Returning to No Applause, Only More of the Same

The semi-large swaddle of fruits lay on the table, surrounded on three sides by the siblings. A few wine-red fruits had spilt out of the black leaf cradling them, drawing the attention of both George and Sam.

“So… What now?” Sam asked, turning her eyes on Kreig. George followed suit looking at him since he was the only one even slightly aware of how to do anything about it.

Kreig looked thoughtful for a moment before speaking. “There are three stages to the process of turning Messiah’s Fruits into the blood of oath. Preparation, fertilization and purification. Is there a bowl of some sort that can be used for the first part? It must be large enough to contain the whole of the fruits.”

George and Sam shared a look. “Yes, we have one,” George said, turning towards the cupboards behind him. “I’m pretty sure we kept it from after we moved away from home. Most of the other things we didn’t require immediately were kept in a storage unit, but - oh, there it is.” George pulled an obscenely large bowl out from inside a bottom cupboard. It had a red outside and a white inside, the paint on the outside only a little peeled.

Sat on the table, it somehow looked even larger than when George had held it in both arms.

Thumbing his lower lip, George continued softly: “Now that I think about it, there are many things stored there that are technically yours. Would you like to visit sometime? Next Saturday, maybe?”

Not really listening, Kreig nodded, accepting the offer while he moved closer to the bowl and fruits.

Both George and Sam watched quite intently as Kreig peeled off the large black leaf, exposing all the fruit and then dumping the lot of them unceremoniously inside the bowl. For a bundle of fruits with such divine names, one would expect them to be treated with a bit more reverence, but neither George nor Sam had anything to actually say about it.

But then both of them recognized the about-to-crush-them movement that Kreig was about to do, and they had to stop it. “Hey, whoa, Kreig!” Sam said, Kreig’s hands stalling as he glanced at her. “You-, you’re not going to, like, wash your hands or anything?”

Kreig stared at her like she was an idiot. “No.”

Her left eye twitched. “Dude, hang on right there. Uh. You just touched dirt with that hand, right?” She pointed one big finger at his right hand. He nodded questioningly as if that had nothing to do with it. “It’s dirty. You can’t go making food with dirty hands!”

“My hands are not tarnished,” Kreig explained slowly, “they cannot be, and they never are.” This was in reference to his status as a Divine Human, which instantly killed any impure creature that touched him, be it bacteria or imps.

This was not something that Sam understood or, for that matter, even cared about. “Sure. Okay, but wash your hands first. I don’t care if you’re Dalai Lama, if you’re going to stick your hands in food, wash them first.” Her eyes narrowed into slits. “That’s an order.”

Faced with that, no matter his reasons, Kreig couldn’t disagree.

Scratching the back of his head, he slowly lumbered off to the bathroom. Technically speaking, using soap would only make his hands more tarnished than before, but he couldn’t deny her, so he washed his hands for a good thirty seconds, rubbing them together until white foam appeared.

When he returned to the kitchen, his hands only slightly wet, he found George presenting him with an apron. “I don’t feel like doing any laundry today,” he said. Kreig accepted the apron, slung the hooked band over his neck and tied the string behind his back into a bow. Since he was only wearing a shirt he didn’t have to roll up any arms, but standing as he stood, he felt remarkably homely.

With Sam happy about his hands and George happy about his dress, Kreig positioned himself back by the bowl, his siblings standing on either side adjacent to him, looking intently at the bowl's contents.

That was the final go-ahead, and Kreig got started on the first part.

Plunging his hands into the bowl, he began by dislodging the fruits from each other. For a clutch of grapes, there would be a singular stalk to remove, but the Messiah’s Fruits had a total of four, and each had to be removed carefully without destroying any fruits in the process.

Kreig worked nimbly and carefully, recalling how strong he was now compared to the last time he had done this himself. It had been back before the church fell, back before the church so much as declared war at all, and he’d been told that distilling his own bottle of blood of oath was a sacred rite. He’d spent several months on the process, forcing himself to learn every in and out, ignoring his numerous failures, only looking back on his mistakes to learn from them. One of these mistakes was to destroy a fruit before removing the stalks, or to so much as break a stalk before all fruits have been removed.

Just this step had made him fail many times before, but this time he was no longer just a man, and he did not have access to limitless clusters either. There was only one chance, and just a twitch of his finger could easily ruin it.

But still, for all his carefulness, he was still able to work quickly, spending only as much time on removing every individual fruit as was needed. Moving his massive fingers between a hair-thin stalk and pinching only lightly enough to remove the fruit from the stalk and not hard enough to burst either stem or fruit was a challenge he had faced many times before.

After only five minutes of carefully separating, he was finished, and in one sleek movement, he removed the whole of the stalks, allowing the fruits to tumble freely within the bowl. Gingerly, he placed the stems on a small plate before getting back to the work at hand. He’d need the stems for later, but not now.

Once more, he plunged his hands into the bowl, this time doing as was expected: crushing them.

Yet another situation, this time dependent not on immediate carefulness, but rather on speed. If he was not quick enough, the fruits would quickly lose their potency.

Good thing then that Kreig’s speed was inhuman, and in a mere moment, wasting not a single drop on the table or his apron, the whole of the fruits were crushed into a bundle of flesh, skin and juice. And at this moment, the first change came over the fruits as they all quickly turned a brilliant white, as though a thick layer of snow had suddenly covered them.

“Is it supposed to do that?” Sam asked carefully, eyebrow cocked hesitantly.

Kreig slowly nodded. “It indicates we have done well so far. Had it turned black instead, we would have failed.”

Sam bristled at the mention of failure but kept silent. George merely nodded, quietly enraptured in the sequence.

With the fruit prepared, Kreig bounded over to the cupboards, removed a sharp knife and a cutting board and returned to the kitchen table. No explanation was needed as Kreig placed the previously discarded stems on the cutting board and began to gently whittle off the outer part of the stem, knife moving quickly and carefully, slicing off the smallest patches of bark to finally remove the very core of the stems. The bark was apparently useless, as Kreig uncaringly passed one finger over them, turning them first into white fire and then into snow so fast that both George and Sam thought they must have imagined the whole thing. A shared glance removed such delusions.

The core of the stalks was then chopped up into a bunch of smaller pieces, and by merely using the end of his right thumb, Kreig was able to grind it into a thick paste. A swipe of the knife brought the small glob of paste onto it.

He then put this paste into a very small bowl, put the knife to the side, and turned to look at his siblings. “Neither of you has any issue with blood, do you?”

A pair of concerned looks met him, but he took it as a “no.”

Aetherial Knife (III)

Their looks of worry only intensified when the shimmering, crystalline knife materialized in his hand. Kreig summarily plunged the edge of the knife into his thumb. Both his siblings jerked where they stood, eyelids flaring at the self-mutilation, but still knowing enough not to stop him when the knife disappeared in a flash and he held his thumb over the small paste-filled bowl.

Unlike what one would expect, Kreig’s body didn’t actually hold much blood anymore, most of his arteries choked shut by his numerous thick white roots. It was with no little effort that a few drops of blood struggled out of the wound, dropping down into the paste and staining it a deep red. A total of seven drops fell before Kreig finally removed his thumb from above the paste, bringing it far away from the bowls.

Years before, he had made the mistake of thinking that the more oracle’s blood was used in the fertilization process the purer the blood of oath became. Not so. Using too much or too little would spoil the batch.

It didn’t matter what oracle the blood came from, all that mattered was the precise quantity. Now that Kreig thought about it, he could just as well have used Sam’s blood.

...Though, with her being from Earth, he couldn’t possibly know how the fruits would react. It was best to stick to what he knew would work.

And now, it was time for a part that was usually either automated using machines and workers or done using an oracle’s skill. Kreig had no machine, and neither did he need one.

He stirred his blood into the paste with one burly finger until it became almost black, at which point he dumped the full of it into the white crushed fruits. He took one step back, spread his arms on either side of the bowl, and told his siblings: “Take distance.”

Stir (IV)

The numerous crushed fruits and the paste slowly began to move as though it had a mind of its own, turning around and around, almost like a typhoon. A deep hole began to form in the middle of the torrent, the edges rising until they almost exploded out of the bowl. Then, at that point, the mixture suddenly rose from within the bowl, leaving it fully to hover mid-air, a massive ball of crushed fruit and paste mixing together into a liquid, the nearly black paste staining the white fruit with a deep red, the furious stirring working not only to spread the paste evenly throughout the concoction but also mincing the skin and flesh into a semi-homogenous liquid.

The mid-air mixing took place for only a little more than a minute, at which point it was fully mixed and Kreig slowly let it return to the bowl, the stirring slowing until the liquid was still and calm.

And that was the worst of it over. Turning his gaze from the bowl, Kreig was given a good view of how both of his siblings also stared into the bowl, George’s brows furrowed into perplexion, Sam’s chest rising and falling softly.

The liquid within the bowl was opaque and muddy and only barely looked drinkable.

“...Is it done?” Sam asked, her eyes begging for it not to be over already.

Kreig ignored her and turned to George. “Have you prepared a cloth?”

George’s eyes widened, but he nodded all the same, grabbing a small, thin cloth from off the counter and handing it to Kreig, who accepted it gratefully. Then he looked at the almost full bowl, looked around the room and realized that, no, they didn’t have another bowl that could hold that much liquid. He wasn’t eager to do so, but that meant his only way of doing this would be to use skills. Maybe it was okay since this whole situation required skills to begin with?

Either way, he handed either end of the towel to his two siblings, asked them to hold it above the bowl, and then he began.

Whisper of the Seas (X)

Kreig spoke softly and quietly, no louder than a mumble, words spoken in a language that couldn’t possibly exist. The liquid within the bowl quivered, listened, and obeyed. In a stream of dull red, it lifted into the air, nosing through the kitchen like a serpent, listening to every garbled word Kreig spoke. Tumbling around, the liquid flipped over and twisted through the white cloth, leaving a small residue of shredded skin and other solids behind. At Kreig’s whispered command, it repeated this looping process four more times, finally ending with the liquid settling back down in the bowl, going back to rest.

Sam and George slowly lowered the cloth.

“And you couldn’t just use some skill to hold the cloth - why?” Sam asked, her voice curious more than upset.

Kreig looked her over and decided not to admit that it was more fun to just let them help than to summon some spectral creature or magical flying hands. But he didn’t say that. The blood of oath wasn’t completely done yet.

The liquid, although a bit clearer now, remained slightly muddy. Normally, this would in most villages be the time when the liquid is left to stand for several weeks, after which the completed blood of oath is diluted to a concentration of about 3% or less depending on the situation, the rest of the liquid being made up of the much cheaper Wortwine. They wouldn’t be doing that stage though, since no self-respecting oracle would settle for such filth. That kind of liquid was only used in lesser churches of the kind you’d find in small villages.

And, for a lack of time, Kreig would finish it here and now.

It wasn’t what was usually done, it wasn’t an option usually open, but in this moment, he could do it. As a Divine Human, he had that capability.

Kreig leaned over the almost-finished mixture, closed his eyes, and let a single tear fall from within. It dropped into the cloudy liquid, and the second it touched down and joined the liquid, it turned clear. The opaque was banished in a single moment, every trace removed, leaving behind a liquid as clear and pure as stained glass. It had a deep, innate glow to it, like a sea of rubies, shimmering and glittering in the soft light. It had no smell, but something about it appetized the soul.

It was done.