The jackalope was not good food. Sure, Tristan could eat it, but it had a rubbery texture, making it feel like chewing gum. Cooking it did not help, there was a fine line where it went from rubbery to charred and Tristan had not prepared enough types of food to get it just right. He still needed the energy from the meat, so he choked it down.

“What was that about not being able to taste it?” Vulcan teased.

“Shut up,” Tristan grumbled. There was little animosity in his words and he realized he was being petulant, but it was hard not to be when a voice in your head mocked you.

Tristan lacked a place to store what he was unable to eat, so he simply left it with the wroughtwilers in the wash. It was wasteful, especially as he got lucky when hunting down the last one. If it could even be called hunting.

After sleeping through most of the night and the following day, Tristan started his exploration. He did not intend to stay at the outpost, but it was the only safe place for him to sleep while he acclimated to life out in the wilderness. There were other conclaves of humanity out there, and it would be prudent of him to locate them.

The Elders had found one a few hundred miles from the Caldera. Supposedly, they were hostile. It made Tristan wary of them, he could not match a nation. Vulcan had mentioned their populations could rise to more than a million, a number that was inconceivable to Tristan. He did not want to be on the bad side of that many people.

For now, he intended to locate the mythical beast with a high concentration of absorption force. He thought it would be difficult, but whatever these were, stealth was not in their skill set. A swath of plants had been smashed down in a straight line and gouges were torn out of trees. They weren’t from claws but were something that Tristan would expect if a carapace or other hard body part scraped across it every day.

The trail was fifteen feet wide, which was enough for Tristan to avoid it. Anything large enough to use it would be too large to follow Tristan through the trees. So he followed the path a few feet into the tree line.

Four miles later, he felt something. It was metal, but it gave off a feeling of density. Tristan paused, the last time he had felt something like this, the Caldera had been destroyed. His metal sense extended over two hundred feet now that he was in the upper parts of tier four, however, whatever metal was giving off the essence was much farther away.

It was not uncommon for Tristan to sense things beyond his range. Those things tended to be much stronger than him and cause a lot of hardship. It tended to come from a sentient being that immediately started killing people when disturbed. He took a step back.

“Wait,” Vulcan said.

“Why,” Tristan whispered, “I don’t want it to know I’m here.”

Confusion flooded their link. Thankfully, Tristan could respond in a wave of emotions that clarified the point better than words could. Vulcan clarified for Tristan, “You’re right, that is a person. Or it was.”

“What do you mean?” Tristan prodded, “Explain now.”

“It gives off a similar feeling to the water cultist who attacked my ship,” Vulcan paused as if in thought, “Ripple, I think? Whatever, the ship was made of absorption alloy for its stealth capabilities. It is cheap and stops most signals from bouncing back, including any wide area essence senses. That pantheon showed up because one of them had the force of absorption, nullifying any stealth my ship had.”

“You’re telling me there’s a god up ahead. And you want me to check it out?” Tristan was in the process of turning and leaving. No way was he going to mess with some tier twenty monster.

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“A part of one’s corpse, yes. You are going because you can’t pass up an opportunity like this,” Vulcan said.

“What exactly am I walking into,” Tristan needed answers before he did anything.

“There are several possibilities, but I would guess that Ripple condensed an artifact upon death and the mythical beasts are using the artifact’s aura to mutate themselves,” Vulcan said, “There are quite a few other possibilities, but that one is the most likely.”

Now that was not something Tristan could turn down. He would not be able to use a high tier weapon like that, but it would still be more than ten tiers higher than himself. If it was an article of clothing, it would be the best armor he could get his hands on, if it was a weapon, it would never need maintenance, and if it was something random like jewelry, he could still make use of its durability. The only bad thing would be if it was something like a book or a stone tablet.

Tristan was not sure if the temple had anything about the ancient beings right. However, if they did, he suspected the artifact to be something akin to Hestia’s Sickle, only vastly more powerful. Tristan went from hesitant to eager in a moment, falling into a jog. He wanted to reach the source of absorption as soon as possible.

The path led into a ravine, set into the center of a hill. He was not sure when a hill became a mountain, but this one was straddling that line. Tristan had seen this landmark from a distance, the guard who let him through the rampart gates had pointed it out. From that distance, it had looked much smaller.

To all appearances, it was as if a large knife had dropped from heaven and sliced into the hill. The walls weren’t completely smooth, but they were more uniform than was natural. Placing a palm on the ravine wall, Tristan tried to climb. It was difficult, relying more on his fingertips than his grip strength. A professional rock climber probably could have climbed straight up the vertical wall of stone, but Tristan would struggle.

The whole area within the range of his metal sense was laced with a strange material. It was metal, but not one he had felt before. The metal had an odd crystal like structure and was an alloy of several metals. This was the first time Tristan had felt a naturally occurring alloy of two metals. He had felt electrum, a mixture of gold and silver, in jewelry before, however, he could only identify iron as one of the compounds in the alloy.

“Vulcan, do you know what this is?” Tristan asked.

“Wolframite,” Vulcan said, “It is a mixture of tungsten, manganese, and iron.”

“Why is it named after wolves?” Tristan frowned. The metal sounded pretty neat, but names and values rarely matched up.

“Don’t be dumb. It's not named after wolves. It was probably the name of the person who discovered it,” Vulcan answered, he then changed the topic, “Tungsten is a really good material to enhance. Beats out every metal in every area, except impact resistance.”

“Should I collect some?” Tristan needed equipment, but he also lacked the ability to haul around large amounts of supplies.

“Not unless you can get some better reservoirs,” Vulcan said, “tier two weapons will be too weak to do anything and the tier seven one in your amulet is already where it needs to be.”

“I do have an elemental’s heart back in the outpost,” Tristan said, “We could process that and make something.”

Vulcan made a noncommittal noise. Tristan knew it was wishful thinking, even if he had metal and a reservoir, he would still need a workshop to melt the materials down and hammer them into shape. He also lacked the experience to make anything, different materials cooled at different rates, and needed to be at different temperatures to be hammered.

Refocusing on the source of the absorption force, Tristan made his way deeper into the ravine. The walls started nearly fifty feet apart, but they slowly narrowed down. He also noticed that the floor of the ravine was sloping down. That would have let him see down the canyon if rocks had not broken off the walls and fallen. Some of them were as large as the mud houses that the worker caste lived in.

Tristan warily looked up, but he could find no evidence that a rock would disconnect from the wall and squash him. Carefully, he made his way forward, aside from the footprints of what he now knew were turtles, there was no sign of mythical beasts in the area. The ravine narrowed down to only ten feet, boulders had been shoved aside to make room for the Mythical beasts to pass.

The ravine narrowed down to eight feet. Tristan knew he was close, the feeling of absorption was growing. He paused at what he could only call a clearing. The ravine opened up at the eight-foot mark to create a large circular area that was at least a hundred feet across. Inside four shelled behemoths waddled around chomping on rocks.

In the dead center of the room was a fist sized piece of blood red ore. So, not an artifact. There was one pressing question Tristan had.

“Are turtles supposed to get that big?”