Beyond the Bloodline

Main City Square

Metin City

Planet Zotov

January 15th

Year 2018

“Your spatial gate creation was quite good. A lot better than I remember.”

“I’ll have you know that I’m one of the best at creating gates on AND from Estea. You just have ridiculously high standards.”

Miranda replied to Jamie’s words as the two of them, now in different outfits, moved through the lively crowds of festive city denizens.

“I’m the Child of Space, so naturally my standards would be higher than what you guys purport as normal.”

“Here we go again. This is one thing I frankly did not miss.”

She couldn’t help but roll her eyes as she spoke, twisting her body a bit to avoid bumping into a passing stranger.

“There’s something about me that you didn’t miss?”

“…”

The woman went silent after Jamie’s question, her lips twisting into a light pout as she glared at Jamie who was giving her a knowing smile.

‘That smug expression irritates me…’

With that thought, she grabbed the sides of his face and squeezed his cheeks for a bit, before turning around and walking away silently.

“This planet, Zotov, you called it, it’s in a transition stage.”

Jamie caught up to her and locked his arm with hers while speaking about something he had noticed ever since they arrived on this planet.

Since Miranda was the one who made the spatial gate, the distance and speed they could travel through it was outrageously fast, and it did not take them much time to cross the hundreds of light years of distance between Estea and Zotov.

Though this was his first time here, it was not his first time on a planet in a similar state as this one, so he could quickly tell what was going on.

It was in the process of promoting from a Mid-Level World to a High-Level one.

“I’m guessing that’s why this planet’s ego restricted existences on it from exerting above transcendent level of power. It does not want any interruptions.”

“Indeed. Though its sentience is young, its ego is quite strong.”

Miranda pulled Jamie closer to herself when she noticed a group of girls at a corner glancing at him flirtatiously, effectively telling them Jamie wasn’t ‘on the market’.

Speaking of Markets, the Estean Dragon King who largely controlled this world, was a Red Dragon who had stepped into the domain of the richest Dragon Kings due to the amount of Ruindeum he had sold from this planet on the Interstellar Market.

“A new born planetary consciousness that’s capable of creating such a powerful realm restriction law. This is quite interesting.”

Jamie muttered to himself as he used the law of knowledge’s power to glimpse a few things about the planet’s data and the World Law in question.

Even Miranda who was walking next to him, had reduced her power to the level of an Inferior Stage Transcendent so she could enter the plane with her true body.

Other beings above transcendence like her, usually used Avatars or Clones that had power around the same realm to avoid the repercussions of the law.

“I see, so it pulled Causality into the mix, no wonder those guys all obey it.”

The man nodded as he spoke, cutting off the flow of knowledge law energy seeping out of his body before pulling Miranda over to a candy apple stall.

“You have this world’s currency, right?”

“Yeah.”

Miranda replied as she pulled out some notes from her subspace and passed them over to the stall owner while Jamie collected the two snacks.

“So anyway, which of the Dragon Kings in particular are we here to mess with? One of the old ones I know of or a new one who popped up recently?”

“It’s an…*nom* *nom* old one.”

She took a bite from the candy apple still in Jamie’s hand as she replied to him, her hands busy counting how much cash she had on her from this world.

‘Looks like I have to get more.’

Turning her gaze back to her blue-eyed companion, she called out the name of the person who was their target.

“Ikerth, remember him?”

“How could I not? He’s the reason why the Dragons under him suffered in my hands, and why the next 19 generations of red Dragons after him hate my guts.”

It had been stated multiple times that a certain Clan of Dragons hated Jamie to death, and Estea had described this hatred as ‘generational’, a word that described it perfectly.

In ages past, Jamie was exploring a remote, dragon-inhabited planet on a mission to secure an ancient artifact that was rumoured to be a ‘Rule Breaker’.

Leaving aside what ‘Rule Breakers’ were and why Jamie was after one of them; Jamie’s investigation of that world led him to uncover a plot of the red dragons led by Ikerth who was a Senior Race lord at the time.

Basically, they planned to subjugate and enslave entire civilizations on many planets, and they had in fact, already begun doing so.

One of the planets they had targeted in the past just so happened to be the one where he and Miranda had found a young weak werewolf who had been scarred by the war that occurred when the Dragon’s forces clashed with the denizens of that planet.

Driven by a twisted sense of hypocritical vengeance for the child, Jamie fought, or rather, beat up and captured the dragons involved, before going on to temporarily bind all their spirits, forcefully taking control of their abilities to access the artifact's chamber deep within the planet.

He retrieved the artifact, which in the end turned out to be an ancestral artifact of Ikerth’s lineage that he had kept hidden there and not the Rule Breaker Jamie was after.

As for the dragons, they were left weakened and traumatized by the experience, as the ordeal not only stripped some of the weaker ones of their innate powers but also imprinted upon their collective consciousness an indelible mark of humiliation and rage.

To make matters worse, Jamie then proceeded to destroy the artifact in front of them, and toss its shattered fragments into a void, preventing any hope of recovery.

Those Dragons have since sworn Vengeance against Jamie, vowing to bring retribution upon the Hybrid for the shame he brought upon them.

Their hatred and enmity for the Hybrid transcended time, with each succeeding generation harbouring a vendetta against him.

In total, with Ikerth included, Jamie had 20 generations of Red Dragons holding deep-seated hatred towards him.

On a side note; not many other Dragon clans know the reason for this hatred, as the proud creatures did not dare tell others about the shame they experienced on that day.

“So, when he heard that I was about to be revived by the Vampires and Werewolves who wanted to overcome their racial weaknesses, he sent someone to kill the people the two races sent, huh?”

“Basically. I’m assuming the cloaking on Brentlet had made it hard for the Dragon to discover them on time, hence the reason he arrived after you had already been awakened.”

Now seated at a tagliatelle noodle food truck, the two concluded their conversation while slurping down the last of the noodles in their bowls.

““Seconds please!””

They simultaneously held up their bowls with the same request, something that made the old couple running the stall smile as the ‘young couple’ seemed to enjoy their food.

Jamie and Miranda weren’t about to correct their mistaken assumption of their ages though.

“I know I have asked this countless times, but fate really is a bitch.

‘Good’ people like these end up not having the talent to progress far in increasing their existence realm, even with the addition of the system. And yet we have a lot of people on the opposite side of the spectrum overflowing with that talent.”

Miranda muttered to herself as she looked at the old couple, both of whom were Peak Master Realm humans who were reaching the ends of their lifespans.

As for why she considered them ‘Good’ even though she’d only known about their existence for less than 10 minutes, it was because she had used her powers to look through the lives of the two of them, a trivial matter when one took into account the realm gap between them.

“*Who’s to say that these two wouldn’t have turned out like whoever you were thinking about if they had what it took to go far, to achieve power above transcendence and journey into the stars?

Their ‘positivity’ might simply be because of the fact that they were not able to progress above the Master Realm.*”

Jamie replied to her as he collected his bowl of noodles, using the language of the elves on Estean so the couple would not understand the conversation.

“*I see, maybe that would have happened.*”

Right after she replied, Miranda’s interest in the couple’s lives quickly diminished, now replaced by her interest in the meal in front of her.

The 250 years of memories she had just skimmed through were quickly buried in a corner of her mind, suppressed by the weight of her own tens of millennia of memories.