"To steal from a sleeping mountain, your feet must learn the rhythm of its breath." 

A hurricane-force gale of warm, and copper-scented air vented directly out of the porous walls on all sides of us. It wasn't a linear gust rushing down the tunnel; it was an omnidirectional crosswind. The glowing blue mycelium didn't just blow flat—it whipped frantically in the chaotic air currents before being physically pressed tight against the chitin by the sheer, and crushing weight of the sudden atmospheric shift.

Vane-Uru was exhaling? Centipedes didn’t breathe like humans, did they?

No. My foundational biology training immediately cut through the panic. Arthropods didn't have centralized lungs. They breathed through spiracles—a massive network of pores and tracheal valves lining the sides of their segmented bodies. We were standing inside her respiratory network. The immense pressure wasn't just a localized gravity well; it was the physical exhaust of her cellular metabolism, purging the dense Rot Qi out of her living tissues and flooding the hollow cavity around us.

The gravity spiked exponentially with the localized off-gassing. I dropped to one knee, leaning against the wall, gasping as my reinforced ribs bowed inward under the atmospheric load. Pendra instantly flattened herself against the artery floor, her bladed arms anchoring into the petrified tissue to keep from being swept back or crushed by the cross-currents.

Sixty seconds later, the wind reversed. The deep, rumbling inhale pulled the air back into the microscopic valves lining the walls, and the localized gravity marginally released.

I forced myself up, my muscles screaming. My core was empty, and my physical stamina was redlining. I pulled one of the hand-pressed mud pills from my pocket and swallowed it dry, ignoring the screaming protest of my inner voice of reason. The immediate pharmacological shock hit my bloodstream, burning like battery acid, but it flooded my dense muscle fibers with enough raw metabolic fuel to keep me moving. We had to time our progress to her cellular respiration. Move on the inhale, brace on the exhale.

It took us another agonizing hour to reach the end of the fungal map. But as we got closer to Vane-Uru’s living tissue, a new, entirely unexpected hazard hit me.

It started as a dull headache behind my eyes, but it quickly escalated into a violent, and disjointed static in my mind. The mental tether I shared with Pendra pulsed with an agonizing, and sympathetic vibration.

I winced, pressing a hand to my temple as I tried to isolate the variable. Pendra was right beside me, her mind sharp and grounded, but the static was coming through her. If she was biologically—and given this world's physics, spiritually—linked to her mother, then walking this close to the sleeping giant's core mass was turning our connection into a psychic antenna. I was catching the ambient bleed-through.

There was no intent behind it. No directed thought or communication. It was just a chaotic, unstructured flood of sensory data that felt entirely involuntary. Like tapping into an alien REM cycle.

She was dreaming.

Raw, unfiltered apex-predator instincts crashed into my human consciousness. A sudden, blinding urge to launch my body through the tunnels and shatter the bedrock into dust. The phantom taste of alkaline blood and shattered chitin. A hunger so vast and old it felt like a geological era, pulling me in.

I staggered, my vision greying out as the sheer scale of the psychic weight threatened to overwrite my identity.

No. I clamped down on my own mind, utilizing the same clinical detachment I used to dissect biological samples. That is not my biology. That is external data. Box it. Isolate it.

If the tether was the antenna, I needed to tune the frequency. I focused entirely on Pendra. I forced my mental grip to narrow, filtering out the ambient background noise and locking strictly onto the crisp presence of the younger centipede right beside me. I used her relatively grounded mind as a firewall to block out the overwhelming static of the mother. It worked, mostly. The crushing pressure receded to a dull, manageable roar in the back of my skull.

"Keep close," I pushed the intent to Pendra, my mind feeling bruised.

The glowing blue mycelium trail finally terminated in a massive, enclosed bio-chamber. The fungal threads had completely overgrown a mound of amber-like, petrified biological mortar fused right against the inner wall of Vane-Uru's living carapace.

Fossilized directly into the center of that mound was a human skeleton.

My eyebrows climbed toward my hairline as I approached slowly, timing each step with the rhythmic inhales drawing into the walls. The skeleton wasn't sitting in a peaceful, and meditative lotus position; the geometry of the spine was contorted in a clear posture of agony. The bones were completely blackened, indicating they were entirely saturated with heavy Rot Qi, and they had fused seamlessly into the giant's inner shell.

The anatomical layout told the whole story: this cultivator hadn't died fighting Vane-Uru. They had died trying to act like a parasite. They had likely found a path into these hollowed-out sections, sat down, and attempted to siphon the colossal ambient energy radiating from her dormant core. But they hadn't calculated the biological load, or they lacked the necessary filtration mechanisms. The raw, unfiltered density of the Rank 4 energy had calcified their meridians, turning them to stone from the inside out.

But clutched in the skeleton’s fused, and blackened hands was a heavy slate of deep green jade. It was completely untouched by the surrounding rot, its surface densely carved with structural schematics and geometric script.

An archive, or at least it looked like the bronze tablet that had sent me to this world, so I assumed it must be like it. An instruction manual, but with less heavy metal poisoning, I hoped.

I stepped up to the mound. The jade slate was perfect, but the structural mechanics of the skeleton presented an immediate hazard. The blackened bones were highly conductive; I could see faint, microscopic arcs of purple energy pulsing through the cultivator's fossilized arms, feeding directly back into the massive carapace of Vane-Uru behind them. The dead cultivator had become a literal, conductive circuit connected directly to the sleeping giant's passive nervous system.

If I just grabbed the jade slate and snapped the fossilized fingers holding it, I would break the circuit. In any biological system, a sudden grounding spike or severed circuit risks triggering an immediate localized immune response—or worse, an involuntary reflex. If a centipede this size flinched, the shifting tissue would flatten us instantly, or worse

I wasn’t prepared for worse, so I was going to have to put some thought into my next move.