There weren’t really any kind of rules to the challenges, but Uli did have a certain kind of honor. Challenging someone with less Blood was considered dishonorable, and since the amount of Blood was basically evenly correlated to the names carved into one’s flesh, it was fairly obvious at a glance when that was happening.

  So, as I kept to myself while the other boys of my cohort challenged each other, my potential challengers diminished, two by two—one because they became stronger than me and wouldn’t challenge downward, and the other because they were dead, gone from the tribe but for a name etched in memory and Blood onto the victor’s body.

  Once they were all “stronger” than me, I would be in the free and clear until the next year’s group of boys became Bloodied. In a usual situation, a boy like me wouldn’t tolerate that and would challenge upwards, which was allowed and would be considered poor form for the challenged to turn down. The dishonor was only in seeking out someone weaker, not accepting the brave challenge of one. At our level, with so little Blood control among the newly Bloodied, it wasn’t that much of a difference between the boys regardless of wins and losses, so it was very possible for a “weaker” boy to win against a “stronger” one.

  I asked Daru what would happen if a newly Bloodied boy challenged really far upwards, someone like the tribe leader, and somehow won. Once Daru stopped dismissing it as impossible and accepted the hypothetical, he told me that the Blood Fever would probably be severe, possibly even fatal.

  Not that I intended on doing that, but I wondered how my own weird circumstances would affect that. Accepting Uqar’s Blood had been hard on me because my Will was preternaturally high, but from what I had learned, killing someone weaker should make it easier to accept their Blood, not harder.

  As the risk of challenges diminished, it was hard not to let my guard down as I settled into my new circumstances. I was focusing on my training, doing my various tribe responsibilities, and visiting the creche when I could.

  That was where he found me. I was just leaving the creche when a boy my age stepped out in front of me.

  “Mali-iq Rumi, I challenge you!”

  Ugh, I thought, immediately chiding myself for not being more cautious. But he knew me by name, which means he had sought me out, specifically. There was only so much avoidance I could do in that case; he could have waited for me outside Daru’s tent all day.

  Whether he—or whoever had told him to seek me out—had forgotten my performance at the First Blood ritual, come to believe it was a fluke, or that there were no other boys to challenge without more wins to their name, was a moot point. The challenge was made. There was only one acceptable response; any other option was, ultimately, worse.

  “I accept,” I begrudgingly said. “What’s your name?”

  “Nu-iqal Orqa!” the boy said proudly.

  I wouldn’t need to remember it. Soon, it would be embedded into me, carried with me for the rest of this life.

  * * *

  We acquired the necessary witnesses, which was at least two tribesmen. Those Uli were usually the fathers, if they were still alive, and that was true in this case. In the process of collecting them and heading out to the combat arena, we acquired a few more spectators, though it paled by comparison to the full First Blood ritual.

  There was no need for speeches or fancy ivory daggers at this point. This was just a facet of life as an Uli tribesman. The strong killed the weak. The strong went on to protect and feed the tribe. If the weak couldn’t become strong, they had no place in it.

  As for the Blood ritual itself, that was, apparently, a mechanic of the world itself. In my last life, killing monsters had the potential to provide levels and with it, stat points, but killing sapients with souls did nothing. In this life, there were no monsters, and killing animals—even big and strong ones—did little more than provide meat and safety. But killing other sapients with souls resulted in acquiring their Blood energy before they passed on.

  I was a bit worried what that meant for me and my stats if I was killed by another soul in this world, as opposed to by a monster or from natural causes. It definitely seemed like this Blood stat was two-fold, a difference in quantity and quality, and that the energy I would leave behind to be absorbed by my killer was more like the mana I contained in my body as Tovar, not my actual Will stat. I didn’t plan to allow myself to be killed regardless, but it was extra incentive to avoid death by ritual combat, or by any Uli’s hand, in case it crippled me heading into my next life.

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  Yet something about the way Blood worked in this life niggled at my brain. I couldn’t fully accept that the entire magic system of this world could only progress through ritual murder.

  I could worry about it later, though, when I wasn’t about to commit ritual murder.

  The stage was set, and the battle was about to begin. I thought about the best way to deal with this fight on my way over; winning would put me back in the sights of the boys who had already claimed another life, as a target, so playing it coy wasn’t likely to do me any favors. I could only hide for so long.

  “Begin!” one of the tribesman called out, and I raised my eyes to see the boy—I had already forgotten his name—step towards me in a grappling stance. I could feel his Blood energy rising, ever so slightly, perhaps the beginning of learning his own [Blood Augmentation] skill.

  I did not feel like wrestling the boy I was doomed to have to kill.

  Stepping forward with my internal energy directed into my fist, I hit him with a [Blood-Empowered Blow].

  My fist hit flesh, and kept going.

  I had targeted his center mass, and even expected to kill him on impact, but the weight of my Brawn and Will-heightened Blood technique had blown clean through him. I could already feel new characters splitting open my skin, extending my Blood list.

  Pulling my arm back in surprise, it made a disgusting squelching sound that I would surely have nightmares about as I dislodged myself from my now-dead opponent. Nu-iqal Orqa, whose name I could never forget now that it was a part of me, fell to the ground in a heap, no longer held up by my arm.

  Looking up, I saw surprise written plainly on many of the faces of the observers. Death was part of life, here, but it wasn’t usually like that.

  While I was trying to come to terms with all that, I prepared myself for the onslaught of pain that had come from Uqar-il Roru’s Blood, but this time, it didn’t knock me unconscious. In fact, it barely tickled. The sensation of his name etching into me was uncomfortable, but manageable. Rather than think about what I had just done, I tried to think about why it was so much less painful this time around.

  My assumption was that my “fever” from Uqar’s Blood was more of the traditional kind, like an immune response. Rather than my Blood fighting to subsume and adapt the foreign Blood, it was my past life’s Will trying to fight off a foreign energy. Having now gone through that, my Will seems to have updated itself to this new paradigm, as I could use it for Blood techniques. It would likely take killing someone with enough Blood to compare to my past Will in order for it to hurt as much as it had the first time.

  I frowned. I didn’t like that. The pain seemed like the right recompense for the act.

  Blood dripped from my arm onto the rocks by my feet.

  “I’m going to go wash up,” I said, turning and leaving the combat arena.

  * * *

  Nu-iqal Orqa wasn’t the only new name on my body.

  After his, in sequence, was another name, which had started shrinking and partially winding as it was cut into me. It was, I realized after a while, the name of his First Blood victim. Nu-iqal had made it part of his Blood, so when I took his in turn, I acquired some of the other boy’s in the process.

  Clearly, the conversion was imperfect, and there were losses. My Blood stat was now 3, not 4. Had it always been a complete doubling, the exponential growth curve would have been insane.

  Now I understood why some of the adult tribesmen were so heavily “tattooed”. They hadn’t actually killed all those people; only the core names were their direct victims, and the trails of names that extended beyond were the record of those whose Blood lingered beyond.

  I flexed the new Blood under my control with [Blood Augmentation]. This would go a bit further for future battles, though I hoped my grotesque display dissuaded more challengers for the foreseeable future.

  In the meantime, more Blood meant I could push my training even more. I did not want my name marking some other Uli’s skin, and if I was going to make waves with my strength, I had to be sure that I could hold on to it.

  Days passed, and the rumors spread. Rather than needing to start avoiding the other boys who could challenge me again, I noticed some of them had started to avoid me, in turn. They must have thought that with my “newfound strength” I would seek them out to quickly advance the ranks, an inverse of the situation I had been living through before.

  That suited me just fine. And, having resigned myself to needing to acquire more power to survive in this tribe, I realized there wasn’t much of a reason in prolonging the inevitable. Avoiding my peers in Blood power just meant that I would have to kill younger boys in the future. I still had no intention of making challenges myself, but I prepared myself to accept them more readily in order to overcome this portion of my life and put it behind me.

  A few months passed like that, in which I did end up fielding several challenges, dispatching the challengers and further marring my body with a list of the dead to increase my Blood. Each time was a bit harder; each time was a bit easier.

  I gave into the mundanity of the murder, and it faded into the noise of training and tribe chores.

  It was after another successful hunt by the tribesmen, and I was delivering the meat to the creche. I was greeted by my mothers and siblings, and braced myself for a hug that didn’t come.

  “Where’s Nadi?” I asked, turning to my mothers and realizing that Ro-oma Ubul was also absent.

  “Nadi has become fertile,” Loma-ar Nuiq said, looking pleased. “She has left the creche to undergo preparations to become a mate and mother.”