She replied with little confidence, "Sort of."
He shook his head and said, "Life is not fair."
She admitted, "You're right."
But he didn't stop there. He pointed out, "By your definition, I also cheated when I used Mind Domination Network to defeat Stella and her diamond skin. I don't believe that what I did then and now was cheating. I believe that I bested cleanly with my great ability."
Then he asked, "Tell me, who else could have eliminated different types of enemies as easily as I do? Next, you should tell me who is as versatile as I am. After that, you should tell me if versatility is my power or not."
Wrath couldn't refute that. So she gave up and changed the subject.
She asked, "So what do you plan to do next?"
He gave a quick reply. "I am going to go around the city leaving blood hooks in people. I'll leave as many as I can. Then I will return to studying and preparing for the foreign battlefield."
She nodded and gave him some advice. "You have to make it hidden so as not to draw attention and investigation into yourself. I'm sure the city will panic if they find that many people have been infected. These infected people can also be used to track you, so you have to be careful."
He said, "I'll be careful. If it were up to me, I wouldn't infect people with things that can be traced back to me. But I might need the life force in a critical moment on the foreign battlefield. It is best to be prepared for that, so I prioritized it above staying."
Wrath shook her head. "I hope you won't need to use your blood hooks."
He nodded and said, "I hope so too."
They chatted some more as he made his way to the radiation zone outside of the city before he returned to the city.
He was in such a good mood that he wasn't affected by the presence of the demigod as badly as before. Even so, he has to deactivate his Extraordinary Perception ability before he could trick himself into entering the city again.
This made Wrath make fun of him. He tried to explain to her, "It is like I know that it is a lion's den, and I know that the lion is in the cave. I know that the lion is sleeping, but I also know that there is nothing I can do if the lion wakes up and wants to eat me. How can any reasonable person enter such a lion's den?"
But she didn't stop making fun of him. It made him frustrated a little bit, which translated to him using a little too much force to knock people out before putting the blood hooks into the wound that he cut in on their bodies.
The tiny red worms drilled into the wounds and disappeared. Then he gave them some life force, which the worms used to heal the cuts. This way the wounds disappeared, and the host of the blood hooks will be unaware of the passenger in their bodies.
Then he moved on to other targets.
The blood hooks are an important asset that can save his life. But they also have to be kept secret as they are part of his flesh, not some independent effect of his ability.
Currently, he is difficult to track because of his shape-shifting ability. He could always change his physical parameters, which makes tracking him difficult. But blood hooks, if found, can be used to find him.
So the blood hooks are vulnerabilities that have to be kept a secret. This is why he didn't put any of them in the members of his cabal.
He was tempted to use it to force them into submission by claiming that it is a monitoring tool. But doing so will directly expose the fact that the blood hooks are related to him.
If he wants to keep his connection to the blood hooks a secret, the first thing he has to do is not tell people about it. The second thing to do is not tell the hosts about it.
The third thing is to not use the blood hooks, as that might expose their existence. The fourth is to make sure to kill the host and destroy the blood hooks if he uses them.
The last thing to do is hope that no one notices the blood hooks before he uses them. And if they do notice, he can only hope that they are not powerful enough to trap the blood hook before he can destroy it.
If he fails to destroy the blood hook, then he has to prepare for war.
He comforted himself as he infected his latest victim. "At least I can find the blood hooks. That way I can find whoever is using them to track me, eliminate them, or destroy the blood hooks up close."
He spent the rest of the day infecting people because there was technically no limit to how many blood hooks he could create.
The blood hooks were dormant, so he doesn't need to actively control them. As long as he has life force, he can create more of them.
It is like an investment. He invests life force in the blood hooks and will be able to use this little life force, which he can replenish easily, to reap the whole life force in a host.
The return on that investment is about a hundred times his initial investment. So he is tempted to keep creating more, as the more there are, the more life force he will have at his disposal at a critical moment.
But he had to stop after a while because he could never have enough and because the more infected people there were roaming about the city, the higher the chances of the blood hooks being discovered.
By increasing the number of infected people, he would be increasing the likelihood of being caught and the magnitude of the trouble he will be when it is discovered that a lot of people were infected with his blood hooks.