The chamber was massive, with five floors. The walls were built from red marble Thalion hadn’t seen before. There was a big blood pool in the middle, soldiers who seed to refill their stock before moving upward. The alarm was constantly going, which made any kind of talk impossible if you didn’t infuse your voice with mana.
There were a few empty bars, a weaponry section, and most importantly, stairs going down in the middle. There were so many soldiers running around that no one noticed Thalion. Walking by the blood pool, he acted like the others by snatching so of the blood. The Sanguis Impera wanted to consu the whole thing, but Thalion held it back for now. Its ti would co; there was no doubt about that.
Yet his visit to the blood pool differed in one other minor detail. He secretly guided a drop of his essence blood into the pool. He was about to go a level down—what did he care if chaos erupted in this place? The biggest reason for doing it was that he wanted to see if there was so kind of cleansing array, infecting the blood of the Scarlet Continuum before the king could activate the ritual. If there was so kind of cleansing array, this tactic wouldn’t work. This seed the best way to test it.
By how the blood began to change color and ominously flowed like there was a dormant power lying within it, nothing changed at first. Thalion’s bloodsense, of course, knew a lot more. The curse had traveled through the whole pool in re seconds.
A Scarlet Warden on the opposite side found out the hard way. When he absorbed a few liters of blood to get ready for the fight above, he almost stumbled over his own feet. A few seconds later, he was rolling over the ground screaming.
Thalion used the distraction to venture deeper into the tunnels under the ziggurat. He ca out in an identical chamber and quickly ventured into one of the side tunnels, where he killed the two soldiers guarding the red crystal storage.
The whole stage had been so good to him. He had been able to enter, and now he could move freely through the levels and tunnels without anyone noticing. They were all panicking over what was happening above, and no one seed to notice that the ascension chambers were emptying quickly. Maybe Thalion was just lucky, and soone thought they had already been woken up by soone else.
With how lucky he had been so far, Thalion still had to fight a crazy laughter bubbling up when he put mountain after mountain of red crystals into his spatial amulet. He even used the vines of the Sanguis Impera to get them down quicker because there were simply so many.
The best part was when he left and at the reception a Sanguine Prelate was waiting with the intention of handing over ten red crystals. The man complained loudly that soone must have already woken up the ones in the ascension room he had been ordered to handle.
As the good receptionist Thalion was, he took the crystals, and after a quick talk about how badly the whole Scarlet Continuum was organized, he killed the man the mont he turned around. That soone would complain that the mass murder of a whole kingdom wasn’t well organized wasn’t sothing Thalion had on his bingo card.
In the ascension chambers, Thalion helped produce Sanguine Prelates like the kingdom had never seen before. It couldn’t see it for much longer after they were fed to the Sanguis Impera one by one.
Thalion began to feel a bit bad as the Sanguis Impera radiated the joy of a plant that had survived the longest winter and was now seeing the first ray of sunshine.
Its appetite is just on a different level, that is all. You have done nothing wrong, Thalion told himself repeatedly.
With the crystals and the many Sanguine Prelates Thalion killed, his leaderboard points had also risen to entirely new levels even he couldn’t have anticipated.
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