[The Bond Pool does not redistribute. It creates.]

Quinlan read that last line twice.

He knew how experience worked in this world. You killed something, you earned a fixed amount. If you were in a party, the party split that amount based on kill contribution. If you had a multiplier like [Blessed Seed], the multiplier tripled what you personally earned.

But the total was always the total. Nobody got more than the kill was worth. The system kept its books clean, and no class, no skill, no artifact in this world had ever been documented producing experience that did not come from somewhere.

[Blessed Seed] tripled a woman’s kills. If Sera brought down a creature worth ten thousand experience, she walked away with thirty thousand, which was powerful and the reason his girls had climbed faster than anyone on the continent could explain.

But the experience still came from the kill. The creature died, the system assigned a value, and the Seed multiplied that value for the woman who earned it. The math was generous, but it was still math, and every point could be traced back to a corpse.

The Bond Pool could not be traced back to anything.

When a bonded family member killed, the bond conjured twenty percent of the earned experience as surplus on top of what the killer already received. Sera’s thirty thousand was untouched. Nobody’s share shrank. The twenty percent was created by the bond itself and deposited into a pool that fed every member of his family, weighted so that whoever was lowest in level received the largest share.

That was the difference. [Blessed Seed] was a multiplier that rewarded a woman for her own kills, and if she did not kill she did not earn. The Bond Pool did not care who held the blade. It created experience from nothing and poured it across his entire family as long as anyone in the bond was fighting somewhere, and the weakest ate first.

’...What the hell kind of class is this?’ Quinlan mused inwardly.

[New Ability: The Crimson Reservoir.]

[The Sangomar substance has integrated into the Bloodfather’s body. It serves as a tactical reserve for the bonded family. Any bonded may draw from the Reservoir in combat for temporary amplification of abilities. The Reservoir refills through bonded kills. The mark is the conduit.]

[Warning: the Reservoir cannot heal. Healing belongs to those who earned it.]

The warmth at the hollow above his heart pulsed once, deep and sure, and the [Crimson Reservoir of the Sangomar Line], a thousand liters of blood-essence that had lived inside the flask-stone on his finger since the dwarven raid, threaded through the lattice on his chest. It stopped being a thing he carried and became a thing he was. The Sangomar band sat plain on his finger, its empty mount a quiet reminder of where the substance had come from.

[New Ability: The Living Bond.]

[The Bloodfather feels every kill his bonded make and every wound they suffer. The bond carries awareness across any distance. In combat, it carries intent between all bonded without speech or signal.]

[The Bloodfather’s bonded are of two kinds.]

[Those bound to the Bloodfather in body and heart are his Beloved. Their bond channels the Abyssal Genesis Physique’s creative nature. Their marks carry gifts their classes could not author alone.]

[Those bound to the Bloodfather in trust and war are his Champions. Their bond channels the Abyssal Genesis Physique’s predator nature. Their marks elevate what they already are to a higher grade.]

[Both circles carry the mark, the pool, and the Reservoir. The gifts are different in kind. Neither is lesser.]

The system called them Champions. He said he would not accept retainers and the class his body authored had heard him.

[Warning: The Beloved.]

[If a Beloved dies, the Bloodfather suffers permanent stat degradation. The class itself degrades: each lost Beloved reduces the ceiling of all Bloodfather abilities by a fixed fraction. The Bloodfather’s vitality will carry the wound for the remainder of his natural life. This cost cannot be avoided, reduced, or transferred.]

[Warning: The Champions.]

[If a Champion dies, the surviving Champions bear the cost. The broken bond fractures across the martial circle. Every remaining Champion suffers a temporary reduction in the gifts the mark provides. The reduction fades only through shared combat. The pack heals itself, or it does not heal.]

Quinlan read the warnings twice, making sure he had not misread a single word.

He hadn’t.

If one of his wives died, the bond would gut him.

If a Champion fell, the cost landed on the pack.

The math was savage. Every bond he formed was a liability he could never shed, a debt that would come due in full if he failed to protect what he had claimed.

But his heart accepted it before the second read-through was done.

This was the class that created experience from nothing and poured it into the women he loved, alongside what sounded like other benefits...

The price was that he could never afford to lose them.

Quinlan’s mouth tilted behind his visor.

That was not a price. That was how he already lived. Every raid, every war, every sleepless night. All of it pointed at the same truth the class had just written into law. His women could not die. He would not allow it. He had been paying this cost since the day he decided that the people he loved would reach the peak beside him, and the Bloodfather had simply put a number on what was already absolute.

Whatever the price of giving them the power they deserved, he would pay it.

The class fit his desires the way a blade fits a hand that was built to hold it.

When he looked up, the courtyard had changed.

The pain was done. The marks were sealed. Eighteen women sat scattered across the moss in the amber haze of an evening they had earned, and the suffering that had wracked them for hours had left behind something quieter and harder than what it found.

Some were still reading notifications, lips moving around words like ’Bond Pool’ and ’Reservoir’ with the sharp focus of women who had just been told the rules of this world bent differently for them now.

Others had stopped reading and started feeling. Vex had both palms pressed to the mark above her womb with her eyes shut, and what reached Quinlan through the bond was a devotion so fierce it tightened his chest. Sera was testing the connection with careful little pulses of brightness, grinning each time she felt a reply she hadn’t authored.

Each presence was distinct. He could have closed his eyes and named every woman with ease.

Then, just as Ayame grinned excitedly, her pouts gone, and reached for her katana...

Every sentient being in existence saw gold.

The window etched itself into the air before Quinlan’s visor in the same heartbeat it appeared before every woman on the moss, every maid at the courtyard’s edge, before kings on carved thrones and children in muddy streets, before gods in their silent domains and mortals in their beds, across every continent and every realm the Soul Records touched.

[UNIVERSAL ANNOUNCEMENT]