A thick metallic branch made of ironwood came free with a wet, sucking sound, spurting out directly on Dion, who simply wiped the purple ooze off his cheek, his breath steaming in the hot metallic air.
A few inches from him, what looked like a crystalline spider the size of a kitten lay dead.
As everything twisted here, it followed the same template–patches of crystalline exoskeleton plates scattered across its frame.
It made killing the little critters trickier, especially with a tree branch, even if it was made from ironwood.
Yet its corpse lay at his feet, refracting the sickly glow of the Ferro-Locus into jagged, colorless spears of light.
A few meters away, another lay crumpled. Beyond that, more scattered across the expanse, six in total, all wearing the same gaping wounds, the same purple ooze seeping into the metallic soil.
He nudged its broken leg aside, stepping past.
A week ago, such a sight would have frozen him. Now, he barely gave them a second glance.
Yes, one week had passed since he first stepped onto shore.
What surprised him most was that he was completely fine. Not that he'd expected to die, exactly. But he had prepared for the worst.
Apart from that initial, unnerving lesson and the assessment of what he was, the Alchemist had mostly left him to his devices.
He didn't truly feel like a prisoner. He was allowed to leave the shed and move freely.
Still, where the hell could he even go?
Dion glanced around, taking in the obscene aftermath of the massacre painted across the metallic soil, as if he needed any more proof that he was beyond human.
He moved faster now. Bled slower. Felt lighter. Each one on its own was a small enhancement, but together they made him inhuman.
At the moment, his ordinary amber eyes glowed with a hint of sapphire.
—
STATUS PANEL — IMPRINTED
NAME: Dion Helvius Lavos
AGE: 15
BLOODLINE: Ferrumvein
CONDITION: Brine-Touched
TITLE: None
---
DISSOLUTION PRINCIPLES
- SOLVENT-SOLUTE AFFINITY
- STRUCTURAL BREAKDOWN
- MASS TRANSFER & DIFFUSION
- EQUILIBRIUM LIMITATION
---
GRAND WORK
WITHER:
When activated, your perception undergoes a fundamental transformation. You cease to see objects, beings, or systems as they are, and instead perceive them as they inevitably will be: dissociated components awaiting return to entropy.
---
BRINE-TOUCHED PHYSIOLOGY
- Lightweight Skeletal Structure
- Hyper-Flexible Tissue
- Hypersaline Vitality
- Accelerated Recovery
---
COMPREHENSIONS
- Dual-Sword Mastery (Proficient)
- Lavosian Heritage
- Alkahestics (Novice)
- Bestiary (Emerging).
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- ***
Status imprinted through Brine resonance.
---
Dion's eyes lingered on the Grand Work section. Throughout the fight against the arachnids, he had never once reached for it.
Not just because of the drain. That was part of it, yes. Each use left him hollowed, shivering, his body protesting long after the sapphire light faded.
But the deeper reason lived in his gut like a splinter he couldn't dig out.
Every time you manifest the Alkahest, you give off a delicious scent. Alchemists like myself are drawn to it.
Those words. They had planted something in him that day, not just fear, but a wary understanding.
His gaze dropped to the Comprehension tab, noting the newest additions.
Alkahestics (Novice). It had appeared after his lesson on the Gates of Transformation, after the Alchemist had laid out the path.
Calcination. Dissolution. Separation. Conjunction. Fermentation. Distillation. Coagulation. Seven gates. Seven transformations.
His knowledge of what they meant was still threadbare, surface impressions and half-understood concepts. But somehow, it was enough for the panel to acknowledge it.
Bestiary (Emerging). That one was easier to understand. For the past few days, treading the Locus from dawn until the sun's sickly glow began to fade, he had seen things that belonged in nightmares.
Creatures of crystal and metal. Beasts that moved like liquid and struck like forged steel. The panel was cataloging what his eyes witnessed.
He closed the panel with a thought, the sapphire light fading from his vision.
Tap.
Dion glanced to his side. On cue, a wobbly, stitched-up creature came into view.
He'd finally learned its name.
P-7.
He couldn't help but feel a pang of pity for the thing. He still couldn't wrap his head around how something could be left to suffer this way.
It looked like an experiment gone horribly wrong, one that was constantly made to suffer.
Yet surprisingly, it didn't seem to view itself that way, it was efficient. From cleaning to cooking to the latest role of being his potter in the Ferro-Locus, it did everything with quiet diligence.
As if to say its appearance was the only thing about it that was sloppy. Together, they made an unlikely duo. A slave prince and an abomination, threading this cursed land together.
P-7 had proven its resourcefulness more times than Dion could count. It led him to safe routes, guiding him away from the true predators of the Mid-Locus back to the outer verge.
And Dion listened. Why wouldn't he?
Despite the overall enhancement from the Brine Alkahest, as he came to know, the thought of facing another gang of Skollynx wasn't on his checklist. It was a fate he'd rather avoid altogether.
Yet, what scared him more was the realization that the Skollynx weren't even top predators.
Well, they were in a way, but that was only here, on the outer verge. In the Mid-Locus, they were mid-tier at best.
Then there was the inner locus, where things were much worse.
P-7 stumbled forward. Dion watched it shuffle toward today's kill, its movements clumsy yet deliberate.
If he hadn't witnessed its resilience over the past week, seen it take hits that would cripple a man and keep moving, he would have feared for its safety.
With surprising strength, it lifted the shattered carcass of the crystalline spider.
"Be..a...st…..no…..ta..s.te…. go..od…" it spoke in its usual broken cadence, each word feeling like an effort.
Dion sighed.
He was well aware of the fact. The usual prey were small, squirrel-like creatures, the same meat he'd eaten on his first day.
Unfortunately, other predators, like the crystalline arachnids, also took a liking to them. That made them quite rare.
The only option was to go after another prey. A decision that had led him to the most important lesson so far.
Beasts in the Ferro-Locus were divided into two categories.
Crystalline and Metallic.
The fractured and the forged.
Spotting the difference wasn't hard. Much like the arachnids, crystalline beasts shimmered under the sickly light, their bodies studded with jagged, glass-like plates that caught and refracted the glow like scattered rainbows.
They moved with an eerie, fractured beauty, beautiful and deadly.
Metallic beasts, on the other hand, were something else entirely. No shimmer. No refraction. Just a dull, brutal presence.
Their hides felt forged, rather than grown. Iron plates. Copper sinew. Joints that hissed with steam and pressure.
They simply embodied a level of invincibility.
The categories weren't just about appearance. They were about survival. One you could fight. The other, you ran from.
Still, this was just the base estimation using himself as the measuring stick. For ordinary humans? He doubted they would survive any encounter.
After all, these creatures were still visibly stronger than anything he had seen before stepping on shore.
Take the arachnid, for example. Their webbing was semi-fluid crystalline in nature, hardening within seconds of exposure to air.
It wasn't something a normal human could easily break out of. Coupled with the fact that each one was already the size of a house cat. A cluster of them would send even the strongest men running for their lives.
"Well, except you know where we can get something better," Dion finally replied, glancing at P-7.
"Without taking on a metallic beast, I don't think we have much say in what we eat.”
Crystalline arachnids were the best he could handle at this time.
A metallic one? He recently watched just one tear through a pack of Crystalline Acridian, small fist-sized insectoids with bodies of polished bone and wings like razor paper.
It didn't break a sweat. Dion simply acknowledged that without Wither, there was no way to fight such a monster.
Dion could swear he heard P-7 mumble something unintelligible in response as it reluctantly picked up the beast's corpse.
He chose to ignore it, instead focusing on his surroundings.
This section of the Outer Verge was quite different from the shore where he'd first washed up.
Here, the ground sloped gently, covered in a carpet of rust-colored shavings that crunched underfoot.
Maybe another direction.
Dion thought. The land still felt confusing, like he was moving in circles no matter which way he went.
Then he heard it. A rustle of something moving through the underbrush a fair distance from him.
He tensed, his hand drifting toward his makeshift blade.
The bush parted.
?A single creature broke from the brush. It looked like a bunny, if one had been shattered and glued back together with emerald glass.
Its ears were segmented armor plates that twitched with a mechanical snip-snip sound
P-7’s eyes constricted upon seeing the creature. It paid him no mind, its emerald gaze locked on Dion.
It hopped once, and another, and then it lounged.
Dion nearly laughed, remembering how they had complained about the scarcity of edible prey just moments ago, and now one strolls out of the brush like it was handed to them.
He reacted instinctively, sidestepping with fluid, brine-touched grace as he brought the ironwood edge down. The creature’s head came off with a sound like a breaking window.
?He turned to P-7, a smirk forming. "See? Dinner just—”
Huh?
Dion's smirk died.
P-7 was gone. Not shuffling, not lagging. The creature was a blurred dot over a hundred feet away, moving with a terrifying, jerky speed that defied its stitched anatomy.
His mouth twitched.
In all the time he'd known the stitched creature, it had never moved like that.
Deliberate and slow. That was P-7. Not whatever that had crossed distance in the span of a heartbeat.
He didn't know if he was more impressed or disturbed.
Wait….why is he running?
Then, the sound hit him.
It wasn't a growl. It was a tinkle. Like a thousand crystal chandeliers being dragged across a stone floor.
?The treeline didn't just part; it shattered. Another green glow. Then ten.
Then a hundred.
The "Bunnies" didn't just hop, they flowed like a landslide of broken glass.
Individually, they were prey. Together, they were a grinding mill of razor-edged fur and crystalline teeth.
?P-7’s voice floated back on the wind, no longer slow, but frantic and high-pitched.
"Ru..n...Bun… n…y… hor…de.”