"Nature is a machine of infinite gears. He who understands the smallest cog may halt the largest clock."
The dust in the hollow hadn't even begun to settle. Pendra’s broken form lay twisted in the dirt among the shattered clay and demolished wood of my workbench, her carapace covered in spidering cracks all over her body. Black blood pooled beneath her, hissing faintly as it ate into the packed earth. Pendra wasn't moving, and I couldn’t feel anything as I tried to send her mental images. The frantic noise of fight for survival had been completely silenced, replaced by a terrible, heavy stillness.
I stood ten feet away, the heavy stone mortar still gripped tightly in my right hand. Not typically chosen for life or death battles by any. Chosen even less to fight whatever nightmare realm this midnight horror had crawled out from. Regardless, I needed to think of something quick because I was not built to deal with something like this, or anything really.
In the gap where the root barricade had been violently pulverized, what I was going to call a Void-Stalker waited. It made no sound, and the fact it had no face, no eyes, and no mouth made it infinitely worse than anything I had faced yet. It was an undulating mass of slate-grey flesh, completely devoid of the protective chitin that defined what I had assumed to be the forest's apex predators, but I seem to either be wrong, or this wasn’t native to this area. Its body was a dense, rippling knot of pure muscle that shifted like thick oil, adding another layer to unsettle me. Worst were the clusters of whip-thin, translucent filaments, each ending in a barbed hook that pulsed with an otherworldly green light.
The monstrosity completely ignored Pendra. Instead, I seemed to be the only thing on the menu at this current moment. My partner had been broken, and even if I looked weak, I still was at the first step of the second stage. With one threat neutralized, and only me left, the Stalker’s sensory filaments were entirely zeroed onto me.
My mind, usually a cold and steady engine, struggled against the sheer, suffocating pressure radiating from the creature. If that was the only thing, I would be fine, but the flashes of images in my head, and the biting pain from my tetrahedrons had gone silent. I felt lost like never before in my life, mixed with the sheer terror of the monster before me, and the clear and unwavering knowledge that I had less than ten percent chance of coming out of this encounter alive. All of it was eating me alive at millisecond intervals.
Biting my lip almost hard enough to draw blood snapped my mind back into focus, I squashed the useless thoughts down, and focused on the thing that bothered me the most to ground me. The silence. I forced my focus on what my mind was most comfortable with. The details.
My eyes darted around observing the ambient energy of the forest. It wasn't just resting around it; it was actively being swallowed. I looked past the grey horror to the edges of the breach. The visual cues were impossible to ignore. The hanging vines and the thick, parasitic moss clinging to the hollow walls weren't swaying in the breeze. They were pulled unnaturally straight, stretched taut toward the Stalker’s core like iron filings aligning to a massive, invisible magnet.
The creature didn't operate on Qi output, but on how much it could draw in to increase its density. Its body was moving on to the first stage of gravitational absorption. This was what it must have been like for Vane-Uru at the third stage, the beginning of a walking, biological sinkhole.
I needed a measurement. I opened my hand and let the heavy stone mortar drop.
It didn't fall at a standard nine-point-eight meters per second squared. The moment it left my palm, the stone accelerated unnaturally fast, ripping through the air and slamming into the dirt with a heavy, muted thud. The gravitational vector was violently skewed toward the creature's center mass.
There was so much I still didn’t understand about this world and the Cultivation in it, but I wasn’t blind. It was a literal translation of the thermodynamic physics standing in front of me. The gap between stage and steps was much greater than I had assumed after being within Vane-Uru’s gravity well. I had assumed far too much without understanding already, and each move felt like they were piling up. I should have known she would have lost because you cannot fight a localized black hole with blunt force. Every ounce of kinetic energy she swung at it had simply been eaten, absorbed into its orbital field, and used to crush her.
If I hit it with the cleaver, the weapon would be pinned. If I tried to run, the localized gravity would drag me backward and snap my spine. There was no physical escape vector.
But physics wasn't my primary discipline. I was an ethnobotanist.
My eyes darted down to the overturned wreckage of my workbench. Tucked safely in the mud, miraculously unbroken, was the heavy glass vial. Inside it rested the golden-frosted steel needle, completely submerged in the consolidated, hyper-dense liquid Jing I had harvested from the headless Jötnar. It was raw, unrefined, and dangerously heavy.
In cellular biology, there is a concept regarding hypertonic solutions. If you place a living cell into an environment where the solute concentration is infinitely higher outside the membrane than inside, the cell will aggressively attempt to reach equilibrium. It will absorb the heavy solution until it swells, distorts, and violently bursts.
If this thing survived by swallowing the ambient kinetic energy around it, then the solution wasn't to fight the pull. The solution was to feed it an impossible density of raw Jing and force its cellular matrix to attempt a phase change it was structurally incapable of surviving.
I dropped to one knee, my fingers closing around the cold glass of the vial.
The Void-Stalker moved.
