"The abyss does not give up its secrets to the righteous; it only pays those who bring the blade."

Keeping my composure, I watched Karg bolt off into the treeline. I listened to the sound of his panicked crashing fade, feeling far better than I should about it all. His departure left the clearing in an empty silence. 

The arrays on my arms and hands pulsed steadily in the quiet aftermath, a cooling sensation spreading through my veins as the Infinite Weave on my palm kept its seemingly endless passive intake.

We had our target, but I was in no hurry to march to the black ice lakes. Vora was in a forced biological torpor and would survive in that state for at least a year safely tucked away in her crevice. She might not be in great shape after that long, but she could recover. Rushing headlong into what was mostly the territory of a rank 4 spirit beast without understanding my own limitations was a good way to end up as marrow-paste. I had acted rashly to get the tablet in my back that I still didn’t understand, and ended up with alterations that constantly caused me pain and made it hard to concentrate. I needed to grow my understanding of this world, learn what the tablet said, feed Pendra’s core, and understand the mechanics of the world I was trapped in.

Just another day in paradise. Day five? What a start.

I turned back to the center of the clearing, trying to detach myself from the horrific scene. The three dead Jötnar lay exactly where they had fallen. Pendra was already crouched over the one whose heart she had ripped out. She was using her lower mandibles to methodically crack a rib, extracting the dense, iron-rich marrow like a dog with a soup bone.

I didn’t have the luxury of squeamishness, but my stomach was still doing flips. Survival in this environment required a clinical detachment from the grotesque. That was my motto, but I chanted it to myself as a mantra. Curling my nose up and narrowing my eyes, I stepped over a pooling puddle of heavy blood and knelt beside the giant with the severed spinal cord.

He was wearing a heavy, cured-leather harness, strapped over a thick pelt. I unbuckled the primary satchel at his waist and dumped the contents onto the dirt. A handful of dried, salted meat strips tumbled out, along with a fired clay jug stoppered with a wooden plug, a small leather drawstring pouch, and two surprisingly well-crafted glass vials wrapped in protective twine.

“No way,” I muttered. “Perfect.”

I picked up the clay jug and uncorked it. It smelled sharply of fermented roots and cheap, caustic alcohol. I poured the liquid out into the dirt, wiped the rim clean with a patch of moss, and set it aside. The next thing was the leather pouch; it was full of a fine, gritty grey powder. I rubbed a pinch between my fingers. It was highly astringent—likely a clotting agent made from crushed limestone and dried yarrow or its local equivalent. I tossed the pouch into my own bag. 

Taking one of my empty glass vials, I walked over to the first giant—the one missing his head. I needed samples. A cultivator’s blood was a universal reagent for arrays, talismans, and pill refinement. I needed to see how Jötnar biology reacted on an alchemical level—whether their hyper-dense blood could be used as a conductive ink for my Lattice, how it interacted with Pendra’s internal chemistry, or if it could be distilled into a marrow-tempering pill. But I had to harvest it now, before the ambient Rot Qi began to corrupt and break down the cellular structure.

With an uneasy look scrunched onto my face, I knelt by the stump of the giant’s neck. Holding my arm out, I angled the glass vial to catch the slow drainage from the carotid artery, and I watched the blood leak like sap. What was most surprising was the liquid's incredible weight. It didn’t splash or run; it slid down the glass like liquid mercury, thick and metallic. I filled two vials, sealed them tightly with their wax-coated corks, and tucked them safely into my canvas roll alongside my acupuncture needles.

I tossed the bundle of dried meat to Pendra.

She caught it out of the air without looking, snapping a strip into her mandibles. Instantly, a faint, acidic hiss sounded. Pendra violently spat the half-chewed meat into the dirt, her mandibles clicking in a rapid, agitated staccato as she aggressively scraped her tongue against her teeth.

“Poison. Burns. Bad meat.”

I paused, looking at the white, crystalline crust on the remaining strips. “Right. The sodium.”

It was a stupid oversight on my part. Oomukade, chimera or not, still had its biology fundamentally rooted in arthropod anatomy. High concentrations of salt still seemed to desiccate her soft inner tissues on contact through osmosis.

“My mistake. Leave it,” I said, wiping my hands on my coat. “Grab that cleaver. Let’s find a place to set up camp. I need to run a baseline titration before this blood coagulates into a brick.”

We moved deeper into the timberline, putting distance between ourselves and the fresh kill site. The scent of blood would attract scavengers soon enough.

The forest was a labyrinth of colossal dark wood trees, their roots forming natural barricades against the rot. I kept my eyes on the undergrowth. The local beasts were monstrous, but the plants followed the same brutal logic of any ecosystem. The soil here was soured by the runoff from Vane-Uru’s corpse, and in that toxicity, I found what I needed.

I stopped twice to harvest. First, a handful of bioluminescent moss—the kind that thrived on high-mineral deposits—and then a cluster of pale, jagged ferns. The sap from the ferns beaded on the cut stems, hissing as it hit the air. It was a potent, caustic oil; in the right concentration, it could strip the hide off a scavenger.

We found a hollow beneath an overturned pine. It was dry, defensible, and quiet enough to work.

Pendra took her post at the entrance, dragging the heavy bone-cleaver behind her. She sat cross-legged, using a piece of flint to scrape the edge of the blade, the rhythmic shhh-shhh of stone on bone filling the space.

I set my workbench on a flat, petrified root. I didn’t have a lab, only a clay jug and the vials of Jötnar blood. The blood was a disaster—it had already thickened into a heavy, mortar-like sludge that refused to pour.

“I need to crack this open,” I muttered, more to the notebook than myself. “If I can separate the energetic signature from the physical density, I can see how the Jing increases density so greatly to form the gravity wells .”

Focusing back on my work, I crushed the ferns into the jug with some effort, grinding them until they released their acidic sap, and then added the moss to temper the solution. I scraped a dollop of the giant’s blood into the mix. It sat there, a thick, stubborn lump that refused to dissolve.

“Too dense,” I whispered. “The solvent isn’t deep enough.”

I needed a catalyst. I needed a sharp, localized spike of heat to shock the cells into opening.

Above the root-ceiling, the brush rustled. A predator was circling, drawn by the scent of the blood. I didn’t look up. I was busy calculating the thermal properties of the venom glands I’d seen in the local vermin.

A massive, armored centipede dropped from the canopy. It didn’t look at Pendra. Its antennae went wild, twitching toward the heavy, iron-rich scent of the giant’s blood on my workbench. It lunged.

Pendra didn’t even stop sharpening her blade. Her mid-limb flicked out in a blurred, wet thwack. The centipede was bisected mid-air, the two halves hitting the dirt on either side of my workbench, twitching.

After no more than five minutes, the brush directly above our root-ceiling rustled again.

I kept my focus locked on the rim of the clay jug. I was running the ethnobotanical variables in my head, calculating how to shock the giant’s stubborn, dense blood into breaking down. I needed a catalyst—a localized spike of heat.

Without warning, an even more massive, armored centipede—easily nine feet long, its carapace the color of bruised iron—dropped from the canopy overhead. It ignored Pendra entirely just as before, its antennae twitching wildly as it locked onto the heavy, iron-rich scent of the giant’s blood on my workbench. Its mandibles snapped open, dripping a caustic yellow fluid.

Pendra didn’t rise. She didn’t even shift her posture or adopt a combat stance. She casually reached backward with one of her bladed back-limbs, her eyes never leaving the cleaver’s edge she was sharpening.

Her chitinous blade flashed in a dark blur.

There was a sharp series of wet Schlick-thunks, then large sections flew past me. The larger centipede was diced in mid-air, and each part that fell on the dirt on either side of me was still twitching violently as the severed nervous system misfired. A spray of yellow caustic fluid sizzled against the petrified root, landing mere inches from my open notebook.

Pendra blew a flake of bone dust off the cleaver and went back to scraping the flint. “Crunchy bug. Tastes like acid. Bad meat.”

“Please kill them before I can smell what they previously ate, Pendra,” I murmured, my tone entirely flat as I brushed a speck of dirt off my page. “You almost ruined the solvent.”

I set my notebook down and leaned over the carcass. My tweezers found the small, pulsing yellow sac near the creature’s thorax immediately—it radiated a harsh, ambient heat that I could feel against my knuckles.

A venom gland.

“But this will do nicely,” I said.

I gripped the sac with the tweezers, carefully severing the connective tissue with a needle, and dropped the venom gland directly into the clay jug.

The reaction was instantaneous. The acidic fern sap rapidly ruptured the gland's thin membrane, releasing a localized flash of biological heat. The sudden temperature spike forced the dense Jötnar blood to expand, instantly breaking its surface tension. The solvent rushed in, violently liquefying the stubborn cells.

I stepped back as the mixture bubbled and hissed, giving off a faint puff of grey steam. Once it was clear, the concoction cleanly separated into a dense, iron-rich sludge that sank to the bottom of the jug. On the top, a clear, highly energetic golden liquid floated to the surface, shimmering with a faint kinetic distortion.

With excitement and a bit of trepidation, I leaned closer, hovering over the glowing liquid. The violet markings on me flared automatically as the liquid’s energy spiked in response. 

This wasn’t just plasma. It was liquid Jing—the raw vitality of not only the giant’s bone structure, but every being on this forsaken world. And I finally had it isolated.

“Fascinating,” I whispered, rapidly jotting down estimated ratios before tapping my charcoal on the top of my field journal. “Density isn’t just a passive trait of the giants, not that I thought it was. No, it seems everyone converts this environmental energy into a liquid form through some kind of active metabolic process. The body constantly consumes energy, but it is never consolidated, leaving the bones porous and the muscles bloated like stereo users.”

I looked over at the entrance. Pendra was absentmindedly chewing on one of the centipede’s severed legs like a piece of straw.

If I could synthesize this liquid Jing, I wouldn’t just understand how the giants survived; I would understand how they lived. I could theoretically apply the same structural density multiplier to my own biology, but actually use it. I could temper my own bones using alchemy and acupuncture, rather than relying on external pressure. I still needed to figure out cultivation, but this was a strong step towards fingering out many other mysteries that I planned to look into.

I took a clean steel needle and slowly dipped the tip into the clear liquid.

The moment the steel breached the surface, it began to frost over with golden energy. The hyper-dense, golden, mercury-like energy reacted with the conductive material, forcing the steel's bonds to structurally align. In an instant, all the remaining liquid Jing was sucked into the needle before I could blink, and it instantly became twice as heavy in my fingers. It was like the needle had become tungsten or iridium in a flash, and I could barely keep my grip.

I pulled it out, with great difficulty, and examined the gold frosted metal in the dim light of the hollow. I had the fuel, but was still unsure of the effects or why the needle sucked it all up. The goal would be to safely inject it into my own meridians without shattering my bones or making me explode.

This was only the start of our journey, and I had a lot of work to do.