Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

The more Ryu learned about the three souls and seven spirits, the more he realized that the odds that he was the only one who knew about them was middling at best. He had run into too many of his abilities that would benefit from them to believe that he was the only one who could have figured all of this out. He was arrogant, but he wasn't foolish.

He wasn't the only one ever born with Mysteries of Heaven and Earth Pupils, if he had been, it wouldn't be ranked number one as the ranking was dependent on the feats of its past owners and the ties of Fate between them. He wasn't the first to form a Founding Dao and he most definitely wasn't the first to ever have an Origin Flame.

While he was in a unique situation that allowed him to master these things so early on and without the backing of others, there were definitely other geniuses out there that had Ancestors that could lay out the truth for them without any effort on their part at all, and there were most definitely lone cultivators who had progressed into the Sky God Realms-deep into them, at that-that had Daos much more powerful than his current that could see through the secrets of such things.

However, whether or not these people had an understanding of the full scope was unknown, and only time would tell Ryu that.

Much of what he knew about the souls were based on folk tales he had pieced together. He hadn't run into any information on them even in the Taboo Ruins that he had visited two of by now. However, that didn't mean that there wouldn't be clues on higher Heavens.

Regardless, he would just have to keep this matter in the back of his might. Right now, what was most important was understanding the changes to his body and what might have triggered it.

His most important gain was understanding that emotion was intangible at all. When you felt rage, your body heated up. When you felt sadness, there were pangs in your heart. When you felt anxiety, your mind would fizzle out of control and your blood might race at speeds it shouldn't. When you felt depressed, you might feel a feeling of emptiness.

The deep and profound effects emotions had on the body were clear and obvious, almost like an open secret that could be easily waved away. Ryu, for example, just assumed that since emotions were just a balance of changes to the brain and soul, the fact they could impact the function of the body was only natural.

What he hadn't considered was if there were certain centers of such things within his body itself, separate from his brain and soul.

It sounded ridiculous, foolish even, like a pseudo science concocted by some braindead granny clutching her crystals and whispering to herself. But Ryu's mind had been completely occupied by the assimilation with the Diamond Protector Spirit. If his mind was so occupied, how could it have time to feel emotion and then cause changes in his body?

It meant that there was something deeper, something far more primal, something buried within the fabric of his body itself, and this was where the strength of his Bloodlines came from.

And then it suddenly clicked.

Beasts didn't have the usual Six Pillars that humans and humanoid races did.

Their Daos were replaced by their Runed Bones and Beast Crystal infused Runes. As for the rest of their five pillars, they were practically fused into one, forming the system of flesh that housed their Spiritual Roots.

Within a beast's body, they didn't have Meridians, or at the very least it wasn't a separate system from their veins and arteries. Instead, it was a single whole system that they used called Spiritual Roots. This was something true across Sacrum and the True Martial World as well, though the Beast Crystals and various runes were distinctive to the latter.

If you cut open a beast and took out their Spiritual Roots, you wouldn't find anything 'spiritual' about them at all, it would just look like a wiggling mass of bloody organs. But why was it that they had such an... enlightened name?

It all fell into place for Ryu right then.

The beasts had evolved differently from humans. Humans Seven Corporeal Souls had become somewhat dormant, lying in their bodies and only barely pulling out the strength that they would need from time to time, often not even at the behest of their host or owner. Focus Qi was a perfect example of this.

However, the Seven Corporeal Souls of beasts had taken a different line of evolution, forming into a robust cultivation network.

It all made sense to him now. They were called Spiritual Roots because they were truly spiritual, they were the very core of a beast's being.

It wasn't that a beast didn't have a soul in the normal sense, but rather that their own manifested in different ways.

Then, the question was obvious. What did it mean for Ryu who had taken the Bloodline of beasts and yet didn't have Spiritual Roots to use them properly? What roadblocks would he run into? What difficulties would he have in controlling and manifesting their talents?

Ironically, all this time, he had been so focused on his Bloodlines as being a part of his body, trying to wrestle with his Vital Qi, his Bone Structure, even his master's Elemental War God legacy to figure out a method of using them.

However, all the while, the secret was far more spiritual.

Beasts were often seen as unaware and unintelligent, endowed with their gifts from the heavens and being unallowed to change their Fates.

But what if from the very beginning this was just the sacrifice for their Spirituality? What if they were even more spiritual than humans could ever hope to be?

And what would happen if a human like Ryu finally comprehended all of this and pieced it together one by one?