Beyond the Bloodline-Chapter 316: Spatial Pursuit
When David finished his narration, Jamie looked around and then clicked his tongue.
"Those bastards purposely avoided using it..."
Just as he spoke, a pillar of flames descended onto the floor beside him, the embers fading away to reveal a beautiful red-haired and eyed androgynous figure who immediately questioned him.
[Using what?]
"Spatial Power.
The quickest way to escape after abducting a high-profile target like a Race Queen’s granddaughter would be teleportation. But besides myself, nothing has teleported in or out of this area within the past hour.
They fled on foot and erased the planet’s records in this zone to cover their tracks."
’Even worse, I can’t sense the girl anywhere on this planet. They must have had a getaway vehicle wait—!’
Jamie’s thoughts came to an abrupt halt as he turned towards David and asked.
"Do you know how long ago you were attacked?"
His sudden question had the young man shaking his head, but before he could answer, Wanete spoke up.
"Seven minutes ago."
Jamie turned to her, about to ask how she was so certain when he saw her holding up Davina’s cracked tablet. The Notes app was open, and at the bottom of the screen, the words ’Last Edited Seven Minutes Ago’ were clearly displayed.
Taking that into account, Jamie’s eyes narrowed as he mentally retraced the sequence of events.
’The attack came first, followed by the destruction of the planetary records. They definitely erased them before escaping, and while the job looks rushed, it wasn’t instantaneous.
They had to escape in a way that would make it difficult for me to track them. Checking all planetary records outside this destroyed zone might help me find them but that would take too much time—and who knows what could happen in the meantime.
Estimating the time since the planetary record destruction, it happened shortly after I re-entered Knesix and before I rewound time on this planet—right when that rupture occurred!’
If Jamie’s deduction was correct, then the rupture that had occurred right as he used his Imperial Privilege to rewind planetary damage wasn’t a random accident.
’It was their escape route!’
With his accelerated thought speed, Jamie only needed seconds to reach this conclusion. Without hesitation, he swung his hand, tearing open the space beside him and creating a spatial gate leading directly to the site of the rupture.
He leapt through without a moment’s pause, and the other three in the destroyed booth followed wordlessly.
On the other side, they were met with the sight of a massive rupture in the sky. It looked as though someone had folded space like a sheet of paper, used scissors to carve an irregular pattern, then unfolded the cut-up fragments and stretched them across the sky.
The area was in utter chaos. Fires raged from the wreckage of crashed spaceships, panicked screams filled the air, and medics and emergency responders scrambled to salvage what they could.
"They most likely caused this chaos while escaping—an attempt to throw off my spatial senses."
[Are they suicidal? That thing could send them ANYWHERE in the Universe!]
The red-haired phoenix, Aikess, couldn’t help but voice their disbelief.
"They’re either suicidal or they’re confident they’ll reach their intended destination. They must have some means to navigate the distorted spatial channels of the forcibly merged wormholes..."
Even a Race Emperor with a Spatial Authority would struggle to pinpoint where a group of five vampires had been sent through such a chaotic rupture—especially when hundreds, possibly thousands, of others, had also been sucked in when it occurred.
Any one of the people pulled into the rupture could have been Davina and her kidnappers. And since David had mentioned a fourth vampire appearing after the first three, it would be prudent to assume their group might be even larger.
Tracking where this rupture had sent them would be a wild goose chase across spacetime.
’This is even more annoying than the labyrinth with that Bewússtsein guy back in Valmone...!’
Jamie recalled a similarly frustrating incident but quickly pushed it aside, focusing instead on finding the fastest and most efficient way to locate Davina.
It took him exactly five seconds to find his answer.
"Looks like that Orikar idiot was useful in the end."
Raising his hand, Jamie activated his Imperial Privileges once more.
|Second Privilege: Space. Fourth Privilege: Time.|
The world around them shifted to monochrome, freezing everything and everyone in place. Even the rupturing space, which had been constantly spewing distorted magic power, came to a halt.
Aikess immediately turned to Jamie, brows raised in question.
[What are you doing now? Don’t tell me you’re planning to search every single distorted spatial channel in that thing?!]
"I don’t have the time for that," Jamie snapped back, his focus locked on his Privileges as he tried to establish a link to what he needed.
"Earlier today, something happened that prompted me to give that child a drop of my blood."
[You gave her your blood?! Were you trying to kill her?!] 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎
Aikess couldn’t help but question Jamie’s reasoning—not because they were aware that his blood could be poisonous. That was something they knew he could control at will.
It was because even a single drop of Jamie’s blood contained an overwhelming amount of energy—far beyond what someone at the power level they estimated Davina was at should be able to handle.
[Your blood contains cosmic energy!]
"I removed that before giving it to her. But I left the magic power intact—after all, I was trying to restore her magic."
Even as he spoke, Jamie’s cosmic energy surged through the distorted spatial channels of the massive rupture in the sky.
"However, no matter how small the amount, the magic power in my blood is still far too much for someone at the Epic Realm to fully absorb in just a few hours."
The moment he said this, Aikess’ eyes widened, realization flashing through their crimson pupils.
"All I have to do now is track what direction in space that my ’blood’ went..."
Jamie’s words trailed off as he phased his cosmic energy through more and more of the distorted spatial channels. And eventually—
"!"
One of them began glowing an azure blue.
"Got you!"
He clenched his fist and pulled his arm back, erasing the space between them and the glowing rift.
"Aikess, stand by in case I need to call you. You two, follow me."
With those words, Jamie leapt into the rupture, David practically flying in right after him, while Wanete followed after a moment’s hesitation.
Left behind, Aikess tilted their head in confusion and asked.
’Now that I think about it, why didn’t he just pan across time from a higher dimension?’
A moment later, the phoenix simply shrugged, deciding it wasn’t worth the effort to question why Jamie did certain things the way he did.
◇ ◇ ◇
Rule number one—the golden rule that every Spatial Manipulation teacher who truly cared for their students always emphasized—was simple:
If you can avoid it, never teleport or attempt any form of Spatial Travel in a region with unstable space.
There was a very good reason for this.
Imagine the Spatial Channel created when one travels through the fabric of space as a pipe, connecting the starting point to the destination. The people or objects being transported would be like water flowing through that pipe.
In normal conditions, the pipe was smooth and straight, with only a few necessary bends.
But when space was unstable, everything changed.
The pipe would twist and contort unnaturally, bending backwards, looping into itself, and forming chaotic intersections.
Worse, it would be riddled with cracks, and just like how water would leak through cracks in a pipe, anything travelling through an unstable spatial channel could slip through these fissures.
And if someone did fall through?
If they were lucky, they’d drop through a gap in space and get hurled onto some random planet.
If they weren’t... the sheer pressure of ambient spatial law energy would crush them into nothing more than a smear of flesh and bone.
Jamie, David, and Wanete were being hurled through one of those chaotic, fractured spatial channels.
Thankfully, they had Jamie—one of the finest spatial manipulators in all existence—with them.
With his control, he prevented them from slipping through the cracks and plummeting to their deaths. He also worked to stabilize the channel as much as possible, keeping it from twisting back on itself or looping into tangled intersections—delays they couldn’t afford when they had no idea what situation Davina was in.
Thanks to him, their journey through the spatial channel—though dangerous, unstable, and rough—ultimately brought them safely to their destination: the place where Jamie’s blood, or more precisely, the magic power within it that Davina had yet to fully absorb and make her own, had ended up.
As they emerged from the destination rift in space and touched solid ground, Jamie’s still-active Imperial Privileges of Space and Time instantly fed him a complete metadata readout of his current location.
He knew, in an instant, exactly where he was in relation to his previous position, the centre of the galaxy, and even the broader expanse of the known universe.
But it wasn’t the precise coordinates that caught his attention, but the familiarity of the place itself.
Their current location, was on Planet Anadus Prime.
The planet where Jamie had spent February through November of last year.
This thought briefly crossed his mind as he unleashed his spatial power without restraint, scanning all 9.638 billion square kilometres of the planet’s surface.
His brain captured and filtered through all that information, searching for the magic power signature of his blood that couldn’t be concealed from him.
Within seconds, he pinpointed it on the far side of the planet and, without a moment’s hesitation, tore open a spatial gate to the location.
