Adyr ignored the upgraded and newly acquired skill Sszhar had gained and focused directly on the Spark's description.

It was written in binary, and it was not the system used on his current Earth but the one from his previous world.

"After all those languages, now it's machine language?" He once again questioned the connection between the Beyond and his old Earth.

He then proceeded to read what was written in the description.

Reading binary was not so hard; all one needed to do was memorize the ASCII table, where every number from 0 to 127 was mapped to a specific character: a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or control code. For someone like Adyr, who had a photographic memory, keeping such a table in his mind was quite easy.

Thereafter, he just needed to convert each 8-bit code into its corresponding number.

For example, "01101001." From left to right, the bits represented the values 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1. Summing only the positions where the bit was 1, in this case 64 + 32 + 8 + 1, gave 105, and the entry for 105 in the table was "i."

He quickly read all of the text, and as he took in what was written, his brows furrowed.

"Information not found?" It felt as though the System had crashed, resulting in an error.

In the Beyond, the System was something the Gods had created and gifted to their people. At least, that was what the general public believed.

It was divine and absolute, a construct said to contain all the information and secrets of the universe. The idea that it could simply crash like a faulty program was not something anyone there would even consider.

Yet right now, displayed in binary, it looked to Adyr like any other human-made language.

From that perspective, it felt almost natural that when the System stepped outside its predefined scope or encountered data it had not been designed to handle, it would respond with an error message like this.

To him, it pointed to one clear conclusion that he began to consider: the System had no knowledge of the Blood Path, and when confronted with an unknown anomaly related to it, it crashed.

The System clearly had information about the treasure Heart of the Blood Palace, providing a flawless description; however, its inability to provide a proper description of the Spark it had affected was deeply confusing.

Feeling he needed additional information and time to find out what all this meant, Adyr decided to set it aside for now and diverted his focus to another problem at hand.

He looked at the 5 skills Sszhar now possessed: Dread Shackle, Blood Maw, Riftwalk, Blood Mirror, and Leech's Reach, and another frown appeared on his face.

Normally, when he subdued a Spark, the skill information he acquired would flood into his mind naturally. The full nature of the skill, how to use it, what it did—every detail would settle into his brain and instincts as if it had always been there.

But now there was nothing. He felt completely clueless about the newly upgraded skills, Blood Maw and Blood Mirror, as well as the newly gained skill, Leech's Reach.

He realized he needed to try them to see what they really were, but when he prepared to do so, a new realization surfaced with the instinctive information that did reach him: the energy cost for each skill had risen absurdly.

Blood Maw, formerly known as Rift Maw, now required more than 4000 energy to use, which was more than half of Adyr's current total energy reserve.

Blood Mirror was even more extreme, with a cost above 5000, and Leech's Reach felt like a joke in comparison, demanding more than 10000 energy for a single use.

"Should I still go with the idea of evolving with this Spark?" Adyr slowly descended from the sky, beating his wings as he landed on Sszhar's massive head.

Even physically, the Spark was giving him an unfamiliar feeling, as if it had been completely transformed; only its name remained as the single familiar thing from before.

If he wanted to keep his previous objective of evolving with this Spark, then it was going to be a blind evolution for sure. He could no longer even guess what kind of physical trait or innate talent he would gain from it.

"It just became more fun, didn't it?" Adyr laughed, viewing the current situation not as a dilemma but as an opportunity to relish.

No matter what he got, it would give him a lot of power, and he didn't have many choices, so there was no point in thinking about it too much.

He jumped down from Sszhar's head to the ground and looked at the massive serpent's body.

With his decision made in his mind, the System message appeared in front of him.

[Do you want to begin the evolution process?]

– Cost: 3000 Energy

Thankfully, the normal evolution cost had not gone up like the skill costs, which made Adyr accept without any worries left.

"Yes."

As soon as he agreed to the process, he felt Sszhar's eyes on him, full of loyalty and quiet sadness. Then the Spark's massive body began to melt, turning into thick crimson liquid.

Great chunks of blood dripped from its form, splashing onto the ground and dyeing it red. The spreading liquid gathered into a vast pool, and before it could flow away, it began to change once more, thinning into pure energy.

It broke apart into countless red, light-like particles and rushed toward Adyr's body.

Familiar with the process, Adyr quickly stripped off his uniform and tossed it aside.

He sat down on the ground, cross-legged and naked, letting all that energy pour into him as he waited for it to shape his body toward Evolution Step 4.

As the transformation took hold and the energy began to rewrite his flesh and mind, a quiet understanding began to settle in.

This Blood Path was not some handmade, second-rate Path, but a true one, with a real lineage and a deliberate design behind its creation.

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