Chapter 129: Chapter 129

With a heavy heart, and given how hard fresh vegetables were to come by in winter, Ron didn’t gorge himself. He simply went through the celebration motions before heading home.

Liya’s family naturally assumed he was eager to examine his rewards, but only Ron himself knew that he was genuinely a little frightened by Liya’s tender, affectionate gaze. He simply couldn’t accept such devotion with a clear conscience.

However, he still intended to honor the promise he had made to Liya. No matter what the future held, he would take care of her. After all, he had initially used her family; how could he possibly abandon them now?

Looking at it purely from his perspective as “Transmigrator Ron,” he could fully appreciate the care Liya’s family had shown him. And he wasn’t some deranged monster; naturally, he was incapable of committing deranged acts.

…

Upon returning to his own home, Ron didn’t continue agonizing over the situation with Liya. For now, he could only let nature take its course. Perhaps, given time, he would be able to face her without this weight on his chest!

Temporarily setting the matter of Liya aside, the business of his rewards once again commandeered his brain.

Back at the Bell Tower, he had only briefly sampled the Bloodline Secret Art inheritance ice crystal, and he hadn’t been able to employ his most critical tool in front of Foss. Naturally, this left him feeling that the experience was somewhat incomplete.

But now, back in the safety of his own home, Ron could finally study this inheritance ice crystal at length. He placed the wooden box containing the crystal onto his table, then followed the method Foss had taught him earlier, using the edges of his palms to grip the crystal from below.

In an instant, that electric, tremoring sensation surged through his entire body once more. This time, having braced himself in advance, Ron managed to hold on a little longer before the muscles in his arms began to spasm, rendering his hands incapable of maintaining their grip on the crystal.

The moment the crystal left his hands, the biting cold rushed back. Ron sealed the wooden box, lay back on his bed, and closed his eyes. In reality, his consciousness had already withdrawn from his physical body, returning to where his true form, the Light Orb, resided.

Next, he intended to use his Light Orb to examine the memories of the inheritance he had just received, investigating the transmission process from its very roots.

…

Although his true form was no longer the same body he had before transmigrating, his familiarity with it was no less than it had been back then. Recalling sensory information was practically an innate instinct.

Of course, calling it strictly “memory” wasn’t entirely accurate, because the sensory information that could be traced back through the Light Orb hadn’t yet become his memories in the truest sense.

Memory was the process and result of consciousness processing perceptual information. Raw sensory information alone couldn’t constitute memory, and it wasn’t even necessarily stored within the consciousness itself.

Just as with Ron now, his Light Orb, dwelling within the “Ron” body, functioned much like a human eye: it naturally received all manner of information. Yet Ron’s consciousness was entirely independent from it.

If his consciousness was residing within the Light Orb, things were fine; the vast majority of information could be synchronized with his consciousness in real time. But if his consciousness was absent, the only option was to return to the Light Orb afterward and retroactively trace that perceptual data.

He had performed this particular task more times than he could count. Ever since his transmigration, apart from the first few days of acclimatization, he had returned to the Light Orb’s perspective nearly every single day to review all the interactions the “Ron” body had engaged in during the day.

These included, but were not limited to, interactions with people, with objects, and with Secret Patterns.

And right now, what he needed to find was exactly what changes had occurred in his body the moment he made contact with the inheritance ice crystal. At the very least, that electric shock sensation couldn’t have materialized out of thin air!

…

Light Orb Perspective.

Because the time gap was so brief, Ron quickly located the physical changes that had occurred when he touched the inheritance crystal. The Light Orb had perceived and recorded every detail in the form of Secret Patterns.

Just like the Breathing Technique inheritance he had received in the Inheritance Chamber beneath Sis Castle, the root of the Bloodline Secret Art inheritance was likewise a mysterious power that Ron could not yet directly perceive. He referred to it as 【Transcendent Factors】.

It was the activity of Transcendent Factors that generated Transcendent Secret Patterns. And Life Energy, at its core, was also derived from these same 【Transcendent Factors】. Its essence was simply a relatively stable pattern of fluctuation within the Transcendent Factors.

Things that couldn’t be directly perceived didn’t mean they couldn’t be perceived at all; it simply required indirect methods.

Ron had originally reverse-engineered the existence of an unknown mysterious force from the process by which Life Energy was generated. It was this force that caused the human body to produce the illusion of possessing Life Energy.

Transcendent Secret Patterns were much the same. However, unlike Life Energy, Secret Patterns were a tangible, indisputable reality. At least from the perspective of Ron’s Light Orb, Secret Patterns were genuinely real entities existing across a different dimension.

They reflected the patterns of change in the 【Transcendent Factors】 within reality.

And now, Ron was witnessing yet another case of 【Transcendent Factors】 influencing reality:

The birth of a Bloodline!

That was the terminology used in this world. In Ron’s parlance, it was essentially a specific modification protocol that 【Transcendent Factors】 imposed upon the human body.

By tracing the Light Orb’s perceptual records, Ron discovered that during his contact with the inheritance ice crystal, a massive quantity of Transcendent Secret Patterns had been generated on the fly. The overwhelming majority of them vanished the moment the inheritance process ceased, but a tiny fraction still remained.

They had harmonized and fused with his Body Secret Pattern system!

Just as using Life Energy to strengthen the body would add Transcendent Secret Patterns to the Body Secret Pattern system, receiving an inheritance accomplished the same thing.

If using Life Energy to enhance the body could be viewed as a targeted form of bodily modification, then receiving an inheritance could be regarded in exactly the same light!

The inheritance Ron had just received was the Bloodline Secret Art 【Ice Armor】. In Morris’s words, this was cultivating a new bloodline, an artificial Transcendent Bloodline!

“Could it be that all Transcendent Bloodlines in this world originated this way?” The thought flashed through Ron’s mind unbidden.

The inheritance ice crystal Foss had given him had explicitly specified 【Ice Armor】 as the Bloodline Secret Art. This indicated that Foss, or the Lord’s side, was capable of customizing the inherited bloodline to at least a certain degree.

Ron refused to believe these things could have materialized out of nothing. It was highly probable that extensive research into existing bloodlines was required before these “results” could be produced.

Which naturally raised the question: where did the very first person with a Transcendent Bloodline come from?

From learning a Secret Art? But based on his deductions, a Secret Art could only be created after first studying the corresponding bloodline; the inheritance came after the bloodline, not before.

But without a Secret Art, how did one obtain a Transcendent Bloodline in the first place?

Ron couldn’t arrive at a reliable answer to this question for the time being, though he could certainly venture a few guesses. He suspected that the original Transcendent Bloodlines might have arisen from something akin to radiation-induced mutations, or perhaps through crossbreeding with other Transcendent creatures.

Not necessarily through direct mating and producing offspring, but more likely through some form of bloodline transplantation.

However, Ron had not yet heard any related rumors, let alone witnessed any concrete examples. It would be premature to draw any definitive conclusions for now. But one thing was absolutely certain:

There had to exist pathways to acquiring Transcendent Bloodlines in this world that lay outside of Bloodline Secret Arts.

…

The reason a Bloodline Secret Art was called a “Secret” Art was twofold. On one hand, it was sufficiently clandestine. On the other hand, it was because:

Once learned, the practitioner no longer needed to rely on any inheritance medium and could cultivate it independently.

Just like the Ice Breathing Technique; Ron didn’t need the Eternal Ice to use it. He could practice it on his own, needing only Ignition Potions as an assist.