"Mr. Bernhardt, you mean the earliest generations realized that their special power would weaken through successive generations, so they wanted to preserve it through marriage between close relatives?"
"Yes, but perhaps that method simply did not work, or perhaps such marriages caused even more serious problems in their descendants. In any case, the practice was abandoned after only a few generations."
Mr. Bernhardt felt that he had more or less figured out the Burgundy Family's secret:
"Mad King Lugh, and the king several centuries later who introduced Bloodkin blood into the royal line—they were both rare bloodline heirs who awakened their ancestor's power anew. It seems this inherited power is terribly unstable. Derainore has a history of a thousand years, yet there cannot have been many awakeners like them."
Shade thought of something:
"If naturally born descendants have an extremely low chance of awakening a special bloodline, could artificial intervention—human alchemy—be used to produce descendants who awaken their ancestor's bloodline power?"
Mr. Bernhardt immediately nodded:
"Of course it can. Take the Dragonborn families as an example. Aren't most of the existing 'Dragonborn Awakening' rituals things they devised to raise the chance of bloodline awakening?"
"No, no. I do not mean intervening in descendants after they have been born. I mean intervening and experimenting on an unborn child at the very beginning of life. Yes, I see now. The Blood Spirit School's 'New Humanity' and Peggy Lemay's 'Perfect Child'—theoretically, they actually..."
Seeing that these Bloodkin could no longer be communicated with, Shade prepared to summon the girls outside the tomb chamber and seal them away again. Mr. Bernhardt, for some reason, thought of Shade's "Blood Brew," so he had Shade brew some animal blood into blood wine and feed it to the Bloodkin.
Though the idea was quite creative, unfortunately, it