The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 25: Chapter 25

Read chapter 25 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"The abyss does not give up its secrets to the righteous; it only pays those who bring the blade." Keeping my composure, I watched Karg bolt off into the treeline. I listened to the sound of his panicked crashing fade, feeling far better than I should about it all. His departure left the clearing in an empty silence. The arrays on my arms and hands pulsed steadily in the quiet aftermath, a cooling sensation spreading through my veins as the Infinite Weave on my palm kept its seemingly endless passive intake. We had our target, but I was in no hurry to march to the black ice lakes. Vora was in a forced biological torpor and would survive in that state for at least a year safely tucked away in her crevice. She might not be in great shape after that long, but she could recover. Rushing headlong into what was mostly the territory of a rank 4 spirit beast without understanding my own limitations was a good way to end up as marrow-paste. I had acted rashly to get the tablet in my back that I still didn’t understand, and ended up with alterations that constantly caused me pain and made it hard to concentrate. I needed to grow my understanding of this world, learn what the tablet said, feed Pendra’s core, and understand the mechanics of the world I was trapped in. Just another day in paradise. Day five? What a start. I turned back to the center of the clearing, trying to detach myself from the horrific scene. The three dead Jötnar lay exactly where they had fallen. Pendra was already crouched over the one whose heart she had ripped out. She was using her lower mandibles to methodically crack a rib, extracting the dense, iron-rich marrow like a dog with a soup bone. I didn’t have the luxury of squeamishness, but my stomach was still doing flips. Survival in this environment required a clinical detachment from the grotesque. That was my motto, but I chanted it to myself as a mantra. Curling my nose up and narrowing my eyes, I stepped over a pooling puddle of heavy blood and knelt beside the giant with the severed spinal cord. He was wearing a heavy, cured-leather harness, strapped over a thick pelt. I unbuckled the primary satchel at his waist and dumped the contents onto the dirt. A handful of dried, salted meat strips tumbled out, along with a fired clay jug stoppered with a wooden plug, a small leather drawstring pouch, and two surprisingly well-crafted glass vials wrapped in protective twine. “No way,” I muttered. “Perfect.” I picked up the clay jug and uncorked it. It smelled sharply of fermented roots and cheap, caustic alcohol. I poured the liquid out into the dirt, wiped the rim clean with a patch of moss, and set it aside. The next thing was the leather pouch; it was full of a fine, gritty grey powder. I rubbed a pinch between my fingers. It was highly astringent—likely a clotting agent made from crushed limestone and dried yarrow or its local equivalent. I tossed the pouch into my own bag. Taking one of my empty glass vials, I walked over to the first giant—the one missing his head. I needed samples. A cultivator’s blood was a universal reagent for arrays, talismans, and pill refinement. I needed to see how Jötnar biology reacted on an alchemical level—whether their hyper-dense blood could be used as a conductive ink for my Lattice, how it interacted with Pendra’s internal chemistry, or if it could be distilled into a marrow-tempering pill. But I had to harvest it now, before the ambient Rot Qi began to corrupt and break down the cellular structure. With an uneasy look scrunched onto my face, I knelt by the stump of the giant’s neck. Holding my arm out, I angled the glass vial to catch the slow drainage from the carotid artery, and I watched the blood leak like sap. What was most surprising was the liquid's incredible weight. It didn’t splash or run; it slid down the glass like liquid mercury, thick and metallic. I filled two vials, sealed them tightly with their wax-coated corks, and tucked them safely into my canvas roll a