Suddenly, the aura inside the room disappeared, leaving Alex finally free to move. He immediately got up and ran to where Pearl had landed.
He took pearl in his arms and started asking, "are you okay? Are you hurt?". But Pearl couldn't hear him. "What is happening?" Alex wondered as he looked at Pearl.
Pearl seemed to be asleep, but his eyes were fully open. His breathing was calm and there were no irregularities in his aura as well. Alex started to worry about what was happening to him.
Suddenly, Pearl jerked as he jumped down from his arms and started running around the room like crazy. "Meow," it screamed as if it was in pain.
"Wha-what's wrong?" Alex didn't know what to do. After a few laps around the room, Pearl finally stopped and released a loud growl, that sounded neither like a meow or a cat's purr. It almost sounded like…
Pearl looked up. His fur even more white, eyes filled with great intelligence and-
"Did you grow in size, buddy?" Alex said as he went up to Pearl to grab him. Pearl went from being about 15 cm in length to about 25 cm. He had grown a little bigger.
"Meow," Pearl meowed in confirmation. Alex got stunned. He could easily tell that Pearl was saying 'YES' to his question. Before, it was a vague feeling of an answer, but now, to him, it felt pretty clear. This was a chance he wasn't expecting.
"What happened to you? Why did you suddenly go to eat the blood essence?" he asked.
"Meow." A long meow came from Pearl and Alex once again was stunned as he could more clearly understand what Pearl was saying. 'I ate it because I had to.'
"Ho-How do I understand you?" He tried to think back to the records he had read and the lessons his master had given him. "Master said that once a beast companion turns adult, you can communicate with them. Did she mean that they could communicate both ways and not just the monster understanding the cultivator's word?" he wondered.
"But, that would mean that you are already an adult, and that is impossible, right? I just saw the system calling your infant this afternoon."
Alex nervously opened the cat's status page once again and was surprised by the difference from before.
[White Cat (Child) - Bonded
Cultivation Base: Skin Tempering 8th Realm
Evolution Chance: 40%
Cultivation Method: ????? ?????'s Dominating Body (Shared)]
Pearl had changed from infant to child according to the game. Also, his cultivation base had had a massive leap in the realm.
'Is this normal? Does a beast not need to be an adult to start communicating?' Alex started to wonder. He looked at the Evolution Chance stat and was shocked to see that it had gone from 5% to 40%.
"What brought along such a massive change? Could it be him breaking through? No way, right?" When Alex properly thought about it, he came to a single conclusion. "It was the blood essence, wasn't it?"
He looked at Pearl and thought, " That was your mother's blood essence, but it didn't belong to your mother. If it did, it would say White cat, wouldn't it?" He asked.
"Meow," Pearl meowed in confusion as none of what Alex was talking about made any sense to him.
"That must be it. What if that thing whose blood essence you took, what if this evolution turns you into that? Maybe you have a 40% chance to become something else." Alex felt pretty good about this theory and moved on.
Finally, he saw the new cultivation method that Pearl had acquired. "Dominating body?" he was slightly caught off guard. "Why is your cultivation technique a type of body? That should be its own thing no?" he asked.
"Yeah, you wouldn't know. I know. Still, it's weird that a body is a cultivation method. I would've never guessed that." Alex started to accept what was written and was about to close the status page when he finally noticed the 'shared' thing written on the cultivation method.
"What is this?" he was about to question it when suddenly, Pearl started coughing.
"What's wrong? Are you okay?" he panicked as he started rubbing Pearl's back to relieve some stress.
But he kept on coughing. "Is something stuck in your throat?" he tried to send his spiritual sense into Pearl's body, but it couldn't penetrate past his skin.
He started feeling more worried.
Suddenly, Pearl coughed out something red onto the floor and stopped coughing. Only then, did he start breathing normally with no more cough.
"It's okay, It's okay," he consoled Pearl while slowly rubbing his back. "What was that?" he turned to look towards the red thing that flew out of his mouth.
There, Alex saw it. Crimson red blood, floating in the middle of the air. Unlike the blood essence previously, it was all liquid. It was floating with an unstable form, constantly moving around, unable to keep a shape for more than a moment.
"Is that Pearl's blood or…" he started to wonder if this was the true form of the blood essence that Pearl swallowed.
Just as he was thinking this, he felt his body start heating up. "What now?" there were just too many things happening one after another for him to process.
"Pearl, get back," he said and waited for Pearl to go back to being a tattoo. Once he was inside, Alex started feeling more and more heat from the inside of his body.
Suddenly, a gravitational force erupted from him. The heat all rushed up to his head and that had become the source of the gravity. The shapeless blood suddenly stopped moving and immediately shot towards him.
It hit him right at the middle of his brows and pierced its way through.
Alex never got to hear any of these as he fainted the moment it entered his head.