[With your Vital Gu secured, your ambitions began to grow]
[However, you first needed to figure out what the Cursed Blood Gu’s feeding requirements were]
[Gu Worms belonging to the Blood Path were usually very easy to maintain.
This was one of the reasons why you chose the Blood Path in the first place]
[They required only the blood of a Gu Master of their corresponding Rank as food]
[Even if there was no Gu Master of their Rank that could provide suitable blood, their feeding requirements were extremely flexible and could be substituted with larger amounts of ordinary human blood]
[Your initial plan was to use your own blood as a Rank 1 Gu Master]
[After all, it wasn’t really a big deal to lose some blood when Mizukume was around to heal you!]
[Unfortunately, as was usual with your dog shit luck, it turned out more complicated than expected]
Damn, that’s a bit harsh.
‘Dog shit luck?
Come on, Simulation Gu.
I wouldn’t have acquired you were it not for this same luck!’ I calmly rebuked with a laugh.
Though compared to Michizane, his luck might actually be in the dumps.
Being a noble and having Mizu as his companion were the only good things about his life right now…
Well, he’s also apparently karma-less, but I didn’t even know what that meant.
Anyway, Gu Worms indeed needed to be fed.
It could be understood that Wild Gu were the very incarnations of Heaven and Earth.
Therefore, they didn’t need any food and never felt hungry.
The world itself fed them with its energy!
However, the moment a Gu is refined by a human, the world no longer considers that Gu its own, cutting it off from its previously boundless supply of food.
This was different from the Primeval Essence used to fuel a Gu Worm’s abilities.
After all, even Magi needed to regularly eat despite using Magical Energy for their spells.
Now mind you, the ‘food’ that each Gu required was often quite strange and extraordinary.
There were Gu that fed on clouds, ashes, or soil.
Those were actually the easiest to figure out.
It was the Gu that fed on abstract concepts like bad luck or killing intent that was hard to understand.
The Simulation Gu itself would presumably just feed on my dreams when I wasn’t using the simulation.
Though I’ll naturally have to test the validity of that assumption once I get back to the real world.
I wonder how my future wet dreams will taste, hehe.
As for Michizane’s Gu…
The Cursed Blood Gu floated on top of a bowl of fresh human blood.
Both the four-armed boy and the jackal-like girl observed it with curious intent, their gazes alternating between the fetus-shaped Gu and each other’s faces.
“I don’t think it wants your blood, Michi-kun…” Mizu muttered with a tilt of her head.
“I mean, I wouldn’t either.”
However, that was understandable.
After all, she helped him refine the Cursed Blood Gu in the first place and ensured he survived the process.
Were it not for her, he might not have succeeded so smoothly.
Keeping it a secret from her would take a lot of complicated gaslighting and unnecessarily drive a wedge between them.
Though he probably wouldn’t tell her about its otherworldly nature, I certainly wouldn’t.
Fortunately, his Gu Master abilities could easily be explained as his own normal, albeit unique Magecraft that he had been naturally born with.
“What if we use yours, Mizu?” Michizane asked as he looked to his dear companion.
“No.” She shook her head immediately.
“…Huh, why?”
“I might not be human like you are, but I’m not a lunatic either!” She shouted in dismay.
“Why would you go to such lengths for such a minor alchemical ritual, anyway?
I hate having to heal you!”
She pouted and crossed her arms in an adorable manner, displaying her clear disapproval of his methods.
“Fair enough.” Michizane shrugged at this, taking it at face value.
Eventually, the Yakan gave quite the interesting suggestion, “Um, what about the blood of those scorpions you like to catch so much?”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re poisonous creatures and this baby-looking thing turns you poisonous too, right?” Mizu pointed out with a smile.
“It makes perfect sense for it to want poisonous blood as its food!”
“Scorpions are venomous, not poisonous.” Michizane corrected as he held his chin in contemplation.
“But that’s not a bad idea.
You’re quite smart, Mizu.”
“Of course, consider me a scholar!” She giggled and gave an overjoyed expression at the praise.
Michizane tried this immediately as he crushed the body of a scorpion and dripped its remains onto a new bowl.
This time, the Cursed Blood Gu devoured the blood with a voracious pace!
‘So it really does feed on the blood of toxic creatures…’
The boy then tried feeding it with the blood of other toxic creatures, confirming that it wasn’t just that particular type of scorpion.
In addition, he tried to feed it his own blood after it was cursed, but it sadly would not accept it even like that.
This meant it could only feed on the blood of naturally poisonous or venomous creatures.
Quite the interesting diet, indeed!
[Year 8: You managed to refine two more Gu Worms as the year went by]
[These two Gu were the offense-oriented Blood Spike Gu, and the support-oriented Copper Blood Gu]
[Blood Spike Gu allowed you to solidify any blood you touched into sharp spikes, whereas Copper Blood Gu greatly increased the copper content of your blood upon activation, turning it hard and dense] This chapter was taken from novelping dot com without permission.
[Luckily enough, unlike the Cursed Blood Gu’s more exotic diet, these two Gu had no problems subsisting entirely off of your blood]
The next scene opened with an arrow being shot from its bow.
This arrow wasn’t an ordinary arrow as it was completely made of hardened blood with a texture resembling that of raw copper.
It pierced through the air and shot straight into the bark of an old tree, where four other blood arrows had wedged themselves in.
“…Nice!” Mizu called out as she sat atop a nearby boulder, munching on a fresh, exquisite plum that she must have plucked on the way here.
“Not nice,” Michizane shook his head in return as he lowered his yumi, the classical Japanese longbow.
His right wrist was slit open with a bloodied wound, no doubt the source of that previous arrow.
“That was way too slow, I think it’s because the whole thing’s made of copper blood instead of just the tip.”
He heaved a sigh and focused his emerald green Primeval Essence into the Blood Spike Gu as the stream of blood dripping down from his wound congealed and gathered into the shape of an arrow.
It then gained a coppery luster as he loaded the arrow into his yumi.
—TWOONG!
He released the bowstring as the blood arrow followed a similar trajectory to its predecessors, stabbing into that same old tree.
It was clear that this scene was of him testing out his new abilities to their full extent.
Aside from the archery practice that was currently being shown, I also saw the various remains of blood daggers and blood stakes littering the forest floor.
Some of them had already crumbled back to their original liquid states, meaning that the effects of Blood Spike Gu and Copper Blood Gu were ultimately temporary.
Good to know.
As for where he got that yumi from, I didn’t know for sure, but he probably just stole it from the Sugawara Clan’s armory.
He must have stolen that black chamber pot, after all.
There was no way that thing hadn’t been heavily guarded and they obviously would not risk him taking it outside in fear of it breaking.
Just him using it wasn’t that strange to me.
Archery had been a skill I picked up from my school’s extracurricular since I wanted to impress that girl from my past life.
However, I found it rather hard to believe that his four-armed body could sneak in and out to steal both the yumi and black chamber pot without an issue.
In both cases, Mizu must have helped expedite the thievery!
My gaze turned complicated as I stared at the Yakan.
It would be naive of me to completely trust her at this point, not with that ambiguously malicious stare she directed at Michizane when he had been paralyzed.
Like come on, what on earth was that about?
Sure, it could be that she was just angry that he was so willing to potentially throw his life away for the tiniest sliver of power.
She was his friend and any friend would rightfully be horrified by such a thing.
…But I doubted that.
If that was really the problem, then why even help him in the first place?
Wouldn’t that be considered an oxymoron?
Although she claimed to not be a Kitsune, she really acted like one.
A sly, conniving fox that spends its leisure time deceiving mankind and beguiling the world.
…Or maybe I was just being a tad bit too dramatic over the unpredictable mood and disposition of a little girl, who knows.