Dex woke to the sound of light rain tapping at the leaves-but against his ravaged body it felt like hammer blows. He opened his eyes with painstaking slowness to a vision blurred and stained red; that was blood, dried across his eyelids. He attempted to draw in the forest air, and a sharp stabbing in his left side reminded him at once of his shattered ribs.
"Damn it..." he rasped, his voice sounding as though it rose from the bottom of a deep well. "How long was I out?"
He cast a quick look at his surroundings. The three Gloom Lizard carcasses were still there, stiffened atop the stone he had conjured, but the smell of death had already begun attracting Falus Forest's large blue flies, which droned with a revolting hum around the bodies. The air was cold, and the darkness was withdrawing to make way for a grey, cheerless dawn.
He tried to raise his left arm-and a stifled cry escaped from between his clenched teeth. The wound left by the leader lizard's claw was ghastly. The flesh was split open and burned by residual acid, and the edges had already begun to turn a deep violet-the warning colour of oncoming infection or gangrene.
In the world of prison, there are no doctors who care whether you live, and no antibiotics available except to those who have money or power. There, Dex had learned to work miracles from refuse: how to use cleaning fluid against fungal infections, how to fashion dressings from bed sheets after boiling them with iron rust to sterilise wounds. Now, in Falus Forest, the forest was his large cell, and its resources were his chemical instruments.
"If I stay here another half hour, the tissue will die," Dex assessed his condition with surgical detachment, pressing down on his nerves to prevent himself from sinking back into unconsciousness. "I need a disinfectant, a painkiller, and a source of energy."
With immense difficulty, he crawled toward the leader lizard's carcass. He was not going for gold or treasure-he was looking for biochemistry. Using his intact dagger with a hand that trembled badly, he sliced open the acid gland located in the lizard's throat.
"At full concentration the acid kills-but diluted to near-nothing and combined with an alkaline substance, it can function as a chemical cauterising agent for dead tissue," Dex thought.
He collected a few drops of the green saliva in a small vessel he fashioned from a thick leaf. Then, drawing on the precise botanical knowledge he had absorbed from the novel's descriptions of the forest, he began searching around the base of the tree he was leaning against. He found a variety of white fungus known as Gravecap-poisonous if consumed, but containing a naturally high concentration of ammonia.
With trembling fingers, he crushed the fungus and mixed it with a single drop of acid and a measure of water from his canteen. The mixture reacted immediately, producing a grey foam and a pungent, acrid smell.
"This is going to hurt... it is going to hurt a great deal," he whispered to himself with a bitter smile.
He drew a deep breath, bit down on a piece of oak bark, and poured the mixture directly into the open wound on his arm.
Sssssssssss-
Dex's scream erupted from behind the bark, and his eyes flew open so wide they nearly left their sockets. It felt as though an iron skewer, heated white-hot in a forge, was being driven into his arm. The chemical foam began to eat through the necrotic, acid-damaged flesh, scouring the wound by the most brutal means imaginable. Cold sweat poured from his body in sheets-but when the foam subsided, the wound was clean, bleeding bright red instead of the thick, black discharge of before.
He did not stop there. He still needed to staunch the bleeding and accelerate tissue repair-a Rank E body would not survive sustained blood loss. He crawled on one knee through the immediate area until he found a creeping vine known as Widow's Thread. These plant fibres were uniquely adhesive and strong, and contained a natural compound that encouraged blood clotting and prevented bacterial inflammation.
He wound the threads tightly around his arm, then covered them with a layer of mineral-rich forest clay that he extracted using what remained of his Earth Mana-which had begun to regenerate, slowly and stubbornly. The clay would serve as a natural splint for the broken ribs and a sealed barrier between the wound and the forest's contaminated air.
As for energy, Dex performed an act that was reprehensible but necessary. He split open the belly of one of the lizards and removed its liver. According to the novel, the liver of an Acidic Gloom Lizard was dense with proteins and raw Mana-but its taste was bitter enough to cause vomiting, and it carried low-level toxins.
"Chemistry does not care about taste," Dex thought as he chewed a piece of raw liver.
The flavour was something resembling lead mixed with rotten fish. He forced himself to swallow, and felt a strange heat spread through his stomach, then migrate into his veins. The raw Mana in the liver had begun to charge his exhausted Mana Core-and despite the nausea, he felt his strength returning by degrees.
After an hour of gruelling, agonising labour, Dex stood upright. He looked like a ghost that had clawed its way out of a grave: his face pale as paper, his clothes shredded and stained with blood and clay, his left arm wrapped in a strange herbal dressing. But his eyes-his eyes glittered with a frightening clarity.
"Now. Let us take the prize," Dex said, moving toward the three carcasses.
With his dagger he worked with the precision of a practised surgeon, opening the chests of all three lizards. From each one he extracted a small gemstone-glowing with a faint green luminescence, pulsing faintly with trapped life. These were the Mana Cores of Rank E+.
To an ordinary adventurer, these cores were worth a handful of silver coins. To Dex, they were fuel for his future. Each core contained concentrated energy that could be used to elevate his rank, to forge magical implements.
He placed the three cores in a small leather pouch and felt their weight-the weight of the second fruits of his victory in this world. This was his second true profit, earned with blood and sweat and the one resource that had never failed him: his mind.
He cast a last look at the concrete trap. It had become a strange landmark in the forest now-a grey stone mass jutting from the mud, three grotesque corpses entombed within it. It would serve as a message to any adventurer or creature that passed this way: someone came through here. Someone who does not play by the forest's ordinary rules.
He retrieved his pack and his first dagger, checked that the dressings around his ribs were holding firm. The pain was still present-a continuous undertone humming at the back of his consciousness-but he had learned in prison how to isolate pain: how to place it in a small box inside his mind and lock the lid, so that it would not reach his decisions.
Dex set off again. His steps were not swift-but they were steady, with the unhurried certainty of fate's own footfall. He moved more cautiously now, using his Earth Sense in the smallest possible doses to preserve his Mana.
The forest had begun to change as he drew closer to the eastern sector. The trees grew more massive-but they appeared dead. Their branches were bone-white, bare of any leaf, jutting from the trunks like the bleached ribs of some enormous creature long collapsed. The fog had begun to thicken as well: a shimmering, silver mist that carried on it a scent... the scent of tears.