Ounce of Lucidity

"Chronos always knows how to ruin the mood."

"What have I done to make you do this?" You ask.

"It seems like you don't know the situation at all."

'It seems like you don't know the situation at all, my dear 'Lamentor'.' echoes through your mind. Everyone always demands you to know everything, it always has been like that. Humans never change, those gods or deities haven't changed. Is it so hard for them to stand still and give you everything you need to know? Why won't reality work like a novel or game where the people living inside always spare their time telling the player the creation of the universe, why won't the world you're transmigrated to be similar like that!?

"Then tell me, how am I supposed to know if you didn't tell me!?"

She hurls a deep sigh, "Your brain has no flavor. Well, the current you that is. In any case—" A spear of red made from the blood you spill has been casted to form, "I'll stain that head of yours with flavor, myself!"

You immediately stand, running away in the midst of terror. She aims at your left leg, the spear pierce your shin to send back the blood to the place where it belongs. Knowing that your blood was regenerated, the extra blood seeps into the cracks and into your whole body, resulting in a heavy hemorrhaging as the overloaded blood destroys the majority of your inside.

Two of the Chrolings are strengthening your veins to refrain your body from bursting like a balloon, one of them is actively converting mana for the other to use. You're wondering where the third Chroling is, there is no sign of her as if there are only two of them from the beginning.

"SHIT! SHIT SHIT!"

The devil walks towards you with her usual grin, "If I stop now then call me a quitter."

Your head is heavy once again. You wish you could dissolve yourself in this psychedelic air. It's getting harder to act like you don't really care.

While all hope is lost, your broken necklace talisman spews a black haze as the smoke materializes into a humanoid form. The back of a small child with long white hair appears in your view, holding a long red-bladed ōdachi twice the length of her height in an aggressive stance.

She glances at you, revealing her tanned brown skin and bended wrist-length pairs of red horns, "Ah, I'm sorry for being late. I'm at my job interview, luckily I passed it." A familiar soothing voice that can send you into a dreamland, more talkative than before.

"Candy Lady!?" You shout while gargling blood.

"So you saw me as a candy lady!?"

Well, she isn't a lady anymore.

She retracts her gaze from you. "Ah, it's Ketanium." The horned child says, "My name is Ketanium. Well, my codename, you can say."

Although blurry, you can see the visible displeasure strapped into the devil's face, "A damn, bloody Oni. Hey kiddo! I would like you to quietly leave with one leg off from the ground." She retracts numerous sharp red nails from her whole fingers, spreading them over like a fan.

"Ah, but princess! She's my target and I couldn't let her be killed by none other than myself." Ketanium then mumbles another sentence in a low voice you can't hear, as if she is mocking someone.

You interfere, "Aren't both of you are literally child-looking?"

"Shut up!" Shouts both of them.

"I'm using your appearance, bloody hell!" Says your doppelganger.

"Ah, sorry for shouting. I'm too hyped up by the brat over there." Says Ketanium while gesturing her ōdachi into the devil, "This is also not my real body."

Your doppelganger disappears, in miniscule amount of time she then appears with a heavy gust of wind following her. As your Chrolings deal with your physical problem, trying to stabilize the body; your eyes spectate the oni dicing up your clone. Within a blink of an eye, Ketanium manage to slice her whole three times, ten times, twenty times—hundred times in consecutive burst at the speed of sound.

The devil's right arm reforms, punching the oni in the face to move her aside from you with destructive power, as her whole body begins to regenerate fully. In the speed of a single breath, the flying oni quickly stabs the ground with her feet to decelerate using the ground friction before launching herself after a pause, to pierce down the devil by the neck with her long ōdachi and pin her into a tree ten meters from you.

"That should do." Ketanium then let go of the long ōdachi's handle, donning a deadpan while the devil is struggling to break the magic formation within the long ōdachi's engravement going through her neck.

"I never thought that I would meet a primordial oni outside of that hellish realm. Aren't you all too prideful to step outside?" Says the devil, gargling blood while putting up the facade while she claws the long ōdachi.

The oni raises one of her hands and in an instant she speaks a word with a straight face, "Ah no, I'm from Tartarus. I'm not that old."

"The new organization who meddles too much, how about hell?"

"Which hell?"

"The True Hell."

"Ah, I'm not a hellspawn, I'm from the underworld."

"So a mere underling."

"As much as I wanted to know the lore from your chit-chatting, can someone help me?" You interfere, signaling an 'sos' with your judging stares.

Ketanium points her forefinger at your direction, a ray of red is projected from her fingertip that lands at your forehead—a scroll then manifests inside your mana sea. One of the Chrolings takes the scroll, the other chops the top of the wood block into a thinly sliced paper-like piece. The scroll content is then transferred into the wood paper with something you can comprehend, the translation is then decrypted again, giving you two versions of the scroll content.

'Blood Manipulation Technique - First Arc: One is strong, the blooming sakura under the bloodshed from the yama. The wafted blood under the wooden sword made out of Juboko is then learned by the learner. Half of the fire, iron, and water. To become firm is to smith the controller's hands with hellfire.'

Surprisingly, the original version is written in kanji, katakana, and hiragana, all which are the literature's symbols the Japanese use.

Here is the decrypted version: 'Blood Manipulation Technique - First Arc: A self duplication-circuit virus that automatically hosts into the blood plasma and engrave the proteins with mana marking for the substances accessing while using the host as a factory to spread out the mana circuit in large quantity. Deoxygenation of haemoglobin is needed to make a magnetic property for the blood bending in which it will be automatically engraved by the virus into the hosted blood cells. The stored circuit for the virus pattern: magnetism circuit, ferromagnetism enhancing circuit, multivariable gates, deoxygenation circuit, and dodecahedron three-dimensional configuration circuit.'

"What is this!?" You ask the oni.

"Ah, it was my gift for surviving that blood sabotage. Do you like it?"

"I DON'T UNDERSTAND ANY OF IT!"

While in the middle of your confusion, one of the Chrolings inside your mana sea manages to absorb a chunk of your mana and create the said virus—it's in the form of a chibi metal-robot.

After the virus creation, the Chrolings send their calculation and methods into your memory. It is overwhelming, you're experiencing what they did with the exact amount of computation to make the self replicating virus—adding more weapons into your arsenal.

'Blood Manipulation Technique - First Arc' acquired.

'Blood Bending Virus' acquired.

'Circuit Duplication' knowledge acquired.

'Non-Mana Circuit Duplication Factory Formation' knowledge acquired.

'Chibi-Shaped Circuit Vessel' knowledge acquired?

'Blood Seeking Circuit' knowledge acquired.

'Magnetism circuit' knowledge acquired.

'Multivariable gates circuit' knowledge acquired.

'Ferromagnetism enhancing circuit' knowledge acquired.

'Deoxygenation circuit' knowledge acquired.

'Dodecahedron three-dimensional configuration circuit' knowledge acquired.