Beyond the Bloodline-Chapter 173: Saintess Candidate

Even with the excruciating pain and the torrent of energy coursing through it, the salamander’s vitality, as a Level 900 Transcendent beast, was far from extinguished.

It released a burst of black flames from its body and though Jamie’s multi-layered skin-tight barrier could block it, he simply teleported to avoid it.

When he reappeared, the monster forced its body towards him and sucked in a deep breath, before releasing a powerful torrent of flames powerful enough to sink a huge portion of the very landmass they stood on.

"Dude! If you destroy the road, where are they gonna pass?!"

Such was Jamie’s exclamation as he filled his blade with spatial power and swung it down, releasing a slash that cut open the fabric of space and created a rift which sucked in the powerful continent-destroying blast.

The salamander continued to pump the torrent of flames at him, and while it was occupied with that, Jamie teleported to its side and threw a kick with all his might, sending the creature hurtling through the air and bashing into the trees behind.

The monster’s impact set the withered trees ablaze with the residual flames on its body. It plummeted to the ground with such force that it carved a kilometre-wide crater into the earth, landing with its belly exposed to the sky.

It released a final burst of flames that shot in the opposite direction of the road before choking on its own blood bubbling up its throat. Jamie’s seemingly casual kick had done far more internal damage to its already wounded internal organs.

Faster than it could reorient itself and turn its body over, Jamie landed from above, driving his sword into the salamander’s vulnerable underbelly.

The blade sliced through the creature’s tough scales with practised ease, piercing into its vital organs and eliciting guttural screams of agony.

The salamander convulsed and thrashed wildly, but Jamie wasn’t thrown off its body. He maintained his composure and twisted the blade, infusing his azure flames into the sword and giving a command.

"Explode."

**THUUM!

The monster’s insides exploded into a gory mess, forcing it to vomit its own charred internal organs before its thrashing ceased abruptly.

With a final, shuddering breath, the colossal salamander’s life drained out of its body and the Hybrid pulled out his blade, flicking off the blood and organ fragments sticking to it before sheathing it.

Jamie turned his gaze in the direction of the convoy and his body vanished in a burst of spatial power. Upon his reappearance, he removed the spatial expansion applied to them, causing the space to return to normal and allowing the convoy to cross the road unimpeded.

He took a seat beside Miranda, placing his sword to the side before looking up at the two women seated opposite them.

On the left was a fit woman who had brown eyes with thin eyebrows and long brown hair that she tied into a bun while styling the front of it into two bangs.

She wore a maid uniform, covering her bun with a headpiece, and the rest of her uniform consisted of a white collared shirt underneath a black dress with a blade skirt, and dark leggings.

This woman was Kendra Anthony, the maid of the one seated to her left—the one Jamie and Miranda were hired to protect.

It was a young woman with shoulder-length black hair, her bangs extending down to cover the middle of her forehead.

Her deep black eyes were framed by a pair of half-framed glasses that gave her an air of quiet intelligence. She wore a flowing knee-length one-piece dress, lending her an air of understated elegance.

The dress, simple yet sophisticated, complemented her refined appearance, while the glasses added a touch of intellectual charm. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

She was Tiris Argeryan, the Saintess Candidate for the Religion worshipping the goddess Esanke of Gnocyl Prime.

In the myths of Gnocyl Prime, the goddess of the Sky, Esanke, fought an evil god in a fierce battle that ’collapsed the heavens’. She was victorious, but in an apparent last-ditch effort to wreak havoc on Gnocyl, the evil god contaminated the planet’s energy with their lifeblood.

The reality was that Esanke was a god Queen, and the ’Evil god’ was another god Queen she was at war with.

The defeated god Queen indeed sacrificed her soul to contaminate the planet’s energy as a final act of malice against Esanke who was a Gnocyl Native.

Unfortunately, she succeeded and the contamination ran deep, affecting more than half of the Prime World.

Considering Gnocyl was a Prime World even bigger than some Brown Dwarf Stars, the amount of contaminated energy was enormous.

The planet’s consciousness, in an effort to rid itself of the contaminated energy, began expelling said energy to the surface in the form of miasma wells like they were currently passing through.

Any monsters within the area of these miasma wells were contaminated by them, and perhaps because the god Queen responsible for this crisis possessed an Authority of Creation, the contaminated energy created new monsters which attacked everything in sight.

To combat this, the religion of Esanke, under her guidance, created various forms of purification magic spells and techniques.

These spells and techniques were best used by those with Divinity, which was expected given that it was a god who was behind their creation.

Those with the Divine Factor were highly revered on Gnocyl, and there were those who had so much Divine Factors that they were practically demigods in all but name.

Tiris who was before Jamie, was one of those rare Divine Humans.

Somewhere up in her family’s ancestry, there must have been a god or demigod involved, and she was an atavist who inherited those genes.

As such, she, like everyone else who had such strong innate divine powers, was to be exalted to the position of a Saintess.

"Hey, Tiris. Why don’t you purify the swamp outside?"

Jamie made this suggestion and Tiris raised a brow in confusion. The miasma swamp whose monsters Jamie had cleared would continue producing more monsters after some time, so unless it was completely purified, any travellers using this road would be attacked.

However—

"I...don’t think I can purify a swamp this large..."

Tiris was not confident in her ability to deal with this miasma. She was still a ’Saintess Candidate’ and was heading towards Skyhaven, the Holy Mountain of Esanke’s religion where she would begin to undertake her proper training.

Said training was closed door so she wouldn’t be seeing the outside world for a long while. Even after it was done and she became a full-fledged Saintess, her movements would be extremely restricted by the higher-ups of the Church.

As such, this trip to Skyhaven was kind of her last taste of ’complete freedom’. Kinda sad, considering she was only 18 years old.

"Don’t worry. The miasma doesn’t penetrate deep into the forest. It actually only affects the outskirts for about 700-800 metres."

Jamie spoke as he moved to the opposite seat, seamlessly placing himself in between Tiris and her maid.

This ended with Kendra being pushed away from her lady while Jamie leaned towards the young woman in question and continued.

"We’ll be approaching the centre of the miasma soon, if you use an AOE Purification spell, it should be possible for you to clear the whole swamp in one go."

"Again...I don’t think my divinity is strong enough yet. I’m only Level 730, and my energy stat is still just ’X1’."

"If it’s energy that you need, then I’d give you. I have a lot of that."

Jamie didn’t let up, grabbing her hands and passing a bit of his magic power into her body. However, Tiris really wanted him to give up on it for more reasons than one.

"First off...I need divinity to use the AOE Purification, and you don’t have divinity."

’Secondly, please can you move away!? You’re too close and it’s not good for my heart! More importantly, Lady Miranda’s cold stare would freeze me over!!!’

Tiris unfortunately could neither voice out her weakness for Jamie’s handsome face nor her fear of getting killed by Miranda.

Given how close Jamie was to her, it was only natural that there was physical contact. The man had even grabbed her hands to demonstrate his magic transference and Tiris felt that Miranda wanted to slice off her hands with her gaze.

"You’ve never tried an AOE purification with just magic?"