Seven sat in the middle of his room.
Time was exactly 12 at noon, and he looked dazed, feeling like both his memories as Seojin and Seven had been merged together.
Based on the memories, the one he's about to attempt isn't the body's first time— Seven Hart had done this more than a thousand times!
But seeing that he couldn't feel any Zi within his body nor in the air around him, it seemed that 'his' attempts led to nothing but frustration.
"Can't blame him, honestly. This shit's not that simple, unless they have a reader privilege like… no, unless they're geniuses like me."
Huffff…!!
Taking a loooong, deep breath, he closed his eyes.
Recalling the novel, there are two Zi paths: [Zi Stars] for the path of magic, and [Zi Rings] for the path of sword. His path was the latter.
To put it simply, what he needed was to attempt forming a Zi orbiting his heart, and of course that is not as easy as kicking a loose stone on the ground.
In order to do that, he needed to first separate the Zi flowing along his oxygenated blood in his arteries and reroute it towards the heart, which meant carving a new highway against the natural current.
In short, making the vein a two-way road.
He once asked in the forum, "if blood (deoxygenated) already goes back to the heart, why fight the current?"
Thus, entered the tale of Arven, the third prince of Valen.
Gifted, beloved, and desperate to prove himself, Arven believed he had found a gentler path. He guided his Zi along the veins returning blood to the heart, thinking the body itself would accept what it already carried home.
But just as he did, the Zi scattered.
The waste-laden flow rejected it. The dispersed Zi turned violent, rupturing his veins and tearing through him from within.
Arven died seated upon the dais of his own room, crown still upon his head, his body intact only in appearance.
Great healers only knew what kind of risk Arven had attempted upon investigating, and then wrote it in books and published to prevent such foolish acts from happening again.
From that day on, the shortcut was known by another name 'the Prince's Path' and no one ever dared walk it again.
'Damn it, this is getting boring. How the hell did Seven Hart have such long patience to do this almost every day?!'
His legs had long gone numb, legs… if he even still had one! He couldn't tell if they existed at all.
Still, he didn't move.
His breathing had slowed to the point where it no longer felt natural, each breath taken only because he remembered to take it, as though it would stop the moment his attention drifted.
'This is pointless.'
His mind began to swirl, and his thoughts were whispering too hard inside his ears, telling him to move on and stop this useless and futile resistance.
He didn't listen.
Suddenly, his heart thumped so hard that even though with his eyes closed, a bright light engulfed his vision, returning to black right after, then returning to white again with each heartbeat.
Thump, thump!
Sweat dripped from his chin, splattering onto the floor one drop at a time. He registered it distantly. The cold from the open window no longer reached him.
All he felt was heat gathering, compressing, and trapped inside his chest.
'Focus. I can do it. Focus…'
Thump!
It was the last heartbeat he felt. There was nothing after that.
Every sensation of his body and the world around him had vanished. All that remained was himself, a glowing white figure suspended in an endless sea of darkness.
It was as if he were looking through a night-vision lens.
He saw a map of his own body: rivers of blood flowing in perfect rhythm, branching into every organ. Interwoven among them were threads of blue blood [Zi] faint but luminous, like starlight caught in a current.
The view zoomed inward, passing through skin and muscle, diving finally into the arteries and veins, focusing on those two kinds of blood.
Carefully, he thought purely about guiding the Zi flow against the current of the blood and it worked, though it was lethargic.
'Damn, this might take longer than I thought. I'm gonna go hungry, but if I stop now, all the progress would be reset back to—'
Thump!
Near his chest, no— exactly at the position of his heart, a brilliant white flame had finally ignited, burning like a hellfire, sounding like a heartbeat.
'There it is. I just need to guide all these blue blood cells towards it now. Focus.'
But it wasn't easy. Blood always moved one way after all, and Zi had to swim upstream.
It felt like swimming against a bottomless ocean, where no matter how much he struggled to go upwards, the current kept on pulling him down.
In a much simpler way, he couldn't even separate blue from red!
His hands trembled as he imagined each thread of blue, shivering like fish, trying to slip back into the red rivers.
Time passed, and he was too focused.
It was only then he had finally separated Zi from the red blood then pictured the blue threads of Zi flowing toward the thumping white flame at the center of his chest, moving with painstaking patience.
He kept the pace steady, refusing to force the Zi forward.
Urgency would be death; haste was the enemy.
The maze of arteries stretched endlessly around him, where each wrong turn was a potential disaster. One misstep (a diversion into an organ, any organ but the heart) and it would be over in an instant— boom!— inside out.
It was a good thing he had memorized the map earlier in the brief moment it was shown.
But…
Suddenly, a similar threads but green in color, came from the opposite direction and crashed into the blue threads of Zi— boom!— making an explosion, returning Zi back to the bloodstream.
'What the hell was that?! Damn it all!'
Refusing to give up, he had again gathered the Zi and was ready to swim upstream.
However, the threads of that green Zi he had collided with earlier had solidified into a massive boulder. It cut off the Zi's path upstream, and worse, also blocked the bloodstream.
'This is bad… If I don't break it, either my artery will rupture, or my organs will fail.'