Red String Plan

Time continued to flow.

To the outside world, it was nothing more than a few pages turning on the calendar.

But for the Bloodline within, countless dawns and dusks had already slipped through their fingers like running water.

In the third month after deployment, by outside time, Bloodline society underwent its first major structural transformation.

It began with an accident.

While a Bloodline was digging a new water intake point upstream of the creek, his Stone Hammer smashed through a layer of rock crust.

Beneath the crust was a fist-sized piece of glowstone.

Sunlight shone into the pit from behind him and fell across the surface of that glowstone.

The next second, the entire pit was drowned in a burst of dazzling golden-white light.

He instinctively raised his arm to shield his eyes, but at the same instant, he felt a warm current surge into him through that arm.

Under the stimulation of the intense light, the stellar fragment began to resonate violently.

The sensation was extremely powerful, several times fiercer than standing beneath the noonday sun.

The news triggered a shock throughout the settlement no less intense than the merger on the cold night.

The Bloodline began to consciously search for and mine glowstone.

Their earliest method of using it was simple and crude: swallowing it directly, letting the minerals come into contact with the stellar fragments inside their digestive tracts.

The effect was immediate, but the cost was just as obvious.

Some individuals absorbed too much or too quickly, causing the heat inside their bodies to exceed the limits of dissipation, as if they had been ignited from within.

Ron gave this condition a clinical code name: Solar Scorch Internal Injury.

"This is the inevitable pain of technological development."

"When any tool is first mastered, it goes through