The death of the Serpentia Triad coincided with the completion of Luna’s ritual, possibly adding some EXP to the total I gained, and propelling me to reach level eighty. Nearby, I could see Silva relax and dissipate the powers she had called upon to utterly devastate the Triad, shrinking back to her normal size and settling on four paws, looking quite exhausted. After shaking herself for a moment, she padded back into the slowly dissipating shield they had conjured up earlier, using the remaining energies of her Goddess to rejuvenate herself at least a little.

In the meantime, I quickly checked my notifications, nodding at the one for my level before looking over the various skill gains. Blood Rune Mastery reached forty, giving me a new Rune once I could delve for it, Darkness Rune Mastery got to level fifty-seven, as did Ice Rune Mastery, while Water Rune Mastery got to twenty-seven, going up two points, likely due to the combination with Ice Magic I had used repeatedly over the last two days. Only two of my pure Magic Skills had levelled, namely, Ice and Water Magic, going up by one each, reaching sixty-six and twenty-seven each.

All in all, fairly good advances, good enough that a part of me wanted to look for more enemies like the Serpentia Triad, or even the Scorchipedes we had fought the day before. Fighting powerful enemies was a lot more effective than normal training when it came to increasing skills, likely due to the threat of death forcing your mind to perform at a higher level, the experience improving your general work with these skills. Or something like that, I wasn’t quite sure. It might be simply a quirk of the System and not something innate to people.

Either way, with the Serpentia Triad dealt with, we could now focus on the more important things, namely the results of Luna’s ritual if she could communicate them, and the harvesting of one giant monster. Even in the privacy of my mind, I wasn’t sure which I was more interested in, the knowledge or the interesting things this giant serpent might have in its body, both options had their own draw. Luckily, I didn’t have to pick, the knowledge in Luna’s head would hopefully stay there and she’d be able to add it to the shrine of Hecate we had been charged with building, while the Serpentia Triad would have to be harvested here, hopefully without having our loot degraded by the Astral Power radiating from the central crystal.

Glancing at Luna, I realised that my munchkin was kneeling in a comfortable position I had seen her take before, when she was praying to Lady Hecate, making me think that she was currently busy, discussing the ritual and its effect with the management upstairs. Or wherever Lady Hecate’s realm was located in relation to ours, not that it really mattered. However, it meant that talking to Luna would have to wait, so I could focus on the harvest without worrying, especially given that Silva had placed herself near Luna, keeping an eye on things while resting. Nothing would happen there, of that I was fairly certain.

And if it did, we were all only a few dozen metres away, close enough to intercede with any potential trouble.

Stepping up next to Lia, I looked at the shredded remains of the Triad, trying to pick out a plan of attack when it came to harvesting it. Sadly, from the way Silva had torn into the thing, most of its organs, and thus a majority of the interesting parts, were utterly destroyed. Its skin, too, was left hanging on the many, many bloody chunks Silva had ripped from its body and strewn around the field of battle, making me wonder if there was any part large enough to make skinning it worthwhile, though I didn’t think so. At best, the heads were relatively intact, Silva had focused on the conjoined body of the Triad but sadly that meant the fascinating pattern of its body was lost.

Alas, maybe I shouldn’t complain too much, I had a feeling that Silva’s way of destroying it had spared us a variety of troubles, though I couldn’t be certain. Either way, the battle was done and its results couldn’t be changed.

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So, instead of focusing on things we wouldn’t be able to harvest, I began to search for things that we could get. Thinks like the somewhat small, but quite magically powerful, crystalline growths the Triad had on each of its heads. These growths almost looked like horns, sharing the colour and magical bias of their respective heads and would hopefully be useful for some future projects. Whether one of mine or one of Alex’s, I wasn’t sure but I was certain one of us would be able to use them. Somehow.

Next to me, Alex was doing something similar, slowly checking over the various bits and pieces, carefully separating the pieces by criteria I couldn’t immediately tell. It wasn’t just along the lines of magical bias, there were additional criteria, that much I could tell, but what they were? I would have to take a closer look at some point, maybe have our alchemically aligned pair teach me some of their craft. By now, they had pushed that particular discipline in ways I just couldn’t follow, creating effects I would consider magical but using different means that made them incredibly effective. It was almost like employing a lever or maybe springs to store physical force, only magical in nature. Or pseudo-magical, I was fairly certain that their art was more focused on the materials used and the reactions between those materials. But that was something to look into later.

For now, I focused on helping Alex to take out the teeth from the different heads, fascinated that the Triad had specialised teeth to inject different liquids, I had a feeling all of them poisonous, into its prey. These teeth were retractable, hidden behind massively powerful teeth, some of them large enough to be used as daggers. Teeth to grip prey and keep it still, maybe so that the other heads could tear it apart or use the Triad’s more esoteric skills, or its poison, on them. Some of those teeth, Alex had already removed in their quest to get the poisoned teeth, removed and carefully stacked, most likely for a later project.

Looking at them, I considered whether I could do something interesting with them, too, and when I touched one, carefully sending my senses out to get a better idea, I had to nod to myself, these would be quite useful for some Fire-based enchantments. What type of enchantments, I wasn’t quite certain just yet, but at least the teeth from the red head would work great for that.

Similarly, the other teeth had their own elemental biases, as one would expect, though I wasn’t sure I could do anything useful with them. Maybe turn them into simple, enchanted weapons but that would be it. Daggers to poison and bleed your enemy for the poisoned ones and maybe use the corrosive aspect of the other head to make something nasty. Nothing I could use to help my allies, which was where I put my focus currently.

As we continued to take the Serpentia Triad apart for its parts, I began to mentally put together a picture of the creature and how it might have worked. It was an incredibly fascinating mechanism, reminding me of the Centaurs on Mundus a little, with one apparent primary head, at least that’s what I got from the way the spinal cords merged together, and two secondary heads. The central head seemed to have been at least somewhat in charge, though I couldn’t tell whether that was merely in an anatomical sense or if the creature truly had three different minds, one for each of its brains.

Looking back at the fight, I doubted it, as my Curse had afflicted each of its heads without any problem, normally, I’d have to focus on spreading it to more than one target but here, it simply worked out. So, maybe it was more like the different hemispheres in a human brain, with each part of it responsible for different things. Following that train of thought, I began to dig into the area where the different spinal cords merged into one and found yet another interesting structure. It looked very similar to a brain, only that it wasn’t just made of the soft, spongy brain matter I was used to, there were some fairly solid, almost crystalline strands growing throughout the structure, all of them based around a single, multi-hued crystal. Checking that crystal closer, I realised that it held all three elemental biases in equal measure, making it quite an interesting, and valuable, find.

Grinning to myself, I began to carefully extract that small, but incredibly fascinating, part of the creature, with Alex watching closely, likely curious about my findings. After showing them what I found, we continued our slow and bloody work, a task not made easier by the fact that the blood was mildly corrosive and soon started to hurt our skin. Alas, some pain had to be suffered in the pursuit of knowledge and loot.