“The strength of the wall is not in the stone, but in the silence that keeps the river from knowing it is trapped.” 

I tried to ignore it as I worked, but the hollow was starting to smell horrible. The sharp, acidic tang of the crushed ferns was rapidly losing ground to the odor permeating the area from the sliced-up centipedes. In a forest where everything seemed to run on rot and hyper-dense blood, sitting next to a fresh kill was an open invitation to every apex predator within a five-mile radius.

"Pendra," I said, keeping my arm perfectly still so I didn't drop the slick metal. "Bring me some scraps and stones I can etch on."

As she did as I asked, I looked down at the needle in my hand. It was cool to the touch, but the steel was completely frosted over, practically glowing with the hyper-dense energy of the liquid Jing it had absorbed. It felt like holding a solid rod's worth of depleted uranium, hypercondensed, with all its weight. I couldn't transport it safely like this, but I also couldn't afford to waste the energy.

A light came on in my head, and I rolled my eyes for not thinking of the solution as I unstoppered the second glass vial. It was one of two I had harvested from the headless giant to collect blood, but it was a much better vessel to hold the heavy needle. I was worried that sticking it in a root might drain all the Jing, but if the glass didn't work, I'd have to create more in the near future anyway.

After pouring the heavy, metallic blood into my clay jug to consolidate the batch, I used the cleanest part of my shirt to wipe the vial out. Carefully, I lowered the golden-frosted needle into the somewhat clean glass tube, holding my breath. It hit the bottom with a soft clink, but the fragile glass held the concentrated weight effortlessly. Once done, I sealed the wax-coated cork back on top. Safe for now.

I didn't plan on carrying this thing around, but I also couldn’t just tap the needle to the cleaver and expect the energy to transfer over; I didn't even know how it absorbed into the needle; it just happened. If I wanted to keep moving forward with my work, I needed a better understanding of how it worked, and how to apply it. 

Up until now, my crafting had been limited to talismans—crude arrays carved into chitin or stone that were explicitly designed to violently shatter and release their stored energy all at once. What I wanted to do with the liquid Jing was entirely different. I wanted to enchant the cleaver, not make it explode.

Enchanting meant etching a permanent set of geometric instructions directly into a material, creating a closed-loop array that would only alter the item's physical properties when the wielder actively pushed their Qi into it. Sounded quite simple in my mind, but that was only because of the brain rot cultivation light novels had caused. I had never attempted an enchantment because it wasn't possible on earth, and I certainly wasn't going to risk bricking Pendra's primary weapon on a blind guess.

I picked up a discarded splinter of petrified wood and a fragment of a Jötnar rib from the dirt. "Give me a few minutes," I murmured, setting my notebook back on the root.

My first step was to find a proper conductive ink, but before that, I needed the right syntax.

Enchanting wasn't about drawing mystical runes in my view; it was applied physics translated into geometry if the talismans were anything to go off of. If I wanted to create a thermal effect—to make the blade hot—I would need to etch radial fractals that instructed the Qi to mimic rapid particle friction. But I didn't want heat. I needed density and edge alignment. That required a circuit of tight, interlocking hexagonal lattices, bound by straight, converging lines that forced the weapon's mass down into a single, unbreakable plane.

Unfortunately, there was a hard limit to the number of enchantments bones could hold. I found the limit after two hours of trial and error. 

At my current level of understanding, and what I assumed must be low-ranked material as a base, the bone's porous matrix could only support a two-layer circuit. While this was only tested on Jötnar bones, I was running under the pretext that the cleaver was the same, even if it wasn't. My plan was to etch one array for structural density and a second for edge retention. 

If I tried to add a third effect—like thermal friction or localized weight reduction—the overlapping geometric instructions just caused the material to break down. This would create an explosion that would just turn the weapon into a shrapnel bomb. Two effects seemed to be the ceiling for the First Layer of Creation.

With that finally out of the way, I could move on to the ink. Now that I had figured out the patterns and how they worked, I felt more confident about moving forward. To start, I began with the tried-and-tested simple mixture of acidic fern sap and moss, carefully drawing the hexagonal density array onto a scrap of petrified wood. I pulled the heavy needle from its vial and tapped the circuit. The wood instantly splintered, structurally unable to withstand the localized kinetic spike.

"Good, that was exactly as I had expected," I mused, jotting down notes before turning to Pendra. "Go get more of the Jötnar bones."

It didn't take her long, and when she returned with more bones, I started to test. I laid a flat section of a giant's rib on the petrified root. Using a clean steel needle, I etched the interlocking hexagons of the density array into the porous surface with the moss-and-sap mixture. I uncorked the glass tube, extracted the heavy, golden-frosted needle, and tapped the starting node.

The Jing rushed in, and the dead Jötnar bone didn't splinter; it handled the kinetic spike without issue. Unfortunately, the array didn't hold, but that was hardly a surprise. The golden energy flared, then immediately bled directly into the microscopic fissures of the bone with a slow, suffering-sounding hiss like cold water hitting a hot forge. Within seconds, the circuit was entirely dead, and I shook my head.

After safely setting the frosted needle back into its glass vial, I began tapping my charcoal against my notebook as I processed the new information. The array was mathematically sound, but the circuit was just bleeding everything into the material, with no effect. The issue was that the bone was incredibly porous. It was like pouring water into dry sand—it just absorbed. The enchantment was pointless if the energy bled out, but how did I get past this?

I looked over at the headless Jötnar corpse near the clearing's edge. The giants constantly pumped massive amounts of this liquid Jing through their bodies to maintain their hyperdensity without thought. I needed to look at it clinically. How did they channel that much raw kinetic energy without it bleeding into their surrounding tissues and cooking their own organs?

In human anatomy, electrical impulses traveling along nerves were insulated by the myelin sheath. The giants had to have a macroscopic, biological equivalent that acted as a natural Faraday cage for the Jing.

I grabbed a clean glass vial and walked back over to the kill site. Kneeling by the stump of the severed neck, I ignored the thick, heavy blood pooling in the arteries. I dug my tweezers directly into the center of the exposed spinal column. Carefully, I extracted a thick, clear, gelatinous fluid, scraping it straight into the vial. It had weight, but it lacked the violent kinetic distortion of the blood. It was completely inert.

Back at the workbench, I added a dollop of the spinal fluid to my acidic sap and moss ink. I stirred the mixture with a clean needle until the paste thickened into a highly viscous gel.

I grabbed a fresh piece of bone and re-etched the density array. The new paste settled into the scratches, leaving a faint, glossy film over the drawn lines. I used the frosted Jing needle to tap the starting node.

I watched as the golden Jing flooded the circuit. This time, it didn't bleed, to my relief. The spinal fluid easily coated the inside of the etched lines, creating a perfect insulator. The energy flashed brightly and ran flawlessly along the exact hexagonal path I had etched, then locked completely in place without a single wisp of energy escaping into the air.

"Progress," I muttered, writing down the ratios.

But as I leaned closer, I noticed a new problem. The energy was perfectly contained, but the ink itself was faintly smoking. The moss inside the lines was starting to carbonize under the sheer pressure of the Jing. I had solved the insulation problem, but the base material couldn't handle the bandwidth. If I wanted to push enough energy through an array to make a weapon viable, I was going to need a much better conductor.

I reached for the mortar—a hollowed-out piece of ironwood Pendra had carved for me—and grabbed the shards of the centipede's carapace I'd gathered earlier. I was about to drop them in to start grinding them down into the conductive powder I needed when a sharp, rhythmic tapping echoed through the hollow.

Clack. Clack-clack.

The sound brought my attention to Pendra, though she hadn't moved from her post at the cave entrance, but her posture had started to shift. The bladed limbs she usually kept relaxed were slowly extending at sharp, defensive angles, and a pair of antennae popped out of her silky white hair. They were vibrating at a speed I could barely track. She didn't look at me; her focus was entirely on the tree line to the north.

“Movement. Large. Fast. Not Jötnar.”

I didn't drop my tools, but I stopped the grinding. I looked toward the opening. The forest floor was dark, but I could see the tall, spindly shadows of the trees shifting in a way that wasn't just the wind. Something was tracking us. It wasn't the blind, hunger-driven aggression of the centipedes; this was deliberate.

"How close?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

“Close. Quiet. Stalking.”

I cursed under my breath. I had been so preoccupied with the insulating properties of the spinal fluid that I hadn't been monitoring the perimeter. If we were being hunted by something intelligent, staying here to finish a delicate chemical synthesis was a death sentence.

"Can you handle it, or do we need to move?"

Pendra slowly turned her head, her mandibles inside her mouth clicking once—a sound of dark, predatory amusement. “I handle. You finish. Fast.”

She stepped out into the twilight, the heavy, Jing-enhanced cleaver held in a low, ready grip.

I turned back to the workbench, my pulse steadying. I didn't have the luxury of slow, methodical grinding. I dumped the carapace shards into the mortar and started pulverizing them with a heavy stone, the sound masked by the distant, wet thud of Pendra's first strike in the brush. I had to get this powder fine enough to suspend in the gel, or the circuit would fail under the load.

I worked with a clinical, frantic intensity, the smell of Pendra's acidic blood and the crushed centipede husk filling the air as I created the conductor I needed.