Chapter 401:The Bloom of Blood
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"She hears me," Bat Bat said again, half to Sekhmet and half to herself. "She hears me."
Then the green patch reacted.
That was the next strange thing.
The grass around them stirred though no wind passed. The leaves nearest Leaf trembled and tilted toward her as if responding to pain in their smallest queen. Tiny root-lines under the soil glowed faintly green, answering whatever was happening in her spirit. The little patch of life did not merely surround her now. It responded to her.
Auri saw it too. "The patch is holding her."
Yes.
That could matter.
Leaf’s light flashed again, this time red-green-gold all at once, and then her tiny body folded inward. Her wings wrapped around her. Her head tucked down. Her light compressed instead of flaring.
Bat Bat sucked in a breath. "What is she doing?"
Sekhmet already knew. He had seen enough transformations under his line by now to recognize the shape of what came before emergence.
"She is cocooning."
The word had barely left his mouth when it happened.
Leaf’s tiny folded body dropped from the air, not hard, but gently, as if the green patch itself had caught her. The grass and leaves under her shifted upward and around her in answer to the bloodline change. Green light spiraled around the tiny shape. Then red joined it. Then the two colors tangled together, wrapped tighter, and began forming a cocoon no larger than both of Bat Bat’s hands put together.
It did not look like Lily’s.
It did not look like Mira’s either.
This cocoon was a small living bud, forest-wrapped and blood-lit at once. Green veins glowed through the outer shell, but between them ran thinner lines of crimson. It looked like spring had swallowed a drop of blood and decided not to spit it back out.
Bat Bat stared at it.
Auri’s eyes narrowed.
Sekhmet turned inward immediately.
"System."
The answer came cleanly.
[SYSTEM Notification: Hybrid Vampire Spirit conversion initiated successfully.
Target stabilized in a transformation cocoon.
Estimated emergence time: pending.
Leaf’s evolution is in progress.]
Bat Bat looked up at him with a face so open that for once there was no performance in it at all. "Did it work?"
"Yes."
That hit her hard enough that she sat back on the grass.
Not from weakness.
From relief.
Then, almost immediately, she leaned back toward the tiny cocoon and placed both hands around it without touching, as if she could guard it through sheer refusal to let the universe misbehave further.
"She is so small," Bat Bat whispered.
Auri said quietly, "And still braver than most people in the city."
Bat Bat did not answer that.
She only kept looking at the cocoon.
Sekhmet did the same.
The little bud-shaped shell gave off a gentle glow now, pulsing in slow rhythm. Not the panicked flicker from before. A steadier beat. Life reorganizing itself. Spirit becoming something else.
The green patch around it brightened slightly in answer.
Leaf was changing, and the land nearest her was answering in return.
Sekhmet looked at Bat Bat. "You stay with her."
That snapped her fully back into focus.
"Yes."
"You do not move her."
"Yes."
"You call me if the cocoon changes sharply."
Bat Bat nodded again, fiercer this time. "Yes."
Auri added, "I will stay too."
Sekhmet looked at her once, then at Bat Bat, then at the little glowing cocoon between them.
That was enough.
For now, at least, it would hold.
Leaf had taken the first step.
And now all they could do was wait for what would grow out of it.
.
.
.
A few hours passed in the Void Land without anyone truly relaxing.
Bat Bat never moved far from Leaf’s cocoon. She changed positions many times, which was not the same as leaving. Sometimes she sat cross-legged beside it with both hands on her knees, staring so hard at the bud-shaped shell that it seemed possible she thought attention alone could keep it safe. Sometimes she lay on her stomach in the grass with her chin in both hands, talking softly to the cocoon as if Leaf might already hear her through bark, blood, and spirit-sleep. Sometimes she stood and walked small circles around it, muttering to herself about responsibility, queenship, and how unfair it was that important work always involved waiting.
Auri stayed nearby the entire time.
She did not circle. She did not fidget. She chose one dark stone near the edge of the green patch and remained there like a quiet guardian carved from patience and wings. More than once, Bat Bat glanced at her as if expecting criticism or mockery. Auri offered neither. She only watched the cocoon, the surrounding patch of life, and Bat Bat with the calm focus of someone who understood that certain transformations belonged to the kind of silence one should not disturb carelessly.
Sekhmet came and went.
He did not remain crouched over the cocoon like Bat Bat did. He had too much else moving through the day. Dawn House still stood under pressure. Mihos still waited outside the city like a blade pretending to be a guest. Iron House would already have discovered the emptied warehouse by now. Messages, orders, worker fear, merchant hesitation, and route changes were all still active threads around his house and name.
But each time he returned to the Void Land, he saw the same thing.
The cocoon remained stable.
That mattered.
At first it had been only the shell itself that changed. The small forest-bud cocoon pulsed with a slow rhythm, green and crimson moving through it in delicate lines that looked less like veins and more like roots remembering blood. The surface never hardened into a dead casing. It remained alive, damp with spirit-light and growth-force, as though Leaf’s own nature refused to allow her transformation to become anything fully separate from the land around her.
Then the ground began answering.
That was when the true change started.
The little green patch where Leaf had always lived was the first to react. The grass around the cocoon thickened. Not over days. Over hours. Blades grew denser, richer, and brighter, their roots pushing deeper into the dark soil as though some hidden command now urged them downward and outward. Soft moss crept across stone that had remained bare until now. Thin little vines began winding over the nearest rock edges. A tiny cluster of red-veined leaves unfolded near the cocoon’s base and remained there, trembling as if listening for instructions.
"Interesting."
Sekhmet crouched near the edge of the patch the second time he came to check the change. Bat Bat looked up immediately.
"She is making it bigger," Bat Bat whispered, as though speaking too loudly might break the spell of it.
Sekhmet studied the ground.
"Yes."
Bat Bat looked absurdly pleased by that answer, not because she had been correct, but because Leaf had done something worth being proud of before even emerging.
"She is already working," Bat Bat said.
That, too, was true.
Auri lifted one hand and let her fingers brush the top of a new grass cluster that had not been there earlier. "The growth is not random," she said quietly. "It is spreading with intent."
Sekhmet looked up at her.
"Toward water pockets," Auri said. "Toward softer cracks. Toward places where life would hold better if it reached them first."
That pleased him more than he showed.
Leaf was not merely exploding with growth. She was directing it.
That meant the Vampire Spirit path was not simply adding bloodline hunger to a forest spirit. It was sharpening authority.
By the third hour, the patch was no longer a patch.
It had become a small living zone.
Nothing enormous. Not yet. The Void Land remained vast enough to mock all small victories if one stood too far back and looked at them coldly. But up close, the difference was impossible to ignore. The green had pushed outward in a rough widening ring. Soft grass spread farther across the black ground. Moss climbed the lower stones. New little red-green shoots rose where previously only cracked dirt had existed. One tiny tree sapling had forced itself up near the edge of the old patch, thin and dark and alive with an almost defiant intensity.
Bat Bat cried when she saw that.
It was not loudly. Not dramatically.
Just one tiny gasp and shining eyes and then an immediate offended look when she realized Sekhmet had noticed.
"I did not cry," she said.
"You did."
She replied, "It was moisture with purpose."
Auri turned her face away very slightly.
That meant she was hiding amusement.
Bat Bat caught the movement and narrowed her eyes. "You are both cruel to visionaries."
No one apologized.
Then, sometime deeper into the afternoon, the cocoon changed again.
Until then, it had pulsed in the same slow rhythm. Stable. Bright. Alive. Then, without warning, the rhythm altered.
Bat Bat noticed first.
Of course she did.
She sat up so quickly she nearly fell backward into the new grass. "Master."
Sekhmet was already turning.
He crossed the distance faster than the words finished leaving her mouth. Auri rose from her stone at the same time, one wing shifting outward slightly as if the body itself knew the next part might require shielding or action.
The cocoon had begun glowing more strongly. It was not a flare. But a gathering.