System of the Beast Slayer [litrpg Adventure]
Copyright© 1999 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 80
“Mm ... mm, not bad...” His teeth easily crushed the leaves and roots, a sharp crunch filling his mouth, and a sap scented with green, plant musk flooded his mouth.
“Distinctive, crisp with a faint sweetness.” When Roy greedily swallowed the whole herb, his esophagus and stomach answered with another peculiar flavor, the iron-sweet tang of blood.
The aftertaste lingered, clinging to tongue and lips.
Roy frowned and wiped the juice from the corner of his mouth with a finger. Before his eyes lay a shocking splash of red, like human blood, still faintly warm.
He frowned again.
“It feels like I swallowed a life.”
He closed his eyes and probed the shifts in his body. A strange warmth flashed through his limbs and bones, then vanished.
Something had been added within him, but not enough to make anything obvious change.
When his attention moved to his personal template, attributes and Class were unchanged, but the Skill panel held a new row of faint green characters, flickering as if they might vanish at any moment.
Could a new ability be forming?
“Not enough consumed, the new ability can’t stabilize?” Roy guessed, confirming that he’d need to ingest five ounces outright to trigger a change.
Then he would eat a few more.
He decided not to hog the benefit; half the herbs he would leave for Letho.
He reached, grasped and pulled, wrenching a second, weeping Blood of the Sun free from the earth.
The Witcher did not stop him. He only raised an eyebrow, crossed his arms against the wall and watched as if for sport.
Two, three, four, five—when half the Blood of the Sun in the soil had been taken, Roy stopped eating. He crouched on the cold floor in the posture of Meditation, feeling for change.
His noble brows and tightly set mouth twitched involuntarily as the digested Blood of the Sun erupted heat. It began in his belly and spread through him like a furnace, roasting his face crusted with old blood, his neck, his forearms exposed beneath the cuirass until they flushed a deep, ruddy color.
The burning warmth even surged into his brain, carrying with it the massive information encoded in the blood, resolving into strange characters made of straight lines, curves and dots.
Thousands of characters scrolled through his mind; he was sure he had never learned a single one. Most were foreign and obscure, archaic in form, tasting of something primeval.
Only a small portion resembled the Common Speech of the North he’d studied at Aldersberg House of Cardell.
More precisely, the North’s Common Speech had been derived from this small set of odd characters.
He was in a peculiar state, time slipping away.
One by one the strange characters imprinted themselves in his mind—pronunciation, orthography, meaning—etched into his bones and soul, never to be forgotten.
He had mastered a language.
Elder Speech?
Roy came to from the fierce bodily change, and the instinct was right.
The language that had appeared in his mind was the tongue of the Elves, Elder Speech.
“But why does eating Blood of the Sun make me master the language of the Elves?”
His focus snapped back to the template, and everything fell into place.
“You consumed a large quantity of Blood of the Sun ... You have acquired the racial trait of the Aen Elle Elves, and through blood-memory you have mastered Elder Speech.”
You unlocked Skill: Grace of the Wind (Passive Trait): Elves possess naturally elegant features and a panther-like sharpness in their movements. Charisma +1, Agility +1.
Charisma 5 → 6 Agility 5.1 → 6.1...
He could hardly imagine that a mere handful of Blood of the Sun had altered his lineage.
“So I’m not purely human anymore.”
As a man displaced into another world, Roy did not cling to any particular bloodline. He had become a Witcher and feared little; a trace of Elven blood was less troubling than that.
Elves or no, at least it gave him two free attribute points.
He scanned the template again. The Elven blood he’d acquired was not from the Witcher world’s Aen Seidhe, but from the otherworldly Aen Elle.
The relationship between the two Elven branches was complicated.
But he knew one thing—the Child of Destiny Ciri in the Witcher world travels time and space because of Elder Blood, and the source of Elder Blood lay in the ancient Aen Elle line.
Could this half-measured Aen Elle blood allow him a glimpse into the secrets of time and space?
He shook his head and laughed at himself. He was indulging a fanciful notion. At this stage it was impossible, only a daydream.
Letho had been leaning against the wall watching the boy with closed eyes. In barely five minutes the other’s appearance and bearing had shifted subtly; the tanned skin of his face had smoothed and taken on a sheen, even the grimy blood-crust could not hide it. The originally oval ear openings seemed to have grown a little upward, tapered just a touch; unless you looked closely, you might not notice.
When Roy opened his eyes, the dark, bright pupils looked deeper, star-like.
Compared with before, his looks and presence were more striking.
“Kid, how do you feel?”
“Great!” The boy sprang up, stretched his limbs and, in the cramped chamber, executed a carefree front flip. “My body feels more limber, my balance is better. Oh, and I learned Elder Speech.”
“Elder Speech?” The Witcher scanned him up and down. “Did you notice your appearance changed after swallowing the Blood of the Sun?”
“Where do you mean?” Roy touched his cheek, nose, eyes and mouth but could not feel any change. He’d need a mirror to be sure.