As it turned out, I shouldn’t have been able to crack the rock just yet.

  Clearly, this was my Will at play, hidden behind the scenes of this world’s Blood. I had a qualitative strength to my Blood use from the get-go, but I lacked quantity. Unfortunately, the only way I knew of to gain more was through ritual killing, which I wasn’t planning on seeking out myself.

  My father all but guaranteed that challengers would eventually be coming for me, no matter what my wishes were on the matter. Uli, like any people, often had a short memory, and soon enough people would come to see me as a potential target again. Perhaps after enough demonstrations, that would slow or stop, but at the moment I was just a kid who probably got lucky in his First Blood match-up.

  Surprisingly, Daru wasn’t upset when I expressed no desire to seek out more challenges on my own. Perhaps after losing so many sons to the First Blood ritual, he saw it as a necessary evil, rather than something to be celebrated. Or he was just relieved I wasn’t going to rush to my death.

  “Focus on your Blood control and skill growth for now,” was what he said on the topic of my progress.

  Unfortunately, the single [Blood-Empowered Blow] used up my Blood, so I couldn’t continue training until I ate and slept a bit. Devastating power for my age and “level” was great, but not if I used it up in one quick shot. [Blood Augmentation] would tank some powerful hits, but again, it would rapidly run out. I had a high Brawn to back that up, but my “magical stamina” would remain low until I was forced to increase it by surviving my challengers attempts to kill me and claim my Blood as their own.

  If there was another way to increase the quantity without ritual killing, no one seemed to have any idea. It was clear that additional quantity alone didn’t cause the growth in power for adults, though; that was at least partly the skill level rising, but also probably direct training to Blood causing its quality to rise. It was interesting that the difference wasn’t more clearly reflected by the System in this world, but then again, Brawn was a single number which didn’t clearly reflect how much one could lift or how much force one could handle before injury. Having stat numbers was a fascinating reference for growth, but was still only part of the story.

  The only reason my father wasn’t more surprised by my ability was that he, apparently, also had very good Blood control. It was his major claim to fame and the reason why he had a place in the tribe. He was exceptionally good in a hunt thanks to his skills, and could handle himself in a fight, even though he was smaller and weaker in terms of Brawn. He was a bit of an odd duck in the tribe, and his children had largely been targeted as “easy wins” by the other boys coming of age and growing into adults. Until they had time to master Blood control, they were low hanging fruit ripe for the picking.

  Having survived my First Blood ritual, and gaining the ability to control my Blood, Daru had hoped I would have enough time to master more skills to keep me alive through my subsequent challenges. He had more skills to teach me, and I was happy to add those to my repertoire and use them to exceed his expectations.

  I was going to be staying with my father in his tent during my training, which was a bit like a father-son apprenticeship. Until I was ready for a hunt and proved myself on it, I wouldn’t be a true grown Uli, despite having graduated from childhood by becoming Bloodied. The hide and bone of my first hunt would be mine to make my first tent from, which was when I would then properly be considered a tribesman, and could first stake a claim to a mate, begin developing my own creche, and so on.

  Not that I was all that interested in doing that just yet. I was confident in my abilities and could likely join and succeed in a hunt quite early, but there was no reason to rush.

  Well, there was one reason to rush: the other Bloodied boys could only challenge other Bloodied, not true tribesmen. If I could become a tribesman, I would be free from killing other teenagers, barely out of childhood. On the other hands, once I was a tribesman, I was susceptible to getting into conflict with other tribesmen, which, unsurprisingly, often resulted in combat to the death.

  Despite my reincarnator advantages, I wasn’t actually very confident I could win a fight with a full-grown Uli yet, particularly one such as the chief. I would need to keep my head down, train my Blood skills, and see if it were possible to increase my Blood in a more palatable way.

  There were upsides to being in this position between childhood and full adulthood, though. I had chores and errands to do, which included bringing food to the creche. That meant I got to see my mothers and siblings again, which I had presumed was behind me, lost alongside my childhood innocence.

  “Mali!” my siblings cried out when I entered the tent with the tribesmen’s latest successful hunt. At least, the ones who had liked me and remembered me, which wasn’t all of them. I was, no doubt, a weird kid, and had twisted a few arms to get some of my younger brothers to help me with my training, but most of them enjoyed my quirks and had learned from me.

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  Now that I had survived the First Blood ritual, I hoped to pay it back by being the older brother that other creches benefited from, and encourage my brothers to train their Brawn and [Grappling], so that they too could hopefully survive.

  One sibling in particular crashed into me with a tight hug.

  I wasn’t sure how I should handle Nadi now that I could continue seeing her. Of all the Uli in this life, she was the one I cared for the most, though exclusively as a sister, like I had Torra when I was Tovar.

  What Nadi had said before my First Blood ritual was almost certainly not a true proposition and more a desperate attempt for someone afraid to lose something trying to find a way to keep it in their life. Now that I remained alive and could visit the creche, I hoped that it would be enough, and in time to dismiss any notions of claiming her. Though, Nadi was old enough that she would likely leave the creche soon, herself, and so long as I wasn’t yet a full tribesman, I couldn’t make a claim, regardless. All I had to do was dodge challenges for long enough and it would be a moot point.

  At the moment, she was clearly just excited and happy to see me, as a sibling would be, so I hugged her back. “Good to see you, Nadi.”

  “We’re glad to see you as well,” Ro-oma Ubul said, on behalf of all my mothers. I turned to greet them, and saw some amount of relief on all their faces, but noted the way Loma-ar Nuiq was clutching her chest above her heart.

  “I’m as well as can be,” I responded with a soft smile.

  Emotionally, I was not that well, actually. Killing Uqar-il Roru sat heavily in me, and bearing the mark of it was a constant reminder. Perhaps if I was entirely native, with a low Brain stat, the memories wouldn’t be so clear, but having raised my Mind to 61 in my life as Tovar, my memory retention was one of the things which had improved, and I could still see it clear as day, up to the moment I passed out.

  I wondered if I had made the right choice, but every way I analyzed the situation, I concluded that I had, no matter how heavily it weighed on me.

  Only one of us was going to come away alive from that ritual. It was possible, even, that had I tried to avert that outcome, neither of us would have.

  Had Uqar have won, he would go on to kill others of his cohort on his way to becoming a tribesman, or end up killed later on by another. I likely couldn’t avoid doing the same, but I would only be answering challenges, not giving out my own. Perhaps that didn’t put me in the ethical right, exactly.

  From a utilitarian perspective, given the nature of reincarnation of souls to which I was uniquely aware, any Uli I wound up facing who died would be reborn, and the stats and skills they earned along the way would end up lost to them. Any stats and skills I earned by surviving in this life would remain with me. That didn’t necessarily make me more intrinsically worthy of this life, but worthiness beyond might rarely had any meaning in a survival of the fittest situation.

  Would allowing myself to be murdered by another child have been substantially less of an emotional burden? Suffering the pain of death while young and full of potential, offloading that responsibility onto another? Death would deprive myself of any potential to find happiness in this life, but also any potential to change things. I wasn’t sure that was possible, but at least I was here to think about it and try to discover what could be done to improve the situation of all Uli, rather than self-sacrifice that would benefit no one.

  No. In the same situation, I would do it again, and likely would have to when I faced another challenger.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to my mothers and siblings. “I intend to stick around. You’ll be seeing a lot more of me.”

  * * *

  The days that followed involved dodging the other boys my age as much as possible. Ostensibly, this was for my own survival, but in reality it was more for theirs. If they had more time to train, they could bring new skills to bear. As things stood, I expected I could tough out most of their attacks even with raw Brawn, but with [Blood Augmentation] at hand and a [Blood-Empowered Blow] at my disposal, it wouldn’t be a fair fight.

  When I wasn’t doing my chores, I apprenticed with my father, practicing my skills. For the moment, we were trying out advanced techniques with the skills I had to level them up, rather than acquiring new skills. I would rather have grabbed as many first-level skills as possible right then and work on them later on, but Daru was of the mentality that it was better to practice one skill a thousand times than a thousand skills once, which I couldn’t argue with. He was probably right, particularly from his perspective, and my desire to gain a wide set of skills was more about optimizing for future reincarnations rather than the immediate concerns of this one.

  I mentally thanked the admin of my previous life once more. He had said that [Mana Manipulation] would serve me well in future lives, more so than a specific spell, and he had unsurprisingly been right. Had I been granted [Create Light] as Tovar and went on to learn all the same spells, I wouldn’t have had any Blood advantage in this world. By learning to directly manipulate the energy in me, I saw some carryover to my Blood-based skills. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to extend [Manakinesis] to my Blood abilities just yet, as it was wholly internal.

  At least, that was what I thought, until one evening in his tent, I watched Daru begin to carve some ivory.

  I had wondered how such expert carving could be possible in this world, without metal tools. To my surprise, my father used a sharp nail to puncture the skin at the tip of his finger, and then began to wield his actual blood as a bladed edge, expertly chiseling and gouging at the dentine.

  “Whoa,” I murmured, watching him puppet his blood as a chisel.

  Daru glanced up at me, gave me a quick grin, then went back to his carving. “It’s an advanced skill. You’ll want to learn how to use your Blood to heal your wounds, first, and then be careful not to bleed out while learning it. You’ll need a lot more challenges behind you before I teach you this.”

  Self-healing with Blood was also a great skill to aim for, so I filed both of those tidbits away. I suspected I would have an easier time with the Blood puppetry skill than most thanks to [Manakinesis], but I didn’t want to be covered in open wounds. The only healing I knew from my life as Tovar was rote spellcasting, so I’d need to learn that the hard way in this life before I could leverage another one of my advantages.