He squatted and reached out his hand to touch the corpse, "Let's see if I can make use of bloodline acquisition without the system,"

Gustav's palm made contact with the body of the shredded body, directly pushing his hand into the bloody part.

​​

Squelch!

It made some funny noises as Gustav's palm dipped into it.

The blood from the corpse of the solar worm had been exposed to air for quite some time and had lost a lot of it's corroding quality so Gustav hardly felt any pain after dipping his hand in it.

Gustav closed his eyes and tried recollecting the feeling of withdrawing a bloodline from a body.

His breathing became steady and his concentration increased to the max.

After a few seconds, he felt a weird kind of reaction and opened his eyes to stare at his arm.

His veins had bulged out of his skin and were extending forward towards his fingertips.

His fingertips were lodged deep into the corpse of the solar worm.

He remembered that this was the same phenomenon that occurred when he was sucking the bloodline from the body of others.

Gustav focused on the buldged out veins that traveled to his fingertips and tried drawing the bloodline of the solar worm out.

Moments turned to seconds and seconds turned to minutes, before Gustav knew it ten minutes had gone by and he was still unable to draw out the bloodline of the solar worm.

Gustav moved his hand to another body part and tried again.

He focused on drawing out the bloodline once again but he was met with the same situation, failure!

Gustav started moving from one corpse to another while trying to draw out their bloodline.

As time passed he had dipped his hand into the shredded corpse of more than seven solar worms and it was still the same result.

Gustav decided to stop.

Sigh!

"I guess without the system, bloodline acquisition is impossible," Gustav came to this conclusion after failing several times.

He thought he would be able to make it work since he was able to figure out how to trigger the veins that sucked out the bloodlines from the body of others but no matter how he tried he couldn't draw out the bloodline of the solar worms.

It felt like something was blocking him from completing the process and he could tell that it was because of the absence of the system.

Gustav wondered about what he could do to get into the cave without being noticed.

Even after thinking for a long time, Gustav couldn't come up with any good ideas.

The only ones he thought up, needed him to change his skin color to match that of the cave's when he entered.

To do this, he'd have to be stark naked but that wasn't the problem now. The problem was the solar worms sensed their environment using temperature and the temperature of humans, Slarkovs, or mixed-bloods were a lot different from solar worms which meant that coming into contact with any one of them would expose him immediately.

The system upgrade was still at 40% so it would still take a few more days before it got to 100%.

While Gustav was thinking about the best possible plan he suddenly sensed movement from the southeast part of the forest.

"What why is there another one headed here?" Gustav muttered with a surprised expression.

He walked forward while thinking of how to kill the creature headed for him in the fastest way possible.

Gustav suddenly paused again.

"Not one... Not two... Not five..." Gustav's face showed a wary expression as his perception spread across the place.

"A horde?" Just as Gustav mentioned this with a shocked look, the ground started to vibrate.

At first, it was a soft vibration but as time passed, it increased in intensity.

Gustav wasted no time in turning around and running as fast as his legs could carry him.

He took the form of the partial bloodwolf he used earlier and activated dash manually to boost his speed.

Swwoosshh!

Behind him was a horde of solar worms coming from the direction of the cave.

They all had their bloodline activated so their movement carried an Intense heatwave as they travelled.

Even the living things in the environment that had adapted to the heat couldn't handle this.

A lot of trees in the vicinity were already getting smoked while some turned to ash.

Gustav had already sensed the Intense heatwave before it arrived so he had to run for his life.

More than a hundred of them coming to avenge the death of their kind.

Gustav never knew that they could sense if thier kind died. If he had known he would have left earlier but now he had to run as fast as he could to escape the heatwave.

With his distance from them being a bit longer it would take some time before they would catch up to him but the same couldn't be said for the intense amount of heatwave they were bringing along with them.

The heatwave was literally like twenty feet behind Gustav as he bolted across the place madly.

If the first layer of the heatwave came into contact with him, he would turn into cooked meat.

Zwoosshhh!

Gustav swerved from left to right and right to left while running forward and dodging the trees.

Feeling like the ground was slower than the air due to the number of trees he had to dodge each time, Gustav leaped up.

Thooom! Grab!

He grabbed a branch and swung further forward before landing on another tree branch ahead.

Thoom! Thoom! Thoom! Thoom!

He kept jumping from tree to tree for a few minutes until the forest of tall trees started becoming sparse.

The trees within the area reduced as he further jumped ahead before he arrived at a wide opening.

Bam!

Gustav jumped down from the last tree within a hundred feet radius of him.

The border could already be seen in front.

Since he was faster than the solar worms he had already gone way ahead of them but remembering just how crazily they attacked because of the death of their kind made Gustav feel uneasy.

He didn't waste anymore time before performing the same ritual he used to enter the border earlier.

This time it was done with a faster speed.

When the border opened up Gustav darted through it.

Swoooshhh!

It closed up when he arrived on the other side.