Level 1 to Infinity: My Bloodline Is the Ultimate Cheat!

Chapter 973: The Bloodline Hidden Inside Him

Yaya didn’t hold back.

"Big brother, you know your constitution is special. You have the Ancient Sacred Body. But the energy needed to evolve that body no longer exists in this world. Your physical strength can keep increasing, but your rank itself will remain at the mortal level forever."

Ethan stared at her for a second before abruptly cutting in.

"Wait, what? Then what am I supposed to do?"

The answer hit him harder than he expected. So this was the reason.

Looking back, everything suddenly made sense. He had always felt himself getting stronger. He could already fight people at Uncle Jed’s level, and after surviving the Heavenly Tribulation, his body had toughened to an absurd degree. Supersonic flight no longer tore him apart like before. Every part of him had improved.

Except his rank.

No matter what happened, he remained stuck at mortal level.

There had always been a missing piece, something he couldn’t explain no matter how much stronger he became physically.

And now Yaya was telling him the truth.

The Ancient Sacred Body couldn’t advance in rank at all. Ever.

Didn’t that make the whole thing completely useless?

Seeing the look on his face, Yaya quickly floated closer.

"Don’t worry, big brother. Precisely because you have the Ancient Sacred Body, I was able to grow safely inside you. If it had been anyone else, the Tree of Life would’ve burst their body apart long ago."

Ethan looked at her blankly.

"What good is that supposed to do for me? So I’m basically just a flowerpot now? A piece of land for growing trees?"

Yaya gave him an odd look, clearly speechless at the comparison. The Tree of Life and a random tree were not remotely the same thing, but she chose not to argue and instead continued explaining.

"Because the Tree of Life took root inside you, you inherited the Elven King’s bloodline."

She said it casually, almost teasingly, but Ethan’s eyes widened instantly.

"The Elven King’s bloodline? You mean the one from Ethereal? That’s actually real?"

Yaya blinked.

"Where else would it come from?"

For a moment Ethan didn’t know what to say. The thing he had always treated like game flavor text had apparently been real the entire time.

"Then how do I awaken it?"

Now that he thought about it carefully, he realized he had never paid attention to the bloodline at all. Ironically, the thing he’d ignored the most had turned out to be the most important part.

Yaya began explaining, and as she spoke, pieces from the past slowly started falling into place inside Ethan’s mind.

He finally understood why Morzan had forced him into the Druid class back in the early days of Ethereal.

Druid had never been considered a strong class. Even in the First Universe’s combat systems, balanced development was viewed as mediocre. After millions of years of testing and optimization, the conclusion had always been the same: people who tried to develop every attribute evenly usually became average at everything. Most eventually ended up in support positions.

But the Elven King’s bloodline required exactly that kind of balance. And Ethan, back then, had been the perfect vessel.

An adult body with no exceptional talents. No overwhelming strength, no monstrous speed, no spiritual advantage. Everything about him had been completely balanced, almost painfully ordinary.

A blank slate.

Morzan had implanted the Elven King’s bloodline into him, forced him onto the Druid path, then poured enormous amounts of resources into accelerating his growth. Everything had been done for a single purpose.

To create the most compatible vessel possible. Only someone balanced to the extreme could fully synchronize with the bloodline.

But Ethan had never known any of this. And Morzan had never explained it.

Though honestly, that wasn’t entirely Morzan’s fault either. Ethan had always been busy surviving one disaster after another, while Morzan himself had been fighting battles Ethan couldn’t even imagine. Then, after that incident, after Ethan triggered something that shook the entire starfield, Morzan had completely abandoned his original plans.

Because Ethan had been acknowledged by that existence.

Even the Order Keeper had said nothing like that had ever happened before.

That existence had existed long before the Order Keeper itself. The Order Keeper was essentially a watchdog created after that being fell dormant. Across endless ages, it had never once awakened because of any individual lifeform.

Because it wasn’t truly alive in the normal sense.

It was the order of the universe itself. The Path of Ethereal. The manifestation of universal law.

It possessed no emotions, no desires, no consciousness as ordinary beings understood it.

And yet it had stirred because of Ethan.

That single event had made Morzan throw away every arrangement he originally prepared. He had intended to guide Ethan down a carefully planned path, but after witnessing that reaction, he chose instead to let Ethan grow freely.

It was a gamble.

Morzan was betting that the Path itself would eventually guide Ethan toward the right direction.

Not because it cared. That existence had no concept of care. Even if the universe collapsed tomorrow, it wouldn’t interfere. Laws did not possess compassion.

But its reaction alone was enough to change everything.

Only now did Ethan fully understand that the Elven King’s bloodline had never been mere game data.

It was real.

According to Yaya, the inheritance itself had already completed long ago. The only thing left was activation.

The first condition had already been fulfilled. His Elven King reputation in Ethereal had reached the maximum level a long time ago. Ethan vaguely remembered receiving the notification back then, though he’d barely thought about it afterward.

The real key lay elsewhere; Inside his Energy Core. More specifically, among the thousands of seed-like stars floating within it.

"Stars..."

Ethan sat motionless in the void, his expression slowly changing. Then his consciousness sank inward completely.

Yaya watched his body go still, so still it almost looked lifeless. After a while, she sighed helplessly and shook her head.

"This silly brother... does he really think the void is safe?"

Her gaze swept across the gray emptiness around them.

"This kind of place stays quiet right up until the moment it doesn’t. And when danger shows up here, it’s never something small."

She floated upward and raised a hand.

Countless green vines burst from her palm like living serpents, weaving rapidly through space around Ethan. In only a few seconds, they formed a massive sphere over a hundred meters wide with Ethan suspended safely at its center.

Yaya tilted her head.

"Still not enough."

With another wave of her arm, sharp vines shot outward from the sphere in every direction like enormous thorns, extending endlessly into the gray void.

They continued stretching farther and farther away. Then one of them suddenly trembled.

The vine stopped extending and immediately recoiled backward. The others followed soon after.

The first vine returned dragging an enormous boulder behind it through the void. The massive rock slowed as it approached before settling beside the green sphere.

Then more boulders arrived. One after another.

Before long, an entire cluster of drifting stone had gathered around Ethan, gradually forming something like a tiny asteroid or fragmented moonlet.

Yaya landed lightly on top of one of the rocks and bounced twice in satisfaction, her eyes curving happily.

"Perfect. Nobody will notice us now."

She had built him a hiding place.

---

Inside his Energy Core, Ethan sat beneath the roots of the Tree of Life, staring silently at the countless floating seed-stars surrounding him.

There were thousands of them.

From a distance they resembled stars scattered across a miniature cosmos, but up close they looked dry and lifeless, like seeds waiting for something to awaken them.

"What’s missing?"

Yaya had said the key was hidden among these stars. But what exactly was he supposed to find?

Ethan stood slowly and took a step forward. The moment he moved, his perspective suddenly shifted.

He found himself standing above one of the stars, and only then did he realize his body had somehow shrunk alongside his viewpoint. Yet despite becoming smaller, his vision could still freely encompass the entire surface below him at once.

The sensation was bizarre.

"...Omni?"

His eyes widened slightly.

If I really have Omni authority here... then can I actually use it? He focused his will onto the seed-star beneath him.

Almost immediately, cracks spread across the dry outer shell.

It worked. The seed reacted directly to his thoughts.

As Ethan continued concentrating, the brittle husk peeled away piece by piece, revealing an entirely new world beneath it.

He pushed further. Rivers appeared first, then lakes.

Then vast oceans formed across the surface in an instant, shaped entirely by his will.

Ethan stared silently at the world changing beneath him. At this moment, he truly felt like a creator.

Forests emerged next. Mountains rose from the earth. Endless fields of flowers and vegetation spread across the land exactly as he imagined them.

Everything bloomed with life. But when he tried to create actual living creatures, nothing happened.

No matter how hard he focused, no lifeforms appeared.

"Can’t create life..."

He muttered the words softly to himself. Even so, the result was already unbelievable.

The transformed seed-star now radiated dense vitality far beyond the untouched seeds around it, and faint traces of Ethereal Rhythm had begun flowing through it as well.

Ethan looked around thoughtfully.

"Is this the method for awakening the bloodline?"

’Do I need to transform all of them?’

At the moment, he had no better ideas. So he simply continued, one seed-star after another.

Slowly, methodically, he reshaped each world according to his own will, and every single one carried traces of Earth within it.

Mountains, lakes, oceans, plains...

Everything he had ever seen or remembered from Earth was recreated among those countless stars.

At one point, acting entirely on impulse, he even recreated the Sea of Death on one of them.

And little by little, he continued transforming the endless sea of seeds.