The path back to the cave took him too close to where he'd hidden the bodies. As he neared, a wet, metallic reek coiled into the air, far too strong for how little time had passed. His steps slowed on their own. He stood there a moment, parsing the scent, then parted the foliage and looked down.
The corpses had been rotting for days. He knew that wasn't true; he had killed these men less than twenty-four hours ago and dragged them here himself, covering them with brush. But his eyes told him otherwise. The skin had turned grey-green, the flesh beginning to sag and liquefy against the bone. The whole scene was wrong, sitting cold and heavy in his chest.
He let Prime run over them anyway, though some part of him already knew it would only confirm what he was seeing.
What made him crouch and look closer was the silence. At this stage of decay, there should have been maggots, clouds of them seething over every inch. But there were none. Not a single one.
The longer he stared, the deeper his unease grew. Prime scanned the corpses from every angle, but each pass only hammered the impossibility home. Every data point suggested a death occurring days ago. To Prime, the accelerated decay appeared perfectly natural, and that was the detail that bothered him most.
He widened his search, his eyes tracking the surrounding foliage, searching for anything out of place.
Then Prime chimed, not in its usual clear tone, but with something discordant, almost reluctant. The notification that surfaced in his mind held a quality he had never encountered before, though he hadn't had enough time with Prime since his rebirth. The tone felt less like a status update and more like a warning issued at the edge of comprehension.
[Unknown energy detected. Analyzing… analysis failed. Signature exceeds established parameters. Insufficient data for classification.]
Aris went still, setting the bundle of meat down with unconscious, fluid motion. The silence of the forest pressed in, heavy and absolute. His eyes returned to the corpses, the impossible decay, the absent maggots, the disturbed, dark soil, and he understood, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the air, that whatever had passed through here existed outside his current framework of reality.
He drew a slow breath and held it. A second unknown energy. The first had been born of his own making—the concoction, the herbs, the strange vitality surge Prime couldn't yet classify. That uncertainty had been his doing, a gap in the world's framework he had introduced himself; or so he hoped. He had precious little knowledge to anchor himself to in a world he'd been thrown into blind, and that energy had been his.
But this was different. He didn't know its source, and he certainly didn't know its intent, but he could feel its malevolence.
He turned the possibilities over methodically: was it a natural phenomenon, or something deliberate? His instincts leaned toward the latter. If this energy occurred naturally, Prime should have detected traces of it elsewhere, near the village, along the forest paths, anywhere.
Unless it was too diffuse to register anywhere but here, concentrated in this single, silent spot.
He shelved the speculation; the probability was too low to build on. Whatever it was, something had been here, something that left a signature Prime couldn't classify on corpses that had no business rotting this fast.
Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst. The mantra surfaced unbidden, but the forest's absolute silence pressed the second half harder than the first. He let himself look—truly look—at his surroundings. No birds. No rustle of undergrowth. No distant animal cries. The deeper one traveled, the scarcer the insects become.
Even the nearby waterfall felt sterilized, devoid of the usual aquatic pulse. He had registered each absence individually and dismissed them as happenstance.
Together, they were a declaration. Something had cleared this place out, or driven everything away simply by existing within it. He dismissed the orcs; they were too loud, too graceless to be this insidious.
Whatever it was, it hadn't come for him. Probably. If it had always haunted this stretch of woods, the villagers would have known; they would have built myths, warned their children, avoided the treeline entirely.
But would a man like the chief ever speak of such a thing? Or would he have long since learned to treat it as the cost of survival, a secret to be managed, a silence to be maintained?
The thought stopped him cold. Rill's wife. Thrown into the forest, the chief had said. A lesson. Retribution. But retribution assumes the forest is merely dangerous—beasts, exposure, starvation.
What if that wasn't it? What if the forest was used precisely because something in it fed, and the chief had learned, over generations, to keep it satiated? A man like him would have noticed the silence. He would have known no beasts would come to claim a body, that something else would.
He circled back to the deer. He'd left the carcass not far from the cave entrance last night; he was still carrying a portion of its meat. If this thing consumed the dead, it had passed over the deer entirely, which meant it was selective. It targeted humanoid prey, beings with sentience, perhaps. Beings with a soul-essence.
Or, more terrifyingly, it was careful. Careful enough to leave the deer untouched, avoiding patterns that might lead to discovery. It allowed itself to be mistaken for nothing at all.
Each question birthed another, spiraling into a void of uncertainty. He had so little to work with, only the residue trembling at the threshold of Prime's detection. Whether that was carelessness or contempt, he couldn't say.
Something that powerful had little reason to concern itself with someone as weak as he was. That thought was either the only thing keeping him sane, or the most dangerous one he'd had since arriving.
He gathered his equipment, picked up the meat, and retreated toward the Dakota fire hole.
Whatever is in this forest isn't actively hunting me. If it were, I'd already be dead. No use digging deeper; that might only draw its attention.
He set the wrapped meat near the hole, then made a quick trip to the pool, returning with a flat stone and three smaller rocks. He arranged them in a triangle over the hole, balanced the flat stone across the top, and set the wood to catch.
When the fire had grown hot enough, he laid the first cut of meat onto the stone and retreated into the brush, coiling low and still, listening. The rich smell of cooking meat drifted into the quiet air, welcome for his stomach, dangerous for everything else. Orcs had sharp noses. He kept his eyes on the trees, ears straining.
Three minutes, then he darted out, flipped the meat with a stick, and slipped back into the shadows. No wild animals came. The forest's stillness, whatever had caused it, at least served him here. Part of him was quietly relieved, even as the silence continued to unsettle him.
He cooked everything in short, guarded intervals. When the last cut was done, he dismantled the fire, wrapped the meat in large leaves, and bound each bundle tight. He moved through the trees toward the cave, the scent trailing him like a lure.
Inside, Lilly had pulled herself upright from the hot stones. Her eyes were clearer than they had been that morning. She had been examining one of the bows, but she set it aside when he came through the cascade, crossing to him and crouching over the bundles before he'd even put them down. "Brother, what is that? It smells incredible."
"Meat," he said. He ruffled her hair once, glanced at the bow she'd left on the ground, then moved deeper into the cave. "Eat. Keep the rest wrapped."
He wrung out his vest and shook the damp from his hair, then turned to the loot pile. He had half-expected her to ask where he'd gotten any of it. She didn't, and he released a breath he hadn't realised he was holding.
He had braced for the conversation, for having to explain what he'd done to acquire these things. But perhaps Lilly wasn't as morally fragile as he'd assumed. Or perhaps she was simply changing, the same way everything else was.
He shelved the thought and picked up the bamboo container of orc blood. Prime, resume the analysis. The chip stirred to life at the back of his mind. He set the container aside and reached for one of the bows, its nine arrows laid out beside it.
He turned an arrowhead over in his fingers, testing the edge with his thumb. Rough work, but the surface geometry was right for holding a coating. These could carry poison.
[Analysis complete. Data archived.]
A new folder surfaced in the depths of his mind. He focused on opening it, and knowledge unfolded with unsettling clarity, not recalled, but known, as though he had spent years studying orc blood and simply forgotten he had.
Prime had worked from a single sample, which meant every figure carried a margin of uncertainty. Even accounting for that, the picture was stark.
At the genetic level, the differences were structural. Orc DNA strands were thicker, denser, wound tighter. Their blood cells were hyperactive, hemoglobin capable of carrying roughly six times the oxygen of a human equivalent, possibly more. Every biological metric Prime could measure ran above the human baseline. Not slightly but significantly.
But that wasn't what held his attention. Woven into the plasma was something else. An energy Prime had no clean category for, fading, residual, as though the sample had been losing it from the moment it left the body. But concentrated enough, just barely, to be parsed. Prime's best classification: ninety-three percent analogous to life force itself.
The source, as best Prime could determine, was cellular. Orcs carried cell types his human body didn't have and in them were specialised organelles that seemed purpose-built for generating or storing this energy. A third kind of energy. But unlike the other two, this one he had an inkling about.
Life force wasn't an alien concept. It had analogues in everything he'd ever read about cultivation, biology, the boundary between the living and the dead. He didn't have a framework for it yet. But he recognised the shape of it.
Ideas came immediately, and he shelved them just as fast. Implementing anything in his current situation was fantasy. Thinking about it too long would only frustrate him.
He turned the empty bamboo container over in his hands, gaze going distant. "I wonder," he murmured, "if there's a connection." He looked at the container, then toward the cave entrance, the forest, the residue Prime couldn't classify, the herbs that had no business doing what they'd done to him. "Something that boosts vitality that drastically… it has to tie back to life force. It has to."
The pieces weren't fitting yet. But they were starting to look like they belonged to the same puzzle.