The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 13: Chapter 13

Read chapter 13 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"The legends sing of jade elixirs and heavenly peaches, but the foundation of the world is built on compacted rot." The first problem was fire. I sat on the resin-coated pillar, staring at the disjointed pile of purple-bleeding meat and carapace the Princess had dropped before me. To eat it safely, I needed to denature the proteins and neutralize the toxins. The standard human approach was cooking. I was a scientist, not a chef—but in this cave, the distinction was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I didn't have a flint, but I had steel acupuncture needles and a cavern full of mineral-hard, petrified resin. Striking a spark was possible for a seasoned survivalist or a Boy Scout. Neither of which I had ever been; navigating fast food menus was the only real-world survival training I had. I knew the concept, but the spark was the issue. I scanned the boulder field of the cavern, my spatial awareness cataloging the geometry of the space. According to the pressure that had been crushing my lungs before forming my core, the atmospheric density in here was absurdly high. The air had a physical, metallic tang that made the back of my throat itch. I hadn't truly processed what the Princess was tearing into earlier. I had just seen gore and panicked. But now, looking at the segmented carapace and twitching, multi-jointed legs, I realized what it was: another giant centipede. An oomukade . She was eating her own kind. My stomach performed a violent, nauseating flip. The visceral nightmare of watching a six-armed, vaguely human aberration happily cannibalize her own species stripped away my scientific detachment. My brain instantly downgraded to the primal rationality of a mouse trapped in a snake nest. Every instinct screamed to run, but there was nowhere to go. I had to force a ragged breath, tear my eyes away from the wet crunch of her mandibles, and focus strictly on the slab of meat she had handed me. I looked at the thick purple sludge leaking from the meat, forcing my ethnobotanist training to override my panic. Centipedes like this didn't have a standard circulatory system; they pumped hemolymph. Considering these creatures lived in a sealed, rotting tomb, they had to survive by metabolizing ambient death. The purple ooze wasn't just blood; it was a necrotic, highly acidic fluid. I watched the sludge drip onto the resin pillar. It hissed, actively etching into the stone-like surface. Because the atmospheric pressure was so high, the acid wasn't just pooling—it was off-gassing. Corrosive fumes evaporated directly into the stagnant, heavy air. If I struck a spark in a hyper-pressurized environment filled with volatile, vaporized acid, I wouldn’t just cook the meat. I would ignite a thermobaric flash. The heat would aerosolize the toxins, turning the air into a lung-melting vapor before the shockwave pulverized my internal organs. Cooking was officially off the table. I pushed my glasses up and adjusted my parameters. If I couldn't use thermodynamics, I had to use chemistry. I analyzed the raw materials: highly acidic purple hemolymph on one side, and a fluorescent green, bioluminescent fluid leaking from the filter-feeding cave-bugs the Princess was snapping on the other. Acid plus base equals neutralization. But that would leave behind heavy-metal salts and toxic precipitates. I needed a binding agent. Vane-Uru’s biological mortar—petrified, porous, and carbon-heavy—was essentially biological activated charcoal. I needed a vessel. I closed my eyes, but the mental tether to the Princess was like a dial-up connection trying to transmit a high-def CAD file. I projected a sharp image: Concave. Armor. Curved. Empty. She chirped and lunged at a dead centipede with terrifying speed. She hooked her obsidian claws under the edge of its cranial plate—a thick, calcified cephalic shield—and ripped it off with a wet crack that made my stomach hitch. She scraped the brains out with a bladed forearm and dropped the hollow, bowl-like carapace plate on