“Remember, this is some of my best work. Not my proudest, but my best work.” when Jianmen handed the rib bone shards with tiny engravings on to Josephine Wong: “To use them, just lock onto your opponent with your mind - doesn’t have to be the core of the opponent, could be just a limb, a tail or a toe. And this sucker will just auto-locate the core of your opponent and dig a tunnel straight to it.”
“I can see why you’re not proud of it.” this was Josephine Wong’s answer when she chuckled and accepted the shards: “You prefer to fight fair huh?”
“Nonono, I don’t like to fight fair. There’s a saying I believe in: ‘Dirty gets you the win and fair gets you a beautiful tombstone at best.’” Jianmen answered while shaking his head: “It’s just still a work in progress - its design has a lot more potential, but it needs to be used by someone with a really good grasp of the trick of perception, insight and intelligence gathering. I have my own way to do it, but it’s either very slow, or fast, but very very painful.”
Right now, Josephine Wong was sitting on the ground inside of a patch of thick forest just outside the edge area of the lava rocks. Looking at the corpse of a crab/spider creature that lunged from the tree top in an attempt to attack her but ended up being hit by one of those bone shards and got fried from the inside, Josephine Wong knew what Jianmen ment: the part of the shard where it was supposed to locate the core and dig through the creature’s body to reach it was somewhat flawed and inaccurate.
“Josephine… help...” Professor Kapur’s voice resounded in Josephine Wong’s ears.
“Professor!” Josephine Wong looked up at the tree top from which the Crab fell and immediately flew up.
Professor Kapur was lying inside of a nest built on the tree top, built with dirt, tree branches and pieces of light but surprisingly sturdy bamboo. She was missing her left arm, and her legs were bloodied and broken. There were around twenty eggs around her, and a few of them looked like they were about to pop.
“Oh my god, Professor.” Josephine Wong sniffled with pain and distraught: “I’m gonna get you out. Let me get you out.”
“The mother… it went out hunting.” Professor Kapur wheezed: “Quick...”
“It’s been handled. Let me get you out, and we’ll - uh, we’ll heal you.” Josephine Wong raised Professor Kapur up with her magic gently and grabbed a few eggs from the nest: “Let’s go, relax.”
“The mother… be careful.”
After lifting Professor Kapur from the nest, Josephine Wong conjured up a small fireball on her right palm and tossed it onto the nest. The nest’s materials were mostly dry, and the fireball was all it needed to go up in flames.
Josephine Wong landed on the ground, and immediately found a relatively inconspicuous corner on the ground. Then, she took out one of the stone boxes with the lizard brain inside and opened it.
The brain was white when it was inside of the soup Jianmen made, but it was brown and gooey when it came out of the stone box. Josephine Wong had no choice but to dig some part of it up and feed it to Professor Kapur, while also casting a basic healing spell trying to stop the bleeding on her missing left arm and legs.
“Thank you...” Professor Kapur swallowed some lizard brain from Josephine Wong’s finger: “Thank you very much, Josephine.”
“Shh, Shh, rest here.” Josephine Wong looked over to the direction where Jianmen was fighting the snake: “I will need to disable a tracking spell first. Please concentrate and guid the healing energy through your body.”
Professor Kapur gently nodded, and then closed her eyes and slowly went into a shallow meditative state.
Josephine Wong started twirling her fingers at the air, a bright red aura flickered around her, and with each move of her fingers, a purple energy wave just blew through the aura. Sometimes, the energy wave would take a small chunk off the bright red aura, and sometimes it would take a bigger chunk of it. Eventually, after the tenth or eleventh try, she was able to finally exhaust the bright red aura, thus disabling the tracking spell the snake placed on her.
A loud and ear piercing scream came from a distance, then came a loud cracking sound.
“Jianmen, if you’re there and alive, find me in the forest at the southern side of the lava rocks, somewhere near a tree crab monster fried from the inside.” Josephine Wong spoke to a piece of flattened stone shaped a bit like a walkie talkie.
There was no response. And Josephine Wong had to feed Professor Kapur more of the lizard brain. Its smell was a bit like that of canned sardines, but Professor Kapur’s facial expression kind of showed her that she was not adverse to the taste.
“Who is this Jianmen?” Professor Kapur seemed to have recovered a bit, as she opened her eyes and asked: “Is someone already here before us?”
“Yeah. And quite a lot earlier.” Josephine Wong shook her head with a wry smile: “But let’s not worry about that, let’s get you fixed up first.”
“This is good. But I’m afraid we’ll need more than healing food.” Professor Kapur was still quite weak: “The crabs - they used some kind of destructive neural toxin to paralyze their prey - I’d better start getting used to wheelchairs now.”
“We will definitely find a way. But first let’s have that sucker crab mother for lunch, and its fucking eggs for dinner.” Josephine Wong showed Professor Kapur the eggs she gathered: “We may need to test for toxins first - but I heard crabs are quite tasty when fried.”
“Hey, I’m sorry. It took a while to settle the snake down.” just this moment, the stone walkie talkie finally sounded a response: “Have you ever had snake gallbladder before? It’s bitter as fuck, but good for dealing with poison and toxins.”
“Gallbladder please.” Josephine Wong exhaled with relief and asked: “What else do you have?”
“Nope, just that. Slippery bastard escaped.”
