing it in their faces that this dual choice they had made covertly would be useless.
They had underestimated him; besides assuming he could only control energy, they also looked down on his cultivation level. Their guess was that Jashua was at the energy control level and could at most transfer the energy in his body to his weapon, thereby neutralizing his most important weapon and defeating him with ranged attacks.
When the reality proved to be more than that, the expressions on their faces changed completely. Not only they, but also the disciples in the spectator tiers were stunned.
"Did you see? He's at the Essence Materialization stage!"
The source of the needles in the girl's arm was their comrades who had just bled from every hole in their heads at the same spot. Jashua carried out his attack using the blood accumulated on the black floor, and this was a skill belonging to the Essence Materialization stage.
"Didn't this guy just enter the sect a day or two ago? When did he learn Essence Materialization?"
As the questions in their minds turned into whispers, the joyful smiles of some did not go unnoticed. These were the ones who had bet on Jashua.
"Heh heh heh, he wounded the support role. The girl is bleeding like a pig hit by a spear, she won't last long!"
The Holy Blood Sect did not have a peaceful environment; both individually and in the groups they formed, disciples could easily bully those they could target and sink their teeth into.
The weakening of one group meant new opportunities for others, and Jashua was currently mauling one of them quite badly.
"With those arms, you can only manage to let your ally fire three more arrows. I'm waiting right here; let's see how talented you are!"
Jashua used his foot to draw a semi-circle from one end of the accumulated blood to the other; this was the boundary he had set.